S131.
The Literary Ghost Story: The Power of Haunted Fiction
Saturday, March 26, 2022
9:00 am to 10:00 am
Recent years have shown the continued popularity of ghost stories across literature, from the terrifying and literal to the comedic and metaphorical—yet how do we make sense of the ghost story as contemporary fiction? In this panel, acclaimed genre-bending authors will talk about the ways ghosts manifest in their own work, the varied roles ghosts play in literature and across cultures, strategies for writing ghost stories, and why they (and all of us) continue to be drawn to haunted fiction.
Participants
Joy Baglio's fiction appears in Tin House, American Short Fiction, the Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, Bread Loaf, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and Vermont Studio Center and is the founder of Pioneer Valley Writers' Workshop.
Sequoia Nagamatsu (@SequoiaN) is the author of the novel How High We Go in the Dark and the story collection Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone. He teaches creative writing at St. Olaf College and in the Rainier Writing Workshop Low-Residency MFA program.
Amber Sparks is the author of several short story collections including And I Do Not Forgive You, which was named a Best Book of 2020 by the Washington Post and NPR. She also writes essays and has published in The Paris Review, NY Mag, Tin House, and InStyle.
Yohanca Delgado is a 2021–2023 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her writing has appeared in Nightmare, One Story, A Public Space, and the Paris Review. Two of her stories appear in the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 anthology, guest edited by Veronica Roth.
