S204. Les Femmes d'un Certain Âge: Women Writers Breaking Boundaries

AWP Bookfair Stage, LA Convention Center, Exhibit Hall Level One
Saturday, April 2, 2016
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm

 

Five women writers, pushing and past 50 and at different stages of their careers, discuss writing at midlife and beyond. How do we continue to “make it new” after years of writing? How has subject matter and audience changed? What do we know now that we didn’t know in our 20s or 30s, and how does that influence our art? What are the challenges of being an emerging writer after 40, and how do we navigate a youth-focused literary world?


Participants

Moderator:

Laura Orem is a poet, essayist, artist, and educator. She is the author of the chapbook, Castrata: A Conversation, and is a featured writer at The Best American Poetry Blog. Her work has appeared in many journals. She has taught writing for twenty years and is a senior editor at Toad Hall Press.

Allison Joseph is part of the creative writing faculty at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. She is the author of several books of poems, the codirector of the SIUC MFA Program, and poetry edtior for Crab Orchard Review.

Alice Anderson's poetry collection Human Nature won the NYU Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Associations Best First Book Prize. Her memoir, Some Bright Morning, I'll Fly Away is forthcoming.

Constance Ford is a former Schaeffer Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV. In 2009, she received the Nevada Arts Council Grant for fiction. Her short stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines, and she teaches writing at California State University, Dominguez Hills.

Joani Reese

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