S207.
When Form Meets Content: Structuring a Nonfiction Book
Saturday, March 26, 2022
3:20 pm to 4:35 pm
Structuring a book-length work presents unique opportunities and challenges. How does form meet content at over 50,000 words? There are a myriad of different ways to answer this question. This panel brings together a diverse group of nonfiction writers from across the country to discuss their approaches to form in a manuscript, the many craft decisions made during the writing process, and the different storytelling lineages called upon in crafting the final version of the work.
Participants
Maddie Norris, the recipient of Ninth Letter‘s Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction, was the Thomas Wolfe Scholar at UNC-Chapel Hill and earned her MFA at the University of Arizona. Her work can be found in Fourth Genre, Territory, and Essay Daily.
Daisy Hernández is the author of The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease and the memoir A Cup of Water under My Bed. She coedited the feminist anthology Colonize This! and is an associate professor at Miami University in Ohio.
Danielle Geller's first book, Dog Flowers, was published in 2021. She is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and her work has appeared in the Paris Review, the New Yorker, and Brevity. She teaches creative writing at the University of Victoria and the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Elissa Washuta (Cowlitz Indian Tribe) is the author of White Magic, My Body Is a Book of Rules, and Starvation Mode, and coeditor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She is an assistant professor at the Ohio State University.
Melissa Faliveno is the author of the essay collection Tomboyland, named a best book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library, and O, the Oprah Magazine. She was the 2020–21 Kenan Visiting Writer at University of North Carolina and is currently a visiting assistant professor of English at Kenyon College.
