R129. Rejection! Everything You Always Wanted to Know (but Were Afraid to Ask)

Auditorium Room 2, Level 1
Thursday, April 9, 2015
10:30 am to 11:45 am

 

Top editors from W. W. Norton, Tin House, and the Kenyon Review join emerging writers (including a literary-rejection blog author) to dish about exactly how submissions are evaluated, what it’s like to rebuff so many labors of love, the mysterious hierarchy of rejection slips, whether and how the best work really gets published, tips to avoid surefire rejection—and how to maintain faith in your work and your voice even when rejections keep piling up. Audience questions encouraged!


Participants

Moderator:

Melissa Stein is the author of the poetry collection Rough Honey, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. Her work has appeared in New England Review, Harvard Review, Best New Poets, and many others. She has received fellowships from Bread Loaf, Yaddo, and MacDowell, and has several awards.

Jill Bialosky is the author of four poetry volumes, most recently The Players; two novels, House Under Snow and The Life Room; and a memoir, History of a Suicide, a New York Times Bestseller. She is Vice President, Executive Editor at W. W. Norton & Company. She edits poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.

Rob Spillman is editor and co-founder of Tin House, a seventeen-year-old bi-coastal (Brooklyn, New York and Portland, Oregon) literary magazine, as well as the executive editor of Tin House Books and co-founder of the Tin House Writers Workshop, now in its twelfth year.

MB Caschetta is an award-winning author of fiction and creative nonfiction, but whatever: she is still a literary reject and has been blogging about it anonymously since 2007. Her novel Miracle Girls will be published in November 2015.

David Baker is a poet, critic, and editor whose recent books include Scavenger Loop (poems, forthcoming), Show Me Your Environment (essays), and Never-Ending Birds, winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. He is Poetry Editor of the Kenyon Review and teaches at Denison University.

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February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center