R118. The Killing Fields: Representing State-Driven Slavery, Genocide, The Holocaust, and Other Systemic Murders

Liberty Salon M, Marriott Marquis, Meeting Level Four
Thursday, February 9, 2017
9:00 am to 10:15 am

 

How does literature engage state-driven atrocities like Native American genocide, war crimes, executions by police, and other systemic murders? This inclusive panel will interrogate representation, mourning, witness, and the impact of such writing. The panel will explore the use of divisive identity markers, texts as political narrative, and balancing political work with good storytelling. The place of literature in times of fear and unrest shall be considered. Handouts will address craft and bibliography.


Participants

Moderator:

Anna March's writing has been in The New York Times, NY Magazine, VQR, Tin House, and regularly in The Rumpus and Salon. She writes extensively on gender, sexuality, and feminism. A 2016 resident at the Millay Colony, her novel, The Diary of Suzanne Frank is forthcoming as is her essay collection.

Kiese Laymon is a black southern writer. He is an associate professor of English at Vassar College and is the author of the novel, Long Division, a collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America.

Benjamin Reed's work has appeared in West Branch and Seattle Review, among other places. He is an adjunct lecturer of composition and American literature at Texas State University, and the fiction editor at Arcadia magazine. His first book will be published in early 2017.

Jocelyn Bartkevicius has received the Missouri Review Essay Award, the Annie Dillard Award in Nonfiction, the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize, and other awards. Her essays are in the Hudson Review, Bellingham Review, Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, Waveform: 21st Century Women Essayists, and elsewhere.

Keith S. Wilson is an Affrilachian Poet, Cave Canem Fellow, graduate of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and recipient of three Bread Loaf scholarships. He holds an MFA in poetry from Chicago State University. Keith works as a writer and game designer in Chicago.

#AWP24

February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center