T206.
I Did the Damn Thing: Facing the Second Book and Overcoming the Sophomore Slump
Status: Not Accepted
Thursday, March 9, 2023
1:45 pm to 3:00 pm
After riding the highs and lows of publishing your first book, eventually the dreaded question rolls around: what next? A panel of bestselling and award-winning writers with successful first books will discuss strategies for building a sustainable writing career after the debut. We will also share tools and resources to help overcome roadblocks and self-sabotage, and hope to redefine “success” as a process toward a vision and an internal accomplishment rather than one of external recognition.
Participants
Nafissa Thompson-Spires (she/ her) wrote Heads of the Colored People, which won the PEN Open Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Siedenbaum Award for First Fiction. It was longlisted for the National Book Award, the PEN/ Bingham Award, and many other prizes. Her novel is under contract.
R.O. Kwon is the author of a novel, The Incendiaries, and coeditor of an anthology, Kink. The Incendiaries is being translated into seven languages. The recipient of an NEA fellowship for fiction, she has also published work in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Guardian, and The Paris Review.
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of the poetry collection Beast Meridian, and a recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. She is a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and lives with her son in Los Angeles, where she is a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California.
Deesha Philyaw is the author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, winner of the the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction.
J Wortham
