Barbara Turner-Vesselago

For the past three decades, Barbara Turner-Vesselago has been leading highly effective Freefalll Writing Workshops throughout the English-speaking world. She brings to the teaching of writing a unique combination of writing and teaching skills, literary knowledge, psychological expertise and insight that has made her workshops popular in centres as diverse as England’s Rising Dragon Tai Chi School and the Yale University School of Medicine. An expert in modern literature, she has a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, and has taught at Girton College, Cambridge, the University of Jos (Nigeria), and the Universities of Toronto, Washington and Western Australia. But having been mentored by Canadian writer, W.O. Mitchell, at the Banff School of Fine Arts in the Canadian Rockies, she left academia to write, and to teach writing. In 1995, she was designated one of six “Voices of the Nineties,” by the University of Western Australia. Barbara Turner-Vesselago’s novel manuscript, No News But Kindness, was chosen a finalist for the Chapters/Robertson Davies Book Prize (Canada) and Britain’s Short Story Radio First Chapter award. She is the author of Skelton at Sixty (The Porcupine’s Quill, Canada) and Writing Without a Parachute: The Art of Freefall (Vala Publishing, Jessica Kingsley Publishers UK; Finch Publishing, Australia). She lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.