Two panelists speaking speaking at a #AWP24 Featured Event with Kansas City graphics in the background.

2022 AWP Conference Schedule

The #AWP22 Conference & Bookfair in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania schedule is searchable by day, time, title, description, participants, and type of event. This schedule is subject to change. A version accessible to screen readers is also available.

Please note: The schedule you build on awpwriter.org will not transfer to the mobile app or the virtual conference platform as these systems are independent.

Scroll over participants’ names in blue to read their biographies.

 

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Saturday, March 26, 2022

7:30 a.m. to 8:45 a.m.

124, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S101.

Sober AWP

Daily 12-step meeting. All in recovery from anything are welcome.

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8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Broad Street Atrium, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S102.

Vaccination Verification Check-In

The first stop at #AWP22 is the vaccination verification check-in, located at the 155 N Broad Street entrance to the Pennsylvania Convention Center. All attendees must verify proof of valid COVID-19 vaccination through CrowdPass. Once you are verified, you will receive your #AWP22 lanyard, which will serve as indication your vaccination status has been verified. Proceed to the Registration area in Halls D&E on the 200 level to complete the registration process.

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Hall E, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 200 Level

S103.

Conference Registration, Sponsored by Philadelphia Stories

Attendees who have registered in advance or who have yet to purchase a registration may secure their registration materials in AWP’s registration area located in Exhibit Hall E, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 200 Level. Please consult the bookfair map in the conference planner for location details. Students must present a valid student ID to check in or register at our student rate. Seniors must present a valid ID to register at our senior rate. A $50 fee will be charged for all replacement badges.

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Near Halls D & E, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 200 Level

S103B.

Coat Check

Coat check is available outside of Halls D & E on the 200 level of the Pennsylvania Convention Center. It is $3.00 per item checked, or $5.00 for two items. ATMs can be found in the Broad Street Atrium on the 100 Level, by the Business Center on the 200 Level, and near the Concierge on 200 level.

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Near 126B, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S104.

Mamava Nursing Pod

A Mamava lactation suite is located outside of room 126B of the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

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110A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S105.

Lactation Room

The Lactation Room is located in room 110A of the Pennsylvania Convention Center. To access the Lactation Room, please see the AWP Help Desk to obtain the key. For reasons of privacy and security, access to the lactation room is granted with permission from AWP only.

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113B, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S106.

Dickinson Quiet Space

A dedicated quiet space for you to collect your thoughts, unwind, and escape the literary commotion. "There is a solitude of space, / A solitude of sea, / A solitude of death, but these / Society shall be, / Compared with that profounder site, / That polar privacy, / A Soul admitted to Itself: / Finite Infinity."—Emily Dickinson

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117, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S106B.

Dickinson Quiet Space 2

A second dedicated quiet space for you to collect your thoughts, unwind, and escape the literary commotion. “There is a solitude of space, / A solitude of sea, / A solitude of death, but these / Society shall be, / Compared with that profounder site, / That polar privacy, / A Soul admitted to Itself: / Finite Infinity.”—Emily Dickinson

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110B, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S107.

Nonfluorescent Quiet Space

A quiet space free of fluorescent lighting located in room 110B of the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

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9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Hall D & E, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 200 Level

S108.

AWP Bookfair, Sponsored by Butler University MFA in Creative Writing

With more than 600 literary exhibitors, the AWP Bookfair is the largest of its kind. A great way to meet authors, critics, and peers, the bookfair also provides excellent opportunities to find information about many literary magazines, presses, and organizations. Please consult the bookfair map in the printed conference planner or AWP mobile app for location details.

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Halls D & E, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 200 Level

S109.

Bookfair Concessions, Bar & Lounge

Breakfast and lunch concessions are available inside the Exhibit Hall in the Pennsylvania Convention Center. Cash, debit, and credit cards are accepted at all food and beverage locations. Please consult the maps in the conference program or mobile app for location details. Due to COVID-19 precautions, eating and drinking is limited to designated areas.

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126B, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S110.

The Wick Poetry Center’s Traveling Stanzas Makerspace

The Wick Poetry Center’s Traveling Stanzas Makerspace offers conference attendees an opportunity to creatively engage with themes of health and healing, social and racial justice, nature and environment, and peace and conflict. This interactive exhibit invites participants to share their voice using a suite of digital expressive writing tools, such as Emerge (an erasure poetry app), Thread (community-generated poems), and the Listening Wall (thematically-driven touch-screen poetry displays). Visitors will be able to choose a theme, follow a prompt, then print and share their responses. More information can be found at http://travelingstanzas.com.

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9:00 a.m. to 10:15 a.m.

121A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S110B.

LitNet Meeting

LitNet is a coalition of literary organizations from across the United States that works to promote the importance of the literary arts in American culture, build the capacity of the literary field, and broaden funding for the literary arts. Join us for a meeting from 9:00 a.m. to 10:15 a.m. to learn more about what we do, followed by a breakfast mingle with literary leaders and other advocates from the field.

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109AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S111.

Faith, Family, & Fanaticism: Women Writing Religion

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Many writers and academics are deeply influenced by our faith of origin yet are often dismissed by society as secularists. Women writers who explore Catholicism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism in poetry, prose, and hybrid forms will discuss writing about faith in this era of rising faith-based fanaticism. How do we approach topics like spiritual abuse? How do we keep from self-censoring? Why is it important to share our stories despite the social cost?

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Deirdre Sugiuchi spent her adolescence in a faith-based troubled teen facility and is writing her reform school memoir, "Unreformed." Her work has been featured in Dame and Electric Literature


Twitter Username: DJSugi

Anjali Enjeti is the author of the collection of essays Southbound and the novel The Parted Earth. She teaches in the MFA program at Reinhardt University. Her other writing has appeared in the Oxford American, Harper's Bazaar, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the Boston Globe, and elsewhere.


Twitter Username: anjalienjeti

Website: anjalienjeti.com

Liz Harmer is the author of two novels: The Amateurs (2018) and Strange Loops (2022). She is at work on a memoir about her experience with and family history of mental illness.


Twitter Username: lizharmer

Sakinah Hofler is a fiction writer, poet, and playwright. She has won the Manchester Fiction Prize, the Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers, and the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award. She teaches creative writing at Loyola University.


Twitter Username: blackquisition

Website: https://www.sakinahhofler.com

Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, author of Imperfect Tense (poems), four education books, and numerous articles and essays, was awarded 2015–2021 NEA Big Read grants, a Fulbright (2014), and artist residency (2017) in Mexico. She is professor of language and literacy education at the University of Georgia.


Twitter Username: cahnmann

Website: www.melisacahnmanntaylor.com

111AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S112.

What Kind of Times Are These?: Immigrant Poets & the New Politics of Resistance

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Adrienne Rich writes: “I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled / this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here.” This panel is about English language poets from Eastern Europe writing about the parallels between their homes and the US: nationalism, nativism, homophobia, and human rights abuses. We discuss new strategies of resistance for more than one culture and explore how poets co-opt the language of oppressors for their own power.

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Olga Livshin is the author of A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman. Her work explores finding a place as a queer refugee. She is the co-organizer of From Across the Waters: Voices for Immigration.


Twitter Username: olgalivshin

Website: olga-livshin.com

Mariya Deykute is a teacher, writer, performing artist, and translator. Mariya received her MFA from University of Massachusetts Boston and has taught at University of Massachusetts, the OLLI Institute, PEN New England, and Tohatchi High School. She currently teaches creative writing at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan.

Lana Spendl, a Bosnian American writer, is the author of the chapbook We Cradled Each Other in the Air. Her work focuses on displacement, trauma, and queer identities and has appeared in The Rumpus, New Ohio Review, The Greensboro Review, Zone 3, Epiphany, and Baltimore Review.

Larissa Shmailo is a poet, translator, novelist, and writing coach. She is leader of the workshop Writing Resilience for writers affected by trauma, addiction, and/or mental illness. She is the original English-language translator of the avant-garde opera Victory over the Sun by Alexei Kruchenych.


Twitter Username: larissashmailo

Website: www.larissashmailo.com

Anna Halberstadt is a poet, translator, and author of two poetry collections in English—Vilnius Diary and Green in a Landscape with Ashes—and two in Russian—Transit and Gloomy Sun—as well as American poetry translations Selected Selected by Eileen Myles and Nocturnal Fire by Edward Hirsch.

113A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S113.

Choice Words: Writers on Abortion

(, , , Kristen Ghodsee, Susan Rich)

A reading and discussion with contributors to the first major anthology of literature on abortion. Panelists will read from works on abortion written over five centuries and six continents, discussing their own writing process about abortion, the suppressed lineage of abortion literature, and the themes that mark the book, including the struggle against silence and shame, the importance of support during abortion, and the impact of class, politics, ethnicity, and religion on reproductive justice.

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Annie Finch’s books of poetry include The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells, Calendars, and Spells: New and Selected Poems. Other recent books are A Poet’s Craft and Choice Words: Writers on Abortion. She teaches poetry, meter, scansion, and magic of rhythmical writing at Poetry Witch Community.


Twitter Username: anniefinchpoet

Website: anniefinch.com

Josette Akresh-Gonzales has been published in Atticus Review, JAMA, the Pinch, the Journal, Breakwater, PANK, and many other journals. A recent poem has been included in the anthology Choice Words (Haymarket). Cofounder of the journal Clarion, she was its editor for two years. Tweets @Vivakresh.


Twitter Username: vivakresh

Camonghne Felix is the author of Build Yourself a Boat, which was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Awards. Her collection of poems, Dyscalculia, and collection of essays, Let the Poets Govern, are forthcoming from One World.


Twitter Username: CAMONGHNE

113C, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S114.

The Teaching Press as an Agent of Change

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Teaching presses and apprenticeships in the art and craft of publishing prepare student writers to submit and publish their work. They also provide the foundation for a more inclusive, innovative, and accessible publishing industry. Join panelists from Kaya Press, LARB Books, Lookout Books, and Ooligan Press as they discuss their respective publishing models and demonstrate how their work as publishers, editors, and teachers empowers future generations to lead meaningful change.

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Emily Louise Smith is the founder and publisher of Lookout Books and its sister magazine, Ecotone. An assistant professor of creative writing at University North Carolina Wilmington, she also directs the department's Publishing Laboratory. Her writing appears in Best New Poets and the Southern Review.

Neelanjana Banerjee is the managing editor of Kaya Press. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in Prairie Schooner, Chicago Quarterly Review, PANK, the Rumpus, and several anthologies. She teaches writing and Asian American literature at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University.


Twitter Username: neelanjanab

Website: www.neelanjanabanerjee.com

Robyn Crummer-Olson is the publisher at Ooligan Press, a student-run trade press at Portland State University. As senior instructor, she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in book marketing, book publishing for writers, management skills in publishing, publishing lab, and publishing studio.

KaToya Ellis Fleming is a graduate of Spelman College and holds an MFA in narrative nonfiction from the University of Georgia. She is the former Oxford American Jeff Baskin Writers Fellow, and she is currently an assistant professor of publishing arts at UNC Wilmington and editor at Lookout Books.


Twitter Username: katoya3000

Irene Yoon (she/her) is executive director of the Los Angeles Review of Books. She holds a PhD in English from UC Berkeley, and she is the director of the LARB Publishing Workshop since 2018.


Twitter Username: beenepon

115AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S115.

Bowling Green State University MFA's Fiftieth Anniversary Reading

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Celebrating our fiftieth year of fostering original literary voices, BGSU presents five writers from various eras of our program’s history. Writers from BGSU have published more than 400 books and been recognized with the Yale Younger Poets Award, the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, the Drue Heinz Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, among other honors. This reading will showcase the quality and diversity of BGSU’s writers over the decades.

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Carolyn Forché’s books of poetry include Blue Hour; The Angel of History, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and The Country Between Us. She is also the editor of Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness and the coeditor of Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English 1500–2001. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the director of the Lannan Center for Poetry and Poetics and holds the Lannan Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.


Twitter Username: carolynforche

Website: www.carolynforche.com

Charles Fort is author of The Town Clock Burning, We Did Not Fear the Father, Darvil, Frankenstein Was a Negro, and Mrs. Belladonna’s Supper Club Waltz. His poems appear in The Best American Poetry (2001, 2003, and 2016). Fort's novel The Last Black Hippie in Connecticut is forthcoming.


Twitter Username: charlesfortpoet

Website: https://www.poetcharlesfort.com/

Karen Craigo is the author of Passing through Humansville and No More Milk. She served as the fifth poet laureate of the state of Missouri. She is a 2000 graduate of BGSU's MFA program.


Twitter Username: karenkawrites

Website: betterviewofthemoon.blogspot.com

MIchael Czyzniejewski is the author of three collections of stories: I Will Love You for the Rest of My Life: Breakup Stories, Chicago Stories, and Elephants in Our Bedroom. He teaches at Missouri State University, where he edits for Moon City Press and Moon City Review.


Twitter Username: MCzyzniejewski

Matt Bell is the author of the novels Appleseed, Scrapper, and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, the story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, and two works of nonfiction, Refuse to Be Done and Baldur's Gate II. He is an associate professor at Arizona State University.


Twitter Username: mdbell79

Website: http://www.mdbell.com

115C, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S116.

Where Every Voice Matters: Community College Literary Journal Showcase

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Community college literary journals offer new and emerging writers, many of minority and underrepresented backgrounds, unparalleled access to publishing their first works, learning about journal design and production, and the literary world at large. Panelists from around the country (CA, FL, MD, MI, NY) will share strategies to engage community college students and other writers from local communities in practices of the literary marketplace and the nuts and bolts of running different journals.

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Lane Igoudin, MA, PhD, is a published nonfiction writer who blogs for American Journal of Sociology, Family Equality, and The Forward. A tenured English professor at Los Angeles City College, he is familiar with LACCD literary journals such as the Citadel, Hybrid Culture Magazine, and Milestone. www.laneigoudin.com


Twitter Username: LIgoudin

Website: www.laneigoudin.com

Maria Brandt teaches creative writing at Monroe Community College in Rochester, New York, where she guides capstone students through the annual production of a hand-crafted literary magazine. She herself has published a novella, a short-play collection, and several short stories around the country.

Omar Figueras, a professor at Miami Dade College, sits on the advisory board of Reading Queer. In January 2019, he received a KWLS Teacher & Librarian Scholarship, and in the summer of 2020, with the sponsorship of The Humanities Edge Grant, he created the MDC Student Writers Conference.


Twitter Username: omar_figueras

Magin LaSov Gregg is an associate professor of English at Frederick Community College. She has advised the student newspaper and will begin advising the literary magazine in the spring of 2022. Her essays appear in the Washington Post, NPR, the Rumpus, Bellingham Review, Full Grown People, and elsewhere.


Twitter Username: maginlasovgregg

Joe Baumann teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at St. Charles Community College, where he leads the creative writing program. He possesses a PhD in creative writing from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

118BC, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S117.

Writing for Recovery: New Sobriety Narratives

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The addict's crisis transcends the page and is often brought there by the writer-addicts themselves. The trauma of addiction is a central conflict in any addict's story; however, it is not the only plot point. This panel of writers in recovery seeks to discuss where the sobriety narrative stands today, how recovery stories can combat harmful fetishization tropes that further stigmatize addicts, and how real-life recovery tools can help the writer become a better writer of witness.

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Tara Stillions Whitehead is a writer and filmmaker. Author of the hybrid collections Blood Histories and The Year of the Monster, she is an assistant professor of Film, Video, and Digital Media Production at Messiah University in Pennsylvania.


Twitter Username: MrsWhitehouse74

Mike McClelland's first book, Gay Zoo Day, was released by Beautiful Dreamer Press in 2017. He is a graduate of Allegheny College, the London School of Economics, and Georgia College and is currently pursuing his doctorate at the University of Georgia.


Twitter Username: magicmikewrites

L. L. Kirchner is a journalist, award-winning screenwriter, and author of two memoirs, including the forthcoming Blissful Thinking: Surviving the Wellness Revolution. Her essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and print outlets including the Washington Post and Salon.


Twitter Username: llkirchner_

Website: llkirchner.com

Darren C. Demaree is the author of sixteen poetry collections, most recently a child walks in the dark.


Twitter Username: d_c_demaree

119AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S118.

Making the Personal Public: Airing Secrets in Memoir

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In memoir, how do we balance telling the story we need to tell with the discomfort of exposing secrets that can cause harm—especially to those we love? How do we write despite the possible fallout? Five acclaimed memoirists tackle this question through their own candid explorations of family, romantic partners, and careers, exploring what it means to make the personal public. Attendees will come away with tools to dig deep into the truths they must tell.

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Joanna Rakoff is the author of the bestsellers My Salinger Year—recently adapted into a feature film starring Sigourney Weaver—and A Fortunate Age, winner of the Goldberg Prize for Fiction. Her family memoir, The Fifth Passenger, will be out in 2022. She writes for the New York Times and Vogue.


Twitter Username: joannarakoff

Website: http://joannarakoff.com

Maya Shanbhag Lang holds a PhD in comparative literature and is the author of What We Carry and The Sixteenth of June. Her work has been featured in the New York TimesWashington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Times of India


Twitter Username: mayaslang

Website: www.mayalang.com

Leslie Gray Streeter is a journalist, author, speaker, and advocate for grieving people. She released her first book, the memoir Black Widow. She and her work have appeared in Palm Beach Post; Washington Post; O, the Oprah Magazine; Seattle Times; the Atlantic, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and more.


Twitter Username: LeslieStreeter

Julie Metz is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Perfection and Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother's Childhood and What a War Left Behind. She has written for publications including the New York Times, Tablet, Salon, Dame, and Catapult and is a fellow of MacDowell, Yaddo, and VCCA.


Twitter Username: juliemetzwriter

Website: www.juliemetz.com

Jessica Pearce Rotondi is the author of What We Inherit: A Secret War and a Family's Search for Answers, which Oprah Magazine named a best book of summer 2020. She is a a former senior editor at HuffPost and has written for the Boston Globe, History Channel, Reader’s Digest, Salon, and Vogue.


Twitter Username: JessicaRotondi

Website: http://www.jessicapearcerotondi.com/

120AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S119.

Not Just for Scholars: How to Publish Fiction & Memoir with University Presses

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As the number of big commercial publishers contracts, university presses offer an essential alternative. Almost ninety universities are actively acquiring creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and translations, but information on their interests and procedures is not always easy to find. This diverse panel features one university press director and four acclaimed writers of multiple genres, published by a range of university presses. They guide you through the publishing process, from submission to distribution.

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Sharon Harrigan is the author of the novel Half and the memoir Playing with Dynamite. She has published over fifty short pieces in the New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at WriterHouse, a literary center in Charlottesville, Virginia.


Twitter Username: harrigan_sharon

Website: www.sharonharrigan.net

Kelly Fordon’s short story collection, I Have the Answer, was published by Wayne State University Press, 2020. Other books include Goodbye Toothless House and Garden for the Blind. She runs a monthly blog called #letsdeconstructastory at www.kellyfordon.com.


Twitter Username: kfor24

Website: www.kellyfordon.com

Dennis Lloyd is the director of the University of Wisconsin Press.


Twitter Username: dlbookman

Yang Huang’s novel My Good Son won the University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize. Her linked story collection, My Old Faithful, won the Juniper Prize, and her debut novel, Living Treasures, won the Nautilus Book Award silver medal. She works for the University of California, Berkeley.


Twitter Username: yangwrites

Website: www.yanghuang.com

120C, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S120.

Short Story as Laboratory

(, , , Gwen Kirby, Sequoia Nagamatsu)

The short story is a form uniquely suited to experimentation and play. Five fiction writers discuss innovative approaches to the short story in their own work and the work of writers whom they admire, reflecting on what premises and constraints have proved fruitful for them and for others, thinking through the purpose of experimentation—what it makes possible, both for the writer and the reader—and offering exercises to prompt writers who hope to experiment in their own work.

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Cara Blue Adams is the author of You Never Get It Back, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, judged by Brandon Taylor. Her award-winning fiction appears in Granta, the Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. She is an associate professor at Seton Hall University.


Twitter Username: carablueadams

Website: www.carablue.com

Ramona Ausubel is the author of Awayland, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, A Guide to Being Born, and the PEN America award-winning novel No One Is Here Except All of Us. Her work has been published in the New Yorker and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA program at Colorado State University.

Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of Parakeet, Safe as Houses, and 2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas. Honors include the O. Henry Award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Fellowship, and the Pushcart Prize. Her alien opus novel Beautyland is forthcoming from FSG. She teaches at NYU and The New School.


Twitter Username: mhbertino

Website: www.mariehelenebertino.com

121BC, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S121.

The Value & Use of Ecopoetry Anthologies in a Time of Environmental Crisis

(, , , , Laura-Gray Street)

Five ecopoetry anthology editors will discuss editing and publicizing anthologies (international, national, or local) encouraging action on our environmental crisis and environmental injustice that can help readers feel a sense of both urgency and hope. Some of us have collaborated with scientific or environmental organizations, donating royalties and developing action guides. We will discuss organizing the book, finding a publisher, and working with the publisher to develop a unique point of view.

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Elizabeth J. Coleman is the editor of Here: Poems for the Planet  and the author of two poetry collections from Spuyten Duyvil Press, two poetry chapbooks, and a poetry translation. She is a public interest attorney, environmental advocate, and mindfulness teacher.


Twitter Username: ejcpoetry

Ruth Nolan, MFA, MA, is the author of Ruby Mountain (poems), editor of No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of CA's Deserts, and coeditor of Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of CA. She is professor of English, creative writing, and Native American literature at College of the Desert, Palm Desert, California.


Twitter Username: ruthnolan

Ann Fisher-Wirth's sixth book is The Bones of Winter Birds. Her fifth book, Mississippi, is a poetry/photography collaboration with Maude Schuyler Clay. Coeditor of The Ecopoetry Anthology, fellow of the Black Earth Institute, Ann teaches English and directs environmental studies at the University of Mississippi.

Craig Santos Perez, PhD, is a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is the author of five poetry books and the coeditor of five anthologies. He is a professor and former director of the creative writing program in the English department at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.


Twitter Username: craigsperez

Website: www.craigsantosperez.wordpress.com

122AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S122.

The Language in Question: New Poetry from Milkweed Editions

(, , , , )

Benjamin Garcia writes, "the language in question is corrupt // it's poison and salve // savage and sage // it's honeysuckle and bitter oleander." The poets in this reading, with recent books published by Milkweed Editions, all illustrate in varying ways the press's ongoing commitment to art that uses language to trouble and interrogate the status quo. Our poetries are radical, queer, disabled, genre-bending. We seek to celebrate our power as creators—come join us!

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Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer and the author of Real Phonies and Genuine FakesThe Octopus Game, and The Diminishing House. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado-Denver, where she coedits the journal Copper Nickel.


Twitter Username: nbeerpoet

Website: nickybeer.com

Benjamin Garcia provides HIV/HCV/STD and opioid overdose prevention education to higher-risk communities in New York State. He has received scholarships from the Frost Place and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. His work is forthcoming in Lambda Literary, Indiana Review, Boston Review, and elsewhere.


Twitter Username: bengarciapoet

Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley is an Affrilachian author.


Twitter Username: BenKingsleyy

Michael Kleber-Diggs (KLEE-burr digs) is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things, won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His poems and essays has appeared in several journals and anthologies.


Twitter Username: MKDorDiggsy

Website: michaelkleberdiggs@gmail.com

torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk and MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Zoeglossia, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. She is the author of Wound from the Mouth of a Wound.


Twitter Username: tagreathouse

124, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S123.

This IS Women’s Fiction: Asian & Asian American Women & the Global Narrative

(, , , , )

From Tiananmen Square to the London Bombings to Duterte’s dictatorship in the Philippines to the power of Fake News, four women writers’ work reshapes the narrative of contemporary event as it gels into history. Through their novels that deal with the big issues—representation, surveillance, legacy, colonialism, resistance—the work of these award-winning Asian women is working to transfigure the discourse through the political novel as it expands to include diverse, articulate voices.

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Catherine Ciepiela is a scholar and translator of Russian poetry who teaches at Amherst College. Her main interests are Russian modernism, especially the writing of Marina Tsvetaeva, and contemporary Russian poetry. She recently finished translating a book of hybrid essays by Polina Barskova.

Sabina Murray is the author of the novels The Human Zoo, Valiant Gentlemen, Forgery, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, and Slow Burn and two short story collections, the Pen/Faulkner Award winning The Caprices and Tales of the New World. She has received Guggenheim and an NEA. She teaches at UMass Amherst.

Gina Apostol's last novels, Insurrecto and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, explore the Philippine revolutions against America and Spain. Her third novel, Gun Dealers' Daughter, won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award. Her first two novels won the Juan Laya Prize (Philippine National Book Award).


Twitter Username: GinaApostol

Website: ginaapostol.com

Tracy O'Neill is the author of the novels The Hopeful and Quotients. A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and a 2012 Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellow, her work has appeared in Granta, VQR, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, the Guardian, and the New York Times.


Twitter Username: tracysoneill

Meng Jin’s novel Little Gods was a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Award and LA Times First Fiction Prize and longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. A Kundiman fellow, she has short prose appearing in Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and elsewhere.


Twitter Username: jinittowinit

125, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S124.

Retrograde Radical: Marilynne Robinson's Cosmic Realism

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Four innovative novelists, all seasoned fiction workshop leaders, discuss how Robinson achieves her remarkable effects, engaging women's and men's lives, race, Christianity, and American cultural history in novels simultaneously unadorned and complicated, regional and universal, and reminding us that novelists can be our public intellectuals. Panelists will tease out how Robinson does what she does and what we can learn from this work, with insights for both pedagogy and our own writing.

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Ted Pelton has authored five fiction titles, numerous articles and reviews, and over fifty published stories, including in BOMB and Brooklyn Rail. An NEA Literature Fellow in fiction and the former director of Starcherone Books, he directs the creative writing program at Tennessee Tech University.

Elisabeth Sheffield is the author of four novels, most recently Ire Land (a Faery Tale), and one critical book. She is the recipient of a 2012 NEA Award for Literature and a 2014 Fulbright at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast, and she was a 2016/2017 writer in residence at the Hanse Institute in Germany.


Twitter Username: Elisabethsheffi

Website: www.elisabethsheffield.net

Aimee Parkison is the author of Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, which won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. She teaches in the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University and has published five books of fiction.


Twitter Username: AimeeParkison

Website: www.aimeeparkison.com

Michael James Rizza is the author of the novel Cartilage and Skin and a monograph about Jameson, Baudrillard, and Foucault, along with various works of short fiction and academic articles. He is an associate professor of creative writing and the department chair at Eastern New Mexico University.

126A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S125.

Surviving (& Thriving in) the Sophomore Slump

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That first book is out in the world, the launch is long past, and you're back at your desk plugging away at the next one. You've already written and published one book—shouldn't the next one be easier? If you're still plagued by uncertainty and struggling with your second book, you are not alone. This panel of authors working on their sophomore books will grapple with surviving your debut and how to get the work done afterward while encountering the struggles and slumps of second books.

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Blair Hurley is the author of the novel The Devoted, longlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize. She received a 2020 Alberta Magazine Prize, a Best Small Fictions Prize, and a 2018 Pushcart Prize. She hosts the Writerly Bites podcast and teaches at Catapult and McMaster University.


Twitter Username: bhurley

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You: Stories, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and We Cast a Shadow: A Novel, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize.


Twitter Username: mauriceruffin

Lara Ehrlich is the author of the story collection Animal Wife and the host of Writer Mother Monster, a conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of “having it all” and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice as we make space for creative endeavors.


Twitter Username: ehrlichlara

Arif Anwar’s debut novel, The Storm, was published by Simon and Schuster in 2018 to international acclaim, and it has been translated to multiple languages. Arif’s work has been published in the Daily Beast, VICE Magazine, Electric Literature, and the Daily Star, among others.


Twitter Username: arifanwar

Rachel Beanland is the author of Florence Adler Swims Forever, which was a Barnes & Noble Book Club pick and recently recognized with the 2020 National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction. Rachel has an MFA in fiction from Virginia Commonwealth University.


Twitter Username: rachelbeanland

9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.

Virtual

S126.

A Reading and Conversation with Marian Crotty, Brenda Peynado, & Blake Sanz

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Three award-winning writers of recently published books of short fiction give brief readings, followed by moderated conversation about the short story collection in today's publishing landscape. What are the things that a collection can say in 2021 that can't be said in other ways, and how do these authors' books strive toward that aspiration? When do you know that you have a collection that works as a whole? When do you know that you have a collection ready to submit for publication?

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Blake Sanz is the winner of the 2021 Iowa Short Fiction Award for his story collection, The Boundaries of Their Dwelling (forthcoming), selected by Brandon Taylor. He has had fiction appear in Ecotone, Puerto del Sol, and Fifth Wednesday Journal.


Twitter Username: blakesanz

Marian Crotty is the author of What Counts as Love, which was longlisted for the PEN/Bingham Prize and won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. She is an associate professor at Loyola University Maryland and an assistant editor at the Common where she works with the Common Young Writers Program.


Twitter Username: mgcrotty

Brenda Peynado, author of The Rock Eaters, her debut collection, has received an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Grant, and a Nelson Algren Award and appears in Tor.com, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, and The Sun. She is an assistant professor at the University of Houston.


Twitter Username: brendapeynado

Virtual

S127.

Opening the Gate: Poetry Reviewing as an Agent of Inclusivity

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What is the role of the book reviewer? Are current critics engaging with new poetry in ways that are illuminating and rewarding for readers and writers of different genders, races, and ethnicities? As readers demand that institutions support poets who write into the many traditions outside the historical center, what’s the responsibility of the critic? This diverse group of poet/critics considers these questions and others within the context of the changing landscape of writing and publishing.

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Ruben Quesada is a gay, first-generation Costa Rican American poet and critic who was raised by immigrant parents. He is the author of the poetry collections Revelations and Next Extinct Mammal. He is currently producing a documentary about Latinx poetry.


Twitter Username: rubenquesada

Website: www.rubenquesada.com

Emily Pérez is the author of House of Sugar, House of Stone; Made and Unmade; and Backyard Migration Route. With Nancy Reddy she coedited The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. A CantoMundo fellow, she has received funding from Bread Loaf, Community of Writers, and Jack Straw.


Twitter Username: emilytheperez

Emilia Phillips (she/her/hers) is the author of four books, including Embouchure (2021). Her poetry appears in AGNI, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. She is an associate professor of poetry in the MFA writing program at UNC-Greensboro.

Victoria Chang's books are Obit and Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. Her children's books are Love, Love and Is Mommy?.


Twitter Username: VChangPoet

Website: www.victoriachangpoet.com

Mandana Chaffa is founder and editor in chief of Nowruz Journal, a periodical of Persian arts and letters, and a writer and editor at Chicago Review of Books. She serves on the board of the Flow Chart Foundation and was named a 2021–2022 Emerging Critics Fellow by the National Book Critics Circle.


Twitter Username: recycledgiraffe

Virtual

S128.

The Empire Writes Back from the Program Era: CW in Asia & Beyond

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While books like MFA vs. NYC echo AWP reports on the rise of creative writing (CW) educations in the US, and their popularity in Australia reveals this rise is not limited to North America, non-English countries have been slower to enter “the program era.” Two new anthologies from Routledge and Bloomsbury chart the rise of CW educations around the world and the next major chapter in tertiary CW education—the multilingual student. Anthology editors and contributors discuss global tertiary CW ed.

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Darryl Whetter is the author of two poetry collections and four books of fiction, most recently the climate crisis novel Our Sands. A Canadian, he was the inaugural program director of the first creative writing master’s program in Singapore. www.darrylwhetter.ca


Twitter Username: darrylwhetter

Website: www.darrylwhetter.ca

Xu Xi 許素細 has published fourteen books of fiction and nonfiction and edited five anthologies. Her newest title is The Art and Craft of Asian Stories. She is the founder of Mongrel Writers Residence™ and Authors at Large and is currently the Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.


Twitter Username: xuxiwriter

Website: www.xuxiwriter.com

Dai Fan has taught one of the few creative writing courses in English as a foreign language in China since 2009. She publishes in both Chinese and English. She is professor of English and director of the Sun Yat-sen Center for English-language Creative Writing and runs the Sun Yat-sen University Writers' Residency.

Sam Meekings is the author of Under Fishbone Clouds (called "a poetic evocation of the country and its people" by the New York Times), The Book of Crows, and The Afterlives of Dr. Gachet. He is assistant professor of creative writing at Northwestern University in Qatar.


Twitter Username: SMeekings

Marshall Moore is a course leader and senior lecturer at Falmouth University in the UK. He teaches creative writing and publishing and holds a PhD in creative writing from Aberystwyth University. Prior to moving to Britain, he worked in higher education in Hong Kong and Korea for fifteen years.


Twitter Username: marshallsmoore

Virtual

S129.

Unconventional Bodies Now: An Intersectional Reading

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Join us for a poetry reading in celebration of bodies deemed unconventional by everyday society. This reading will feature five award-winning published authors living with varying physical and mental intersections and ranging identities as Black, Salvadoran, Mexican, Iranian American, and Indian American writers. Come witness how the body works as a poetic tool to liberate, reinstate power, and, most importantly, return to self-love.

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Karla Cordero is a descendant of the Chichimeca peoples and a Chicana poet, educator, and ARTivist. She has been offered fellowships from VONA, Macondo, CantoMundo, the Loft Literary Center, and Pink Door. She is the author of the poetry collection How to Pull Apart the Earth.

Yesika Salgado is a Los Angeles-based Salvadoran poet who writes about her culture and her fat brown body. She is the recipient of the 2020 International Latino Book Award in Poetry, writer of the column Suelta for Remezcla, and author of the best-sellers Corazón, Tesoro, and Hermosa.


Twitter Username: yesikastarr

Edwin Anthony Bodney is a Black, queer, nonbinary writer and educator with a direct eye for vulnerability and nostalgia of the heart. Their works have been featured in publications from Platypus Press, Not A Cult Press, and the largest LGBTQ+ magazine in the country, the Advocate.


Twitter Username: edwinbodney

Virtual

S130.

Writing the Grit of Motherhood: A Reading by Mutha Magazine Contributors

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Since 2013, Mutha Magazine has given voice to motherhood from diverse perspectives, particularly to the stories too often silenced or ignored. Mutha contributors, whose experience is as diverse as their writing, will read works that recognize mothering in its complex realities, including the grit, beauty, brokenness, and getting by.

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Cheryl E. Klein’s column, Hold it Lightly, appears monthly(ish) in MUTHA Magazine. She is the author of Crybaby, a memoir about wanting a baby and getting cancer instead. She also wrote a story collection, The Commuters, and a novel, Lilac Mines.


Twitter Username: cherylekleinla

Website: http://breadandbread.blogspot.com

Erin Pushman's How to Read Like a Writer: Ten Lessons to Elevate Your Reading and Writing Practice is forthcoming in 2022. Her essays appear in the Gettysburg Review, Confrontation, Mutha, and Pangyrus. A writing professor at Limestone University, she blogs about parenting a critically ill child.


Twitter Username: ErinPushman

Website: https://the-face-of-bravery.com/

Jade Sanchez-Ventura is a writer and radical educator. Her personal essays have appeared in Slice Magazine, Seal Press, and Bitch Media’s Popaganda podcast. She is a Hertog Fellow and has earned Slice and Disquiet Literary Conference awards. She is a regular contributor to MUTHA Magazine.

Lisa Lim is a comic storyteller born and raised in Queens, New York. Her recent work focuses on the grit and heart it takes to mother, especially during a pandemic. Her graphic stories have been featured in HuffPost, Scary Mommy, and MUTHA Magazine. Find more of her storytelling at lisalimcomics.com


Twitter Username: chineseladybug

Virtual

S131.

The Literary Ghost Story: The Power of Haunted Fiction

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Recent years have shown the continued popularity of ghost stories across literature, from the terrifying and literal to the comedic and metaphorical—yet how do we make sense of the ghost story as contemporary fiction? In this panel, acclaimed genre-bending authors will talk about the ways ghosts manifest in their own work, the varied roles ghosts play in literature and across cultures, strategies for writing ghost stories, and why they (and all of us) continue to be drawn to haunted fiction.

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Joy Baglio's fiction appears in Tin House, American Short Fiction, the Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, Bread Loaf, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and Vermont Studio Center and is the founder of Pioneer Valley Writers' Workshop.


Twitter Username: JoyBaglio

Website: www.joybaglio.com

Sequoia Nagamatsu (@SequoiaN) is the author of the novel How High We Go in the Dark and the story collection Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone. He teaches creative writing at St. Olaf College and in the Rainier Writing Workshop Low-Residency MFA program.


Twitter Username: sequoian

Website: http://sequoianagamatsu.com

Amber Sparks is the author of several short story collections including And I Do Not Forgive You, which was named a Best Book of 2020 by the Washington Post and NPR. She also writes essays and has published in The Paris Review, NY Mag, Tin House, and InStyle.


Twitter Username: ambernoelle

Website: www.ambernoellesparks.com

Yohanca Delgado is a 2021–2023 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her writing has appeared in Nightmare, One Story, A Public Space, and the Paris Review. Two of her stories appear in the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 anthology, guest edited by Veronica Roth.


Twitter Username: yodelnyc

Website: yohanca.com

Virtual

S132.

Translating Trauma: Poetry, Self, & Other

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Trauma is universal, but since 2020 it has become vital that we explore our relationship to trauma and our translation of that trauma into words, between languages, from ourselves to others and from others to ourselves. This panel will explore personal and political traumas and their translations in and out of language and meaning across a variety of poetry, examining the wider implications of translation beyond just its literary usage.

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Yolande Schutter is a doctoral candidate and adjunct professor of English and creative writing at SUNY at Albany. Her poetry and translations have been featured in Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of North African Literature, Eleven Eleven, Rattapallax, and CELAAN.

Dan Kraines is the author of the chapbook Licht, forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press. His translation of Goethe's "Erlkönig" appeared in Queen Mob's Tea House queer translations issue. He holds a PhD in literary criticism and queer poetics from the University of Rochester.


Twitter Username: dan_kraines

Catherine Pond is the author of Fieldglass, winner of the Crab Orchard First Book Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Best American Nonrequired Reading, AGNI, and the Adroit Journal. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California.

Claire Foster is a literary translator from French based in Toronto, where she also works as a bookseller at Type Books. Her translation of Pierre Clémenti’s memoir, A Few Personal Messages, is forthcoming.


Twitter Username: claireloufoster

10:35 a.m. to 11:50 a.m.

109AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S133.

Reterritorializing Space: What Can American Letters Learn from Diné Writers?

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Diné writers, often expected to speak of their work for its content and aesthetic alone, carry a compounded burden since settler-colonial patterns of subjection promote primitivism; genocidal legislative history; and Hollywood-glossed, southwest aesthetics, including violence and savagism. This panel presents Diné craft methods and Dinétics (Diné aesthetics/poetics), which are erased or obscured (at best) and violated or made meaningless (at worst), to interrogate false narratives as an act of restoration.

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Esther G. Belin is a Diné artist and writer and currently a faculty mentor in the low-res MFA program at the Institute for American Indian Arts. She has two poetry books: From the Belly of My Beauty and Of Cartography.


Twitter Username: arroyoarte

Jake Skeets is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, winner of the National Poetry Series, American Book Award, Whiting Award, and Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He is from the Navajo Nation and teaches at Diné College.


Twitter Username: JakeSkeets

Website: jakeskeets.com

Natanya Ann Pulley is a Diné prose writer. Her short story collection With Teeth was published in 2019, and links to her work can be found online at natanyapulley.com. She's the founding/managing editor of Hairstreak Butterfly Review and is an assistant professor at Colorado College.

111AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S134.

Writing Our Whole Selves: Mixed Writers Challenge the Narrow Literary Landscape

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In a society that favors the unambiguous over the complex, how do mixed authors of color write the truth of ourselves? Do we depict the ambiguity of our backgrounds or default to the recognizable and marketable? Do we reframe the issue by writing nonhuman characters? How do we embrace our in-betweenness and how do we influence structural change to reflect the nuances of the mixed experience? Five writers discuss how their work fits in the literary landscape now and in a more inclusive future.

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Donna Miscolta is the author of three books of fiction. Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories (2020) is her latest. Her work reflects her Filipino and Mexican heritage. Recent essays appear in Poetry Northwest and The Museum of Americana. She recently retired as a project manager in local government.


Twitter Username: donnamiscolta

Website: donnamiscolta.com

Jeni McFarland holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Houston and is a 2016 Kimbilio Fellow. Her debut novel, The House of Deep Water, is out now.


Twitter Username: jeni_mcfarland

Website: jenimcfarland.com

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri is a mixed South Asian American writer living in California's Central Valley. Her short fiction has been published in the Minnesota Review, Ecotone, Southern Humanities Review, and the Common. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories and a novel.


Twitter Username: TaliaKolluri

Aliah Lavonne Tigh is the author of Weren’t We Natural Swimmers, a forthcoming 2022 chapbook with Tram Editions. Her poems have appeared in Guernica, The Texas Review, Matter Monthly, and The Rupture.


Twitter Username: Alovetigh

Website: AliahLavonneTigh.com

Dawn Pichon Barron lives and works at the south end of the Salish Sea. She is the director of the Native Pathways Program at the Evergreen State College and Creative Writing Indigenous Studies faculty. Her chapbook, Escape Girl Blues, is out in the world.


Twitter Username: pigeongirlsgot

113A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S135.

Innovations in Social & Community-Based Creative Pedagogies & Curriculum

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The Central Brooklyn Oral History and Atlas project is a college-wide research project at Medgar Evers College in New York City that engages students, faculty, and local community residents on the collecting, archiving, and exhibition of oral histories from the area. College faculty on this panel will share and discuss how innovative creative writing pedagogy and curriculum and social and community-based art practices based on oral histories can be used to make the classroom more inclusive.

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Darrel Alejandro Holnes is the author of Stepmotherland and Migrant Psalms; his poetry has appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, Callaloo, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize and others. He is an assistant professor for CUNY, and he teaches at New York University.

Joanna Sit was born in China and grew up in New York City. She is the author of My Last Century, In Thailand with the Apostles, and most recently, Track Works. She teaches creative writing at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York.

Donna Hill has more than seventy titles in print. She has won numerous awards for her body of work. Three of her novels were adapted for television. She holds an MFA in creative writing and is an assistant professor of professional writing at Medgar Evers College.


Twitter Username: donnahill

Website: www.donnahill.com

113C, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S136.

Philly X 5: Set to Prose

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Hear from prose writers on Philly activism, Philly café life, Philly poverty, and how Philadelphians struggle with Philly's creative economy as written in their latest works. How do five authors approach the layers, neighborhoods, tensions, despairs, and sheer pretty brickness of a city the New York Times once hypothesized as “the sixth borough”? The “New York novel” is its own beast, but these authors demonstrate that prose set in Philly is a capture all its own.

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Caren Beilin is the author of a novel, Revenge of the Scapegoat. Other books include Blackfishing the IUD and Spain. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

Hilary Plum's books include Strawberry Fields, winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose, and Watchfires, winner of the GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction. She teaches at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program and is associate director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center.

Marc Anthony Richardson is author of Messiahs and Year of the Rat, winner of an American Book Award. He is the recipient of a Creative Capital Award, a PEN America grant, a Sachs Program grant, and a Hurston/Wright fellowship. Currently, he teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania.


Twitter Username: MarcAnthonyRic2

Website: www.marcanthonyrichardson.com

Emily Abendroth’s newest book, Sousveillance Pageant, coasts restlessly between fiction, poetry, and research essay. She is author of the poetry collection ]Exclosures[ and The Instead, a book-length collaborative conversation with fiction writer Miranda Mellis. 

Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer from Frankford whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Philadelphia Stories, Gulf Coast, the Offing, and the Kenyon Review.


Twitter Username: JETVGC

115AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S137.

So You Want to Be an Independent Editor

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Many writers of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry offer freelance editorial services as a sideline, but few are able to generate a steady income as independent editors. If you’ve ever dreamed of self-employment as an editor, part-time or full-time, this panel is for you. You’ll meet four experienced author-editors who will share their personal stories, discuss best practices, and offer advice on everything from finding new clients to setting your rates.

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Will Allison is an independent editor, a teacher, and contributing editor at One Story, and the author of two novels. He served as executive editor of STORY and editor-at-large of Zoetrope: All-Story. He has taught at Columbia University, Ohio State University, Butler University, and elsewhere.


Twitter Username: WillAllison3

Website: www.willallison.com

Maya Shanbhag Lang is the author of What We Carry and The Sixteenth of June. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and Times of India. She holds a PhD in comparative literature.


Twitter Username: mayaslang

Website: www.mayalang.com

Pamela Erens is the author of Middlemarch and the Imperfect Life (2022) and the novel Matasha (2021). Her previous novels were Eleven Hours, The Virgins, and The Understory, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She writes frequently on books, feminism, and sexuality.


Twitter Username: ErensPamela

Website: www.pamela-erens.com

Erika Krouse is the author of Contenders and Come Up and See Me Sometime, with two new books coming out soon: Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation, and Save Me: Stories. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Ploughshares, and One Story.


Twitter Username: ErikaKrouse

Website: www.erikakrouse.com

115C, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S138.

Beyond Romanticism, Beyond Shame: Writing About Mental Illness

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“Illness,” writes Lauren Slater, “medicine itself, is the ultimate narrative: there is no truth there.” While there is much more awareness and less romanticising of mental illness in literary culture than there once was, writing about diagnosis and recovery still brings with it plenty of stigma and shame. With work that ranges from graphic forms to narrative nonfiction, our panelists discuss their approaches to writing about mental illness, family history, and psychiatric care.

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Liz Harmer is the author of two novels: The Amateurs (2018) and Strange Loops (2022). She is at work on a memoir about her experience with and family history of mental illness.


Twitter Username: lizharmer

Courtney Cook is the author and illustrator of the graphic memoir The Way She Feels: My Life on the Borderline in Pictures and Pieces. Her personal essays have been published by outlets such as TIME, the Guardian, and the Rumpus.


Twitter Username: c00kc0

Ashley-Elizabeth Best (she/her) is the disabled author of Slow States of Collapse and Alignment. Her poems have appeared in New Welsh Review, the Literary Review of Canada, Ambit magazine, December magazine, and others. She holds an honors degree from Queen's University.


Twitter Username: Ashley_E_Best

Claire Phillips is the author of the memoir A Room with a Darker View: Chronicles of My Mother and Schizophrenia and the fantastic novella Black Market Babies. She is a lecturer at Cal Arts, a recipient of the American Academy of Poets award, and a notable mention in The Best American Essays 2015.


Twitter Username: phillipsclairel

Hollay Ghadery is a writer living on Anishinaabe land in rural Ontario. She has her MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir in mixed race identity and mental illness, was released by Guernica Editions’ MiroLand imprint in the spring of 2021.


Twitter Username: Hollay2

118BC, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S140.

Structure as Muse: The Generative Rewards of Daily Practice & Constraint

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The blank page looms. What if self-imposed rules and practices could help you generate your most inspired work? This panel explores ways in which writers across genres pair daily ordinary activities (morning walks, art-making) with self-imposed writing constraints (mandated vocabulary, word limits) to unlock creative potential and create full-length books. Panelists will discuss their practices and constraints and offer tips and exercises to help audience members begin their own projects.

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Aaron Angello is a writer and theatre artist who lives in Frederick, MD. He teaches theatre and creative writing in the new MFA program at Hood College. His first book, Close Reading, is forthcoming from Rose Metal Press (2022).


Twitter Username: aaronangello

CA Conrad is the author of eight books and has received fellowships from Lannan Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Headlands, and Pew Center for the Arts. For his books and details on the documentary The Book of Conrad (Delinquent Films, 2016), please visit http://CAConrad.blogspot.com.


Twitter Username: CAConrad88

Website: http://CAConrad.blogspot.com

Julie Carr is the author of five books of poetry, most recently 100 Notes on Violence, Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines, RAG, and Think Tank. Prose books include Surface Tension: Ruptural Time and the Poetics of Desire in Late Victorian Poetry and Objects from a Borrowed Confession.


Twitter Username: carrcarrjuli

Website: juliealicecarr.com

Alexis Almeida is a poet. She teaches writing at Bard College, and she is the author of several chapbooks and the translator of several books by Argentine and Chilean authors. She also edits 18 Owls Press.


Twitter Username: alexisfalmeida

J. Michael Martinez is the author of Museum of the Americas, selected for the National Poetry Series and longlisted for the National Book Award, and Heredities, winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. He is an assistant professor of poetry at San Jose State University.

119AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S141.

An Alice James Quartet

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Alice James Books publishes poets whose writing possesses the range, depth, and ability to cultivate greater empathy in our world and to dynamically push against silence. This work is instrumental in driving conversations that help us overcome the barriers we face. Four poets with new or forthcoming collections from Alice James will read from their work and discuss their writing process.

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Carey Salerno is the executive editor and director of Alice James Books. She is the author of Tributary and Shelter and an editor of the anthology Lit from Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books. Her poems, essays, and articles are in print and online.

Jeffrey Thomson is the author of seven books of poems, most recently, Museum of Objects Burned by the Souls in Purgatory from Alice James Books. He was Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre and is a professor of creative writing at University Maine Farmington.


Twitter Username: jeffreyThomson

Website: www.jeffreythomson.com

Rosebud Ben-Oni won the 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery and is the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS. She received fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts and CantoMundo; her work has been commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in NYC.


Twitter Username: RosebudBenOni

Website: 7TrainLove.org

Sumita Chakraborty is a poet, essayist, and scholar. She is Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, and she is the author of the poetry collection Arrow, published in the US by Alice James Books and in the UK by Carcanet Press in 2020.


Twitter Username: notsumatra

Shara McCallum is the author of six books published in the US and the UK, most recently No Ruined Stone. Her work has received recognition, including the Silver Musgrave Medal and OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry. She teaches at Penn State University. She was appointed the 2021–22 Penn State laureate.

120AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S142.

Whenever the Wounds of Injustice Are Salted We Will Gather: Poetry of Activism

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How can poems make vivid the work of activism and protest and attract more people to social movements? Can poems make us more compassionate, effective activists? Called by Vincent Toro’s poem “Vox Populi for the Marooned,” poet-activists will read poems on nuts and bolts of social change: demonstrating; making flyers, zines, and new media; fundraising; direct action; group messaging; door-knocking. Panelists will discuss craft elements that make visible the hard work of building another world.

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Sarah Browning is cofounder and for ten years was executive director of Split This Rock. Author of Killing Summer and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden, she received an MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction from Rutgers Camden in 2021 and is a recipient of the Lillian E. Smith Writer-in-Service Award.

Tamiko Beyer is the author of two poetry collections, Last Days (forthcoming) and We Come Elemental, and two chapbooks. She is a Kundiman and VONA fellow and a Hedgebrook alum. She is a social justice communications writer and strategist.


Twitter Username: tamikobeyer

Ching-In Chen is author of The Heart's Traffic, recombinant, to make black paper sing, Kundiman for Kin and coeditor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence within Activist Communities. They are part of Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Macondo, and VONA communities.


Twitter Username: chinginchen

Website: www.chinginchen.com

Sonia Sanchez was the Laura Carnell Professor of English and Women's Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia. She is the recipient of the Robert Frost Medal and the Langston Hughes Award. One of the most important writers of the Black Arts Movement, Sanchez is the author of sixteen books.

Vincent Toro is the author of Stereo.Island.Mosaic., which won the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. He is a professor at Bronx Community College, director of a writing program at The Cooper Union, and is poet in the schools for The Dodge Poetry Foundation and Dreamyard.


Twitter Username: toropoet

Website: www.grito.org

120C, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S143.

Classroom Sanctuaries: Helping Students to Write About Trauma & Mental Illness

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In memoir courses, painful experiences can spark powerful stories, yet the classic writing workshop asks college and adult-education students to sit in judgment of one another. They may feel exposed or dump too much information. Depression, self-harm, homophobia, racism—such topics impact storytelling. On this panel, we'll move past workshopping to empathic support, discussing how to create sanctuaries in person or online that foster self-awareness. Bring your questions and passion for teaching.

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Martha Nichols is cofounder of Talking Writing, a nonprofit digital magazine. A longtime journalism instructor at Harvard University Extension School, she is the author of the guide First-Person Journalism and editor of Into Sanity, an anthology of personal essays about mental illness.


Twitter Username: talkingwriting

Website: http://athenashead.com

Jane McCafferty is the author of two novels and two books of stories. Her work has won awards such as an NEA, the Drue Heinz, two Pushcarts, and others. She writes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction and teaches at Carnegie Mellon.

Beth Richards writes creative nonfiction and teaches academic, technical, professional, and creative writing at the University of Hartford, where she serves as director of the first- and second-year writing programs.


Twitter Username: BethARichards

Mark Brazaitis is the author of eight books, including The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize, and The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award. He is a professor of English at West Virginia University.


Twitter Username: markbrazaitis

Website: http://english.wvu.edu/facu/mark-brazaitis

121BC, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S144.

Excavating Story & Silence: The Poetics of Erasure

(, , , )

We are innovative writers who unearth hidden stories through erasure poetry, peeling away language to reveal invisible worlds beneath given texts. We examine letters, visual artifacts, pharmaceutical data, and Ancestry.com reports to excavate buried narratives through erasures, a dynamic form that potentially reenacts and heals silences related to family, race, illness, and trauma. We discuss techniques for writing erasures and unearthing hidden texts to reveal vital voices and revelations.

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Hadara Bar-Nadav is the author of several poetry collections, most recently The New NudityLullaby (with Exit Sign)The Frame Called Ruin, and Fountain and Furnace. She is also coauthor of Writing Poems, 8th ed. Bar-Nadav is a professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.


Twitter Username: Hadarabar

Website: www.Hadarabar.com

Donika Kelly is the author of the full-length collections The Renunciations and Bestiary. She is an assistant professor at the University of Iowa.


Twitter Username: officialdonika

Diana Khoi Nguyen is a poet, multimedia artist, author of Ghost Of, and recipient of a 2021 NEA fellowship. A Kundiman fellow, she is core faculty in the Randolph College low-residency MFA and an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Kiki Petrosino is professor of poetry at the University of Virginia. She is the author of four books of poetry, including White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia and Witch Wife. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Literature.

122AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S145.

Second Acts

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Like the musician’s “sophomore album,” the poet’s “second act” navigates complex terrain. How much should a poet show aesthetic range? Does introducing a new project threaten the development of poetic voice? When should a poet look for a new publisher? This reading features five poets whose second books have been released in the past year—a trying year for any release, but especially so for early-career poets. These poets will also discuss the diverse paths that brought them to those books.

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Corey Van Landingham is the author of Antidote and Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois.

Jacques J. Rancourt is the author of Brocken Spectre, Novena, and In the Time of PrEP. He has held fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Cité Internationale des Arts, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. 


Twitter Username: jj_rancourt

Chet’la Sebree is the author of Field Study and Mistress. For her work, she has received fellowships and awards from the Academy of American Poets, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Currently, she directs the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts and teaches at Bucknell University.


Twitter Username: Nahtil

Website: http://www.chetlasebree.com

Christopher Kempf is the author of the poetry collections Late in the Empire of Men  and What though the Field Be Lost, as well as the scholarly book Craft Class: The Workshop in American Culture (Johns Hopkins. A former Stegner Fellow, he teaches at Illinois.

Phillip B. Williams is the author of the poetry collections Mutiny and Thief in the Interior. A recipient of a Whiting Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Lambda Literary Award, he currently teaches at Bennington College and Randolph College low-res MFA.


Twitter Username: pbw_poet

124, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S146.

Veterans Online: A Field Guide for Navigating the Digital Writing Sphere

(, , , , Kara Krauze)

Iraq and Afghanistan military and veteran writers have enthusiastically embraced the internet to amplify their voices and build audiences through blogging, online publishing, remote workshopping, and social media promotion and as a bridge to traditional print publication. The members of the panel, all accomplished authors or online journal editors in the veteran-writing field, offer a range of perspectives regarding best online publishing practices, lessons learned, and future possibilities.

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Peter Molin, the keeper of the blog Time Now: The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Art, Film, and Literature, has written and presented often on war-writing and literature and has led and participated in numerous veterans-writing workshops. An Afghanistan vet, he teaches at Rutgers University, New Jersey.


Twitter Username: TimeNowBlog

Teresa Fazio is a former Marine Corps officer and the author of the memoir Fidelis. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Foreign Policy, Washington Post, Lit Hub, and several anthologies, among other outlets. She has an MFA in nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars.


Twitter Username: DoctorFaz

Jennifer Orth-Veillon, PhD, is a writer and translator based in Lyon, France. Published in the New York TimesThe War HorseLunch TicketConsequence, and The Wrath-Bearing Tree, her anthology on WWI and today's veterans is forthcoming in 2022. Her first novel, Mice in the Shadows, is based on WWII.


Twitter Username: orthveillon

Ron Capps the founder and director of the Veterans Writing Project, a 501(c)(3) that has served more than 3,500 veterans and family members in 24 states. He is the publisher of the literary journal O-Dark-Thirty. His memoir, Seriously Not All Right: Five Wars in Ten Years, was published in 2014.


Twitter Username: ron_capps

Website: seriouslynotallright.com

125, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S147.

Order within Chaos: Finding New Forms from Free Verse

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Despite the forms that have arisen since the mid-20th century, conversations about poetic form are often limited to binary notions of traditional forms and free verse. But there need not be firm delineation between them: new forms often arise from free verse. We will explore how free verse spawns different approaches to structures and their subjects and how changes in form demand performative engagement with the texts, in which writers and readers conspire to form order within a chaotic milieu.

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Vincent A. Cellucci wrote Absence Like Sun and An Easy Place / To Die. Vincent performed "Diamonds in Dystopia," an interactive poetry web app, internationally and at SXSW in 2017, and the poem was anthologized in Best American Experimental Writing 2018.  


Twitter Username: theexceptionali

Jiwon Choi is a poet, teacher, and urban gardener. She is the author of One Daughter Is Worth Ten Sons (2017) and I Used To Be Korean (2021). She teaches preschool at the Educational Alliance in NYC. She gardens at the Pacific Street Brooklyn Bear’s Garden near Downtown Brooklyn.


Twitter Username: jcsnuggy

Website: https://iusedtobekorean.com/

Teow Lim Goh is the author of two books of poetry, Islanders and Faraway Places. She has also published many essays on social issues and criticism on poetic forms. She earned her MFA from Western Colorado University.

Christopher Shipman is the author or coauthor of eight books and three chapbooks. His work appears in journals such as Cimarron Review, PANK, Pedestal, Plume, and Salt Hill. His poem “The Three-Year Crossing” was a winner of the 2015 Big Bridges Prize, judged by Alice Quinn.


Twitter Username: STMshipman

Website: www.cshipmanpoetry.com

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and five chapbooks and is the 2020 winner of the Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Award for The Mercy of Traffic. See other work in Persimmon Tree, Rattle, the Atlanta Review, and others.

126A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S148.

No One Cares About Your Kid: Navigating Parenthood as a Poetic Subject

(, , , , Trey Moody)

If it’s true that no one wants to hear about another person’s kids, how then do we write about parenthood? How do we differentiate our writing from the deluge of poems on parenting? How do we craft fresh, compelling work for a wide range of audiences, including nonparents? Five poets discuss how parenthood changed their relationship to their work, sharing practical writing advice for the poet-parent and techniques they developed to avoid cliché and self-indulgence.

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Casey Thayer is the author of Self Portrait with Spurs and Sulfur. His second collection Rational Anthem, finalist for the Miller Williams Prize, is forthcoming. Winner of the Cow Creek Chapbook Prize and Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, he has published work in AGNI, APR, and Poetry.

Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of tether, Errata (Crab Orchard Series winner), In the Carnival of Breathing, and Back-Talk. She's received an NEA fellowship and is an associate professor of poetry and creative nonfiction in the Writer's Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.


Twitter Username: LFCoutley

Eugenia Leigh is the author of Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows. Her second collection, Bianca, is forthcoming, and recent poems have appeared in the Nation, Ploughshares, and Poetry. She is a Kundiman fellow and the recipient of awards from Poets & Writers Magazine, Poetry magazine, and elsewhere.


Twitter Username: EugeniaLeigh

Website: http://www.eugenialeigh.com

Neelanjana Banerjee is the managing editor of Kaya Press. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in Prairie SchoonerChicago Quarterly ReviewPANK, the Rumpus, and several anthologies. She teaches writing and Asian American literature at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University.


Twitter Username: neelanjanab

Website: www.neelanjanabanerjee.com

10:35 a.m. to 11:35 a.m.

Virtual

S149.

N/evergreen: Arab/Indigenous Ecopoesis & Environmental Literatures

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Pluralizing and problematizing simplistic notions of land/sky/water, womanist and queer/trans Palestinian and mixed-race Arab/Indigenous poets, non/fiction writers, performers, and editors examine the ways space and place shape and guide our work. Surfacing stories grounded in geohistory, this panel will discuss the connections between Nations and narration, bodies (of work) and the lands and waters from which they emerge, and decolonizing dialogues of ecopoetic and environmental literatures.

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Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, an NEA and Tulsa Artist Fellow, is the author of Archipiélagos, Antes y después del Bronx: Lenapehoking, and South Bronx Breathing Lessons. He edited Yellow Medicine Review's global queer Indigenous issue and coedited Movement Research Performance Journal's Native issue.

Micaela Kaibni Raen is a Palestinian lesbian poet and nonfiction writer, community organizer and advocate, and international human rights activist. She is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc. Her work appears in Bint el Nas, Yellow Medicine Review, and The Poetry of Arab Women.

Amir Rabiyah is a librarian and author of the poetry book, Prayers for My 17th Chromosome. They coedited Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices. A VONA fellow, their writing appears in Sukoon; Feminist Formations and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics.

feras hilal is a Brown queer Muslim Palestinian writer/performer living on Cahuilla land. They were a Radius of Arab American Writers and Los Angeles Review of Books writing workshop fellow. They are completing a speculative mixed-genre fiction/poetry project that imagines a liberated Palestine.

Janine Mogannam is a queer Palestinian librarian, writer, VONA alum, and member of Still Here San Francisco and Radius of Arab American Writers. She has performed at Split This Rock, Litquake, and National Queer Arts Festival and is published in Kweli, Dismantle, and Writing the Walls Down.

Virtual

S150.

Crossover Poetics: Making Art in Other Mediums

(, )

This panel expands and troubles the practice of poetry through an exploration of two writers’ pathways to nonpage forms including film, dance, and visual art. The panelists will share work and discuss how poetry informs their work, including questions such as: How do we engage multiple practices and poetics? How does our work circulate in the economy of each medium? The panelists wish to acknowledge various barriers to participation for the original panel of five.

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Sarah Rosenthal wrote/produced/directed the short film We Agree on the Sun. She is coauthor of The Grass is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow and author of Lizard and Manhatten. She edited A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area. She is a California Book Awards jurist.


Twitter Username: weagreeonthesun

Website: sarahrosenthal.net

Anne Lesley Selcer wrote Sun Cycle, a poetry book on images and Blank Sign Book, a book of essays that challenges the boundaries of criticism. They are also author of From A Book of Poems on Beauty and other shorter works. Their art frequently exceeds the page and has exhibited internationally.


Twitter Username: @enneleslee

Virtual

S151.

Fire & Water: Pushing against Climate Fiction

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Is climate fiction a misnomer? The climate crisis teaches us that human experiences (and those of other species) are myriad, multifaceted, and irreducible to a narrowly prescribed set of expectations that genres often impose. There can be no one Thing with a capital T that constitutes fiction about climate change, as this anthology's seventeen stories illustrate. Showing itself in different and often inequitable ways around the world, the climate crisis and the stories about it are diverse.

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Kristin Thiel is coeditor of Fire & Water: Stories from the Anthropocene and a full-time writer and editor based out of Portland, Oregon. Other anthologies she has contributed to include Spent and Men Undressed.


Twitter Username: kristinwithpen

Website: www.kristinthiel.com

Mary Fifield is coeditor of Fire & Water: Stories from the Anthropocene. Her fiction has been published in Midway Journal, J Journal, and others, and her short story collection was a finalist for Black Lawrence Press' Hudson Prize. She is working on a novel about the climate crisis.

Jennifer Morales is a queer Latinx poet, fiction writer, and performance artist. Her short story collection, Meet Me Halfway: Milwaukee Stories, was Wisconsin Center for the Book’s 2016 Book of the Year, among other honors. She serves as president of the Driftless Writing Center, in Viroqua, Wisconsin.


Twitter Username: MoralesWrites

Carlos Labbé has published ten novels, among which Navidad & Matanza, Loquela, and Spiritual Choreographies were translated in English. He has also published stories collection, essays, poetry, screenwriting, and music albums. He is part of the literary collective Sangría.


Twitter Username: carloslabbej

Virtual

S152.

Future Memory & the Construction of a Decolonial Digital Archive

(, , , )

This panel focuses on the challenges, methodologies, and drives involved in the creation of a decolonial archive of Puerto Rican literature. It addresses how interviewing writers, translating, working with institutions, and digitizing materials can create a lasting open-access source during a period in which the archipelago’s educational resources are being privatized and the gap between institutional access and intercommunity literary production is widening in both archipiélago and diáspora.

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Ricardo Alberto Maldonado is the translator of Dinapiera Di Donato’s Colaterales  and the author of The Life Assignment. The recipient of fellowships from Cantomundo, Queer|Arts|Mentorship and NYFA, he is managing director at 92Y's Unterberg Poetry Center.


Twitter Username: bookswimming

Raquel Salas Rivera is a Puerto Rican poet, editor, and translator and a principal investigator for El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña/ The Puerto Rico Literature Project


Twitter Username: rugamarspr

Website: raquelsalasrivera.net

Claire Jimenez is a Puerto Rican writer from New York City who received her MFA from Vanderbilt University. A PhD student at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, she is the author of Staten Island Stories and a coprincipal investigator for the Puerto Rican Literature Project.


Twitter Username: clairedjimenez

Virtual

S153.

Not a License for Inaccuracy: Artistic Liberties & Truth in Historical Fiction

(, , , , )

Philippa Gregory's controversial historical fiction is igniting passionate conversation about the fine line between erasing facts and taking artistic liberties. This panel will discuss how to craft historical narratives that captivate readers without sacrificing accuracy, especially about groups of people who are often misunderstood. With wisdom from academia, publishing, and play- and novel-writing, we will discuss how to combine vivid characters and intriguing plots with reality and solid research.

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Ryan Neighbors is a lecturer at Texas A&M University where he teaches writing, literature, and film courses. His research interests include indigenous studies, historical fiction, and the South. His writing has appeared in Tampa Review, Stoneboat Literary Journal, and Barely South Review.


Twitter Username: rcneighbors

Colin Mustful is the founder and editor of History Through Fiction. He is the author of four historical novels about the settlement and Native history of the Upper Midwest. His books combine elements of fiction and nonfiction to tell compelling and educational stories.


Twitter Username: colinmustful

Sandra Warren has publications in multiple genres, including two award-winning historical fiction novels, We Bought A WWII Bomber and Obsessed By A Promise. Contact her at www.sandrawarren.com.


Twitter Username: SandraWarrenNC

Website: www.sandrawarren.com

Richelle Lee Slota writes novels, nonfiction, plays, and poetry. Her historical novel, Stray Son, set in 1942 America, and a nonfiction book, Captive Market: Commercial Kidnapping Stories from Nigeria, were published recently. Until recently, her pen name has been Richard Slota.

Zara Miller is a contributor to the worldwide online platform the Teen Magazine and one of the Creator Institute´s published authors. A vivacious blogger, book reviewer, and social media enthusiast, Miller's young adult novel I Am Cecilia was created to inspire youngsters to dream big and bold.

Virtual

S154.

Writing the Disturbed Essay: Memory & Identity in Creative Nonfiction

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While personal essay often serves as vessel for the exploration of memory and the construction of identity, the disturbed essay stirs up the sediment, allows for memory’s paradoxes, and helps us reevaluate what we reach towards when we write. It allows us to refute dominant narratives about LGBTQIA+, PoC, and disabled lives. Those elements of the past that wake us, interfere with the coherent story of a self, and invade our privacy become the radical heart of a truer story.

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Katie Jean Shinkle is the author of None of This is an Invitation (with Jessica Alexander), Ruination, The Arson People, and Our Prayers After the Fire. She is an assistant professor in the MFA in creative writing, editing, and publishing program at Sam Houston State University.

SJ Sindu is the author of Blue-Skinned Gods and Marriage of a Thousand Lies, which won a Publishing Triangle Award and was an ALA Stonewall Honor Book and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Toronto.


Twitter Username: sjsindu

Website: http://sjsindu.com

Monica Prince is an assistant professor of activist and performance writing at Susquehanna University and the managing editor of the Santa Fe Writers Project. Her creative focus is in choreopoems and performance poetry.


Twitter Username: poetic_moni

Website: www.monicaprince.com

Danielle Pafunda is the author of nine books of poetry and prose including Spite, Beshrew, The Book of Scab, and The Dead Girls Speak in Unison. She teaches at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Lily Hoang is the author of five books, including A Bestiary (finalist for the PEN USA Nonfiction Book Award) and Changing (recipient of a PEN Open Books Award). She teaches in the MFA program at University of California San Diego.


Twitter Username: camerainsecura

Virtual

S154B.

Poetry & Disability Justice, Sponsored by Cave Canem & Zoeglossia

(Khadijah Queen, L. Lamar Wilson)

Adapted from Patty Berne’s "Disability Justice - A Working Draft," a disability justice framework understands that: all bodies are unique and essential; all bodies have strengths and needs that must be met; we are powerful, not despite the complexities of our bodies, but because of them; and all bodies are confined by ability, race, gender, sexuality, class, nation state, religion, and more, and we cannot separate them. Disability justice holds a vision born out of collective struggle, drawing upon legacies of cultural and spiritual resistance.” Cave Canem and Zoeglossia invite you to join Raymond Antrobus, Khadijah Queen, and L. Lamar Wilson in a discussion on how poets of color work within and without that framework, including readings from the poets.

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12:10 p.m. to 1:25 p.m.

Michael A. Nutter Theater, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S156.

Chosen Families: A Reading & Conversation Presented by Red Hen Press

(, , )

The concept of chosen families is important in queer communities. A chosen family is a group of people who deliberately choose to be in each other's lives—people you aren't related to, but your lives are intertwined. This conversation explores the way Americans are moving toward chosen families rather than blood families. Sometimes we are unlucky in our birth families, but that shouldn't stop us from finding big love, a home, a joyous group around us who becomes our family. This event will be prerecorded and available on the virtual conference platform, in addition to being screened onsite. ASL interpretation and live captioning will be provided.

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Yuvi Zalkow's debut novel was published in 2012. His stories have been published in Glimmer Train, Narrative Magazine, Carve Magazine, and others. His forthcoming novel (I Only Cry with Emoticons) will be published in June of 2022 with Red Hen Press. Yuvi also makes neurotic YouTube videos. yuvizalkow.com


Twitter Username: yuvizalkow

Website: http://yuvizalkow.com

Paul Lisicky is the author of six books, including Later, The Narrow Door, and Unbuilt Projects. A Guggenheim Fellow, he is an associate professor in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden and serves on the writing committee of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.


Twitter Username: Paul_Lisicky

Website: http://paullisicky.com

Carlos Allende has a PhD in media psychology, researches narrative engagement, and teaches a psychology class for writers at UCLA Extension. He writes social satire.


Twitter Username: damned_poet

109AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S157.

“Something Done to Something, with Something, by Someone”: Teaching Ekphrasis

(, , , , B.K. Fischer)

W.J.T. Mitchell describes ekphrasis as “something done to something, with something, by someone, for someone.” Teaching and writing ekphrastic poetry elicits questions about power, positionality, knowledge, appropriation—and the anxiety and pleasure of influence. How is the genre evolving and creating innovative ways for poetry to respond to the visual arts? Four writer-teachers who teach and write ekphrasis discuss their progressive pedagogy that imagines this genre in radical, inclusive ways.

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Camille Guthrie is the director of undergraduate writing initiatives at Bennington College. She teaches essay writing, critical theory, ekphrasis, poetry, gender studies, grammar, and first-year writing. She is the author of four books of poetry, including Diamonds (2021).


Twitter Username: GuthrieCamille

Phillip B. Williams is the author of the poetry collections Mutiny and Thief in the Interior. A recipient of a Whiting Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Lambda Literary Award, he currently teaches at Bennington College and Randolph College low-res MFA.


Twitter Username: pbw_poet

Khaled Mattawa's latest collection of poetry is Mare Nostrum from Sarabande Books. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan and is the editor of Michigan Quarterly Review.

Shin Yu Pai is the author of many books including VirgaENSO, and AUX ARCS. She has taught at Vermont College of Fine Arts, University of Texas at Dallas, Southern Methodist University, and was a Peter Taylor Fellow at Kenyon College.


Twitter Username: shinyupai

Website: www.shinyupai.com

111AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S158.

The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood

(, , , , )

Is parenting all-consuming—or is it a complex and nuanced insight into life that adds depth and meaning to our creative practices? Contributors to the new anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood share original writing in a conversation that navigates a range of transformative experiences including living with children both young and grown, being a single parent, experiencing infertility, having a transracial adoption, and being the birth parent in an open adoption.

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Nancy Reddy is the author of Double Jinx, winner of the National Poetry Series, Pocket Universe, and Acadiana. She is the recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation.


Twitter Username: nancy_reddy

Emily Pérez is the author of House of Sugar, House of StoneMade and Unmade; and Backyard Migration Route. With Nancy Reddy she coedited The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. A CantoMundo fellow, she has received funding from Bread Loaf, Community of Writers, and Jack Straw.


Twitter Username: emilytheperez

Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Useful Junk, out from BOA Editions in 2022, and Holy Moly Carry Me, which won the 2018 National Jewish Book award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. She is a professor of English at Virginia Tech.


Twitter Username: rikam99

Website: erikameitner.com

Joan Naviyuk Kane is the author of eight collections of poetry and prose. Her honors include a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Donald Hall Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches at Harvard and Tufts, and she was founding faculty in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.


Twitter Username: naviyuk

Website: thejoankane.com

Faylita Hicks (she/they) is the author of HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. They are a 2021 Shearing Fellow with Black Mountain Institute and currently serve as the 2021 poet in residence for the Civil Rights Corps.


Twitter Username: FaylitaHicks

Website: www.FaylitaHicks.com

113A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S159.

The Art of Pitching Nonfiction: How to Sell Your Essays, Reporting, & More

(, , , )

The first impression a writer makes on an editor happens in the pitch. But what exactly does a successful pitch look like? How long should one even be? What elements should a pitch contain in order to get that coveted assignment? Four writers with experience publishing reportage, essays, profiles, and other nonfiction discuss how to grab an editor's attention with a pitch that tells a compelling story and how to pivot if a pitch gets turned down.

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Caleb Johnson is the author of the novel Treeborne, which received an honorable mention for the Southern Book Prize. His writing appears in the Paris Review Daily, Southern Living, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. Currently, he teaches writing at Appalachian State University.

Irina Zhorov is a freelance writer and audio producer based in North Carolina. She is working on a novel about Soviet miners in Siberia.

Jenny Tinghui Zhang is a Chinese American writer based in Austin, Texas. Her essays and stories have appeared in The Cut, Catapult, Ninth Letter, Passages North, and The Rumpus. Her debut novel, Four Treasures of the Sky, will be out April 2022 from Flatiron Books.


Twitter Username: pantaloonies

Latria Graham is a fourth-generation African American farmer, writer, and teaching artist based in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Her work often centers social justice initiatives, and she has been featured in the Guardian, the New York Times, the LA Times, and Elle. More of her work can be found at LatriaGraham.com


Twitter Username: LatriaGraham

113C, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S160.

Pretending to Write About the Future: Speculative Fiction as a Lens on the Now

(, , , , )

“Science fiction is a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present.” As Ray Bradbury suggests in this quote, many readers and writers turn to speculative fiction not to wonder about what might happen so much as to think about what’s already happening. Five writers and editors will share their experiences working with sci-fi that, rather than being an escape, serves as an engagement or confrontation with the present.

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David Ebenbach is the author of eight books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, including the novel How to Mars. He teaches creative writing and literature at Georgetown University and is a project manager at Georgetown’s teaching center, the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship.


Twitter Username: debenbach

Website: www.davidebenbach.com

Elly Bangs is a Seattle-based science fiction and fantasy author. Her recently released debut novel, Unity, explores the human condition and contemporary global issues through an explosion-rich, post-apocalyptic cyberpunk lens.


Twitter Username: elly_bangs

Jaymee Goh writes, reviews, and edits speculative fiction. Her work has been published in Science Fiction Studies, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy. She is a graduate from the Clarion Workshop and works for Tachyon Publications.


Twitter Username: jhameia

Rone Shavers is author of the experimental Afrofuturist novel Silverfish, recently shortlisted for a CLMP Firecracker Award. His writing has appeared in Big Other, Black Warrior Review, and Bomb. He is also a fiction editor at Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora.

Sheree Renée Thomas is the editor of the two-time World Fantasy Award-winning Dark Matter anthologies, author of Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future, Sleeping Under the Tree of Life, and is the associate editor of Obsidian and the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.


Twitter Username: blackpotmojo

Website: https://www.shereereneethomas.com

115AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S161.

The Lyric Field: The State of Indie Poetry Publishing Now & in the Future

(, , Caroline Hagood, Kate Gale)

Established indie publishers White Pine Press, Ugly Duckling Press, MadHat Press, and BOA Editions discuss the ins and outs of the current sphere of independent poetry publishing. Topics willl include the manuscript selection process (including contests and open submissions), layout and design, PR, marketing, distribution, reviews, the real economics of running a successful poetry press, current trends and waves, technology, and the future.

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Marc Vincenz is publisher and executive editor of MadHat Press and publisher of New American Writing. His fifteenth collection of poetry is A Little Book of Earthly Delights. He has translated many Romanian-, French-, and German-language poets, including Herman Hesse Prize winner, Klaus Merz.

Dennis Maloney is the founding editor/publisher of White Pine Press, a nonprofit literary publisher founded in 1973. White Pine Press publishes poetry, fiction, and literature in translation from around the world. He is also a poet and translator. His most recent book is The Things I Notice Now.

115C, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S162.

The Poet’s Voice: Conversations with the Archive

(, , , , )

Poetry Centered, a new podcast from the University of Arizona Poetry Center, invites poets to curate selections from Voca, the center’s online audiovisual archive of 1,000+ recorded readings from 1963 to today. In each episode, new constellations of meaning emerge, coalescing as intergenerational conversations across time and space. The producers and three poets who have hosted episodes will reflect on voices they encountered in the archive and how this experience shaped their present thinking.

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Diana Marie Delgado is the author of the poetry collection Tracing the Horse. She graduated with a master of fine arts in poetry from Columbia University and is the literary director at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.


Twitter Username: pompomrituals

Website: http://flavors.me/dianamarie

Julie Swarstad Johnson is a poet and the archivist and outreach librarian for the University of Arizona Poetry Center. She is the author of the poetry collection Pennsylvania Furnace and the chapbook Orchard Light. She is the coeditor of the anthology Beyond Earth's Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke (2021 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature winner)'s books include Look at This BlueBurnStreamingBlood Run, and Effigies III. Distinguished professor at UC Riverside, she teaches in creative writing and the School of Medicine, directs UCR Writers Week, Lit Sandhill CraneFest, and Along the Chaparral.


Twitter Username: AAHedgeCoke

Website: www.allisonhedgecoke.com

Francisco Aragón is the author of Puerta del Sol, and Glow of Our Sweat. He is also the editor of the award-winning anthology, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. A third book, After Rubén, is forthcoming. He directs Letras Latinas, the literary program at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies.


Twitter Username: fjaragon1965

Website: http://franciscoaragon.net

Urayoán Noel is an associate professor of English and Spanish at NYU and also teaches at Stetson University's MFA of the Americas. Noel's books include Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico and Transversal.


Twitter Username: urayoannoel

118A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S163.

Speaking With/Speaking From: Perugia Press Poets Discuss Linguistic Diversity

(, , , , )

What community and cultural languages define your work as a writer? Five Perugia poets guide a discussion investigating the challenges of language acquisition and loss, the use of terms as weapons of exclusion in military and civilian spaces, the reclamation and affirmation of mother tongues, and ways of speaking from and for the environment. Explore how linguistic experience intersects with craft in this conversation featuring women poets from one press who represent myriad places and voices.

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Lynne Thompson was appointed poet laureate of Los Angeles in 2021. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Fretwork, Start With a Small Guitar, and Beg No Pardon. She serves on the boards of directors of Cave Canem and the Los Angeles Review of Books.


Twitter Username: poetess151

Ida Stewart is the author of Gloss. Her poems have appeared in journals including Field, Pool, and Typo Magazine, as well as Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods, an anthology of West Virginia writers. Ida is the managing editor of an academic journal in Philadelphia.


Twitter Username: idadottie

Rebecca Pelky is an assistant professor of film studies at Clarkson University. She has two collections of poetry, Horizon of the Dog Woman and Through A Red Place. She is a member of the Brothertown Indian Nation of Wisconsin and writes in Mohegan and English.


Twitter Username: RebeccaPelky

Jacqueline Balderrama is the author of the full poetry collection Now in Color and chapbook Nectar and Small. She is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Utah, poetry editor for Iron City Magazine, and a Piper Fellow-in-Residence at Arizona State for the 2021–2022 academic year.

Abby E. Murray (MFA & PhD) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Her first book of poetry, Hail and Farewell, examines the conflict between civilian and military life from a feminist perspective.

118BC, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S164.

New Directions in the American Sonnet

(, , , , )

The American sonnet is having a moment. This panel features scholars and poets discussing the contemporary sonnet and the ways in which today’s writers subvert, revise, and creatively destroy the sonnet as an inherited form. How, the panel asks, do poets reimagine this prescribed form to engage questions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and power in America? How do today’s sonnets negotiate constraint and agency, tradition and innovation?

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Ted Mathys is the author of Gold Cure and three previous books of poetry. The recipient of fellowships and awards from the NEA, NYFA, and Poetry Society of America, he teaches at Saint Louis University and is president of the board of Saint Louis Poetry Center.

Kazim Ali is a poet, translator, essayist, and fiction writer. His most recent books are The Voice of Sheila Chandra (poems) and a nonfiction book, Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water. He is a professor in the literature department at the University of California, San Diego.


Twitter Username: kazimalipoet

Website: www.kazimali.com

Dora Malech is the author of four books of poetry: Flourish, Stet, Say So, and Shore Ordered Ocean. A former Amy Clampitt Fellow and Ruth Lilly Fellow, her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.


Twitter Username: DoraMalech

Website: www.doramalech.net

John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry. His honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Four Quartets Prize. He is an assistant professor of English and the director of creative writing at Wesleyan University.

Simone Muench is the author of six poetry books including Wolf Centos and Suture (written with Dean Rader). Coeditor of the collaborative writing anthology They Said and a recipient of NEA, VSC, and Yaddo fellowships, she serves as advisor for Jet Fuel Review and poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly.

119AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S165.

We Are Your Saviors: Returning to the POC vs. MFA Conversation

(, , , , )

Since 2016, when these panelists convened to talk about their experience as POC writers who led creative-writing workshops, profound changes in conversations on race and writing have taken place. Let's consider the ways that faculty of color center and negotiate intersectional identities in these spaces. Their dual perspective as marginalized leaders position them to reimagine the writing workshop after centering equity. What has been disrupted? What has stayed the same?

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Juan Martinez is an associate professor at Northwestern University. Best Worst American, his story collection, was released in 2017, and his work has appeared in Huizache, Glimmer Train, McSweeney's, Ecotone, Selected Shorts, and elsewhere.


Twitter Username: fulmerford

Website: http://www.fulmerford.com

DeMisty D. Bellinger teaches creative writing, African American lit, and women's studies at Fitchburg State University. She is the author of Rubbing Elbows and Peculiar Heritage. She also serves as a reader and editor for various publications. DeMisty publishes in all genres.


Twitter Username: DeMistyB

Jimin Han is the author of A Small Revolution and an as-yet-untitled forthcoming novel. She teaches or has taught at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College and Pace University.

Dionne Irving Bremyer is originally from Toronto, Ontario. She is the author of the novel Quint from 7.13 Books, and her short story collection Islands is forthcoming from Catapult Books in 2022. Her work has appeared in Story, Boulevard, Lit Hub, Missouri Review, and New Delta Review.


Twitter Username: LadyDionne79

Julie Iromuanya is the author of Mr. and Mrs. Doctor, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the Etisalat Prize for Literature, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Debut Fiction. She teaches at the University of Chicago.


Twitter Username: Julie_Iro

Website: http://julieiromuanya.com

120AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S166.

So You're Going to Be a Visiting Writer: How to Make the Kids Shine

(, , , )

Working with young people on their developing writing is both exciting and powerful. This panel, made up of teachers, visiting writers, and community organizers, all of diverse backgrounds, share their insights on how to have maximum impact when visiting a K–12 classroom or community center. This panel will discuss all facets of a classroom visit, and how to best set students up for success, igniting a passion for language's potential.

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Joelle Biele is the author of Tramp, White Summer, and Broom and the editor of Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence. A former Fulbright professor in Germany and Poland and writer-in-the-schools, she teaches high school English in Maryland.

Molly Sutton Kiefer is the author of the lyric essay Nestuary, as well as three poetry chapbooks. She is founding editor of Tinderbox Poetry Journal and runs Tinderbox Editions, a nonprofit press. 

Iris Jamahl Dunkle was the poet laureate of Sonoma County, California. Her fourth poetry collection, West : Fire : Archive, was published in the spring of 2021. Her biography, Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer, was published by University of Oklahoma Press, 2020.


Twitter Username: irjohnso

Website: www.irisjamahldunkle.com

Charlotte Pence is the author of Many Small Fires, which received an award from Foreword Reviews, and Code, which received Poetry Book of the Year from ASPS in 2020. She directs University of South Alabama's creative writing program and the Stokes Center for Creative Writing.


Twitter Username: PenceCharlotte

Website: http://charlottepence.com

120C, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S167.

Research as Survival: On Archival Research as Creative Practice & Reparative Act

(, , , , Josina Guess)

“I do not intend to speak about, just nearby,” Trinh T. Minh-ha says in her film Reassemblage, critiquing the documentary genre. What does it mean to speak nearby, as women writers who practice archival research and make work in conversation with difficult histories? How do we reclaim and remake the act of research itself? How do we speak with, without speaking for? Join us for a conversation on the joys, challenges, ethics, and possibilities of research as creative practice and reparative act.

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Sophia Stid is a poet from California. She is the Ecotone Postgraduate Fellow at UNC Wilmington, where she teaches creative writing. She received her MFA from Vanderbilt University in 2019.

Kathryn Nuernberger’s latest book is The Witch of Eye, about witches and witch trials. She is also the author of the poetry collections, RUE, The End of Pink, and Rag & Bone, as well as a collection of lyric essays, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past. She teaches at University of Minnesota.


Twitter Username: KatNuernberger

Chet’la Sebree is the author of Field Study and Mistress. For her work, she has received fellowships and awards from the Academy of American Poets, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Currently she directs the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts and teaches at Bucknell University.


Twitter Username: Nahtil

Website: http://www.chetlasebree.com

Jennifer Loyd is a PhD candidate at Texas Tech and a former editor for West Branch and Copper Nickel. For her poetry investigating marine biologist Rachel Carson, she has received a Stadler Fellowship and travel grants for research at the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.


Twitter Username: TheJenniferLoyd

121A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S168.

Living as Exposition: Asian American Poets in the Southern United States

(, , , , )

Asian Americans are rarely depicted as Southerners. Ours is an invisible history and a conspicuous existence. So to whom do we write? Whom do we preserve by writing? Heritage has long concealed a threat in Southern lexicon. And yet at the root, heritage is an act of transmission from one generation to the next. Join panelists in a discussion to push Southern poetics towards wholeness by asserting that the Asian American experience in the South is vaster than one generation.

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Asa Drake is a Filipina American writer and public services librarian in central Florida. She has received fellowships from Tin House and Idyllwild Arts and is a 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest winner. Her poems are published in Adroit, Copper Nickel, and the Paris Review.


Twitter Username: AsaLDrake

Website: https://www.asaldrake.com/

Ina Cariño holds an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University. Their poetry appears in Apogee, Wildness, Waxwing, New England Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. They are the winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for their manuscript Feast, forthcoming from Alice James Books.


Twitter Username: ina_carino

Tiana Nobile is the author of Cleave. She is a Korean American adoptee, Kundiman fellow, recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize. 


Twitter Username: tiananob

Website: tiananobile.com

Sasha Pimentel is author of For Want of Water, winner of the National Poetry Series, and Insides She Swallowed, winner of the American Book Award. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, PBS NewsHour, and the American Poetry Review. She was the 2018–19 Picador Professor, is a 2019 NEA fellow, and is an associate professor at the University of Texas at El Paso.


Twitter Username: SashaRPimentel

Adrienne Su is the author of five books of poems, most recently Living Quarters and Peach State. Her awards include an NEA fellowship and several appearances in Best American Poetry. She teaches at Dickinson College.


Twitter Username: adriennesu

Website: adriennesu.ink

121BC, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S169.

NBCC at #AWP22 on Comics Criticism: Graphic Novels as Both Literature & Pop

(, , , Tahneer Oksman)

The medium of comics is well-established as presenting works of literary value, but critical writing can be mired in a defensive position (not just for kids, not just illustration, not just a fad). Critics and culture writers discuss the challenges and opportunities in embracing comics as both literature and pop culture; the essential role of diverse communities in comics; drawing on art, literary, and film criticism as reference; the pitfalls of boosterism; and how criticism pushes the field.

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Meg Lemke is the graphic novel reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and editor in chief at MUTHA Magazine and has curated events and festival programs for literary organizations including the Brooklyn Book Festival, PEN America, and the French Comics Association.


Twitter Username: meglemke

Jonathan W. Gray is associate professor of English at John Jay College-CUNY and CUNY Grad Center. He has authored Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination and coedited Disability in Comics and Graphic Novels. He contributes periodically to the New Republic and Film Quarterly among other publications.


Twitter Username: elmcitytree

Robert Kirby is a cartoonist and writer currently living in St Paul, Minnesota. His books include Curbside Boys and the Ignatz Award-winning anthology QU33R. He is a regular contributor to Publisher's Weekly, the Comics Journal, and SOLRAD.


Twitter Username: robkirbycomics

122AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S170.

Tillie Olsen Tribute

(, , , , )

Tillie Olsen (1912–2007), writer, activist, mentor and supporter of women writers, is central to working class literature, feminist literature, and writing about the imagination and the artistic process. Publications include Tell Me a Riddle (1961) and Silences (1978). “Tillie Olsen helps those of us condemned to silence—the poor, the racial minorities, the women—find our voices” (Maxine Hong Kingston). Presenters share about Olsen's mentoring. Short reading, film excerpts, and slide show.

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Katherine Arnoldi (Fulbright, Paraguay 2008–09), created the graphic novel The Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom (Graymalkin 2016), All Things Are Labor: Stories (2007, University of Massachusetts Press). Her awards include two New York Foundation of the Arts Awards, DeJur, Henfield, Juniper, and Newhouse.


Twitter Username: karnoldi2001

Website: http://www.katherinearnoldi.com

Elaine Neil Orr is the author of five books of fiction, memoir, and literary criticism. She is a professor of literature at North Carolina State University and serves on the faculty of the Spalding brief-residency MFA in writing program. She was Distinguished Writer in Residence, Wesleyan College, 2016–17.


Twitter Username: elaineneilorr

Website: elaineneilorr.net

Ericka Lutz's eight books include the novel The Edge of Maybe. Her award-winning fiction, CNF, and poetry appear in many journals. She was a founding editor at Literary Mama. She taught writing at UC Berkeley. She edits and coaches writers at erickalutz.com. She is Tillie Olsen's oldest grandchild.


Twitter Username: elutz

Ariel Gore is a Lambda award-winning author and founding editor of the Alternative Press award-winning magazine Hip Mama. Her books include The End of Eve, Hexing the Patriarchy, and the speculative novel-memoir We Were Witches. She teaches writing in the Literary Kitchen (literarykitchen.net).


Twitter Username: ariel_gore

Website: http://arielgore.com

Anthony Dawahare is the author of Tillie Olsen and the Dialectical Philosophy of Proletarian Literature. He has published on a wide range of multiracial working class writers from the 1930s, including Meridel Le Sueur, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes, and essays on Olsen.

124, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S171.

New Strategies in Trans Storytelling

(, , , , )

The past several years have seen an explosion of trans stories and a vibrant, seemingly limitless array of new strategies used to tell them. Four trans and nonbinary writers consider how their work explores “trans” themes through multiple lenses, rooted in craft and technique: temporal recursiveness and cyclicality; shifts in voice and genre; and narratives that criss-cross normative understandings of geographic, cultural, and linguistic borders.

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Jeanne Thornton is the author of Summer Fun, The Dream of Doctor Bantam, and The Black Emerald, as well as the coeditor, with Tara Madison Avery, of We're Still Here: An All-Trans Comics Anthology, and the copublisher of Instar Books (www.instarbooks.com). jeannethornton.com


Twitter Username: TruckLesbian

Website: http://fictioncircus.com/Jeanne

Megan Milks is the author of Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body and Slug, a revised edition of their award-winning first collection Kill Marguerite and Other Stories. They are coeditor of the anthology We Are the Baby-Sitters Club and teach writing and gender studies in New York.


Twitter Username: sklimnagem

Website: http://www.meganmilks.com

Bishakh Som is an Indian American trans femme visual artist. Her graphic novel Apsara Engine was the winner of a 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Comic. Her graphic memoir Spellbound  is also a Lambda finalist.

Casey Plett is the author of A Dream of a Woman, Little Fish, and A Safe Girl to Love. She coedited Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy From Transgender Writers and has written for the New York Times and McSweeney's Internet Tendency. She is the publisher at LittlePuss Press.


Twitter Username: caseyplett

Juli Delgado Lopera is an award-winning Colombian writer and historian based in San Francisco.


Twitter Username: juliandlopera

Website: julianadlopera.com

125, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S172.

What Are You Going to Do with That Degree?: Making Healthy Undergraduate Programs

(, , , , )

Aside from workshops, what can undergraduate creative writing programs offer students to create a vibrant and engaging community? The panel will discuss undergrad literary journals, navigating budget issues associated with reading series, and enticing cash-strapped students to participate in outside activities. We’ll consider how a program can create an international sense of community as well as offering local service opportunities for writers—all while bearing in mind postgraduate nerves.

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Andrew Brininstool is the recipient of a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose. He is the author of the short story collection Crude Sketches Done in Quick Succession.

Oindrila Mukherjee (she/her) teaches at Grand Valley State University. She has a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Salon, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Ecotone. A contributing editor for Aster(ix), she writes a book series for Scroll.in.


Twitter Username: oinkness

Kiki Petrosino is professor of poetry at the University of Virginia. She is the author of four books of poetry, including White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia and Witch Wife. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Literature.

Glenn Shaheen is the author of four books, most recently, the fiction collection Carnivalia. He teaches at Prairie View A&M University and is the executive dIrector of the Radius of Arab American Writers.


Twitter Username: glennshaheen

Sarah Anne Strickley is the author of two books of prose: Sister and Fall Together. She teaches creative writing and serves as faculty editor of Miracle Monocle at the University of Louisville. She's a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and earned her PhD from the University of Cincinnati.


Twitter Username: sastrick

Website: https://www.sarahannestrickley.com/

126A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S173.

Your Story Ends Here: Flash Fiction, Short Story, or Something Longer?

(, , , )

You’ve embarked on a work of fiction. You have a tentative starting point and an idea of the characters, the plot, and the tension. You even have a vision of how the work will end. All things considered, you’re off to a great start. But you also find yourself in a familiar predicament, and you ask yourself: is this flash fiction, a short story, or something longer? This panel of fiction writers working in a variety of forms will discuss how they decide what shape their work will take.

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Stephen Pisani is a graduate of the MFA program at Adelphi University and the MA in writing program at Coastal Carolina University. His work has appeared in a variety of publications.

Amina Gautier is the author of three short story collections: At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy, and The Loss of All Lost Things. For her body of work she has received the PEN/MALAMUD Award for Excellence in the Short Story.


Twitter Username: DrAminaGautier

Website: https://aminagautier.wordpress.com/

Kevin Wilson is the author of a five books, most recently Nothing to See Here. He teaches in the English department at the University of the South.

Liz Moore is the author of four novels, including Heft, The Unseen World, and the internationally bestselling Long Bright River. A winner of the 2014 Rome Prize in Literature, she lives in Philadelphia and works as an associate professor in Temple University's MFA program in creative writing.


Twitter Username: lizmoorebooks

12:10 p.m. to 1:10 p.m.

Virtual

S175.

Wrangling the Beast: Playing with Structure in the First Novel

(, , , )

One of the most difficult challenges first-time novelists face is figuring out the structure of their stories, yet is structure imposed on story, or does it arise organically from it? The novels we admire most have not just married form to plot but found ways to make the form itself iterate what matters most. In this panel, award-winning fiction writers engaged in first-novel work will discuss their processes, struggles, strategies, and overall journeys through structuring their first novels.

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Joy Baglio's fiction appears in Tin House, American Short Fiction, the Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, Bread Loaf, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and Vermont Studio Center and is the founder of Pioneer Valley Writers' Workshop.


Twitter Username: JoyBaglio

Website: www.joybaglio.com

Emma Komlos-Hrobsky is associate editor at Poets & Writers magazine. She has also served as an editor at Tin House books and magazine and a professor at The New School. Her writing appears in Guernica, Conjunctions, Tin House, Hunger Mountain, Bookforum, and other publications.


Twitter Username: skunkorama

Swati Khurana is a writer, artist, tarot reader, and aspiring podcast creator. Swati edits flash fiction at Asian American Writers Workshop's The Margins and received fellowships from NYFA, Center for Fiction, Kundiman, and Vermont Studio Center.


Twitter Username: swatikhurana

Raluca Albu is a Romanian-born, Bronx-raised writer and translator whose fiction plays with form and explores the creative possibilities of historical archives. She is the online literature editor for BOMB Magazine, a writing lecturer at NYU, and a recent Center for Fiction fellow.


Twitter Username: ralucatweets

Virtual

S176.

Writing Ourselves into Existence: Taiwanese American Voices

(, , , )

Taiwan is the twentieth-largest economy in the world and a modern democracy, but it is blocked from membership in the United Nations and World Health Organization and can’t even compete in the Olympics under its own name. China thwarts Taiwan’s sovereignty not just through diplomacy but through language, by censoring perceived dissent and controlling the narrative. Taiwanese American writers can tell their stories from a safe distance; their words are urgent and necessary to counteract this erasure.

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Grace Loh Prasad received her MFA in creative writing from Mills College and is an alumna of VONA. Her essays have appeared in Catapult, Ninth LetterThe Manifest-StationCha, and Hedgebrook Journal. She is currently working on a memoir/essay collection entitled "The Translator’s Daughter."


Twitter Username: GraceLP

Yi Shun Lai is the author of two books, and a columnist at The Writer magazine. Her work appears in Brevity and Electric Lit of late and she teaches in the MFA program at Bay Path University. She is a diversity, equity, inclusion, and access educator for CanIPlayThat.com.


Twitter Username: gooddirt

Website: http://www.thegooddirt.org

Grace Hwang Lynch is a journalist and essayist whose work has been published by Tin House, Catapult, and NPR. The anthologies Lavanderia: A Mixed Load of Women, Wash and Word and Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting have included her work. She is writing a memoir.


Twitter Username: gracehwanglynch

Lisa Chiu is a writer whose work has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, People magazine, and anthologies including Cheers to Muses: Contemporary Works by Asian American Women and Who’s Your Mama?: The Unsung Voices of Women and Mothers. She is currently working on a memoir, Hungry Ghost.


Twitter Username: lisachiu

Virtual

S177.

Deep Vellum Presents: First- & Second-Generation Immigrant Writers

(, , , , )

In 2020, Deep Vellum, a press with its origins in publishing works in translation, made the decision to publish stateside authors. By happenstance, many of the debut authors were children of immigrants. Panelists discuss their work and what it means to be American authors publishing alongside works in translation.

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Sebastián Hasani Páramo's work has appeared in New England Review, TriQuarterly, Crazyhorse, and Kenyon Review Online. He is the founding editor of The Boiler and poetry editor for Deep Vellum. His is a visiting assistant professor of English at Austin College in Sherman, Texas.


Twitter Username: sebastianparamo

Fowzia Karimi is a writer and an illustrator. Her work explores the correspondence on the page between the written and the visual arts. Her illuminated debut novel Above Us the Milky Way was released in 2020.

Sophia Terazawa is the author of Winter Phoenix and two chapbooks, I Am Not a War and Correspondent Medley, winner of the 2018 Tomaž Šalamun Prize.

Taisia Kitaiskaia is the author of The Nightgown and Other Poems; Literary Witches and its companion oracle deck, both in collaboration with artist Katy Horan; and Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles and its follow-up, Poetic Remedies for Troubled Times: From Ask Baba Yaga.


Twitter Username: kitaiskaia

Mike Soto is a first generation Mexican American poet and translator. He is the author of A Grave Is Given Supper, a narco acid western told in a series of interlinked poems, following the converging paths of two lovers as they navigate the drug war taking place along the borderlands.

Virtual

S178.

Expanding Your Reach: Digital & Social Media Strategies for Indie Publishers, Sponsored by CLMP

(, , Joanna Demkiewicz, , )

Indie presses and magazines discuss the most successful digital and social media strategies they've used to expand their reach, engage their audience, and build community.

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Emma Hine is the communications manager of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP). Her debut poetry collection, Stay Safe, received the 2019 Kathryn A. Morton Prize.


Twitter Username: emkhine

Jisu Kim is the senior marketing and sales manager at the Feminist Press at CUNY.

NaBeela Washington is an Alabama-raised poet, editor, and budding art collector.


Twitter Username: _simplybee

Esther Kim is the digital communications manager at the Asian American Writers' Workshop. She is also a writer and translator with several years experience in book publishing in London and in NYC. Previously she worked for Tilted Axis, Columbia University Press, and Other Press.


Twitter Username: _estheryk

Virtual

S179.

Rethinking Creative-Writing Workshop Feedback in the 21st Century

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This panel examines modes of feedback as a genre that necessitates critique in light of implicit pedagogical traditions and biases that dehumanize the writing workshop. We will discuss how to collaboratively unpack power dynamics and cultural assumptions to build equitable, inclusive workshops. We will discuss different forms and levels of workshops, drawing upon a range of techniques and perspectives from small colleges to HBCUs to large state universities and points in between.

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Jameelah Lang is an assistant professor at Rockhurst University. Her work appears in the Kenyon Review, Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, and more. She has received awards from Bread Loaf, Sewanee Writers Conference, VCCA, and HUB-BUB. She's a board member for Radius of Arab American Writers.

Barney T. Haney teaches English at the University of Indianapolis, where he is chair of the Kellogg Writers Series. Winner of the Chris O'Malley Fiction Prize, he has work appearing in or forthcoming from Mid-American Review, Marathon Literary Review, and Barely South Review, among others.

Shonda Buchanan, author of Black Indian and a journalist for over twenty-five years, is an award-winning poet and educator teaching at Loyola Marymount University. She's working on a second memoir, two novels and a fourth book of poetry: https://www.amazon.com/Black-Indian-Made-Michigan-Writers/dp/0814345808.


Twitter Username: shondabuchanan

Website: shondabuchanan.com

Alexandra Kleeman is the author of You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, Intimations, and the novel Something New Under the Sun and an assistant professor at the New School. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, n+1, Harper's, the New York Times Magazine, and Conjunctions.


Twitter Username: alexkleeman

Website: http://www.alexandrakleeman.com

Christopher Coake is the author of the novel You Came Back and the story collection We're in Trouble, for which he won the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship. In 2006 he was named a Best Young American Novelist by Granta. He teaches and directs the MFA program at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Virtual

S180.

The Last Song, the Last Sweet Bite: A Tribute to Joy Harjo

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Joy Harjo has been a major voice in poetry, in Native Literature, in American Literature, for over four decades. Her influence is immeasurable and her qualities many. Come celebrate with us the beauty, the truth, the strength and musicality of Joy Harjo’s work and the wonderfulness of her as a person.

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Travis Hedge Coke is a writer, editor, and teacher, working with Along the Chaparral to story interred veterans at the Riverside National Cemetery. He is the former writer of the Hugo-nominated Pop Medicine column and current author of the weekly Patricia Highsmash, from Comic Watch.


Twitter Username: travishedgecoke

Oscar Hokeah is a regionalist Oklahoma writer and the author of a forthcoming debut novel, Calling for a Blanket Dance. He is an enrolled member of Cherokee Nation and the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, and he has Latinx heritage. He has fiction published in American Short Fiction, Yellow Medicine Review, and other journals.


Twitter Username: OscarHokeah

Website: www.oscarhokeah.com

Tanaya Winder is a writer and artist from the Southern Ute, Duckwater Shoshone, and Pyramid Lake Paiute Nations. She has a BA in English from Stanford University and a MFA from the University of New Mexico. She blends storytelling, singing, and spoken word to teach about different expressions of love.


Twitter Username: tanayawinder

Website: http://tanayawinder.wordpress.com/

Virtual

S180B.

Root to Branch: Four Generations of Women Writers on the Sustenance of Community

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This event will be a panel discussion between four women of diverse ages, races, and backgrounds who work as literary groundbreakers and who share one common distinction: they come from Kentucky. When the world shifted to life at a distance, we were all searching for ways to draw together. We found renewed community in our successes as women from the same region who branched out. In this event, we explore how reconnecting with the people you’ve met in hometowns past may change your literary future.

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Crystal Wilkinson, Kentucky’s poet laureate, is the award-winning author of Perfect Black: PoemsThe Birds of Opulence (2016 Ernest J. Gaines Prize), Water Street, and Blackberries, Blackberries. She is the recipient of a 2021 O. Henry Prize and a 2020 USA Artists Fellowship.


Twitter Username: crystalwilki

Marissa Davis is a poet from Paducah, Kentucky, now residing in Brooklyn. Her chapbook, My Name & Other Languages I Am Learning How to Speak (Jai-Alai Books) was selected by Danez Smith for Cave Canem’s 2019 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Prize. Davis holds an MFA from New York University.


Twitter Username: marissa_b_davis

Ellen Hagan is a writer, performer, and educator. Her books include: Hemisphere, Crowned, and Watch Us Rise. Ellen is the director of the poetry and theatre departments at the DreamYard Project and directs their International Poetry Exchange Program with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines.

Danni Quintos is the author of Two Brown Dots, winner of the twentieth A. Poulin Jr. Prize, and Python, an ekphrastic chapbook. She is a Kentuckian, a mom, an educator, and an Affrilachian Poet. She received her BA from the Evergreen State College and her MFA in poetry from Indiana University.


Twitter Username: dleighquint

1:45 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.

Michael A. Nutter Theater, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S181.

Love, Grief, Resistance: A Reading & Craft Conversation, Sponsored by Copper Canyon Press

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Three powerhouse poets debut their new collections from Copper Canyon Press and discuss craft as it meets content. Resisting police brutality, lamenting the loss of the natural world, and grieving across distances of time and geography, these poems carry tremendous weight. How can poetry give shape and voice to complex emotional truths and urgent political convictions? These radically inventive authors explore transformative possibilities as they defy collapse and expand out of the status quo.

This event will be prerecorded and available on the virtual conference platform, in addition to being screened onsite. ASL interpretation and live captioning will be provided.

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Victoria Chang's books are Obit and Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. Her children's books are Love, Love and Is Mommy?


Twitter Username: VChangPoet

Website: www.victoriachangpoet.com

Chris Abani's recent books are The Secret History of Las Vegas, The Face: A Memoir, and Sanctificum. Honors include Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Hemingway Award, An Edgar Prize, A Ford USA Artists Fellowship, and the PEN Beyond the Margins Award. He is a Professor of English at Northwestern University.


Twitter Username: chrisabani

Christopher Soto (aka Loma) edits Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color with the Lambda Literary Foundation. They are an MFA candidate in poetry at NYU and the 2014–2015 intern at Poetry Society of America. In 2015, they cofounded the Undocupoets campaign.

Michael Wiegers is the editor in chief of Copper Canyon Press, and the poetry editor of Narrative Magazine. The editor of What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, he translates poetry from Spanish and has edited books from around the globe by poets at every stage in their careers.


Twitter Username: MWiegers

109AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S182.

Sum = {Poetry + New Media + Politics + Performance}

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Akin to how printing technologies revolutionized verse to create a print culture, new media advancements have led to another tectonic shift in how audiences experience language and how poets explore identity and embodiment. Now poets are transforming language and performance for a digital culture by exploring social media, visualization, code, VR, and mobile applications. This reading will showcase work from diverse poets that have incorporated new media into their craft and performances.

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Vincent A. Cellucci wrote Absence Like Sun and An Easy Place / To Die. Vincent performed "Diamonds in Dystopia," an interactive poetry web app, internationally and at SXSW in 2017, and the poem was anthologized in Best American Experimental Writing 2018.   


Twitter Username: theexceptionali

Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD, is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, and cultural critic. His latest book is Lucy 72. He is a professor of literature and creative writing, and Principal Faculty of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Atom Atkinson is the director of writing programs at Catapult and a doctoral student at the University of Utah. They are also one-sixth of the poetry collective Line Assembly. Previously, they served as the inaugural director of literary arts at Chautauqua Institution.


Twitter Username: evie_atom

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is the author of Travesty Generator, a book of computational poetry longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award in Poetry. The author of several works, they currently direct the MFA program at UMASS Boston and edit for Black Ocean Books and Persea Press.

Vincent A. Cellucci wrote Absence Like Sun and An Easy Place / To Die. Vincent performed "Diamonds in Dystopia," an interactive poetry web app, internationally and at SXSW in 2017, and the poem was anthologized in Best American Experimental Writing 2018.  


Twitter Username: theexceptionali

111AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S183.

Opening & Growing: Adapting & Sustaining a Literary Magazine in the 2020s

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This panel of five long-term Typehouse Literary Magazine editors will discuss the challenges of and techniques for dealing with and adapting with the changing publishing world, including structure for dealing with submissions, printing formats, soliciting and publishing ownvoices, establishing consistency in a rapidly changing publishing market, budgeting, and engaging in activism within the magazine industry.

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Val Gryphin is an author, educator, and editor in chief of Typehouse Literary Magazine, founded in 2013. Their fiction, poetry, and queer literary research are published in markets such as BUST and The Writer’s Chronicle. They hold an MFA from Spalding University and teach creative writing and queer literature.


Twitter Username: valgryphin

Website: gryphinliterary.com

Troy E. Wilderson is an African American writer living in the Midwest. She's an editor and graphic designer. Her work is in The Louisville Review, Notre Dame Review, and F(r)iction. She has an MFA from Spalding University and is a 2019 McKnight Foundation Writing Fellow.


Twitter Username: MizGolightly

Lily Blackburn has been an editor with Typehouse Literary since 2016. She is also a writer of short prose and book reviews, as well as a workshop facilitator based in Portland, Oregon. You can find her work in World Literature Today, JMWW, Little Fictions | Big Truths, and elsewhere.


Twitter Username: lilyblackburn93

Yukyan Lam is a senior prose editor at Typehouse Literary Magazine. She is especially interested in work that elevates social justice issues and underrepresented voices. She brings over fifteen years of experience researching and advocating on racial and environmental justice in Latin America, Asia, and the US.


Twitter Username: yukyan_etc

Kameron Ray Morton is a senior prose editor at Typehouse Literary Magzine. All together, they have been working with online and print literary magazines for nearly five years, starting at the age of twenty. A true Zillenial, Morton considers the internet incredibly valuable to the literary scene.


Twitter Username: tallsoyflatwhit

113A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S184.

Landing the Academic Job: Tips from the Search Committee

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The statistics are daunting. Each year, far more writers complete their degrees than academic jobs open, and after so much hard work, the final hurdle to landing a university teaching position can feel insurmountable. Our panel assembles veteran search committee members from universities across the country to illuminate the other side of the search. We will offer advice and answer audience questions, giving writers their best shot at landing a position.

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Amorak Huey is author of four books of poetry, most recently Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy. He teaches at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.


Twitter Username: amorak

Website: http://amorakhuey.net

Katie Cortese is the author of Girl Power and Other Short-Short Stories and Make Way for Her and Other Stories. Her work recently appeared in Indiana Review, Wigleaf, Animal, and elsewhere. She teaches at Texas Tech University, and she is the fiction editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.


Twitter Username: KatieCortese

Website: www.katiecortese.com

Janine Joseph is a poet, librettist, and author of Driving without a License, winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, and the forthcoming Decade of the Brain. A co-organizer for Undocupoets and MacDowell Fellow, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Oklahoma State University.


Twitter Username: ninejoseph

Website: http://www.janinejoseph.com/

Melissa Crowe is the author of the poetry collection Dear Terror, Dear Splendor. She is the coordinator of the MFA program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she teaches poetry and publishing.


Twitter Username: melissamcrowe

Siân Griffiths teaches creative writing at Weber State University. Her work is published in the Georgia Review, Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, American Short Fiction, and other journals. She is the author of the books Borrowed Horses, Scrapple, and The Heart Keeps Faulty Time. Website: sbgriffiths.com


Twitter Username: borrowedhorses

Website: sbgriffiths.com

113C, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S185.

Ni Una Más / Not One More: Femicide & the Politics of Representation

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Four poets and a prose writer, two who are Indigenous and three who are Latinx, discuss the poetics of solidarity taking on the history of femicide at the US/Mexico border and equally devastating record of murdered and disappeared Indigenous women across US and Canada. Together they move beyond arguments involving poetry of witness and documentary poetics to discuss, as compromised individuals, the politics of representation and writing as a place to build alliances and community.

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Claudia Castro Luna is an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow (2019), Washington State poet laureate (2018–2021), and Seattle's first civic poet (2015–2017) She is the author of This City, Killing Marías, One River, A Thousand Voices, and Cipota under the Moon (forthcoming April 2022).


Twitter Username: ClaudiaC_L

Valerie Martínez's books of poetry include Count (2021), Each and Her (2010), And They Called It Horizon (2010), World to World (2005), and Absence, Luminescent (1999 & 2010). She was the poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico from 2008–2010.


Twitter Username: valmatz

Website: www.valeriemartinez.net

Laura Da’ is a poet and teacher. Da’ studied creative writing at the University of Washington. She is Eastern Shawnee. Her first book, Tributaries, won a 2016 American Book Award. In 2015, Da’ was a Made at Hugo House Fellow and a Jack Straw Fellow.

Nina Maria Lozano is associate professor with the Department of Communication Studies at Loyola Marymount University. She received her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book, Not One More! Feminicidio on the Border, is published with the Ohio State University Press.

Sasha LaPointe is a Coast Salish writer from the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian tribes with a focus on creative nonfiction and poetry. She is the author of the upcoming memoir Red Paint: An Ancestral Autobiography and teaches creative writing at the University of Washington's Tacoma campus.

115AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S186.

Building a Successful Young Writers Program

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Young writers programs allow literary organizations to expand their reach and inspire a new generation of readers and writers, but such programs require months of thoughtful planning and attention to detail. Panelists representing a diversity of offerings for young writers (mentorship programs, in-person and virtual classes, yearlong and summer programs) will offer tips for structuring, marketing, and facilitating a young writers program while also considering issues of access and equity.

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Marian Crotty is the author of What Counts as Love, which was longlisted for the PEN/Bingham Prize and won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. She is an associate professor at Loyola University Maryland and an assistant editor at the Common where she works with the Common Young Writers Program.


Twitter Username: mgcrotty


Twitter Username: dinaportnoy

Karin Gottshall’s most recent book is The River Won't Hold You. Her poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, and FIELD. Gottshall teaches at Middlebury College and directs the New England Young Writers' Conference at Bread Loaf.


Twitter Username: KarinGottshall

J. Joseph Kane is the director of youth programs for the Porch—a Nashville-based creative writing nonprofit. Before moving to Tennessee, Joe taught poetry in Detroit Public Schools through the Inside Out Literary Arts Project. He has an MA in poetry from Central Michigan University.

Richard Z. Santos's debut novel, Trust Me, was published in March 2020. He is a board member of The National Book Critics Circle. Recent work can be found in Texas Monthly, Awst Press, Kirkus Reviews, and Crime Reads.


Twitter Username: richardzsantos

Website: http://www.richardzsantos.com/

115C, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S187.

Indigenous Storytelling & Poetics: Strategies for Writing Histories

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This panel will discuss how imaginative techniques can supplement historically researched writing to offer a visceral experience of marginalized voices within an Indigenous framework and how to apply similar strategies to shape a respectful and responsible approach to research and writing outside of that tradition. Panelists will discuss the intersection of documentary and visual poetics, literary cartography, creative ethnography, and enactment of Indigenous sovereignties through creative work.

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Abigail Chabitnoy is the author of How to Dress a Fish, winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award for Poetry and shortlisted for the 2020 Griffin Prize for Poetry. She is a member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak and a mentor at the Institute of American Indian Arts.


Twitter Username: achabitnoy

Website: www.salmonfisherpoet.com

Kenzie Allen is a poet and multimodal artist and a descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. The recipient of a 92Y Discovery Prize and a James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets, her poems can be found in Narrative, Boston Review, and other venues. She teaches at York University in Toronto.


Twitter Username: cerena

Website: http://kenzieallen.co

Deborah Taffa is the director of the MFA in creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 2021, her memoir manuscript won awards from PEN America, MacDowell, Tin House, and Kranzberg Arts. Her writing can be found at Boston Review, A Public Space, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is a citizen of the Quechan Nation.


Twitter Username: deborahtaffa

Website: www.deborahtaffa.com

Franklin K.R. Cline is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation. He holds a PhD in English—creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and served on Woodland Pattern Book Center's Board of Directors for four years. His book So What is available via Vegetarian Alcoholic Press.

118BC, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S188.

Poets Theater

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From Eliot to Okot p'Bitek, poets have stolen theater's ticks and tricks in hybrid forms. Moving on from stylized poetry slams, language poets' performative poetics, and voice-driven poets testing audience credulity, today's poets test new lineations and typography to “theatrify” the page and performance. Five poets display their hybridity to unsettle narratives about race and childhood that control human relations.

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Terese Svoboda has published eighteen books of poetry, fiction, biography, memoir, and translation. Her collection Theatrix: Play Poems from Anhinga was released in 2021.


Twitter Username: teresesvoboda

Website: www.teresesvoboda.com

Rodrigo Toscano is the author of ten books of poetry. His latest is The Charm & The Dread. His Collapsible Poetics Theater was a National Poetry Series selection. His poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry and Best Experimental Poetry. rodrigotoscano.com


Twitter Username: Toscano200

Website: rodrigotoscano.com

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books, including the verse play Dead Youth, or, the Leaks, the critical book The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, and the poetry volume Toxicon and Arachne. She edits Action Books and teaches at Notre Dame.


Twitter Username: JoyelleMcS

Neil de la Flor's solo and collaborative publications include An Elephant's Memory of Blizzards, Sinéad O'Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds, Almost Dorothy, and Two Thieves and a Liar. He is the executive director of Reading Queer.

Douglas Kearney is a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly recipient, an award-winning librettist, a Howard/CalArts alum, and a Cave Canem fellow. He’s published seven books of poetry, essays, and libretti. He teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota.

119AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S189.

Overexposure: How Memoirists Protect Their Privacy

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This panel will explore the counterintuitive subject of privacy in a form that demands divulgence. How can we tell the "whole" truth without including everything? How do we negotiate dueling loyalties to an important story and to loved ones? What devices can a nonfiction writer use to withhold or conceal things? And how do some craft choices reflect the burden placed on certain populations to perform vulnerability? Finally, how can memoirists retain privacy in the social media stratosphere?

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Courtney Zoffness is the author of the memoir Spilt Milk. She won the Sunday Times Short Story Award and the Arts & Letters Creative Nonfiction Prize, as well as fellowships from the Center for Fiction and MacDowell. She directs the creative writing program at Drew University.


Twitter Username: czoffrun

Website: courtneyzoffness.com

Tomás Q. Morín is the author of the poetry collection Machete and the memoir Let Me Count the Ways. He teaches at Rice University and at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

T Kira Mahealani Madden is a lesbian, APIA author of New York Times Editors' Choice memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, and founding editor in chief of No Tokens. Winner of the 2021 Lambda Judith A. Markowitz Award, she is an assistant professor at College of Charleston.


Twitter Username: tkiramadden

Gina Frangello is the author of the memoir Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason, as well as four books of fiction: Every Kind of Wanting, A Life in Men, Slut Lullabies, and My Sister's Continent. She is the creative nonfiction editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB).


Twitter Username: Ginafrangello

Website: www.ginafrangello.com

120AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S190.

All the Whiles: Writing While Parenting While Black

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If writing is an act of solitude, requiring either “money and a room of [one’s] own” or the fluidity of movement and travel that Paule Marshall describes in Triangular Road, then how do writers create amid an act that often requests a subsuming of time, body, and often identity, especially as historically marginalized people, especially now? Panelists examine means of creation that navigate the minefields of parenting from the space of Other.

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Gail Upchurch writes young adult/adult fiction and holds a PhD in creative writing from Binghamton University. A 2021 Tin House YA Scholar, she is an English professor at PG Community College. She is represented by Lucy Irvine of Peters Fraser and Dunlop Literary Agency and is currently on submission.


Twitter Username: upchurch_gail

Shinelle L. Espaillat teaches at Dutchess Community College in New York. Her work has appeared in Tahoma Literary Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, Minerva Rising, the Westchester Review, Ghost Parachute, Cleaver Magazine, and Midway Journal. She is represented by Annie Bomke of Annie Bomke Literary Agency.


Twitter Username: shinelle20

Website: www.shinelleespaillat.com

Cole Lavalais's work can be found in the Chicago Tribune, Obsidian, Apogee Journal, WarpLand, Tidal Basin Review, Aquarius Press, and others. She has taught writing for over fourteen years and is an assistant professor of creative writing and English at Chicago State University.


Twitter Username: colelavalais

Website: www.Colelavalais.com

Claudine Thomas is a recent graduate from Arcadia University's MFA creative writing program. She works at Moore College of Art and Design as an arts administrator, writing and assessing arts curriculum. She writes young adult and middle grade fiction.


Twitter Username: ClaudineWrite

120C, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S191.

Outside of Class: Tentative Outlines & Turning Paths

(, , , , Chad Abushanab)

A thesis often represents a student’s cumulative work in a creative writing program. But what happens next? Panelists who have recently published their first books, will discuss their creative processes, what changes they made from thesis to book publication, how publication affected them, and the challenges they faced, such as revision, submitting to journals and prizes, seeking an agent, and applying to residencies. These authors will offer practical advice to attendees and hold a brief Q&A.

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Charles Kell is the author of Cage of Lit Glass, chosen by Kimiko Hahn for the 2018 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. He is assistant professor of English at the Community College of Rhode Island and editor of the Ocean State Review.


Twitter Username: charles_kell

Website: https://charleskell.com/

Natalie Homer is the author of the poetry collection Under the Broom Tree. She has an MFA from West Virginia University.

Michael X. Wang, born in China's mountainous interior, immigrated to the United States when he was six. He is the author of the story collection Further News of Defeat, which won the PEN/Bingham Prize. His stories can be found in the New England Review and Hayden’s Ferry Review.


Twitter Username: MichaelXWang3

Anna Caritj holds a BA from the University of Virginia and an MFA in creative writing from Hollins University. She received the Wagenheim Fiction Prize in 2012 and was a winner of AWP's 2016 Into Journals Project. Her first novel, Leda and the Swan, came out in May 2021 with Riverhead Books.

121A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S192.

Time Has Come Today: Writing Imprisonment, Incarceration, & Social Change

(, CT Mexica, , , )

Imprisonment affects individuals, families, and communities in layered and lasting ways. Writers working in poetry, prose, and hybrid forms who have been impacted by imprisonment will share excerpts of their work and discuss imprisonment. How does imprisonment affect individuals, their families, and the collective? Why is it imperative to share stories of incarceration? How can writing about imprisonment empower ordinary people to make change?

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Deirdre Sugiuchi spent her adolescence in a faith-based troubled teen facility and is writing her reform school memoir, "Unreformed." Her work has been featured in Dame and Electric Literature


Twitter Username: DJSugi

Caleb Gayle is a writer with a focus on the impact of history on identity. He is a New America Fellow, PEN WFJ Fellow, and winner of the Matthew Power Award. His upcoming book, We Refuse to Forget, from Riverhead is about the untold story of the Black people once considered citizens of the Creek Nation.


Twitter Username: GayleCaleb

Deb Olin Unferth is the author of six books, most recently the novel BARN 8. A Guggenheim fellow and finalist for the National Book Critic's Award, she founded and directs the Pen City Writers, a creative writing program in a south Texas penitentiary.

Caits Meissner is a New York City-based artist and writer. She is the director of prison and justice writing at PEN America where she edited The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting A Writer’s Life in Prison.

121BC, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S193.

Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fiftieth Anniversary Reading

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Join us for a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts! With picturesque locations in Amherst, Virginia and Auvillar, France, VCCA has been providing established and emerging artists with the gift of time and space to create for half a century. Five VCCA Fellows will share their residency experiences, and read from new work.

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Patricia Chao’s novels are Monkey King (1995) and Mambo Peligroso (2005), and she has three additional manuscripts in process. Her poetry and essays have appeared in various anthologies and journals. She also reviews and writes about world music, with a specialty in Latin.


Twitter Username: PatriciaChao

E. Ethelbert Miller is a writer and literary activist. He was inducted into the Washington, DC Hall of Fame in 2015. In 2016 he received the AWP George Garrett Award For Outstanding Community Service in Literature. When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery is his most recent book.


Twitter Username: ethelbertpoet

Website: www.eethelbertmiller.com

Christina Baker Kline is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including The Exiles, Orphan Train, and A Piece of the World, and is published in forty countries. Her novels have received the New England Prize for Fiction, the Maine Literary Award, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Award, among other awards.


Twitter Username: bakerkline

Website: www.christinabakerkline.com

Patricia Spears Jones is the author of A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems. Anthologized in BAX: Best American Experimental Writing  and Reel Verse: Poems about Movies. She was awarded the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize, and she has taught at Hollins, Barnard, Adelphi, and Hunter.


Twitter Username: pksjones1

Website: www.psjones.com

122AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S194.

Embracing Bilingual Writing & Bicultural Narratives

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From the many phrases and words that can’t be literally translated to all of those cultural differences, these five Latin American/Hispanic writers will share how they navigate and balance both languages in their work. The writers on this panel explore the advantages and the importance of bilingual writing across genres and how mixing language (code-switching), culture, and literary traditions helps them to find their unique voice while reflecting on the struggles found along their journeys.

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Ofelia Montelongo is a bilingual writer from Mexico. Her work has been published in several literary magazines. She teaches at the University of Maryland and at the George Washington University. In 2021, she was named a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow. ofeliamontelongo.com


Twitter Username: ofeliamv23

Gloria Muñoz is a Colombian American writer, educator, literary translator, and advocate for multilingual literacy. Her poetry book Dawn's Early / Danzirly was awarded the Academy of American Poets 2019 Ambroggio Prize. She is also the author of Your Biome Has Found You.


Twitter Username: bygloriamunoz

Website: www.gloriamunoz.com

María Isabel Álvarez is a first-generation Guatemalan American writer. She received her BA in English literature and her MFA in creative writing from Arizona State University. Her writing has appeared in Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, Sonora Review, and Gulf Coast, among other venues.


Twitter Username: maria_i_alvarez

Ernesto L. Abeytia is a Basque and Spanish American poet and teacher. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Fugue, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at Binghamton University and Arizona State University. www.ErnestoAbeytia.com


Twitter Username: eabeytia

Website: www.ernestoabeytia.com

Isabel Díaz Alanís is a writer from Monterrey, México. She holds a doctoral degree in Hispanic studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Her forthcoming memoir No Hay Nadie en Casa deals with navigating impostor syndrome in academia.


Twitter Username: eraseunabestia

125, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S196.

Gamers, Gynos, & Robobees: Writers Researching the Ongoing Future

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What are best practices for deep creative research, and how does who researches and writes about science and tech shape our future? Four creative writers exploring underrepresented perspectives in STEM share research practices and experiences, including shadowing med students and visiting North Korea, exploring virtual reality and infiltrating Reddit to access the language and hierarchy of game design companies, visiting deforested areas in Cambodia, and investigating robobees and robot priests.

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A.E. Osworth is a transgender novelist. Their first book, We Are Watching Eliza Bright is based on Gamergate and is narrated collectively and unreliably by Reddit. They teach digital storytelling at The New School and fiction at Catapult.


Twitter Username: AEOsworth

Marie Myung-Ok Lee is the author of forthcoming novels The Evening Hero, Finding My Voice (YA). Fiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review, FiveChapters, TriQuarterly, Witness, Joyland, and Guernica. Nonfiction has appeared in the Atlantic, Paris Review, and the New York Times. She teaches fiction at Columbia.


Twitter Username: MarieMyungOkLee

Website: https://www.facebook.com/MarieLeeWriter

Rebecca Morgan Frank's fourth collection of poems is Oh You Robot Saints!, and her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, APR, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA program at Northwestern University, edits Memorious, and serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.


Twitter Username: poetmorgan

Website: www.rebeccamorganfrank.com

Alden Jones is the author of the books The Wanting Was a Wilderness, Unaccompanied Minors, and The Blind Masseuse. Her fiction and essays have appeared in BOMB, the Rumpus, the Cut, AGNI, and Best American Travel Writing. She teaches at Emerson College and the Newport MFA program.


Twitter Username: aldenejones

Website: aldenjones.com

126A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S197.

Plot Twist: Hybrid Programming is Here to Stay

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Love it or hate it, hybrid programming is the future of literary events, offering unbeatable accessibility and dynamic opportunities for programming not possible with limited budgets or in-person events. Panelists from a library and suburban and urban book festivals, who have all capitalized on the power of technology, will talk strategies for leveraging online spaces in tandem with in-person events to build your buzz and brand in a way that will inspire even the most Zoom-fatigued of us.

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Kara Oakleaf directs the Fall for the Book festival and teaches English at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Her work has appeared in Best Small Fictions 2020, Wigleaf, Matchbook, SmokeLong Quarterly, Monkeybicycle, Nimrod, and the Bloomsbury anthology Short-Form Creative Writing.


Twitter Username: karaoakleaf

Suzanne Rigdon manages the annual Fall for the Book festival in Fairfax, Virginia, where she teaches digital creative writing. She is the cohost of the Fall for the Book podcast.


Twitter Username: SuzyRigdon

Matthew Patin is the literary director at Texas Book Festival, and he coprograms Lit Crawl Austin. He is a board member at Austin Bat Cave, a creative community and writing center, and is also a book editor. He has contributed to Kirkus Reviews and the Austin Chronicle.


Twitter Username: frontmatter

Conor Moran is the director of the Wisconsin Book Festival. He started in this role in 2013 after working in the events department and on the sales floor at an independent bookstore.

Virtual

S198.

Black Women’s & LGBTQ+ Literary Cultures in the City of Brotherly Love

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Despite recent attention to Black Lives Matter, Black literary cultures and the voices of Black women and LGBTQ+ people rarely take center stage. As writers, teachers, organizers and cultural workers, we reflect on Philadelphia's rich Black feminist literary life. How do we center Black women, girls, and trans and nonbinary people in our writing and community work? We discuss nurturing Philly's Black feminist literary imaginaries and gather insights for cultural workers in other cities and beyond.


This virtual discussion room will take place live and will not be recorded for on-demand viewing.

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Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is the author of Blue Talk and Love, The Poetics of Difference, and More of Everything (Norton/Liveright 2022). She has earned honors from Lambda Literary, the Center for Fiction, Bread Loaf, Yaddo, and the NEA. She is an assistant professor of English at Bryn Mawr College.


Twitter Username: mecca_jamilah

Website: www.meccajamilahsullivan.com

Yolanda Wisher is the author of Monk Eats an Afro. A Cave Canem and Pew Fellow, she was the third poet laureate of Philadelphia and works as the curator of spoken word at Philadelphia Contemporary.


Twitter Username: yolandawisher

Trapeta B. Mayson is the City of Philadelphia current poet laureate and a 2021 poet laureate fellow with the Academy of American Poets. She is a recipient of a Pew Fellowship in Literature and Leeway Transformation Award, among others.


Twitter Username: Trapetam

Jeannine A. Cook is a writer, educator, and curator. She is the shopkeeper at Harriett’s Bookshop in Philadelphia and Ida’s Bookshop in Collingswood, New Jersey.


Twitter Username: Harriettsbooks

1:45 p.m. to 2:45 p.m.

Virtual

S199.

FC2 Reading

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FC2 has been a leading publisher of experimental writing for over forty years, hosting a continually dynamic and diverse conversation about what constitutes the innovative. FC2 authors include, among many others, Samuel Delany, Leslie Scalapino, Lidia Yuknavitch, Stephen Graham Jones, Diane Williams, Amelia Gray, and Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi. This event features readings by authors of their latest releases, followed by a Q&A.

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Steve Tomasula is the author of the novels Ascension, The Book of Portraiture, VAS: An Opera in Flatland, IN&OZ, TOC: A New-Media Novel, and the short story collection: Once Human. He also served as editor of Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E-, and Hybrid Writing.

Marc Anthony Richardson is author of Messiahs and Year of the Rat, winner of an American Book Award. He is the recipient of a Creative Capital Award, a PEN America grant, a Sachs Program grant, and a Hurston/Wright fellowship. Currently, he teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania.


Twitter Username: MarcAnthonyRic2

Website: www.marcanthonyrichardson.com

Kathleen J. Woods has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Colorado Boulder. She is a Tin House alum and a former Writers Grotto fellow. Her work has appeared in Bitch Media, Western Humanities Review, Apeiron Review, and The Thought Erotic. White Wedding is her first novel.


Twitter Username: KathleenJWoods

JoAnna Novak's short story collection, Meaningful Work, won the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest and was published in August. Her third book of poetry, New Life was published in October. Her debut memoir Contradiction Days will be published in 2023.

Vi Khi Nao is the author of Swimming With Dead Stars, A Bell Curve Is A Pregnant Straight Line, and the play, Waiting for God. She was the winner of 2014 Nightboat Poetry Prize and the 2016 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest for A Brief Alphabet of Torture, a collection of short stories.


Twitter Username: vikhinao

Virtual

S200.

Barrow Street Press Twentieth Anniversary Reading

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Barrow Street Press began publishing books in 2002 as an offshoot of its poetry magazine, Barrow Street. A significant presence in the small press poetry world, Barrow Street Press continues to publish four books a year through an annual book prize as well as through submissions to the press. Readings by these five representative poets showcase and celebrate the continuing breadth and power of the Barrow Street Press roster of poets.

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Claudia Keelan is a poet, essayist, and translator.  She has published Ecstatic Émigré and also translations of women troubadours. The author of eight books of poetry, she is the editor of Interim and the Test Site Poetry Series.


Twitter Username: claudiakeelan

Timothy Liu is the author of twelve books of poems, most recently Let It Ride. His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. He is professor of English at William Paterson University.


Twitter Username: arabadjisliu

Website: Http://timothyliu.net

Danielle Legros Georges is a poet, essayist, translator, and professor at Lesley University. She was appointed the second poet laureate of the City of Boston, serving in the role from 2015 to 2019. Her most recent work is a book of translations, Island Heart: The Poems of Ida Faubert.

Sally Ball is the author of three books of poems, most recently Hold Sway. She's a professor of English and the director of creative writing at Arizona State University; she's also the associate director of Four Way Books and a faculty member in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.

Miguel Murphy is the author of Shoreditch and two previous collections, Detainee and A Book Called Rats, winner of the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry. He teaches at Santa Monica College in southern California.


Twitter Username: MiguelMurphy

Virtual

S202.

Playwriting & Beyond: Playwrights Discuss Moving into Writing Different Forms

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Between COVID and the shuttering of theaters, low-paying playwriting commissions, and the proliferation of writers needed for online television and performance, many playwrights are venturing into other areas of writing beyond the proscenium. Hear from some of the top writers in our field about how they made the shift into other forms, how their playwriting skills helped/hurt their writing in these forms, and what to do if you are interested in working in areas outside the theater.

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Jacqueline Goldfinger is an award-winning playwright and librettist who seeks out unique collaborations, working across disciplines to create singular works of theatre and opera. Awards include: Yale Prize, OA Discovery Grant, and Smith Prize. Published by Routledge. www.jacquelinegoldfinger.com

Dan O’Brien is a playwright, poet, essayist, and librettist whose recognitions includes a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama and two PEN America Awards. His fourth poetry collection, Our Cancers, and a collection of his essays on playwriting, A Story That Happens, were published in 2021.


Twitter Username: danobrienwriter

Website: www.danobrien.org

Charise Castro Smith is a writer, producer, director, and actor. Playwrighting credits include El huracán (Yale Rep) and Feathers and Teeth (Goodman Theatre). Film/television credits include The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix), Sweetbitter (Starz), and Encanto (Walt Disney Animation Studios).

Beth Kander is an author, playwright, and educator. The granddaughter of immigrants, she writes stories that explore worlds old and new. Honors include Henry Awards, Getchell, PitchWars, Indie Forward, etc. She is the resident playwright at Ashland New Plays Festival and is represented by Allison Hellegers/Stimola. www.bethkander.com


Twitter Username: ByBethKander

Virtual

S203.

Poetry of Witness: Racial Dehumanization & Genocide

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What can a poet do in the face of dehumanization and brutality towards groups of people? How can we avoid sentimentality or reducing victims to statistics? How do we communicate the victimization of a people while still conveying their agency and humanity? Do the details of craft matter in the face of mass murder, and how can poetry honor the dead and urge society towards justice and humanity? And what do poets do when we see the attitudes that led to genocide resurfacing today?

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Gail Newman, child of Holocaust survivors, was born after WW II in a displaced persons camp. Her new collection, Blood Memory, chosen by Marge Piercy for The Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, was published in 2020. The book won the NCPA Gold Award for Poetry. Gail teaches genocide poetry for educators and students.

Dean Rader has written, edited, or coedited eleven books, including Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Prize and the Northern California Book Award. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.


Twitter Username: deanrader

Website: http://deanrader.com

Roger Reeves’s first book of poems is King Me. He has been awarded a 2015 Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, and a 2013 NEA Fellowship. His next book of poems, Best Barbarian, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.

Lorna Dee Cervantes is the author of six books of poetry, including the bestselling Emplumada. Former director of creative writing and associate professor of English at University of Colorado Boulder where she taught creative writing for nineteen years, Cervantes recently relocated to the Pacific Northwest and writes in Seattle.


Twitter Username: LornaDeeCe

Cristina Deptula, formerly a science and technology reporter, founded and currently edits the international literary publication Synchronized Chaos. She also founded literary publicity firm Authors, Large and Small in 2013, providing affordable traditional and social media services.


Twitter Username: smallandlarge

Virtual

S204.

Two Genres Are Better Than One: The SJSU Dual-Genre MFA Program Model

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San Jose State University’s MFA has been a dual-genre program since its inception in 2000. SJSU requires MFA students to complete three workshops in a primary genre and two workshops in a declared secondary genre. SJSU offers tracks in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenwriting/playwriting. We also offer occasional hybrid-genre workshops. MFA core faculty and MFA students will discuss the advantage of working in two genres and reflect on their experiences in the program.

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Sally Ashton is author of The Behaviour of Clocks, Some Odd Afternoon, Her Name Is Juanita, and These Metallic Days, and she is assistant editor of They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing and editor in chief of DMQ Review. She teaches at San José State University.

Alan Soldofsky's most recent collection of poems is In the Buddha Factory. He is also coeditor with David Koehn of Compendium: A Collection of Thoughts on Prosody by Donald Justice. He is a professor of English and the director of creative writing at San Jose State University.


Twitter Username: ADSoldof

Website: http://www.sjsu.edu/people/alan.soldofsky/

Ume Ali is a teaching associate and MFA candidate at SJSU, where she studies fiction and poetry. She has served as contributing editor for Azizah Magazine and she is nonfiction editor at Reed Magazine and also president of the Diasporic Peoples Writing Collective. Ume's work can be found in Azizah and Caesura.


Twitter Username: _writerume

Nick Taylor is the author of the novels The Disagreement and Father Junípero's Confessor. He also writes a series of thrillers under the pseudonym T.T. Monday. He is a professor at San Jose State, where he directs the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies.


Twitter Username: ttmonday

Website: http://www.readnicktaylor.com

J. Michael Martinez is the author of Museum of the Americas, selected for the National Poetry Series and longlisted for the National Book Award, and Heredities, winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. He is an assistant professor of poetry at San Jose State University.

Virtual

S205.

In the Cosmopolis of Memory: Women on Cultural Selfhood in a Globalized World

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Setting and place are at the center of our stories and identities—yet globalization and territorial violences create a complicated spatial “belonging." How do we place ourselves in our writing? Braving political strife, war, and displacement coupled with traumas of misrepresentation by dominant narratives, five women grounded in (global) Lebanese, Azerbaijani, Palestinian, and Pakistani cultures write and/or translate poetry, fiction, and memoir to recast histories and cultures in our own voices.

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Alison Mandaville has received two UNESCO cultural heritage grants for her work supporting women writers and artists in Azerbaijan. A poet, scholar, and translator, she teaches at Fresno State. Her creative and scholarly work has appeared in dozens of US and international journals and books.

Samina Najmi, professor of English at California State University, Fresno, writes essays centered on her life in Pakistan, the UK, and the US. She has just completed a book-length memoir of her home in Karachi. Her work has appeared in World Literature Today, Massachusetts Review, Entropy, The Rumpus, and The Progressive.

Shadab Zeest Hashmi, author of Ghazal Cosmopolitan, Kohl & Chalk, and Baker of Tarifa, is the winner of the San Diego Book Award and the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize. Her work has been published worldwide and has been translated into Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu. She has an MFA from Warren Wilson.


Twitter Username: ShadabZeest

Website: http://shadabhashmi.com/

Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her third full-length collection, titled O, is forthcoming from Penguin Books in 2022. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, Poetry, Ploughshares, and the Adroit Journal, among others.


Twitter Username: zeinabeck

Deema K. Shehabi is the author of Thirteen Departures from the Moon and coeditor with Beau Beausoleil of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, for which she received the Northern California Book Reviewers Recognition Award. She's also coauthor with Marilyn Hacker of Diaspo/Renga. She won the Nazim Hizkmet Poetry Prize in 2018.


Twitter Username: @DeemaShehabi

Virtual

S206.

First-Person Journalism: How Do You Make a Personal Voice Believable?

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Forget objectivity. Journalists increasingly use a first-person point of view in feature articles, commentary, and essays. Personal stories engage readers, especially on digital sites. But in the Disinformation Age, a first-person perspective also promises more honesty about who's doing the observing or deciding which stories to tell, helping to address implicit bias. A diverse panel of journalists and essayists discuss how to build trust with readers by crafting a believable first-person voice.

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Martha Nichols is cofounder of Talking Writing, a nonprofit digital magazine. A longtime journalism instructor at Harvard University Extension School, she is the author of the guide First-Person Journalism and editor of Into Sanity, an anthology of personal essays about mental illness.


Twitter Username: talkingwriting

Website: http://athenashead.com

Moni Basu is an award-winning journalist who teaches narrative nonfiction at the University of Florida. As a senior digital correspondent for CNN, Basu specialized in intimate storytelling about complex topics. She is the author of Chaplain Turner's War, a 2012 e-book about the Iraq War.

Damon Young's debut memoir, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir In Essays, is a tragicomic exploration of the angsts, anxieties, and absurdities of existing while Black in America. It won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and Barnes & Noble's Discover Award.


Twitter Username: damonyoungvsb

Kent Jacobson has taught in prisons and a Bard College program for low-income women in inner-city Massachusetts. His creative nonfictions appear in the Dewdrop, Hobart, Talking Writing, Lucky Jefferson, and elsewhere; his focus is often on matters of race and class.

Lewis Raven Wallace is a journalist based in Durham, North Carolina; the author and creator of The View from Somewhere book and podcast; and a cofounder of Press On, a southern movement journalism collective.


Twitter Username: lewispants

3:20 p.m. to 4:35 p.m.

Michael A. Nutter Theater, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S206B.

A Reading & Conversation with Rivka Galchen & Ruth Ozeki, Sponsored by the Authors Guild

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Rivka Galchen’s second novel Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch was a finalist for the 2021 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her debut novel Atmospheric Disturbances won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and was named to best of the year lists by The New York Times, Salon.com, Slate, and more. Ruth Ozeki’s fourth novel The Book of Form and Emptiness was released in September 2021 and named a best book of the year by outlets including Time and The Guardian. Her 2013 novel A Tale for the Time Being won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Dos Passos Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and National Books Critics Circle Award. Moderated by Zachary Steele.

This event will be prerecorded and available on the virtual conference platform, in addition to being screened onsite. ASL interpretation and captioning will be provided.


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Moderator Zachary Steele, founder and executive director of Broadleaf Writers Association, is the author of three novels, including his latest, The Weight of Ashes. He was nominated for the Sidewise Award for Alternate Fiction and has been featured in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Publisher's Weekly, Writer's Magazine, Shelf Awareness, and City Lights with Lois Reitzes on NPR. Currently, he is hard at work on Jude, due out in 2023, as well as the first book in his upcoming fantasy series, The Fallen Hero.

Rivka Galchen is the award-winning author of five books, most recently the novel Everybody Knows Your Mother is a Witch, about the witch trial of the mother of the astronomer Johannes Kepler. She is also a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, which in 2010 named her one of the "20 Under 40."

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. She is the author of four novels, The Book of Form and Emptiness, My Year of Meats, All Over Creation, and A Tale for the Time Being, which won the LA Times Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2013 Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her fiction has been widely translated and published in over thirty countries. Her nonfiction work includes a memoir, The Face: A Time Code, and the documentary film, Halving the Bones. A longtime Buddhist practitioner, Ruth was ordained in 2010 and is affiliated with the Brooklyn Zen Center and the Everyday Zen Foundation. She lives in Massachusetts and teaches creative writing at Smith College, where she is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities.

109AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S207.

When Form Meets Content: Structuring a Nonfiction Book

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Structuring a book-length work presents unique opportunities and challenges. How does form meet content at over 50,000 words? There are a myriad of different ways to answer this question. This panel brings together a diverse group of nonfiction writers from across the country to discuss their approaches to form in a manuscript, the many craft decisions made during the writing process, and the different storytelling lineages called upon in crafting the final version of the work.

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Daisy Hernández is the author of The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease and the memoir A Cup of Water under My Bed. She coedited the feminist anthology Colonize This! and is an associate professor at Miami University in Ohio.


Twitter Username: daisyhernandez

Website: daisyhernandez.com

Danielle Geller's first book, Dog Flowers, was published in 2021. She is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and her work has appeared in the Paris Review, the New Yorker, and Brevity. She teaches creative writing at the University of Victoria and the Institute of American Indian Arts.


Twitter Username: dellegeller

Maddie Norris, the recipient of Ninth Letter‘s Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction, was the Thomas Wolfe Scholar at UNC-Chapel Hill and earned her MFA at the University of Arizona. Her work can be found in Fourth Genre, Territory, and Essay Daily.


Twitter Username: madnor94

Elissa Washuta (Cowlitz Indian Tribe) is the author of White Magic, My Body Is a Book of Rules, and Starvation Mode, and coeditor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She is an assistant professor at the Ohio State University.


Twitter Username: elissawashuta

Website: http://washuta.net

Melissa Faliveno is the author of the essay collection Tomboyland, named a best book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library, and O, the Oprah Magazine. She was the 2020–21 Kenan Visiting Writer at University of North Carolina and is currently a visiting assistant professor of English at Kenyon College.


Twitter Username: melissafaliveno

111AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S208.

Writing Poetry/Writing History

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Temple University has been Philadelphia’s only full-time residential graduate creative writing program since 1985. This panel celebrates that history by presenting readings from five poetry alumni whose recently published works explore poetry as historiographic practice, covering topics such as surveillance capitalism, the settlement of North America, the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692, anti-Asian violence since 9/11, and Black voices hidden in the archives.

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Yolanda Wisher is the author of Monk Eats an Afro. A Cave Canem and Pew Fellow, she was the third poet laureate of Philadelphia and works as the curator of spoken word at Philadelphia Contemporary.


Twitter Username: yolandawisher

Divya Victor is the author of Curb and Kith. Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Czech. She is currently an associate professor of English at Michigan State University.


Twitter Username: sugaronthegash

Emily Abendroth’s newest book, Sousveillance Pageant, coasts restlessly between fiction, poetry, and research essay. She is author of the poetry collection ]Exclosures[ and The Instead, a book-length collaborative conversation with fiction writer Miranda Mellis. 

Sarah Dowling is the author of three books of poetry: Security Posture, DOWN, and Entering Sappho, which was recently shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize. A literary critic as well as a poet, Sarah is also the author of Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood under Settler Colonialism.


Twitter Username: SarahMDowling1

Pattie McCarthy is the author of seven books of poetry—most recently Wifthing—and over a dozen chapbooks. She was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 2011. In summer 2013, she was a resident at the Elizabeth Bishop House in Nova Scotia. She teaches at Temple University.

113A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S209.

Alternative Professions to Academia for MFA Graduates, Sponsored by CLMP & LitNet

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Professionals from the literary field discuss alternative career paths to academia, including magazine publishing, writers-in-the-schools programs, literary conferences and festivals, and arts administration.

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Asari Beale is a writer, educator, and leader deeply committed to children’s literacy. She is the executive director of Teachers & Writers Collaborative, a board member of the NYC Arts in Education Roundtable, and a steering committee member of LitNet, a network serving America’s literary community.


Twitter Username: asarinyc

Steph Opitz is VP of Partnerships at Zibby Books. She is founder of The Loft Literary Center’s Wordplay book festival. A visiting instructor at the University of Minnesota, she serves on committees for the National Book Foundation, PEN America, and LitNet.


Twitter Username: stephopitz

Jafreen Uddin is the executive director of the Asian American Writers' Workshop. She is the first woman to lead the organization since its founding in 1991. With over a decade of experience working in the public sector, she specializes in communications, education, and fundraising.


Twitter Username: jafreenmu

Shannon McNerney is the executive director at Fishtrap, a literary arts organization in rural northeast Oregon best known for the Summer Fishtrap Gathering of Writers. A writer and classical singer, Shannon has worked in nonprofit management since 2002.


Twitter Username: PDXShan

113C, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S210.

Strike a Chord: The Lyric Essay Forms of A Harp in the Stars

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This panel features craft talks by essayists whose work appears in the University of Nebraska Press anthology A Harp in the Stars, which Aimee Nezhukumatathil calls “a fascinating look into the bright heart of what the lyric essay can be.” Contributors will read brief excerpts of a segmented essay, a braided essay, a hermit crab essay in the form of a word search puzzle, and a hybrid lyric craft essay, then discuss practical strategies as well as theoretical concerns when writing in these forms.

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Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. She is the author of the essay collection Be with Me Always and the editor of A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays. She teaches in the MFA in nonfiction program at Goucher and the low-residency MFA in creative writing at West Virginia Wesleyan.


Twitter Username: randonnoble

Website: www.randonbillingsnoble.com

Heidi Czerwiec, essayist and poet, is the author of the lyric essay collection Fluid States, winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, and the poetry collection Conjoining. She is an editor at Assay and teaches in Minneapolis and with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.


Twitter Username: HeidiCzerwiec

Website: http://www.heidiczerwiec.com

Angie Chuang is a nonfiction writer and an associate professor of journalism at University of Colorado Boulder. Her first book, The Four Words for Home, won an Independent Publishers Award. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Litro, the Asian American Literary Review, Vela, and others.


Twitter Username: angiechuang

Sayantani Dasgupta is the author, most recently, of the short story collection Women Who Misbehave. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the UNC Wilmington and has also taught in India, Italy, and Mexico. She is also the author of Fire Girl: Essays on India, America, and the In-Between.


Twitter Username: sayan10e

Website: www.sdasgupta.com

Laurie Easter is the author of All the Leavings. Her essays have been awarded fellowships by the Vermont Studio Center and Playa, listed as notable in Best American Essays, and published in the Rumpus, Chautauqua, Brevity, and The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms, among other publications.


Twitter Username: EasterLaurie

115AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S211.

Each Book Another Me: Mapping the Progression of Self Over a Career

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One joy of being an avid reader is discovering a fresh voice, new to and in love with literary self-expression, but so, too, is there joy in following the growth of a voice over the course of an author’s lifetime. Each book is a time capsule of sorts: the representation of an individual’s understanding of the world, forever preserved on page. This event will feature writers in various stages of life, reflecting on all the people they’ve been over the years, charting out the many maps of the self.

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Twitter Username: Andrea_M_Ross

Daniel B. Summerhill is a professor of Poetry/Social Action & Composition at California State University, Monterey Bay. His work has appeared in Columbia Journal, Obsidian, Rust + Moth, and The Hellebore. He is the author of two collections: Divine, Divine, Divine and Mausoleum of Flowers.


Twitter Username: bennysummerhill

Roberto Carlos Garcia has written three poetry collections, most recently [Elegies], black / Maybe: An Afro Lyric, and Melancolía. Garcia holds an MFA in poetry/poetry in translation.


Twitter Username: thespokenmind

Dzvinia Orlowsky is an award-winning author of six poetry collections including Bad Harvest. Recipient of an NEA grant, she has translated Alexander Dovzhenko's novella The Enchanted Desna and cotranslated Eccentric Days of Hope & Sorrow: Selected Poems by Natalka Bilotserkivets. @DzviniaOrlowsky


Twitter Username: DzviniaOrlowsky

Molly Peacock is a poet, biographer, essayist, and writer of tales whose multigenre literary life has taken her from New York City to Toronto, from poetry to prose, from words to words-and-pictures, and from lyric self-examination to curiosity about the lives of others.


Twitter Username: MollyPeacock3

Website: www.mollypeacock.org

115C, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S212.

Green Shoots from Old Roots: Writing Realist Ecofiction

(, , , , )

Realist, character-driven ecofiction and cli-fi play a special role in the urgent dialogue on humanity’s culpability for and response to the desecration of the natural world. We discuss how and to what effect we ground such stories in history and science, center nonhuman characters and natural settings, negotiate despair and hope, harness environmental messaging to character and plot, and approach the global- and generational-scale changes that drive speculative ecofiction.

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Anne Coray’s novel Lost Mountain is a love story inspired by the Pebble Mine project. Author of three poetry collections, her work has appeared in North American Review, Kestrel, Poetry, and AQR. She has received fellowships from the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Rasmuson Foundation.

Helon Habila is a professor of creative writing at George Mason University in Virginia. He studied at the University of Jos in Nigeria and the University of East Anglia, UK. His novels include Travelers  and Oil on Water.


Twitter Username: helonhabila

Website: www.helonhabila.com

Susan M. Gaines’s books include the novels Accidentals and Carbon Dreams and the science book Echoes of Life. She currently serves as the international author liaison for the Fiction Meets Science Program at the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study in Germany.


Twitter Username: susanmgaines

Website: www.susanmgaines.com

Julie Carrick Dalton's (she/her) debut novel, Waiting for the Night Song, was a CNN, Newsweek, Parade, and USA Today Most Anticipated 2021 book. A Tin House and Bread Loaf alum, Julie owns a small farm in rural New Hampshire and speaks/teaches about fiction that engages climate crisis.


Twitter Username: juliecardalt

Website: juliecarrickdalton.com

Catherine Bush's five novels include the climate-themed Blaze Island (2020), a Globe & Mail Best Book. “Writing the Real,” an essay on writing climate fiction, will appear in Best Canadian Essays 2021. She is the coordinator of the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA in Toronto.


Twitter Username: writercatebush

Website: www.catherinebush.com

118BC, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S214.

Black MuthaWriters: The Politics, Protests, & Prose of Black Motherhood

(, , , )

Surviving as a Black woman in the world is an act of protest. Thriving as a Black mother and artist can be revolutionary. How does this revolution appear on the page, on the stage, and in the difficult act of getting published—and paid well? In a genre dominated by white women, can the breadth of our stories be acknowledged and lauded? Writers of fiction, memoir, reportage, and plays will discuss the wide artistic terrain of Black motherhood, including health, disability, sex, adoption, and more.

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Deesha Philyaw is the author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, winner of the the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction.


Twitter Username: deeshaphilyaw

Kelly Glass is an independent journalist whose writing focuses on the intersection of parenting, health, and race. Her writing appears in the New York Times, Parents magazine, the Washington Post, Vox, Romper, the Lily, and more. She's also a contributing editor for two parenting publications.


Twitter Username: kellygwriter

Nefertiti Austin writes about the erasure of diverse voices in motherhood in Motherhood So White: A Memoir of Race, Gender, and Parenting in America. Her work can be found in the New York Times, Washington Post, MUTHA, the Nation, etc. She has appeared on the 3rd Hour of the TODAY Show, 1A, NPR, and numerous podcasts.


Twitter Username: nefertitiaustin

Website: www.nefertitiaustin.com

Doreen Olivera is a writer and performer whose award-winning solo show, Everything Is Fine Until It's Not, I broke a sellout record at the New York International Fringe Festival. A Yaddo, VCCA, Hedgebrook, and Sustainable Arts fellow, her essays on race, autism, and parenting have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Kenyon Review.


Twitter Username: doreenoliver

Website: www.doreenoliver.com

119AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S215.

Reclaiming the Collection: Putting Together—and Selling—a Story Collection

(, Sidik Fofana, , , )

In publishing and academic contexts, short stories almost always come with a caveat: they're not marketable or they're just what fits most easily in the workshop format. What if we stopped comparing books of short stories to novels? This panel looks at the story collection as its own art form, rather than a prelude to a debut novel. From contest to indie press to the Big Five, the panelists are writers who have come together to discuss how to write, arrange, edit, and sell a collection.

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Megan Cummins is a Brooklyn-based writer and the managing editor of A Public Space. Her book, If the Body Allows It (Nebraska), was longlisted for the Story Prize and the PEN/Bingham Award for Debut Short Story Collection.


Twitter Username: cummins_megan

Arinze Ifeakandu is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop where he won the Richard Yates Short Story Contest. He is a Caine Prize finalist and an A Public Space Emerging Writer Fellow. His debut collection of stories is forthcoming.


Twitter Username: Ary_Ifeakandu

Kate Doyle is the author of the forthcoming short story collection I Meant It Once which will be published by Algonquin Books. A  2021 A Public Space Fellow, she received an MFA from NYU, and her work has appeared in No Tokens, Electric Literature, Anomaly, Cordella, and elsewhere.


Twitter Username: sometimes_k8

Ada Zhang is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Maytag Fellow and recipient of the Richard E. Guthrie Memorial Fellowship. She is the author of a forthcoming short story collection.

120AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S216.

Craft Lessons from the Submission Queue: Writing & Editing Short Fiction

(, , , , )

Many lit mag editors participate on both sides of the submission process: reading unsolicited stories and sending out their own for consideration. What do editors learn about writing from reading and editing submissions? How does evaluating, accepting, and declining stories change the work of drafting new short fiction? This panel dives into the editorial selection process on a craft level, with editors from American Short Fiction, Apogee, The Common, The Offing, and One Story.

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Emily Everett is managing editor of the Common magazine. Her short fiction appears in the Kenyon Review, Tin House online, Electric Lit, Mississippi Review, and other publications. She studied literature at Smith College, University College London, and Queen Mary University of London.


Twitter Username: Public_Emily

Alex Watson is a fiction writer and poet from Syracuse, New York currently based in Newburgh, New York. She writes about mixed race identity, class, mental illness, and addiction. She’s the executive editor of Apogee Journal, and a lecturer in Barnard College's First-Year Writing Program.


Twitter Username: watsonlexis

Lena Valencia is the managing editor of One Story and teaches writing at the Sackett Street Writers Workshop and Catapult. She has held positions at A Public Space and BOMB Magazine. She has an MFA in fiction from The New School and is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation grant.


Twitter Username: lenavee

Adeena Reitberger is the editor and codirector of American Short Fiction. Her stories and essays have been published in FenceBlack Warrior ReviewMississippi ReviewCimarron ReviewNimrod International, and Sierra Nevada Review.


Twitter Username: AdeenaR

Mimi Wong is editor in chief of The Offing. Her work has appeared in The Believer, Catapult, Electric Literature, Hyperallergic, Literary Hub and Refinery29. Her fiction has been published in Cicada, Crab Orchard Review, Day One, Joyland, and Wildness. She teaches writing at The New School.


Twitter Username: whoismims

120C, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S217.

In Order to Be Totally Free: Teaching via the Writing Constraint

(, , , , Amie Whittemore)

Oulipo writer Georges Perec says, “I set myself rules in order to be totally free.” From word limits to time limits, writing with constraints can be a powerful tool when teaching writers to expand their first-draft strategies as well as further hone their craft through imposed limitations. In this panel, five instructors discuss what specific rule-based exercises they employ in the writing classroom and how those constraining prompts allow students to find greater freedoms in their own work.

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Alexander Lumans was awarded a 2018 NEA Grant in Prose. He was the Spring 2014 Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell, and he received a fellowship to the 2015 Arctic Circle Residency. He teaches at the University of Colorado Denver and at Lighthouse Writers Workshop.


Twitter Username: oldmanlumans

Website: http://www.alexanderlumans.com/

Joanna Luloff is the author of the short story collection The Beach at Galle Road and the novel Remind Me Again What Happened. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver where she edits fiction and nonfiction for the journal Copper Nickel.


Twitter Username: joluloff

Website: www.joannaluloff.com

Jane Wong is the author of How to Not Be Afraid of Everything and Overpour. She is an associate professor of creative writing at Western Washington University.

Hasanthika Sirisena's essays and stories have appeared in Electric LiteratureMichigan Quarterly ReviewEpoch, and Narrative. She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers' Award and the 2015 Juniper Prize for Fiction. Her essay collection Dark Tourist will be released December 2021.


Twitter Username: thinkhasie

Website: http://hasanthikasirisena.com/

121A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S218.

Call It a Beginning: An Undocupoets Anniversary Reading

(, , , , )

To celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Undocupoets Fellowship, a grant awarded to poets who are currently or who were formerly undocumented in the US, this reading features the debut collections of four recipients of the fellowship. This dynamic reading presents a complex and nuanced narrative of the undocumented experience and highlights each poet’s differences in approach and vision. Each poet will also share a poem written by another Undocupoets Fellow to preview the books yet to come.

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Anni Liu is the author of the Lexi Rudnitsky Prize-winning poetry collection The Eye Trees. She edits at Graywolf Press, translates the contemporary Chinese poet Du Ya, and is working on a hybrid memoir about unbearable intimacies. You can find her online at anniliuwrites.wordpress.org.


Twitter Username: IamAnniLiu

Wo Chan is a poet and drag performer. They are a winner of the 2020 Nightboat Poetry Prize and the author of Togetherness (2022). Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, the Asian American Writers Workshop, and elsewhere. Find them @theillustriouspearl


Twitter Username: theillustriouspear

Aline Mello is an immigrant from Brazil and a 2018 Undocupoets fellow. Her work can be found in journals and anthologies such as the Georgia Review, Grist Journal, and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: Latinext. Her debut poetry collection is forthcoming in 2022 from Andrews McMeel.


Twitter Username: thealinemello

Website: https://www.thealinemello.com/

Jan-Henry Gray (he/him) is the author of Documents, chosen by D. A. Powell as the winner of BOA Editions' Poulin Poetry Prize. His chapbook, Selected Emails, is available through speCt! Books. An Undocupoets and Kundiman fellow, he is a visiting assistant professor at Adelphi University.

Janine Joseph is a poet, librettist, and author of Driving without a License, winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, and the forthcoming Decade of the Brain. A co-organizer for Undocupoets and MacDowell Fellow, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Oklahoma State University.


Twitter Username: ninejoseph

Website: http://www.janinejoseph.com/

121BC, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S219.

Winners on Winning: Advice & Insight on Literary Contests

(, , , , )

Literary contests can be a great way to connect with editors, build an audience, and find a good home in the world for your work. Submitting to contests is also an art in itself, one that requires savvy, strategy, and perseverance. In this panel, four writers who have found success in literary contests offer advice on choosing opportunities to pursue, selecting what to submit, and weathering the ups and downs of contest news—all while staying grounded in what matters most: the writing itself.

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Emma Komlos-Hrobsky is associate editor at Poets & Writers magazine. She has also served as an editor at Tin House books and magazine and a professor at The New School. Her writing appears in Guernica, Conjunctions, Tin House, Hunger Mountain, Bookforum, and other publications.


Twitter Username: skunkorama

Suphil Lee Park is the author of the poetry collection Present Tense Complex, winner of the 2020 Marystina Santiestevan Prize. Most recently she received a third prize in the Writer’s Digest short short story competition and won the 2021 Indiana Review Fiction Prize.

Ananda Lima is the author of Mother/land (winner of the Hudson Prize) and the chapbooks Amblyopia, Translation (winner of the Vella Prize), and Tropicália (winner of the Newfound Prose Prize).


Twitter Username: anandalima

Website: www.anandalima.com

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry from AWP. She is the recipient of a 2021 NEA Fellowship and the winner of the 2020 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize. She is currently a doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston.


Twitter Username: Dalai_Mama_

Devon Walker-Figueroa is the author of Philomath, selected for the National Poetry Series by Sally Keith. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Nation, Poetry, and Ploughshares.


Twitter Username: DeVonciFig

122AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S220.

The Dimensional Essay: A Multiform Performance

(, , , , )

This reading will feature five writers who have been invited to perform their written work "dimensionally" using sound, image, objects, and other performance strategies. The goal of the dimensional essay is to provide the space and equipment for writers to engage audiences by using elements that compliment and extend the work of language. This event invites readers to question the formal conventions of a literary reading and offers writers the opportunity to stretch out, collaborate, and play.

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Sarah Minor is an interdisciplinary artist and the author of Slim Confessions, Bright Archive, and the chapbook The Persistence of the Bonyleg: Annotated. She is assistant professor of creative nonfiction at the Cleveland Institute of Art.


Twitter Username: sarahceniaminor

Douglas Kearney is a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly recipient, an award-winning librettist, a Howard/CalArts alum, and a Cave Canem fellow. He’s published seven books of poetry, essays, and libretti. He teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota.

Brandon Shimoda is the author of seven books of poetry and prose. His books include The Grave on the Wall, which received the PEN Open Book Award, and Evening Oracle, which received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.


Twitter Username: brandonshimoda

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.


Twitter Username: robottomulatto

Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral candidate at Ohio University, where she studies creative nonfiction and rhetoric & composition. She serves as the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction and is a podcast host for the New Books Network. Find her at zoebossiere.com.


Twitter Username: zoebossiere

Website: zoebossiere.com

124, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S221.

Exorcising Your Demons: Mental Illness in YA & New Adult Literature

(, , , K. Ibura)

Mental Illness has young people going to extreme lengths to stay afloat. The isolation post-COVID has presented new challenges for this audience (and their families) struggling for acceptance amid increased alcoholism, divorce, family rejection, voices in their heads, and larger judgmental voices in the world. Our group of diverse gendered panelists of different ages, ethnicities, and orientations, will explore these challenges and how the act of writing has enabled us to exorcise our demons.

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Pamela L. Laskin teaches graduate children's writing and directs the Poetry Outreach Center at the City College. She is the 2019 winner of the Leapfrog International Fiction contest for Why No Bhine. Atmosphere Press will soon be publishing The Lost Language of Crazy, a book about mental illness.


Twitter Username: RonitandJamil

Suzanne Weyn is best known for her award-winning Bar Code Tattoo trilogy and her eco thriller, Empty. She teaches writing and children's literature at the City University of New York. Her comedic middle grade novel, Snapstreak, came out in 2018. Find her at suzanneweynbooks.com.


Twitter Username: SuzanneWeyn

Website: suzanneweynbooks.com

Hiram Lorenzen is a graduate student in the City College of New York's creative writing program. He focuses on queer-positive narratives, trauma, and remarkable resilience.

125, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S222.

National Poetry Series Debut Collections: Slow Lightning or Big Bang?

(, , , Teresa K. Miller)

Debut collections chosen for the National Poetry Series represent a unique opportunity for poets to reach a wide audience from the start, more immediately and effectively connecting them to the writing community to contribute to the shaping of contemporary literary culture. But is it possible to prepare for the challenges and opportunities in order to make the most of them? A panel of 2019 and 2020 winners will discuss their paths to the prize and how it has affected them and their work.

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Amanda Moore’s debut collection of poetry, Requeening, was selected for the 2020 National Poetry Series by Ocean Vuong and published by Ecco in October 2021. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Best New Poets and ZZYZVA. She is a high school English teacher.


Twitter Username: amandapmoore

Alexandria Hall is the author of Field Music, a winner of the National Poetry Series. She holds an MFA from New York University and is currently a PhD student in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.

Benjamin Garcia provides HIV/HCV/STD and opioid overdose prevention education to higher-risk communities in New York State. He has received scholarships from the Frost Place and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. His work is forthcoming in Lambda Literary, Indiana Review, Boston Review, and elsewhere.


Twitter Username: bengarciapoet

126A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S223.

Crossing Languages: From First Draft to Publication, Sponsored by ALTA

(, , )

This multigenre panel focuses on strategies for international authors or their translators seeking to publish a translation of the work in English, as well as for international authors living in the US seeking to publish the work in their native country. From Greek memoir to Armenian fiction to Mexican poetry, the panelists will address the challenges faced by authors or by literary translators in spanning cultural differences and in bringing the manuscript to US readers.

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Susan Ayres, a poet and translator, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She teaches at Texas A&M Law School, and she holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poems and translations from the Spanish have appeared in numerous journals. Her translation of Elsa Cross's NADIR is forthcoming.

Sophia Kouidou-Giles has degrees in psychology and social work; publications in Persimmon Tree, Assay, Raven's Perch, Blue Nib, Readers/Writers, and Time Collection; a poetry chapbook: Transitions & Passages; and two memoirs: Return to Thessaloniki (Greek) and Sophia's Return (English).


Twitter Username: kouidou

Website: httpss://sophiakouidougiles.contently.com

Areg Azatyan is an Armenian writer of six fiction books. He has received a President’s Prize for the Best Writer of the Year (2004) as well as several international and national awards. As a filmmaker, he participated in Cannes, Sundance, and Berlinale.

Virtual

S224.

Creative Politics, Political Poetics: Asian American Literary Activism

(, , , , )

Our discussion room will explore literary activism, art and community-building, and literary and academic change-making through five different vantages. In particular, we will share Asian American approaches to crossracial organizing, improvisational pedagogies, neurodiversity, and literary activism in and beyond the academy. We will include examples, generative writing, and somatic and embodied activities for participants to engage, interact, and create so we move toward liberation collectively.


This virtual discussion room will take place live and will not be recorded for on-demand viewing.

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Purvi Shah's favorite art practices are her sparkly eyeshadow and raucous laughter. Terrain Tracks and Miracle Marks, her poetry books, explore gender and racial equity. At the tenth anniversary of 9/11, she led Together We Are New York, a community poetry project to highlight Asian American voices.


Twitter Username: PurviPoets

Website: http://purvipoets.net

Cathy Linh Che is the author of the poetry collection Split, winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies.

Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, PhD, is founding director of the arts nonprofit Asian American Literary Review and coeditor in chief of its critically acclaimed literary journal. He is also a curator for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center.

Sejal Shah writes across genres and dances in her study in Western New York. Her debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, was named an NPR Best Book of 2020 and selected as a finalist for the 2021 CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction.


Twitter Username: SejalShahWrites

Website: www.sejal-shah.com

Ching-In Chen is author of The Heart's Traffic, recombinant, to make black paper sing, Kundiman for Kin and coeditor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence within Activist Communities. They are part of Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Macondo, and VONA communities.


Twitter Username: chinginchen

Website: www.chinginchen.com

3:20 p.m. to 4:20 p.m.

Virtual

S224B.

Breaking into Audio: a Sisterhood of Writers on Why Creating Together is Better

(, , , , )

With over two million podcasts and half of US households listening, many writers are turning to podcasts to make a living—but audio is increasingly difficult to break into. The learning curve is steep, many internships require extensive experience, and mentorship that leads to employment is rare. Five women writers from NPR, Headspace, the ACLU, and the Center for an Urban Future share how they found lifelong mentors, a collaborative community, and the experience they needed to break in.

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Melissa Lent is a researcher and multimedia specialist for Center for an Urban Future. Prior to CUF, she was an apprentice for the Shelter in Place podcast, where she acted as an associate producer and project manager. She has also taught media studies for her alma mater CUNY Hunter College.


Twitter Username: melmollyrose

Alana Herlands is a multimedia producer who has pitched, scripted, researched, and interviewed for documentary shorts, the Behind the Cover weekly video series at the New York Times Magazine, and podcast episodes at Shelter in Place podcast, including a series on vaccine hesitancy.


Twitter Username: AlanaHerlands

Winnie Shi comes from a math and business education background and is always looking for new creative interests to express herself. Through running her own podcast and working as an apprentice at Shelter in Place, she has worked to find her voice as a female.

Elen Tekle is a production coordinator and amateur podcaster based in Los Angeles. She has worked in various media outlets, from documentary and digital media to TV and app-based content. She recently ventured into audio storytelling after completing an apprenticeship with the podcast Shelter in Place.

Shweta Watwe is an associate producer for the ACLU's podcast, At Liberty. Before joining the ACLU, she was part of Shelter in Place's spring cohort, where she learned to aim her writing and research skills towards podcast and audio production. She also has experience in exhibit design and history.


Twitter Username: shwetawatwe

Virtual

S225.

Fostering a Virtual Poetic Community

(, , , , )

Panelists will explain how they adapted to the new virtual world of poetry during the pandemic. The panelists will share insights into how they found ways to forge an inclusive online poetry community that encompasses virtual readings, podcasts, reviews, and newsletters to provide a poetic voice and connection throughout the country. Then the panelists will host a Q&A to provide tips on how to authentically market your own work and support other poets through the internet.

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Hannah Rousselot (she/her) is a queer French American poet. She has published two long works, Fragments of You and Ocean Currents. A reviewer  on hannahrousselot.com, she is the host of the podcast Poetry Aloud.


Twitter Username: hannahrousselot

Trish Hopkinson is a poet and advocate for the literary arts. You can find her online at SelfishPoet.com and provisionally in Colorado, where she runs the regional group Rock Canyon Poets. Hopkinson happily answers to atheist, feminist, and empty nester and enjoys traveling and live music.


Twitter Username: trishhopkinson

Website: https://trishhopkinson.com/

Kai Coggin is the author of three full-length poetry collections, a QWOC, and a teaching artist with the Arkansas Arts Council. Recently named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, her poetry has been nominated three times for the Pushcart, as well as BAP 2015 and Best of the Net 2016 and 2018.


Twitter Username: skailight

Marion Gomez is a program specialist at the Loft Literary Center. She has received grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, Intermedia Arts, and the Loft Literary Center. Her work has appeared in La Bloga, Mizna, Waterstone Review, and Saint Paul Almanac, among others.

Karen Paul Holmes has two poetry books, most recently No Such Thing as Distance. She has been in top literary journals and featured on The Writer's Almanac and The Slowdown. Karen has hosted a monthly critique group in Atlanta and an open mic in a mountain town for more than ten years.

Virtual

S226.

Heal Thyself: How Editors Edit Their Own Writing

(, , , , Matt Ortile)

Every writer needs a good editor—even writers who spend their days working as editors themselves. But writers who are also editors still edit their own work, with the possibility of a unique double vision, even across mediums and genres. Five editor-writers will share the insights, tricks, and challenges they encounter when turning their editing eyes on their own writing, offering complications and alternative to the advice we all give and receive.

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Jaime Green is a freelance writer and editor. She is associate editor of Future Tense, a project of Slate, New America, and Arizona State; and series editor of The Best American Science and Nature Writing. Her book on how we imagine aliens, The Possibility of Life, will be published in 2023.


Twitter Username: jaimealyse

Jess Zimmerman is an editor at Quirk Books and the author of Women and Other Monsters.


Twitter Username: j_zimms

Nicole Chung is the author of All You Can Ever Know, which was a national bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a contributing writer and editor at the Atlantic and has written for the New York Times Magazine, TIME, GQ, and others.


Twitter Username: nicolesjchung

Website: nicolechung.net

Kendra James was a founding editor at Shondaland.com and is currently the managing editor for StarTrek.com. Her writing has been published widely in places like Elle, Cosmopolitan, espnW, Lenny Letter, Vox, and more. Her debut, Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School, is due early 2022.

Virtual

S227.

Digital Narratives: Teaching, Telling Our Stories & Connecting to the Past

(Linda Garcia Merchant, , , Erika Abad)

This panel will offer the perspectives of four women writers of color using digital humanities and digital archives to recover, document, and promote the voices and histories of underrepresented artists, writers, and activists. We will also discuss how we can use digital tools to tell stories in new and compelling ways. In addition, we will describe the challenges we face as women of color in the predominately white field of digital humanities and how we navigate through these obstacles.

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Olufunke Ogundimu is a PhD student in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a research associate at the African Poets Digital Portal. She is a graduate of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas MFA program, a 2018 Caine Prize for African Writing finalist, and a Pushcart Prize winner.


Twitter Username: oluwafumike

Claire Jimenez is a Puerto Rican writer from New York City who received her MFA from Vanderbilt University. A PhD student at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, she is the author of Staten Island Stories and a coprincipal investigator for the Puerto Rican Literature Project.


Twitter Username: clairedjimenez

Virtual

S228.

From Writing Workshop to Community Action: Storytelling as Immigration Advocacy

(, , , , )

A workshop developed at a rural two-year campus in northern Wisconsin introduced students to oral storytelling traditions, structure, and style. Along with performing their own stories, students partnered with community groups to present the stories of marginalized voices. These service-learning projects led the presenters to feature the survival stories of local Somali immigrants, separated from family for years by restrictive policies, in a documentary film to be be discussed in this panel.

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Joel Friederich is a poet and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Colleges. Blue to Fill the Empty Heaven, his full-length collection of his poetry, won the Gerald Cable Award. His chapbooks are Without Us and The Body We Gather.

Lee Friederich is an associate professor at Akita International University in Japan, where she teaches Japanese literature and English literature. A poet and translator of Japanese women's poetry, she has worked with the Barron Somali community as an ESL teacher.

Dang Yang is the director for the Office of Multicultural Affairs at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Prior to this role, Yang served as the diversity manager at Chippewa Valley Technical College (CVTC) and the multicultural recruitment and retention coordinator at University of Wisconsin-Stout's School of Education.

Nancy Pike is a literacy tutor in the Barron County, Wisconsin area. As an outgrowth of that experience and relationships made, she cofounded Immigrant Advocates of Barron County to educate the community about systemic wrongs committed against local families and to work with family members for change.


Twitter Username: BarronAdvocates

Virtual

S229.

Joy Is an Act of Resistance: A Poetry Reading by Women of Color

(, , , , )

In a culture where women of color are ever-expected to perform rage/anger as a primary mode of social protest, five poets flip the script and read poems with joy as their primary focus. These poets find strength in Toi Derricotte’s writing and notion that “joy is an act of resistance.” They explore the powers of gratitude, eros, humor, devotion, and love—those forces necessary to defy/oppose/disarm regimes of hate and division.

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Tina Chang is the author of Hybrida, Of Gods & Strangers, and Half-Lit Houses, as well as coeditor of Language for a New Century. She is a professor and the director of creative writing at Binghamton University.

Brenda Shaughnessy is the Okinawan Irish American author of five poetry books, including The Octopus Museum and Our Andromeda. A recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she is a professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark.


Twitter Username: brendashaughnes

Patricia Smith's books are Incendiary Art, a 2018 Pulitzer finalist and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah; and Blood Dazzler, a 2008 National Book Award finalist. She is a Guggenheim fellow (2014), two-time Pushcart winner, and a professor at CUNY and in Sierra Nevada's MFA.


Twitter Username: pswordwoman

Website: www.wordwoman.ws

Tracy K. Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, memoirist, translator, and librettist who served as poet laureate of the United States from 2017–19. She is a professor of English and African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

Natalie Diaz is a poet with too many colors and voices and places and identities to live in this short reservation of a bio.


Twitter Username: NatalieGDiaz

5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Virtual

S230.

The Poetry of YA Prose: Novelist-Poets at Work

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YA authors who are also poets will discuss the many ways the craft of poetry has informed their fiction. Attendees will learn the relationship between poetry and prose, how poetry can benefit prose, and how these authors see the specific relationship between poetry and YA, as well as how authors navigate each genre’s community.

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Shana Youngdahl teaches writing at Lindenwood University. She is the author of the novels As Many Nows As I Can Get and A Catalog of Burnt Objects (Forthcoming, Dial/PenguinTeen), as well as the poetry collection History, Advice and Other Half-Truths.


Twitter Username: shanayoungdahl

Website: www.shanayoungdahl.com

Raquel Vasquez Gilliland is a Mexican American poet, novelist, and painter. She is the author of the poetry collection Dirt and Honey and the chapbook Tales from the House of Vasquez. Her debut YA novel is Sia Martinez and the Moonlit Beginning of Everything.


Twitter Username: poet_raquelvgil

Brynne Rebele-Henry has two books of poetry: Fleshgraphs and Autobiography of a Wound, which won the AWP Donald Hall Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. She is also the author of the novel Orpheus Girl.


Twitter Username: Brynne_RH

Kit Frick is a novelist, poet, and MacDowell fellow. A senior editor at Black Lawrence Press, she holds an MFA from Syracuse University. Kit is the author of several YA novels including I Killed Zoe Spanos and Very Bad People, as well as the poetry collection A Small Rising Up in the Lungs.


Twitter Username: kitfrick

Guadalupe García McCall is the author of four award-winning YA novels. She is the recipient of the Pura Belpré Author Award, a Westchester Young Adult Fiction Award, and the Tomás Rivera Mexican-American Children’s Book Award. She teaches English at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon.


Twitter Username: ggmccall

Virtual

S232.

What the World Needs Now: Wellness & Healing through Literary Arts

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The literary arts are experiencing more relevance than they have in decades, being more widely regarded as a conduit for healing, a therapeutic modality that benefits mental and physical wellbeing and augments the social and emotional learning of individuals and communities. This panel will feature the work of three nonprofits that employ poetry in therapeutic ways across diverse demographics—from youth in both public schools and nontraditional spaces, to the medically and socially vulnerable.

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Rosemarie Dombrowski is the inaugural poet laureate of Phoenix, Arizona, as well as the founder of rinky dink press, the Revolution (Relaunch), and the therapeutic poetry nonprofit Revisionary Arts. She’s also the recipient of an Arts Hero Award and a 2020 fellowship from the Academy of American Poets.


Twitter Username: poetryprofAZ

Sheree L. Greer, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, founded Kitchen Table Literary Arts to showcase and support the work of women writers of color. The author of two novels, Let the Lover Be and A Return to Arms, she is a VONA/VOICES alum, Yaddo Fellow, and Ragdale Fellow.


Twitter Username: shereelgreer

Website: https://www.shereelgreer.com/

Justin Rogers is a Black poet from Detroit, Michigan, who shares poems surrounding living and praying as a Black man in America. He explores fantasy through pop culture and is the author of micro-zine Nostalgia as Black Matilda and Black, Matilda.


Twitter Username: blklyfmattering

Virtual

S233.

Your Life as a Mechanical Centipede: Writing Past the Documentary Impulse

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A wide variety of events—from the social to the political—spark our writerly imaginations. Closest at hand, often, are the latest injustices and/or cultural outrages. We feel we must write about the "thing itself." This panel will offer a series of disruptions suggesting alternatives to the writer's sometimes essayistic, editorial impulses. Perhaps there is more opportunity in the unexpected. Perhaps we can find more ways to reach the reader when they have their guard down.

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Adam McOmber is the author of three novels as well as two collections of short fiction. He teaches in the MFA writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts where he is also the editor in chief of the literary magazine Hunger Mountain.

Daschielle Louis is a Haitian American poet, writer, and graphic artist from South Florida; her work uses fluid folkloric horror to examine blackness, womanhood, Haitian culture, and migration. She has received fellowships from Pink Door Writing Retreat, the Watering Hole, and the Hues Foundation.


Twitter Username: daschiellelouis

Website: daschielle.ink

Ann Dávila Cardinal is a novelist and recruiter for VCFA where she earned her MFA. Her young adult novels Five Midnights and Category Five are from Tor Teen, and her adult debut, a Puerto Rican magical realist novel entitled The Storyteller’s Death, is forthcoming. 


Twitter Username: anndcardinal

Website: anndavilacardinal.com

Brian Leung is the author of the novels All I Should Not Tell, Ivy vs. Dogg: With a Cast of Thousands!, Lost Men, and Take Me Home. The recipient of a number of awards including a Lambda Literary Award for a Mid-Career Novelist, he is a professor at Purdue University.


Twitter Username: WriteLeungWrite

Website: readbrianleung.net

Virtual

S233B.

Intersectionality & Justice in Contemporary Climate Fiction

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Fiction that engages climate change often focuses on historical decisions or future possibilities, which can strip responsibility and agency from those of us living on Earth today. This panel of climate fiction writers will discuss why contemporary environmental justice, representation, and intersectionality in environmental narratives matter as they share strategies for crafting stories that invite readers into the conversation about the climate crisis.

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Julie Carrick Dalton’s (she/her) debut novel, Waiting for the Night Song, was a CNN, Newsweek, Parade, and USA Today Most Anticipated 2021 book. A Tin House and Bread Loaf alum, Julie owns a small speaks/teaches about fiction that engages climate crisis.


Twitter Username: juliecardalt

Website: juliecarrickdalton.com

Sim Kern is a Gulf Coast environmental journalist and speculative cli-fi writer. Their debut novella, Depart, Depart!, was an Otherwise Award nominee, and the first installment of their YA sci-fi trilogy, Seeds for the Swarm, is forthcoming in the fall of 2022.


Twitter Username: sim_kern

Website: https://www.simkern.com/

Aya de Leon teaches creative writing at University of California Berkeley. Her award-winning feminist heist novel series, including Side Chick Nation about Hurricane Maria, has been optioned for TV. Her latest novel, A Spy in the Struggle, is about FBI infiltration of a Black climate and racial justice movement.


Twitter Username: ayadeleon

Website: ayadeleon.com

Virtual

S234.

A Second Celebration for CQR's Anthology of Black American Literature 2

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Join the Chicago Quarterly Review for a second celebration of its Anthology of Black American Literature, guest-edited by National Book Award winner and MacArthur Fellow Charles Johnson. This reading showcases the breadth of voices that have been brought together in this remarkable issue as well as the Chicago Quarterly Review's commitment to special editions, the fifth in its history. Interspersed with questions and commentary, five contributors of prose and poetry read from their work.

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David Nicholson is a former editor and book reviewer for the Washington Post Book World. He was the founding editor of the quarterly Black Film Review. He is the author, most recently, of a collection of stories: Flying Home: Seven Stories of the Secret City.


Twitter Username: WashDCWriter

celeste doaks is a poet and journalist who has published widely in the US and the UK. She's the author of Cornrows and Cornfields and the award-winning chapbook American Herstory. She is also the editor of the poetry anthology Not Without Our Laughter. You can find her at www.doaksgirl.com.


Twitter Username: thedoaksgirl

Website: www.thedoaksgirl.com

LeVan D. Hawkins is a published poet and writer. He is a Lambda Literary, Millay Colony of the Arts, Marble House Project, and MacDowell fellow. He has read his work at venues such as Dartmouth College, UCLA Hammer Museum, Disney Hall Redcat Theater, Highways Performance Space, and Dixon Place Theater.


Twitter Username: LeVanDHawkins1

Website: www.levandhawkins.com

Aaron Coleman is the author of the poetry collection Threat Come Close and the chapbook St. Trigger. He is an NEA Creative Writing Fellow, Fulbright Scholar, Cave Canem Fellow, and ALTA Jansen Fellow. Aaron is a postdoctoral fellow in Critical Translation Studies at the University of Michigan.


Twitter Username: AaronC_Poetry

Website: https://complit.artsci.wustl.edu/people/aaron-coleman

Virtual

S235.

Breakthrough Nonfiction Forms

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Forms do more than contain: they exclude. They break down. They free. When forms disrupt expectations, they can shatter paradigms. This panel joins five essayists in conversation about how structures we reconstruct expand access, inquiry, and dialogue. They will discuss how new nonfiction forms can be used to increase intimacy, forge inroads into others’ experiences, address global crises that defy traditional structures, and reframe a more comprehensive social context.

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Ira Sukrungruang is the author of the nonfiction books This Jade World, Buddha’s Dog & other Meditations, Southside Buddhist, and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy.The Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College, he is the editor of Sweet: A Literary Confection.


Twitter Username: sukrungruang

Website: www,sukrungruang.com

Rebecca McClanahan’s eleventh book is In the Key of New York City. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize series. Recipient of the Glasgow Award in nonfiction, she teaches in the MFA programs of Rainier Writing Workshop and Queens University.

Eric LeMay teaches in the writing program at Ohio University. He serves as an editor for Alimentum and New Ohio Review and is a host on the New Books Network. He is the author of three books, including In Praise of Nothing, a collection of traditional and multimedia essays. Find him at www.ericlemay.org.


Twitter Username: eclemay

Website: www.ericlemay.org

Jericho Parms is the author of Lost Wax. Her work has appeared in The Normal School, Hotel Amerika, American Literary Review, and Brevity. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a consulting editor at Fourth Genre.

Amy Wright is the author of Paper Concert: A Conversation in the Round, as well as three poetry books. She is senior editor of Zone 3 and the 2022 Wayne G. Basler Chair of Excellence at East Tennessee State University.


Twitter Username: amymwright

Website: www.awrightawright.com

5:00 p.m. to 6:15 p.m.

124, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S236.

Sober AWP

Daily 12-step meeting. All in recovery from anything are welcome.

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126A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S237.

Asian American Caucus

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What does it mean to steward Asian American literature organizationally, collectively, and individually? The sixth annual Asian American Caucus is a town hall-style hang out and community space. Come meet other Asian American writers and discuss opportunities and resources available to support you. Organized by Kundiman, Asian American Writers' Workshop, Kaya Press, Hyphen Magazine, the Asian American Literary Review, and Smithsonian’s APAC. This meeting will be accessible to in-person and virtual attendees.

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Neelanjana Banerjee is the managing editor of Kaya Press. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in Prairie SchoonerChicago Quarterly ReviewPANK, the Rumpus, and several anthologies. She teaches writing and Asian American literature at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University.


Twitter Username: neelanjanab

Website: www.neelanjanabanerjee.com

Cathy Linh Che is the author of the poetry collection Split, winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies.

Mimi Khúc, PhD, is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She is the managing editor of the Asian American Literary Review and guest editor of Open in Emergency: A Special issue on Asian American Mental Health. She is a lecturer in disability studies and Asian American studies.

Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, PhD, is founding director of the arts nonprofit the Asian American Literary Review and coeditor in chief of its critically acclaimed literary journal. He is also a curator for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center.

6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Room 302-303, Marriott Philadelphia Downtown, Floor 3

S238.

Bowling Green State University MFA Fiftieth Anniversary Reception

Please join us in celebrating Creative Writing at Bowling Green. For over fifty years, graduates from BGSU have made outstanding contributions to our contemporary literary culture. We welcome faculty, students, alumni, and new and old friends of the program to share food and drink and stories.

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6:30 p.m. to 7:45 p.m.

126A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

S239.

Arab American Caucus

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This will be a town-hall-style meeting, creating a much needed space for SWANA writers to build and connect within AWP. We invite established and emerging writers, editors, students, scholars, and organizers and aim for the caucus to facilitate networking and exchange on Arab American literary endeavors, craft, publishing, poetics, and praxis. Our caucus seeks to empower and center the voices of underrepresented Americans with roots in the Arab world.

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Jameelah Lang is an assistant professor at Rockhurst University. Her work appears in the Kenyon Review, Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, and more. She has received awards from Bread Loaf, Sewanee Writers Conference, VCCA, and HUB-BUB. She's a board member for Radius of Arab American Writers.

Glenn Shaheen is the author of four books, most recently, the fiction collection Carnivalia. He teaches at Prairie View A&M University and is the executive dIrector of the Radius of Arab American Writers.


Twitter Username: glennshaheen

Aiya Sakr is completing an MFA in poetry at Purdue University, where she serves as poetry editor for the Sycamore Review. She has a master’s degree in literature and writing from Utah State University. Her poems have appeared in Palette Poetry and Mizna.


Twitter Username: aiyaness

George Abraham is a Palestinian American poet. His debut Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) won the Arab American Book Award, and he was a Lambda Literary Award nominee. He is a Kundiman fellow, a board member for the Radius of Arab American Writers, and a Litowitz MFA+MA candidate at Northwestern.


Twitter Username: IntifadaBatata

Angie Mazakis is a PhD student in creative writing at Ohio University. Her first book of poetry, I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First, was chosen by Billy Collins as a finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize. She is a former staff member of AWP and is a member of RAWI.


Twitter Username: angiekm111

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2022_PHILADELPHIA Annual Conference & Bookfair

March 23–26, 2022
Philadelphia, PA

Pennsylvania Convention Center

#AWP24 Virtual Events Guide
#AWP24 Kansas City Program
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