2024 Young Writers’ Conference spotlights alumni author

By Jefferson Beavers, communication specialist, Department of English

Photo: Navdeep Singh Dhillon, by Sona Charaipotra

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Fresno State alumni author Navdeep Singh Dhillon will return to campus to deliver the keynote address for the English Department’s 44th annual Young Writers’ Conference, a full day’s gathering of Central California’s brightest young writers and their teachers.

The conference agenda—packed full of creative writing and imagination—starts in the morning with an awards ceremony and the keynote speaker, both of which are free and open to the public. In the afternoon, registered participants attend writing workshops led by current Master of Fine Arts graduate students.

The event will take place from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Wednesday, April 24, inside the Satellite Student Union. All guests are asked to complete Fresno State’s COVID-19 daily screening questionnaire before attending. Masks are recommended indoors. For those who cannot attend on campus, the morning session will be broadcast live online through Zoom.

Singh Dhillon is the author of “Sunny G’s Series of Rash Decisions,” a young-adult (YA) novel published by Penguin Teen about a cosplaying, crocheting Punjabi teen on a prom night adventure through Fresno with a Hmong cosplaying love interest as he comes to terms with grief, identity, and life after high school.

Sunny G has appeared on most-anticipated lists at Buzzfeed, Bookshop, Book Riot, and elsewhere. The YA book is Singh Dhillon’s debut novel. He is a 2006 alumnus of Fresno State’s MFA program.

Born in England, and raised in Tanzania, Nigeria, Dubai and Fresno, Singh Dhillon served as a linguist in the U.S. Navy, worked as a lifeguard for many years at Wild Water Adventure Park and he said his strangest job was selling overpriced knives as a door-to-door salesman. He spends most of the year in New York City, and he still spends summers in Fresno. 

Singh Dhillon describes himself as “a Punjabi boy at heart” and said that his keynote address for the Fresno audience will include a reading from Sunny G’s opening chapter solely because it ends with the words “Fres-Yes.”

“The process of creative writing is something I’ve come to appreciate more than rushing toward the end results,” Singh Dhillon said. “The ideas I will be exploring during my talk will center on cultivating a long-term creative life and appreciating the process, which is something I wish I’d made more of an effort to do during my earlier years. As a now-published writer, I wish I had slowed down a little and appreciated the freedom I had to write and learn and be in the moment as a young writer.”

As an undergraduate, Singh Dhillon said he bounced around different majors until he took his first creative writing class — a fiction workshop taught by the novelist Steve Yarbrough, now a Fresno State professor emeritus who teaches at Emerson College in Boston.

Singh Dhillon quickly became an English major.

“Fresno State was the first time I envisioned writing as both an art form and as a career,” he said.

After finishing his bachelor’s degree in English and traveling, Singh Dhillon returned to Fresno State’s MFA program to study with Yarbrough, a specialist in Russian literatures and the Southern tradition of storytelling.

“All of Steve’s stories are set in the same location with different characters,” Singh Dhillon said. “I found this so interesting because it really makes the setting a character in its own right, and it’s part of the reason I instinctively set my novel in Fresno even though I was living in the New York City area when I started writing it.”

Singh Dhillon said he’s excited to return to campus to take part in this year’s Young Writers’ Conference, and he hopes his keynote talk will help shape the way participants approach their afternoon writing workshops.

“I hope everyone at the conference knows that their role as artists is not to worry about that shiny book deal; the beauty and originality of their art lies in the process of its creation,” he said. “And perhaps most importantly, even though writing is thought of as a lonely art, it takes a community to support us, from librarians, to teachers, to parents, to writing friends, which hopefully they will all make here.”

Venita Blackburn, an associate professor of English and the 2024 conference’s co-organizer with Brynn Saito, said the Young Writers’ Conference has become “more than an annual event, but a regional phenomenon that reaches across generations.”

Successful alumni authors such as Singh Dhillon, Ethan Chatagnier, and Kristin FitzPatrick have returned to Fresno State to speak at the conference. And in recent years, since the English Department added a full undergraduate bachelor’s degree in creative writing — in addition to the graduate MFA program — faculty are now meeting a growing number of students each year who once attended the conference as a high school student and have now come full-circle to serve on the conference’s editorial board as a college student.

“The conference inspires a deep appreciation of creativity, community connection, and an understanding of the power, magic, and beauty within language,” Blackburn said.

This year’s conference is set to welcome nearly 400 participants from 24 area schools. The conference’s adopt-a-school initiative, now in its third year, drew 11 generous community donors, covering half of participating school delegations. The initiative, a collaboration with the Arts and Humanities Advisory Board, provides financial assistance for schools in need of covering their conference registration.

MFA Creative Writing graduate student Yamille Moss contributed to this report.