F209. The Art of Rendering Sports into Writing, a Multigenre Discussion

Monument, Marriott Marquis, Meeting Level Four
Friday, February 10, 2017
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm

 

Writers in the American tradition often use sports as an entry point to comment upon culture or to develop individual characterization. A background as a player or even informed spectator of a given sport offers good material for one's writing, as well as a means to reach a more mainstream audience. Authors from various cultural and ethnic backgrounds discuss their approach to thematically and stylistically rendering a variety of sports into journalism, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry.


Participants

Moderator:

Roger Sedarat is the author of Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic, Ghazal Games, and Foot Faults: Tennis Poems. A recipient of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, he teaches creative writing and literary translation in the MFA program at Queens College, City University of New York.

Kerry Howley is the author of Thrown, a 2014 New York Times Notable Book, and an assistant professor in the nonfiction writing program at the University of Iowa. Her essays, short stories, and reportage have appeared in Granta, the Paris Review, Harper's, and New York Magazine.

Sameer Pandya is the author of The Blind Writer: Stories and a Novella, which was longlisted for the 2016 PEN Open Book Award. His has published essays on sport and race in the Atlantic, Salon, ESPN, and Sports Illustrated. He teaches in the Department of Asian American Studies at UC Santa Barbara.

Brin-Jonathan Butler is a contributing writer for SB Nation and has been published in ESPN Magazine, Harper's, the Paris Review, Salon, Esquire, and Vice. His 2015 memoir "The Domino Diaries," was shortlisted for the PEN/ESPN literary sports award and was a "Best Book of 2015" by the Boston Globe.

Robert Paul Moreira is the editor of Arriba Baseball: A Collection of Latina/o Baseball Fiction. He is the recipient of the 2016 NACCS Tejas FOCO Fiction Award for his short story collection, Scores. He teaches creative writing at UT Rio Grande Valley and serves as managing editor for riverSedge.

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