R179. Persona of the Personal: A Reading and Roundtable

Ballroom A, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Thursday, March 8, 2018
12:00 pm to 1:15 pm

 

How do memoirists maneuver masks to represent the real world? When do novelists invoke their own lives through their characters? How do poets vary the voices of their speakers for personal ends? Join a memoirist, a novelist, and two poets as they read and discuss the use of persona in their work. As each panelist also mentors other writers, the resulting conversation will explore the experiences of approaching persona as a teacher, reader, and writer inside as well as outside of the workshop.


Participants

Moderator:

David Welch received his MFA from the University of Alabama and now teaches at DePaul University, where he is assistant director and publications manager in the Department of English and Center for Latino Research. His poems appear in journals including AGNI, Boston Review, and Colorado Review.

Ada Limón is the author of four books of poetry, including Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry, a finalist of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, and one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of the Year by The New York Times.

Jaswinder Bolina is author of the poetry collections Phantom Camera and Carrier Wave and of the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America. He teaches on the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Miami.

Hannah Pittard is the author of four novels, including the forthcoming Visible Empire. Her most recent novel, Listen to Me, was a New York Times Editors' Choice. She is director of the MFA Program in creative writing at the University of Kentucky, where she is an associate professor of English.

Barrie Jean Borich is the author of Apocalypse, Darling. Her memoir Body Geographic won a Lambda Literary Award, and her book-length essay My Lesbian Husband won a Stonewall Book Award. She’s a professor at DePaul in Chicago, where she edits Slag Glass City, a journal of the urban essay arts.

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