R153. The Art of Crafting a Chapbook from Start to Finish

Room 5 & 6, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Thursday, March 8, 2018
10:30 am to 11:45 am

 

What makes a chapbook successful, both in terms of literary merit and sales? This panel will explore best practices for writing, organizing, and publishing chapbooks. Authors will discuss how they conceptualized and structured their chapbook manuscripts, and leading chapbook publishers will talk about what they look for in submissions and how they design and market chapbooks. We’ll also discuss the range of genres—poetry, flash, hybrid work—the short length of a chapbook can effectively showcase.


Participants

Moderator:

Abigail Beckel is the publisher of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publishing house for books in hybrid genres that she cofounded in 2006, and which hosts an annual flash chapbook contest. She is a published poet and prose writer, as well as coeditor of two anthologies.

Jennifer Tseng is an award-winning poet and fiction writer. Her most recent book is a collection of short shorts, The Passion of Woo and Isolde. She teaches year-round for the Fine Arts Work Center’s online writing program, 24PearlSt.

Dan Mahoney is the editor in chief of Bateau Press. Bateau publishes a lit mag in the fall and a prize winning chapbook in the spring of each year. He is the author of the chapbook Quantum Entanglement and the book Sunblind Almost Motorcrash, which is something entirely different.

William Todd Seabrook is the author of four novellas-in-flash including The Imagination of Lewis Carroll, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and The Genius of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He earned his PhD at Florida State University, and is the coeditor of The Cupboard Pamphlet, a prose chapbook press.

Brad Aaron Modlin wrote the poetry book Everyone at This Party Has Two Names and the fiction chapbook Surviving in Drought. He holds a PhD from Ohio University. He is an assistant professor at Missouri Southern State University, where he teaches workshops in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.

#AWP24

February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center