Featured Events & Readers

Scroll over presenter photos for biographies.

Disability’s Influence on Literature: Realism As A Craft Concept

Wednesday, March 3 2021
1:30 p.m. CT to 2:30 p.m. CT

• Marlena Chertock
  

  Marlena Chertock has two books of poetry, Crumb-Sized: Poems and On That One-Way Trip to Mars. She uses her skeletal dysplasia as a bridge to scientific poetry. Marlena is a bisexual poet and serves on the planning committee for OutWrite, Washington, DC’s annual LGBTQ literary festival.
  

• Eileen Cronin
  

  Eileen Cronin’s Mermaid, translated in 3 languages, was one of O Magazine’s Best Memoirs of the Year. She’s held fellowships with Vermont Studio Center and American Psychological Association. She won the Washington Writing Prize in fiction. She's a writing instructor and a psychologist at UCLA.
  

• James Tate Hill
  

  James Tate Hill’s memoir, Blind Man’s Bluff, will be published by W.W. Norton in 2021. His fiction debut, Academy Gothic, won the Nilsen Prize for a First Novel. He is the fiction editor for Monkeybicycle and a contributing editor for Literary Hub, where he writes a monthly audiobooks column. The 2019 and 2020 editions of Best American Essays list his work among the Notable Essays.

• T. K. Dalton
  

  T. K. Dalton's writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and appears in Apogee,The Millions, Southeast Review, Tahoma Literary Review, The Common, Radical Teacher, and elsewhere. He recently completed work on The Intimate Register, a memoir for which he is actively seeking representation. A founding editor of The Deaf Poets Society, a digital journal publishing disability literature and art that will publish its ninth issue this spring, Tim has taught writing at the college level since 2005. He holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and is currently earning a PhD in English at the CUNY Graduate Center.

AWP Award Series Reading

Wednesday, March 3 2021
7:30 p.m. CT to 8:30 p.m. CT

• Cécile Barlier
  

  Cécile Barlier was born in France, and received her master’s degree from the Sorbonne University in Paris. Three of her short, “ A Gypsy’s Book of Revelations, ”,“Forgetting, ” and ”MRI,“ have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. “Forgetting” is featured in Epiphany’s 30th anniversary anthology.Her work is featured or is forthcoming in Amarillo Bay, Bacopa Literary Review (first place for fiction, 2012), Blue Lake Review, Clare Literary Journal, Crack the Spine, Cerise Press, Delmarva Review, Euphony Journal, The Emerson Review, Gold Man Review, Gone Lawn, Knee-Jerk, The Lindenwood Review, The Meadow, New Delta Review, Penmen Review, Red Savina Review, Saint Ann’s Review, Serving House Journal, Sou’wester, StreetLight Magazine, Summerset Review, Sweet Tree Review, The Tower Journal, Valparaiso Fiction Review, The Wax Paper, and Whistling Shade.

• Joy Priest
  

  Joy Priest’s poems and essays appear in numerous publications. Priest is the winner of the 2019 Gearhart Poetry Prize from The Southeast Review; the 2019 Nikki Giovanni Scholar at the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop; the 2018 Gregory Pardlo Scholar at The Frost Place; the winner of the 2016 College Writers’ Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation; and the recipient of a 2015 Emerging Artist Award from the Kentucky Arts Council. Additionally, she has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the University of South Carolina, where she received her MFA in Poetry with a Certificate in Women & Gender Studies and served as senior editor for Yemassee Journal. She is a 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center Fellow in Poetry.

• Robert Shuster
  

  Robert Shuster received a 2011 James Jones First Novel Fellowship for To Zenzi when the book was still in progress. His short fiction has appeared in North American Review, Witness, The Mississippi Review, and Stone Canoe (among other publications) and in the anthologies Micro Fiction (W.W. Norton) and Yellow Silk II (Warner Books). His short story, “A Solution to the Barber Paradox,” was the 2014 winner of The Winter Anthology contest. In 2005, he was the recipient of a research fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society for his writings on war. For several years, he wrote art reviews for The Village Voice. Read more at robertshuster.com.

• Megan Harlan
  

  Megan Harlan’s essays have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Colorado Review, Hotel Amerika, Alaska Quarterly Review, Arts & Letters, and Cincinnati Review and have been awarded the Arts & Letters Prize for Creative Nonfiction (2018) and cited as distinguished in Best American Essays 2018. Her first book, Mapmaking (BkMk Press/New Letters), won the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry. She holds a master’s degree from New York University’s Creative Writing Program and works as a writer and editor in the San Francisco Bay Area.