S291. In Over Your Head: The Undergraduate Workshop

D131-132, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1
Saturday, March 30, 2019
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

 

Undergraduate workshops often don’t just pose a problem for students whose aim exceeds their emotional reach and experience; they present challenges to teachers as well. Five professors focus on navigating difficult material—writing that is potentially triggering to other students, for example, or charged personal stories from which students have little distance—and show a variety of approaches, questions, and tools for how fraught material can be handled with grace and care.


Participants

Moderator:

Michael Croley is a 2016 NEA Fellow in Literature. His debut collection of stories, Any Other Place, will appear in 2019. His work has appeared in Lit Hub, The Paris Review Daily, Kenyon Review Online, Virginia Quarterly Review, Narrative, Blackbird, Bloomberg, and elsewhere. He teaches at Denison University.

Laura van den Berg is the author of two story collections, more recently The Isle of Youth, which received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and the Bard Fiction Prize, and the novels Find Me and The Third Hotel. She is a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard University.

Joanna Klink is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy. She has received awards and fellowships from The Rona Jaffe Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Trust of Amy Lowell. Her new book is forthcoming in 2020.

Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, a collection of essays. He is a recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and a NEA in Fiction, and is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College.

Anne Valente is the author of the novel Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, and the short story collection By Light We Knew Our Names. Her fiction appears in One Story, the Kenyon Review, the Southern Review, and the Chicago Tribune. She teaches creative writing and literature at Hamilton College.

#AWP24

February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center