S254. The Real Mother of All Bombs: Reconsidering John Hersey’s Hiroshima

Room 15, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Saturday, March 10, 2018
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

 

"Fear of the bomb" has returned, so a reconsideration of John Hersey’s 1946 book Hiroshima, a landmark of new journalism exploring the effects of an atomic bomb dropped by US forces on that Japanese city, is very timely. Panelists (including the Hersey’s son Baird) will consider the book’s legacy: the phenomenon of its publication as an entire issue of The New Yorker, its formal innovations as a work of long form literary journalism, and its cultural legacy in America and Japan.


Participants

Moderator:

Bob Cowser, Jr. is the author of three nonfiction books, most recently GREEN FIELDS: Crime, Punishment, and a Boyhood Between, an excerpt from which was cited in Best American Essays 2012. A professor of English at St. Lawrence University, he has taught abroad in France, England, and Denmark.

David Mura's books are the memoirs Turning Japanese, Where the Body Meets Memory, the novel Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire, andfour poetry books including The Last Incantations. His latest book is A Stranger's Journey: Race, Identity & Narrative Craft in Writing. He teaches at Stonecoast MFA and VONA Writers’ Conference.

Kelly Grey Carlisle’s essays have appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, The Rumpus, The Sun, and others. Her memoir, We Are All Shipwrecks, is available from Sourcebooks. She is an associate professor of English at Trinity University and edits the nonfiction journal 1966.

John McNally is author of The Promise of Failure: A Writer's Perspective on Not Succeeding; After the Workshop: A Novel; The Book of Ralph: A Novel; Ghosts of Chicago: Stories; Troublemakers: Stories; among others. He is writer in residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Traci Cox earned an MFA from George Mason University. She taught English in Slovakia as a Fulbright Fellow from 2009–10. She is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Missouri, where she teaches. Traci serves as the audio editor at The Missouri Review literary magazine.

#AWP24

February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center