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2023 AWP Conference Schedule

The #AWP23 Conference & Bookfair in Seattle, Washington 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.

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Friday, March 10, 2023
1:45 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Rooms 445-446, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4	F205. So You Want to Publish a Poetry Collection ( Gabrielle Bates, Luther Hughes, Shelley Wong, Paul Hlava Ceballos) Recent debut authors will briefly share their own first-book journeys, offering practical counsel and sharing resources when it comes to organizing, editing, and soliciting feedback on your manuscript; navigating first-book contest submissions; publishing outside of the contest model; and common emotional, psychological, and financial realities of sending your first book out into the world. Download event outline and supplemental documents. Add to schedule Check here to add to my schedule Gabrielle Bates is the author of Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023). An employee of Open Books: A Poem Emporium and cohost of the podcast The Poet Salon, her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, POETRY, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Twitter Username: GabrielleBates Website: www.gabriellebatesstahlman.com Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears (YesYes Books, 2022), winner of the 2019 Pamet River Prize. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and MacDowell. She is an affiliate artist at Headlands Center of the Arts and lives in San Francisco. Twitter Username: shhelleywong Website: shelley-wong.com Paul Hlava Ceballos is the author of banana [ ], winner of the 2021 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. His collaborative chapbook, Banana [ ] / we pilot the blood, shares pages with Quenton Baker and Dr. Christina Sharpe. He lives in Seattle, where he practices echocardiography. Twitter Username: paulhlava Website: www.paulhlava.com
4:45 p.m. to 6:15 p.m.
Metropolitan Ballroom A, Sheraton Grand Seattle, Third Floor, Union Street Tower	F239A. AWP Award Series Reading and Celebration (Anne-Marie Oomen, Paul Hlava Ceballos, Elizabeth Shick, Daphne Kalotay) Join AWP for a reading and reception featuring the 2021 AWP Award Series winners: Anne-Marie Oomen (creative nonfiction), Elizabeth Shick (novel), Paul Hlava Ceballos (poetry), and Daphne Kalotay (short fiction). AWP invites you to this extraordinary reading and reception to celebrate AWP’s Award Series winners, our partner presses that publish the Award Series winners, and the creation of a new endowment to sustain AWP’s Award Series Prize for the Novel, now called the James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel. McPherson was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, a beloved professor and mentor of countless writers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and one of the first winners of the MacArthur Fellowship. We are honored the prize will bear his name. The winner of the 2023 Prize for the Novel will be the first awardee to receive this prize. Add to schedule Check here to add to my schedule Anne-Marie Oomen won AWP’s Sue William Silverman Creative Nonfiction Award for her memoir As Long as I Know You: The Mom Book. A previous memoir, Love, Sex, and 4-H won a Next Generation Indie Award for memoir. She has four Michigan Notable books. She teaches at Solstice MFA at Lasell University. Twitter Username: oomen_anne Website: www.Anne-MarieOomen.com Paul Hlava Ceballos is the author of banana [ ], winner of the 2021 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. His collaborative chapbook, Banana [ ] / we pilot the blood, shares pages with Quenton Baker and Dr. Christina Sharpe. He lives in Seattle, where he practices echocardiography. Twitter Username: paulhlava Website: www.paulhlava.com Elizabeth Shick is the debut author of The Golden Land, winner of the 2021 AWP Prize for the Novel. A longtime American expatriate, she has spent the past twenty-seven years in Asia, Africa, and Europe, and now resides in Bangladesh. She holds an MFA from Lesley University and an MIA from Columbia University. Twitter Username: lizshickauthor Website: https://elizabethshick.com/ Daphne Kalotay is the author of the award-winning novels Sight Reading and Russian Winter and a new novel, Blue Hours, a 2020 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read.” Her debut fiction collection, Calamity and Other Stories, was shortlisted for the Story Prize. She is on the faculty of the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University.
Saturday, March 11, 2023
1:45 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Room 332, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3	S185. Beyond the Trauma Plot: Reframing Trauma Toward a Poetics of Justice (Eugenia Leigh, Vanessa Angelica Villarreal, Paul Hlava Ceballos, Nathan McClain, Janine Joseph) In recent years, the focus on personal trauma has narrowed the conversation, prioritizing individual experience over collective outcomes. Where trauma narratives romanticize suffering and offer easy redemption arcs, poetic innovation and craft deepen our understanding of the language of injustice. Five poets—whose works span collective and individual traumatic histories—will discuss the ways they innovate form and language toward more three-dimensional work in both poetry and personal narrative. Download event outline and supplemental documents. Add to schedule Check here to add to my schedule Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American author of two books of poetry. Poems from her new collection, Bianca, were awarded Poetry's Bess Hokin Prize and have appeared in The Nation, Ploughshares, Waxwing, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, Eugenia serves as a poetry editor at The Adroit Journal. Twitter Username: EugeniaLeigh Website: http://www.eugenialeigh.com Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of the poetry collection Beast Meridian, and a recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. She is a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and lives with her son in Los Angeles, where she is a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California. Twitter Username: Vanessid Paul Hlava Ceballos is the author of banana [ ], winner of the 2021 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. His collaborative chapbook, Banana [ ] / we pilot the blood, shares pages with Quenton Baker and Dr. Christina Sharpe. He lives in Seattle, where he practices echocardiography. Twitter Username: paulhlava Website: www.paulhlava.com Nathan McClain is the author of Previously Owned (2022) and Scale (2017), both from Four Way Books. He is a graduate from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson and a Cave Canem fellow. He currently teaches at Hampshire College and serves as poetry editor for the Massachusetts Review. Twitter Username: nathanhmcclain Janine Joseph, a poet and librettist, is the author of Decade of the Brain and Driving without a License, winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. A co-organizer for Undocupoets, she is an associate professor at Oklahoma State University and a Dean's Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Virginia Tech. Twitter Username: ninejoseph Website: http://www.janinejoseph.com/