Featured Events
#AWP24 Keynote Address by Jericho Brown
Thursday, February 8
8:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. CT
Ballroom A, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 2
Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Award in Poetry and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the 2009 American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, the New York Times, the New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies.
Read more about Jericho Brown.
All Featured Events will be held in-person and livestreamed to virtual attendees.
NBF Presents: Crafting Coming-of-Age
Thursday, February 8,
12:10 p.m. to 1:25 p.m. CT
Ballroom A, Level 2, Kansas City Convention Center
Join 2019 National Book Award winner Susan Choi (Trust Exercise) and 2022 National Book Award finalist Sarah Thankam Mathews (All This Could Be Different) for a conversation on the impact of contemporary bildungsroman and what it means to grow up in adult fiction. Choi and Mathews read from their novels and discuss how and why coming-of-age stories capture writers and readers alike. Moderated by Ruth Dickey, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation. Presented in partnership with the National Book Foundation.
A Reading and Conversation with Sarabande Anthology Poets on Writing & Addiction
Thursday, February 8,
1:45 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. CT
Ballroom A, Level 2, Kansas City Convention Center
Death to the old cliché of the lush poet who destroys themselves and others in pursuit of their tortured genius. Here, four nationally-acclaimed poets from the Sarabande anthology, Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction & Deliverance, read their work and speak to writing and their experiences with (and near) addiction. This event celebrates the work of writers who have grappled, or are grappling with this disease, who do not glamorize addiction but instead live beside it, around it, through it.
Furious Flower Presents Nikky Finney, Anastacia-Reneé, and Malika Booker
Thursday, February 8,
3:20 p.m. to 4:35 p.m. CT
Ballroom A, Level 2, Kansas City Convention Center
Furious Flower commemorates its upcoming thirtieth anniversary, and previews the fourth historic Furious Flower Poetry Conference (September 2024), with a reading and conversation among three award-winning poets—Nikky Finney, Anastacia-Reneé, and Malika Booker—moderated by executive director, Lauren K. Alleyne. They will discuss the geographies, identities, and communities that influence their practice and craft, their relationships to the Black archive, as well as their work within and outside the academy.
Many Moseses, Many Promised Lands Unseen: A Lecture by Rion Amilcar Scott
Friday, February 9,
10:35 a.m. to 11:50 a.m. CT
Room 2501, Level 2, Kansas City Convention Center
Join Rion Amilcar Scott, a fiction writer, and the creative advisor to AWP's HBCU Fellowship Program, currently in its second year. HBCUs have left an indelible mark upon the face of literature. This lecture discusses what it truly means to be a part of that legacy. The lecture will be followed by a book signing.
Language Back: A Reading & Conversation with Indigenous Poets, Sponsored by Indigenous Nations Poets
Friday, February 9,
10:35 a.m. to 11:50 a.m. CT
Ballroom A, Level 2, Kansas City Convention Center
Simultaneous with the contemporary Land Back movement of Tribal Nations is an equally urgent call for Indigenous literary sovereignty. This focus on writing Indigenous includes a strong push for creators to employ tribal languages and their inherent structures—for Language Back. Poet contributors to The Diné Reader, Jake Skeets, Luci Tapahanso, and Esther Belin, will read recent work and discuss how their creative work maps itself at the intersections of tribal language, poetic form, and place.
Black Women As (Keepers of) the Archive: Photographs, Hybrid and Historical Text, Sponsored by Cave Canem
Friday, February 9,
12:10 p.m. to 1:25 p.m.
Ballroom A, Level 2, Kansas City Convention Center
These five Black women writers have crafted works that center those most often removed from history or those that are splayed across it as specimen, silent and reluctant. Hybrid texts help illuminate the forgotten and missing or can create a collage of the living, serving as rescue and reclamation. The poets featured here have embodied, reckoned with, and reinvented the archive: sometimes they raise the dead, sometimes they build a spectacular future, but they always refuse to look away.
Generations: A Reading & Conversation Sponsored by Blue Flower Arts & The Asian American Writers' Workshop
Friday, February 9,
1:45 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. CT,
Ballroom A, Level 2, Kansas City Convention Center
Blue Flower Arts is proud to present GENERATIONS: a reading and conversation with four essential Asian American poets spanning several generations, featuring Tina Chang, Chen Chen, Marilyn Chin, and Kimiko Hahn. In partnership with the Asian American Writers Workshop, and with a conversation moderated by AAWW Executive Director Jafreen Uddin, these four BFA poets showcase the breadth and impact of Asian American writing, exploring urgent themes such as tradition, culture, belonging, politics, race, and queer identity. This reading pays homage to the urgent concerns of each generation as they radically imagine, resist, and transcend through creative expression and future-facing experimentation.
Lead with Love: Queer Voices in Literature with Red Hen Press
Friday, February 9,
1:45 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. CT
Ballroom B, Level 2, Kansas City Convention Center
This panel of BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ writers honors intersectional and intergenerational communities, the safe spaces we hold for each other, the creation, expression, and celebration of their stories. We move together from darkness to light, from banning to expression—by opening doors and inviting diverse communities to the page and to the microphone to lead, speak, read, share, and celebrate with love.
Personal Best: A New Kind of Canon, Sponsored by Copper Canyon Press
Friday, February 9,
3:20 p.m. to 4:35 p.m. CT
Ballroom A, Level 2, Kansas City Convention Center
Who chooses what poems will ultimately be remembered—editors, prize committees, the collective force of social media? This unique reading puts the decision with the artists themselves. Four award-winning poets consider their body of work and bring forward the poems they think matter most. Offering an intimate window onto intrinsic measures of success and failure, this reading—and the anthology that inspires it—upends notions of canon and curation by putting the poet front and center.
Where Is Literary Criticism Headed?, Sponsored by the National Book Critics Circle
Friday, February 9,
3:20 p.m. to 4:35 p.m. CT
Ballroom B, Level 2, Kansas City Convention Center
In its fiftieth anniversary year, the National Book Critics Circle gathers literary critics who have been defining the future of contemporary cultural criticism. Two NBCC criticism award chairs, who have had their fingers on the pulse of critical engagement for the past decade, are joined by three NBCC-honored critics in a reading and wide-ranging conversation about the future of the form.
AWP Award Series Reading & Celebration
Friday, February 9,
4:45 p.m. to 6:15 p.m.
Ballroom D, Level 2, Kansas City Convention Center
Join AWP for a reading, book signing, and reception to celebrate the 2022 AWP Award Series winners and the partner presses who publish their winning manuscripts. The AWP Award Series is an annual competition for the publication of excellent new book-length works in four categories: poetry, creative nonfiction, novel, and short fiction.
Acts of Love: Brian Turner, Katie Farris & Major Jackson Read & Converse, Sponsored by Alice James Books
Saturday, February 10,
10:35 a.m. to 11:50 a.m. CT
Ballroom A, Level 2, Kansas City Convention Center
Alice James Books presents three celebrated, accomplished writers to share their most recent work and engage in conversation together. Brian Turner will read from his new trilogy of poetry books and Katie Farris from her acclaimed 2023 debut and memoir-in-poems. The reading and conversation will be led by Major Jackson, who will contribute poems in communion with their work and guide a conversation between the group about grief, illness, loss, and love as the ultimate act of resistance.
A Reading by Suji Kwock Kim, Sara Daniele Rivera, & Nicole Sealey, Presented by the Academy of American Poets
Saturday, February 10
12:10 p.m. to 1:25 p.m. CT
Ballroom A, Level 2, Kansas City Convention Center
Award-winning poets Suji Kwock Kim, author of Notes from the North (Smith/Doorstop, U.K., 2021) and Notes from the Divided Country (Louisiana State University Press, 2003); Sara Daniele Rivera, author of The Blue Mimes (Graywolf Press, forthcoming 2024); and Nicole Sealey, author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure (Penguin, 2023) and Ordinary Beast (Ecco Press, 2017), read from their work. Ricardo Maldonado, Executive Director and President of the Academy of American Poets, will introduce the event.
Futures for the Novel: Mizna Hosts Isabella Hammad & Noor Naga in Conversation
Saturday, February 10,
12:10 p.m. to 1:25 p.m. CT
Ballroom B, Level 2, Kansas City Convention Center
Mizna hosts Palestinian British novelist Isabella Hammad and Egyptian poet Noor Naga in conversation with Mizna’s executive editor, George Abraham, exploring the ways transnational and multilingual narratives might reimagine the potential futures of the novel as a form. What are the difficulties and generative potentials of writing transnational stories within this historical tradition? What roles can Arabophone literature play in shaping the future formal trajectory of the novel in English?
Literary Citizenship: Rigoberto González & Carmen Giménez In Conversation, Sponsored by Letras Latinas
Saturday, February 10,
1:45 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. CT
Ballroom A, Level 2, Kansas City Convention Center
What does it mean to be a literary citizen? How can you get started as a critic, editor, publisher or arts administrator, while maintaining your artistic practice? Two accomplished writers with twenty plus years of experience share their stories as literary citizens. Opening with a reading of their work, the writers will then participate in a moderated conversation about their various roles championing literature, challenges they may have faced, and ways you can get involved in the literary community.
Kundiman 20th Anniversary Reading and Conversation
Saturday, February 10,
1:45 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. CT
Ballroom B, Level 2, Kansas City Convention Center
Join Kundiman as we celebrate our twentieth anniversary year with a special cross-genre reading and conversation featuring Kundiman writers Franny Choi, Megha Majumdar, and Srikanth Reddy, moderated by Kundiman cofounder Joseph Legaspi. This panel will discuss the history of Kundiman’s legacy, from its inaugural workshop retreat for poets at the University of Virginia in 2004, to its role today as a national nonprofit organization dedicated to nurturing generations of Asian American readers and writers. This intergenerational panel will discuss Kundiman’s role in shaping the landscape of Asian American literature, as well as how the literary arts can be used to explore and address the unique challenges that face the new and ever-changing diaspora.
Stay tuned for more featured announcements in the coming weeks!
