The Writer’s Center welcomes Kim Roberts, David Nicholson, and David Taylor for a conversation and practical creative exercises on how to research in your writing. This event will also include examples of local resources.
About the Event
How can real-world research foster your creative work and thinking? In connection with The People’s Recorder podcast, this conversation with three DMV writers starts from the experiences of writers in a Depression-era cultural experiment, the Federal Writers’ Project. And it comes up to now with views from writers today about how research and interviews feed their own creative work.
As heard in the People’s Recorder podcast, many emerging writers in the 1930s found their voices in community with peers on a government project intended to put people to work documenting American life and history. Young writers — including some who later grew to prominence including Margaret Walker, Tillie Olsen, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and John Cheever — honed skills in archival research, oral history interviews, and street-level research. Those skills also helped in shaping their distinctive voices in poetry, novels and nonfiction.
David Nicholson was born in Washington, D.C., where he attended public schools and the private Sidwell Friends School. He has worked as a reporter for the Associated Press and the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News. After earning an MFA at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Nicholson returned to Washington, where he started Black Film Review and worked as an editor and daily book reviewer for The Washington Post Book World. He’s the author of three books, most recently The Garretts of Columbia: A Black South Carolina Family from Slavery to the Dawn of Integration (University of South Carolina Press, 2024). He and his wife live in Vienna, Va. https://davidnicholson.info/
Kim Roberts is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Q&A for the End of the World, a collaboration with Michael Gushue (WordTech Editions, 2025), and The District’s Departed: Walking Tours of DC-Area Cemeteries (Rivanna Books, 2026), her second guidebook. Roberts co-curates DC Pride Poem-a-Day each June, and co-directs the Pride Poetry Residency at the Arts Club of Washington. She has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Humanities DC, and the DC Commission on the Arts, and has been a writer-in-residence at 21 artist colonies and nonprofit organizations. http://www.kimroberts.org
David Taylor is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. His journalism appears in the Washington Post, Scientific American, and Smithsonian, and his nonfiction includes Ginseng, the Divine Root (Algonquin, 2006) and Cork Wars: Intrigue and Industry in World War II (Hopkins Press, 2018), featuring two Baltimore families. His fiction includes Success: Stories (WWPH, 2008) winner of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House fiction prize; has appeared in Gargoyle, Rio Grande Review, and Subnivean; and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He teaches in the Johns Hopkins Science Writing Program and is a producer for The People’s Recorder podcast. He lives in Washington, DC. https://davidataylor.org
If you need an accommodation for this event, please contact us at access@writer.org. We will attempt to fulfill all requests, but advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility services.
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