The 2023 AWP Conference & Bookfair in Seattle, Washington schedule is searchable by day, time, title, description, participants, type of event, and event format. This schedule is subject to change. A version accessible to screen readers is also available.
The schedule includes events taking place in-person at the Seattle Convention Center in Seattle, Washington and prerecorded virtual events that will be available to watch on-demand online. A select number of in-person events will also be livestreamed for online viewing. Under the Advanced Search, use the “Event Format” search option to filter the schedule and view all in-person events, all virtual events, livestreamed events only, or prerecorded virtual events only. Please note that due to staff and resource limitations, not all in-person events can be livestreamed.
The #AWP23 Conference & Bookfair mobile app is now available! If you would like to build your personal schedule on the mobile app, search “AWP23” in the App Store or Google Play to download the #AWP23 app now. More information, including conference maps and exhibitors, will be added to the mobile app in the coming months.
Please note: The schedule you build on awpwriter.org will not transfer to the mobile app as these systems are independent.
Scroll over participants’ names in blue to read their biographies.
Thursday, March 9, 2023 | |
---|---|
7:30 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. | |
Rooms 338-339, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
Daily 12-Step Meeting. All in recovery from anything are welcome. |
8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. | |
Registration, Summit Lobby, Seattle Convention Center, Level 1 |
T101. 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 Summit Lobby, Seattle Convention Center, Level 1. Please consult the bookfair map in the AWP mobile app 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. |
Room 330, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
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 |
Wellness Room outside Room 340, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
A quiet, private space to gather your thoughts, reset, or take a break away from the crowds. Great to use for those needing low light space or to rest from overstimulation. Space includes seating and a sink. One attendee at a time. |
Room 439, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
This nursing mother’s room is located in Room 439, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4, and is available for any nursing mother to use. This room will be locked, and keys can be picked up at the AWP Help Desk in Registration, Summit Lobby, Seattle Convention Center, Level 1. |
Wellness Room outside Room 440, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
A quiet, private space to gather your thoughts, reset, or take a break away from the crowds. Great to use for those needing low light space or to rest from overstimulation. Space includes seating and a sink. One attendee at a time. |
9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. | |
Ballroom 3 Lobby, next to Olive Way Elevators, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 5 |
Join a certified yoga instructor for a gentle, one-hour yoga and meditation practice, appropriate for practitioners of all levels and abilities, focusing on stretching and mindfulness for writers. Please come wearing comfortable street clothes; mats and yoga apparel are not necessary. |
9:00 a.m. to 10:15 a.m. | |
Rooms 328-329, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T108. Sarabande has a storied history of creative book campaigns. From collaborative art installations to lip sync battles and everything in between, these four Sarabande writers have changed the game of book publicity, finding new and exciting ways to engage with audiences within local and national communities, both virtually and in person. Listen to them discuss their campaign experiences and how they pushed their books to rise above the noise of a bustling literary landscape. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Joanna Englert is the marketing and publicity director at Sarabande Books, where she has represented writers like Sandra Cisneros and Rosellen Brown. Joanna's poems have appeared in The Pinch, Miracle Monocle, and elsewhere, and have been performed by Louisville Ballet. Twitter Username: joannaenglert Adam O. Davis is the author of Index of Haunted Houses (Sarabande, 2020) & cohost of the Poetry Goes to the Movies podcast. The recipient of the Poetry Society of America's George Bogin Award, his work has appeared widely, including in The Believer, The Best American Poetry, and The Paris Review. Twitter Username: cubist_octopus Website: www.adamodavis.com Karyna McGlynn is a writer, professor, and collagist. Her most recent books include the poetry collections 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me about the Multiverse and Hothouse, which was a New York Times Editor's Choice. Karyna is the director of creative writing at Interlochen Center for the Arts. Twitter Username: karynamcglynn Website: www.karyna.io Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (Spring 2023). She is the recipient of a 2021 NEA fellowship and the winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review. Twitter Username: Dalai_Mama_ Karisma Price is the author of the poetry collection I'm Always So Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023). She hails from New Orleans, Louisiana, and holds an MFA in poetry from NYU. She's received fellowships from Cave Canem and NYU and is currently an assistant professor of Poetry at Tulane University. Twitter Username: itsKayPrice |
Room 331, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T109. Illness narratives and medical memoirs have the potential to heal our broken healthcare system in a meaningful way. As these genres expand, with literary works from both patient and healthcare worker perspectives, hear how five writers hope to improve healthcare by reducing stigma and elevating marginalized voices. We will discuss how literature, specifically the individual stories of patients and caregivers, could help make the healthcare system more just, effective, and compassionate. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Mary Pan is a writer and physician with a background in global health and narrative medicine. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, McSweeney’s, Intima, and elsewhere. An alum of Tin House and Kenyon Review workshops, she was runner-up for AWP’s 2020 Kurt Brown Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Twitter Username: marypanwriter Website: www.marypanwriter.com Emily Maloney’s collection of essays, Cost of Living, about the American healthcare system, is forthcoming from Flatiron Books. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, Glamour, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is also a MacDowell Fellow. Twitter Username: emilyfmaloney Dr. Rana Awdish is a critical care physician and author of critically acclaimed memoir, In Shock. Her essays and editorials have been published in HBR, NEJM, Washington Post, and Intima. Her essay "The Shape of the Shore" was awarded a Sydney by the New York Times, and it was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Twitter Username: RanaAwdish Emily Silverman, MD, is an assistant professor of medicine at UCSF and creator and host of The Nocturnists, an independent medical storytelling organization. Her writing has been supported by MacDowell and published in the New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, JAMA, CHEST, McSweeney’s, and more. Twitter Username: ESilvermanMD Suzanne Koven is a primary care physician and the inaugural writer in residence at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her book, Letter to a Young Female Physician, explores imposter syndrome, sexism in traditionally male-dominated fields, ambition, and work-life balance. Follow her @SuzanneKovenMD. Twitter Username: suzannekovenmd Website: www.suzannekovenmd.com |
Room 332, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T109B. Many youth arts organizations rely on a hierarchical structure that reflects adults’ vision without engaging young creatives in the joyful work of self-determination. BreakBread Literacy Project upends this model: placing youth in organizational leadership at BreakBread magazine, fundraising, and daily operations. Join panelists as they discuss how organizations can create more inclusive communities led by the people they seek to serve. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Jamie Danielle Logan is pursuing a PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. She has worked for the Mississippi Book Festival and edited the Mississippi Review, The Pinch, BreakBread, and Product magazines. You can find her writing in the New Ohio Review, VIDA Review, Okay Donkey, and more. Twitter Username: jamiedlogan W. David Hall is CEO and president of The BreakBread Literacy Project. He has directed the Kenyon Young Writers Program for 21 years. He teaches high school English in Los Angeles and co-coaches his school's slam poetry team. He has also published Culture and Context, a writing guide. Jamie Lyn Smith is a writer and editor. The recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, she is also fiction editor at BreakBread magazine and a consulting editor at the Kenyon Review. Her short story collection, Township, was published by Cornerstone Press in January 2022. Twitter Username: jamielynwrites Website: http://jamielyn-smith.squarespace.com/ Crystal AC Salas is a Xicanx poet, educator, and community organizer. She serves as poetry editor for BreakBread magazine. Her chapbook Grief Logic is co-winner of the inaugural Alta California Prize, and she is a 2021–2022 California Arts Council Established Individual Artist Grant recipient. Twitter Username: littlebirdsalas Cara Echols is an artist and writer serving as art and social media director and leadership member for BreadBread Literacy Project. She enjoys writing experimental and speculative literature focusing on the human mind and condition and is currently working on a short story collection. |
Rooms 335-336, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T111. How can we equitably teach students in the online / in-person creative writing classroom and de-center the heteronormative cisgender white male framework of academia? BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ panelists will address how they design equitable course curriculum and assignments to support students from varying backgrounds in their discovery as writers. They will discuss the challenges they have encountered and strategies they have implemented for promoting student engagement in the classroom. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Cynthia Guardado /Gwarr-Dah-Doe/ (she/her/hers) is a Salvadoran-American poet and tenured Professor of English at Fullerton College. She is the editor in chief of LiveWire, an online magazine. She has two poetry collections Endeavor (World Stage Press) and Cenizas (University of Arizona Press). Twitter Username: theguardedpoet Website: https://cynthiaguardado.wordpress.com Meliza Bañales was a 2016 Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Best LGBT Debut Fiction for their novel Life Is Wonderful, People Are Terrific. She served as lecturer in creative writing at UC San Diego from 2015–2020. Their third book, Root for the Underdog, arrived in 2022. They live in Los Angeles. Twitter Username: iammissyfuego Reyes Ramirez (he/him) is a Houstonian of Mexican and Salvadoran descent. He’s a 2020 CantoMundo Fellow, 2022 Crosstown Arts Resident, and received grants from Houston Arts Alliance, Poets & Writers, and The Warhol Foundation’s Idea Fund. His debut short story collection The Book of Wanderers is out now. Twitter Username: y_si_rey_quiere Website: reyesvramirez.com David Campos, a CantoMundo fellow, is the author of the poetry collections Furious Dusk and American Quasar. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Boxcar Review, and LunaLuna, among many others. He teaches English for the Puente Program at Fresno City College. Twitter Username: camposwriter Website: www.davidcampos.co bridgette bianca is a poet and professor from South Central Los Angeles. Her first book of poetry, be/trouble, was released in 2020. When she is not sharing her poetry, she hosts the series Young, Black, and Tenure-Track where she documents her experiences in higher education. Twitter Username: thebridgebianca Website: www.bridgettebianca.com |
Room 337, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T112. These innovative poets from various backgrounds and aesthetic schools will discuss the role that play takes in their creative work and pedagogy, focusing on approach and process and the various ways that linguistic, sonic, and visual play are part of their poetic and teaching lives. How can play make writing pleasurable? How can it provoke discovery for students? Some of the various roles of play that will be discussed are play as innovation, play as protest, and play as improvisation. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Kimberly Grey is the author of Systems for the Future of Feeling (2020) and The Opposite of Light (2016). She's the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. She received a PhD from the University of Cincinnati and lives and teaches in St. Louis. Twitter Username: kimmygrey Felicia Zamora is the author of six poetry collections including I Always Carry My Bones (Iowa Poetry Prize). Her poems appear in Boston Review, Guernica, Orion, The Nation, and others. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for CO Review. Phillip B. Williams is the author of the poetry collections Mutiny (Penguin, 2021) and Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books). A recipient of a Whiting Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Lambda Literary Award, he currently teaches at Randolph College low-res MFA. Twitter Username: pbw_poet 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. She lives in Denver. Twitter Username: carrcarrjuli Website: juliealicecarr.com Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine poetry collections, including most recently Wild Kingdom, and two books of creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Poetry, New England Review, Colorado Review, and Southern Review. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas. Twitter Username: JehanneIDubrow Website: www.jehannedubrow.com |
Rooms 340-342, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T113. In an effort to build community solidarity, this poetry reading and community dialogue convenes Filipinx writers with varied experiences in performance, community organizing, education, and academia from San Diego, Anaheim, Vancouver, San Jose, and Chicago. Participants will share new works and collaborative manifestos as feminist, queer, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and/or anti-capitalist Filipinx writers in the diaspora. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Jason Magabo Perez is the author of This Is for the Mostless (WordTech Editions, 2017) and I Ask about What Falls Away (1913 Press, forthcoming). Perez is an associate professor of ethnic studies at California State University San Marcos. Twitter Username: jsnmgbprz Website: jasonmagaboperez.art Rachelle Cruz is the author of God's Will for Monsters, which won an American Book Award in 2018 and the 2016 Hillary Gravendyk Regional Poetry Prize. She is the director of genre fiction at the low-residency MFA program at Western Colorado University. Twitter Username: rawqeli Website: www.rachellecruz.com Hari Alluri (he/him/siya) is author of The Flayed City and chapbooks The Promise of Rust and Our Echo of Sudden Mercy. Recipient of grants, awards, and fellowships, coeditor of We Were Not Alone, and cofounding editor at Locked Horn Press, siya is published in Best of the Net 2022 and elsewhere. Twitter Username: harialluri Luya is a Chicago poetry organization that uplifts the voices and experiences of people of color. Luya (Tagalog for “ginger”) is used as both a spice and a remedy across many cultures, and we bring this spirit of nourishment and healing to every workshop, performance, and open mic space we create. Twitter Username: luyapoetry |
Rooms 345-346, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T115. Ever since Jonathan Franzen warned that the internet was such a murderer of creativity that he claimed he Krazy Glued the ethernet port on his laptop shut, debates have ranged from ascetics abstaining completely to publishers and agents claiming a modern writer's career is not viable without a "platform" of social media engagement. Three published writers and moderator discuss how the internet has helped make or break their careers. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Julia Fierro is the author of the novels The Gypsy Moth Summer & Cutting Teeth, and Santa Monica & The Last Party (as Cassidy Lucas). She founded Sackett St. Writers Workshop in 2002 (10,000+ writers worldwide) and has published essays on writing with mental illness in New York Times and Poets & Writers. Twitter Username: juliafierro Website: http://www.juliafierro.com/ Rebecca Makkai's fifth book, I Have Some Questions for You, is out in early 2023. Her novel The Great Believers was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it won the LA Times Book Prize, the Carnegie Medal, and the Stonewall Award. She is artistic director of StoryStudio Chicago. Twitter Username: rebeccamakkai Website: www.rebeccamakkai.com Marie Myung-Ok Lee is the author of the novel The Evening Hero, Finding My Voice (YA). Fiction has appeared in Kenyon Review, FiveChapters, TriQuarterly, Witness, Joyland, and Guernica. Nonfiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Paris Review, and New York Times. She teaches fiction at Columbia. Twitter Username: MarieMyungOkLee Website: https://www.facebook.com/MarieLeeWriter |
Rooms 347-348, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T116. This multigenre panel of writers, who have set their work across three continents, will discuss techniques for writing about culture and place, with an emphasis on bringing worlds to life on the page in imaginative and ethical ways. Among some of the questions that we will address: how can we authentically set our work in a culture, particularly if it isn’t our own? And what liberties can we take when representing real places and people, or creating entirely fictional cultures and landscapes? Download event outline and supplemental documents.Hannah Bae is the 2020 nonfiction winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, which is supporting her memoir-in-progress about family estrangement, mental illness, and Korean American culture. She is a 2021 and 2022 Peter Taylor Fellow for the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops. Twitter Username: hanbae Krys Lee is the author of Drifting House and How I Became a North Korean. She is the recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, a Granta New Voices pick, and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She teaches at Yonsei University, Underwood International College. Jung Yun is the author of O Beautiful (St. Martin's) and Shelter (Picador). She's an associate professor of creative writing at the George Washington University, and her work has appeared in Tin House, The Massachusetts Review, The Atlantic, the New York Times, the Washington Post, among others. Michael Lukas is the author of The Oracle of Stamboul and The Last Watchman of Old Cairo. Winner of the National Jewish Book Award, the Sophie Brody Medal, and the Sami Rohr Prize, he has received fellowships from the NEA and Bread Loaf. He lives in Oakland and teaches at San Francisco State University. |
Rooms 427-429, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T117. The path from finishing a book draft to launching a debut novel into the world is thrilling and exciting, but it is also long and full of twists and turns. This panel of debut novelists—with publication dates in 2023 and 2024—will discuss all aspects of this journey, including finding an agent, selling the book, working with an editor, and navigating marketing and publicity. The aim of the panel is to be transparent and to provide helpful advice for all debut novelists to come. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Laura Spence-Ash’s debut novel, Beyond That, the Sea, is forthcoming from Celadon Books in March 2023. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, New England Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere; her critical essays and book reviews appear regularly in the Ploughshares blog. Twitter Username: LauraSpenceAsh Vanessa Chan is the Malaysian author of The Storm We Made, a novel, and The Ugliest Babies in the World, a story collection—both forthcoming from Marysue Rucci Books / Scribner. Her novel will be published in eighteen languages worldwide. She lives in Brooklyn. Twitter Username: vanjchan Jinwoo Chong is the author of the novel Flux, coming March 2023 from Melville House. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Florida Review, and Salamander. He is an editorial assistant at One Story. Twitter Username: jinwoochong Jamila Minnicks won the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction for her novel Moonrise over New Jessup, which was published Algonquin Books. Her work is also found, or forthcoming, in Catapult, CRAFT, Blackbird, The Write Launch, and elsewhere. Twitter Username: lionesstales John Manuel Arias is a queer, Costa Rican-American writer. He is a Canto Mundo fellow and alumnus of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. His work has been published in PANK, The Rumpus, and F(r)iction. He has lived in Washington, DC, Brooklyn, and in San José, Costa Rica, with his grandmother and four ghosts. |
Room 430, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T118. Although its forms have existed for centuries and gone by many names, the lyric essay is often described as an experimental “new” genre. Until recently, many of the most widely anthologized, read, and taught lyric essays have represented a narrow range of perspectives. Editors and contributors to The Lyric Essay as Resistance anthology discuss their commitment to evolving the lyric essay conversation and engaging a range of voices that more accurately represent the expansive nature of the genre. Download event outline and supplemental documents.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 Erica Trabold is the author of Five Plots, selected by John D'Agata as the winner of the inaugural Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize, and coeditor of The Lyric Essay as Resistance anthology. She writes and teaches in central Virginia, where she is an assistant professor at Sweet Briar College. Twitter Username: ericatrabold Website: ericatrabold.com Jennifer S. Cheng writes in poetic, essayistic, and visual-textu(r)al modes. She is the author of Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems (Publishers Weekly 2018 Best Book), House A, and Invocation: An Essay. She has received fellowships from the NEA, the US Fulbright Program, Kundiman, Bread Loaf, and MacDowell. Twitter Username: mooncake Website: www.jenniferscheng.com Jenny Boully is the author of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life, The Book of Beginnings and Endings, The Body: An Essay, and other books. She teaches at Columbia College Chicago and the Bennington Writing Seminars. Twitter Username: jennyboully Website: www.jennyboully.com Krys Malcolm Belc is the author of the memoir The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood and the flash nonfiction chapbook In Transit. He lives in Philadelphia with his partner and their three young children. Twitter Username: krysmalcolmbelc |
Rooms 431-432, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T119. How do situated bodily experiences shape the writing of belonging? Five writers and translators working in and between the Azerbaijani, English, Spanish, Urdu, and Zapotec languages, read poetry and creative nonfiction that attends to how immigrant and BIPOC writers create belonging through words shaped and transformed by their specific bodies, locations, and mobilities. These works emerge through the struggles of displaced people to connect body and place via storytelling—and so survive. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Cecilia Martinez-Gil has published two full-length poetry collections, a fix of ink, the multi-award-winning Psaltery and Serpentines, and she co-wrote the award-winning experimental video “Itinerarios.” She publishes poetry and journalism, teaches English and literature, and has four masters. Twitter Username: cezmartinezgil Website: www.ceciliamartinezgil.com Wendy Call coedited the craft anthology Telling True Stories and wrote No Word for Welcome, winner of the Grub Street National Book Prize for nonfiction. Her translations (from Spanish and Zapotec) include two books of poetry by Irma Pineda, published by Song Bridge and Deep Vellum. Twitter Username: wendycallwrites Website: http://www.wendycall.com Marco Antonio Huerta is a Mexican poet and translator. He holds an MFA from UC San Diego and is a PhD student at UC Irvine. The author of four books of poetry, his work has been published in anthologies and journals in Mexico, Spain, Uruguay, Canada, and the United States. Twitter Username: moteltampico Samina Najmi, professor of English at CSU Fresno, writes essays centered on her life in Pakistan, UK, and the US. Her work has appeared in World Literature Today, Massachusetts Review, Entropy, The Rumpus, Asian American Literature, and The Progressive, among others. 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 US and international journals and books. |
Rooms 433-434, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T120. The body yields many archives. We grasp for meaning through documentation. Yet as Saidiya Hartman argued, the deliberate absenting of certain voices creates “the violence of the archive." When women cede evidence of our collective histories, we sunder connections with our forebears and each other. Real artistic gains have been expunged from cultural memory. We’ll investigate the [archival body]—corporeal, the body politic, and our bodies of work—to refuse silence imposed by the patriarchy. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Kristen Millares Young is a prizewinning journalist, essayist, and author of the novel Subduction (Red Hen Press). Named a Paris Review staff pick, Subduction won Nautilus and IPPY awards. The editor of Seismic, a Washington State Book Award finalist, Kristen reviews books for the Washington Post. Twitter Username: kristenmillares Website: www.kristenmyoung.com Putsata Reang is a journalist and author of the debut memoir, Ma and Me. She is an alum of Hedgebrook, Kimmel Harding Nelson, and Mineral School residencies. Ma and Me released in May 2022 to multiple "Must Read" lists as well as earning starred reviews in major trade journals. Twitter Username: putsata Anastacia-Renee (she/they) is a writer, educator, interdisciplinary artist, TEDx Speaker, and podcaster. Renee’ is the author of (v.) (Black Ocean) and Forget It (Black Radish). Side Notes from the Archivist is forthcoming from Amistad (an imprint of HarperCollins) in March 2023. Michelle Bowdler is the author of Is Rape a Crime? A Memoir, an Investigation and a Manifesto, which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Bowdler has been published in two anthologies, Literary Hub, New York Times, Ms. Magazine, Psychology Today, and other literary journals. Twitter Username: michellebowdler |
Rooms 435-436, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T121. Writers conjure literary power by putting something real on the line. Yet risk operates differently across nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and translation, raising craft questions as well as the challenge of inspiring students to bring vulnerability to their writing. Panelists with experience in many teaching contexts—including universities, conferences, and community workshops—will share concrete ideas for empowering and equipping students to take personal and aesthetic chances. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Destiny O. Birdsong is a Louisiana-born poet, fiction writer, and essayist. Her debut poetry collection, Negotiations, was published by Tin House Books in 2020, and her debut novel, Nobody's Magic, was published by Grand Central in 2022. She earned both her MFA and PhD from Vanderbilt University. Twitter Username: destinyoshay Jan Beatty's sixth book, The Body Wars, was followed by her award-winning memoir, American Bastard. Beatty worked as a waitress, abortion counselor, and in maximum security prisons. For fifteen years, she directed the creative writing program at Carlow University and directed the Madwomen in the Attic Workshops. Twitter Username: janbeatty27 Website: www.janbeatty.com Asali Solomon is the author of two novels: The Days of Afrekete and Disgruntled, as well as the short story collection, Get Down. She teaches fiction writing and the literature of the African Diaspora at Haverford College. Lesley Wheeler’s books include the hybrid memoir Poetry's Possible Worlds; The State She's In, her fifth poetry collection; and Unbecoming, a novel. She is poetry editor of Shenandoah. Her work appears in American Poetry Review, Ecotone, Poetry, Massachusetts Review, and other magazines. Twitter Username: LesleyMWheeler Website: http://lesleywheeler.org/ Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Useful Junk (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 an English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Twitter Username: rikam99 Website: erikameitner.com |
Room 437, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T122. Diasporic essayists writing in multiple hybrid forms talk craft and content that subvert and resist the colonialist / imperialist gaze and genre boundaries of the Western canon. Panelists discuss inspiration for essays from multiple ancestors, from anti-patriarchal writers around the globe, Indigenous and First Nations storytelling traditions, and oral and visual sources. Topics include centering subjectivity, exploring historical trauma and memory, and exploring spirituality and activism. Download event outline and supplemental documents.May-lee Chai (翟梅莉) is an American Book Award–winning author of eleven books, including the memoir Hapa Girl, a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book, and Tomorrow in Shanghai. Her essays have won the Gulf Coast Prize and been cited as Notable in Best American Essays. She teaches at San Francisco State. Twitter Username: mayleechai Melody Moezzi is an Iranian-American Muslim author, attorney, activist, and visiting associate professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her latest book, The Rumi Prescription, won a 2021 Wilbur Award. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times and other outlets. Twitter Username: MelodyMoezzi Carolyn Desalu is an assistant professor of journalism at Elon University. Her editorial work appeared in Essence, Jet, Ebony, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Globe and Mail. An essay about academia and natural hair will be published in Being #BlackintheIvory: Contending with Racism in America. Terese Mailhot is from Seabird Island Band. Her writing appears in West Branch, Guernica, Pacific Standard, Elle, and elsewhere. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling Heart Berries: A Memoir. She is a Tecumseh Postdoctoral Fellow at Purdue University. Twitter Username: TereseMarieM |
Rooms 440-442, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T123. After spending years in a pandemic, many have contemplated futures more hopeful than our present. Utopias continue to captivate readers through genres like hopepunk and solarpunk. Writers imagine through philosophies like Afrofuturism, queer futurity, utopian socialism, and beyond—and these futures we've imagined simultaneously impact our actions in the present. Through different critical lenses, panelists will discuss literary futures in order to envision possibilities outside of the present. JD Scott is the author of Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day (&NOW Books, 2020) and Mask for Mask (New Rivers Press, 2021). Their work has appeared in Best American Experimental, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Sonora Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Twitter Username: jdsctt Website: jdscott.com Tenea D. Johnson is an award-winning creator of seven speculative fiction works, including her latest releases, Frequencies, a Fiction Album and Broken Fevers, of which Publishers Weekly wrote “the 14 hard-hitting, memorable short stories and prose vignettes in this powerhouse collection … are astounding in their originality” (starred). Twitter Username: TeneaJohnson Celeste Chan works across fiction, creative nonfiction, oral histories, and documentary filmmaking. A Hedgebrook, Lambda, and VONA fellow, she facilitates creative writing workshops for LGBTQ youth. She's published in AWAY, Cream City Review, The Rumpus, and beyond. Twitter Username: celestechan2020 Website: www.celestechan.com |
Rooms 443-444, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T124. For independent literary journals, establishing a journal in the larger writing community can be a major hurdle, but maintaining the journal once it’s established can prove to be even more of a challenge. From funding to retaining readers to building a brand, members of independent journals will come together in this panel to discuss the hurdles they experience and the strategies they’ve implemented to survive in an ever-changing literary landscape. Download event outline and supplemental documents.
CD Eskilson is a trans poet, editor, and translator. They serve as poetry editor of Exposition Review and assistant poetry editor of Split Lip magazine, as well as run the Open Mouth Literary Center based in Fayetteville, Arkansas. They are an MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas. Twitter Username: CdEskilson Anya Maria Johnson serves as assistant book editor at [PANK] Books and fiction editor at Exposition Review. Anya is a multigenre writer and an MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College. In 2022, she won the John B. Santoianni Award for Excellence in poetry. Twitter Username: anyamariajo Viva Padilla is a poet and the founding editor of Dryland, an independent print literary journal founded in South Central Los Angeles and owner of the bookstore and cultural center Re/Arte Centro Literario. She is a first-generation Chicana, a daughter of immigrants who crossed the border. Twitter Username: anotchka |
Rooms 445-446, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T125. Learning the craft of literary editing is challenging without apprenticeship or mentorship, and even seasoned editors may find themselves in search of new skills as technologies evolve and times change. How do editors develop, learn, and grow their practice? Drawing from exercises and case studies in the forthcoming editing textbook The Invisible Art of Literary Editing, this panel seeks to make the invisible visible, to demystify the process, and to discuss equity and transparency in editing. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Bryan Furuness is the coauthor (with Sarah Layden) of the forthcoming book, The Invisible Art of Literary Editing. He writes novels, edits anthologies, teaches at Butler University, lives in Indianapolis, and believes that breakfast burritos are the perfect food. Twitter Username: furunati Dionne Irving is originally from Toronto, Ontario. She is the author of Quint (7.13 Books) and The Islands (Catapult). Her work has appeared in Story, Boulevard, Lit Hub, Missouri Review, and New Delta Review. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Notre Dame. Twitter Username: LadyDionne79 Matthew Pitt has published two fiction collections: Attention Please Now and These Are Our Demands. Matt is an associate professor and director of English Undergraduate Studies at TCU, where he has served as editor in chief for descant since 2014. He also is a contributing editor for West Branch. Sarah Layden is an assistant professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, and is coauthor (with Bryan Furuness) of The Invisible Art of Literary Editing. She is also the author of Imagine Your Life Like This, stories, and Trip through Your Wires, a novel. Twitter Username: BySarahLayden Website: www.sarahlayden.com |
Room 447-448, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T126. “For whom do you write?” is a common question asked of immigrant writers, especially in their early career, including in writing workshops. In this event four writers of South Asian roots—Indian, Pakistani, and Nepali—representing different linguistic backgrounds, share their experiences of writing in English and reflect on their audiences and on what it means to them to write from the intersection of languages and cultures. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Khem K. Aryal is the author of a short story collection, The In-Betweeners (Braddock Ave Books, 2023) and th editor of an anthology, South to South (Texas Review Press, 2023). He teaches creative writing at Arkansas State University, where he also serves as creative materials editor of Arkansas Review. Twitter Username: khemaryal Website: www.khemaryal.com Soniah Kamal's novel Unmarriageable received acclaim from Financial Times, NPR, NYPL, People, and more. Her debut, An Isolated Incident, was also shortlisted for literary prizes. She has bylines in the New York Times, Guardian, Catapult, Best Asian Short Stories Anthology 2017, and Pushcart Prize nominations. Twitter Username: soniahkamal Website: www.soniahkamal.com Aruni Kashyap is an Assamese writer, and the author of the novel The House with a Thousand Stories (Penguin Random House, 2013) and a short story collection His Father’s Disease (Flipped Eye Books UK, 2020). He is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Georgia. Twitter Username: arunikashyap Website: http://www.arunikashyap.com/ Chaitali Sen is the author of a novel, The Pathless Sky, and numerous short stories and essays. She has taught writing workshops to children, teens, and adults around the country and is the founder of an interview series with writers called Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice. Twitter Username: ChaitaliSen2020 Website: www.chaitalisen.com |
Terrace Suite I, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T127. Originally a popular form of love ode in ancient Arabic, the ghazal was embraced by Persian poetics and later found its way into numerous Persianate cultures, most notably Urdu. For two millennia, the ghazal has remained intact in spirit, form, and sensibility, with a few important shifts in formal mechanics as it transitioned from Arabic to Persian. In this panel, five women poets with a background in Arabic, Urdu, and Persian, will discuss the ghazal's history and read some of their own ghazals. Download event outline and supplemental documents.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 NCBR Recognition Award. She's also coauthor with Marilyn Hacker of Diaspo/Renga. She won the Nazim Hizkmet Poetry Prize in 2018. Twitter Username: @DeemaShehabi Shadab Zeest Hashmi, author of Ghazal Cosmopolitan, Comb, Kohl & Chalk and Baker of Tarifa, is the winner of the San Diego Book Award, Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize, and the Hybrid Book Prize from Sable Books. Her work has been published worldwide. She has an MFA from Warren Wilson. Twitter Username: ShadabZeest Website: http://shadabhashmi.com/ Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani American poet and translator. Her collection of poems, Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of The Beloved, is a winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and fellowships from Kundiman and Poets House. Twitter Username: Adeebaloo Persis Karim is a poet, editor, and professor of comparative and world literature at San Francisco State where she also directs the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies. She is the editor of three anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature and has published poetry in national literary magazines. Twitter Username: PersisMK Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her books include O, Louder than Hearts, and To Live in Autumn. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, Poetry, Ploughshares, and The Nation, among others. She's the cohost of Maqsouda, a podcast in Arabic about Arabic poetry. Twitter Username: zeinabeck |
Terrace Suite II, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T128. When creative nonfiction writers revisit history through a deliberately subjective lens—with a distinct personal stake—we can amplify underrepresented voices, interrogate stock narratives, and emphasize crucial intersections. But we also face challenges including overwhelming scale, incomplete records, and the danger of appropriation. Panelists will discuss practical and innovative approaches to seeing the past anew including speculation, investigation, immersion, and the use of hybrid forms. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Kathleen Alcalá is the author of six books with work in over thirty anthologies. Recipient of the Western States Book Award, two Washington State Book Awards, and two Artist Trust fellowships, she co-edited Weeping Women: La Llorona’s Presence in Modern Latinx and Chicanx Lore (Trinity University Press). Teow Lim Goh is the author of two books of poetry, Islanders (2016) and Faraway Places (2021), and an essay collection Western Journeys (2022). Nick Neely's most recent book is Alta California: From San Diego to San Francisco, a Journey on Foot to Rediscover the Golden State. He is an assistant professor at Eastern Oregon University and a recipient of the John Burroughs Nature Essay Award and an AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award. Twitter Username: nsneely |
Signature Room, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 5 |
T129. This panel shines a light on the difficult—and sometimes hidden—work of grieving. Can writing help us process grief? Is grief specific to families, to cultures, to languages? A distinguished panel of writers whose work includes award-winning novels, memoirs, poetry collections, short stories, essays, and books on craft discuss the process of grieving as adoptees, as the children of immigrants, as citizens of a troubled country, and as inhabitants of a planet in the midst of irreversible change. Chris Santiago is a poet and fiction writer and the author of Tula, winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. A Kundiman, Mellon/ACLS, and McKnight Writing Fellow, he is associate professor of English at the University of St. Thomas. Twitter Username: santisugi Sequoia Nagamatsu (@SequoiaN) is the author of the national bestselling 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 Victoria Chang's latest poetry books are The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon, 2022) and OBIT (Copper Canyon, 2020). Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief was published by Milkweed in 2001. She lives in L.A. and teaches within Antioch's MFA program. Twitter Username: VChangPoet Website: www.victoriachangpoet.com Sejal Shah’s debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance (UGA Press), was named an NPR Best Book of 2020 and a finalist for the 2021 CLMP Firecracker Award in nonfiction. Her forthcoming short story collection, How to Make Your Mother Cry, will be published in 2024. Twitter Username: SejalShahWrites Website: www.sejal-shah.com |
9:00 a.m. to 11:50 a.m. | |
Rooms 333-334, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T129A. This meeting is for all AWP program directors. Please join us for a cup of coffee and an informal meet and greet with your regional directors. The chair of the AWP board will give a briefing followed by breakouts to discuss timely topics. We are interested in hearing what’s important to you and your program. |
9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. | |
Exhibit Hall 1 & 2, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Exhibit Hall Level |
T104. 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 AWP mobile app for location details. |
Exhibit Hall 1 & 2, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Exhibit Hall Level |
T105. Breakfast and lunch concessions are available inside the Exhibit Hall in the Seattle Convention Center. Debit, credit cards, and tap to pay are accepted at all food and beverage locations. Please consult the maps in the AWP mobile app for location details. |
Exhibit Hall 1 & 2, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Exhibit Hall Level |
Stop by the AWP Membership Booth to learn more about the many year-round benefits of AWP. Browse through issues of The Writer’s Chronicle, ask questions about the annual Award Series or the Writer to Writer Mentorship Program, purchase some AWP swag, or just pop in to say hello and take a selfie! |
10:35 a.m. to 11:50 a.m. | |
Room 327, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T130. Often poetry-music collaboration can falter due to speaking different artistic languages, perceived lack of applicability, and confusion over shared aims. However, poets and musicians benefit hugely from cross-disciplinary work when it involves an understanding of the specific relationship between both. We want to dismantle the obstacles, create effective shared spaces, and foster better cohesion between art forms, countering the "self-first" attitude that typically dominates both. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Laila Woozeer is an award-winning musician, poet, performer, author, and composer whose work often centres cross-disciplinary collaboration. Their debut book, a magical realism memoir entitled Not Quite White was released with Simon & Schuster in June 2022. Twitter Username: lailawoozeer Phil Saint Denis Sanchez is originally from New Orleans. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry International, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. His debut collection, self-portrait before & after my body, is forthcoming on Button Poetry. He lives in Brooklyn. Yusra Amjad is a poet and standup comedian from Lahore, Pakistan, who managed to retain an authentic voice despite spending two years in an MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College. She is also a graduate of Forman Christian College, a Pushcart nominee, and a Fulbright scholar. |
Rooms 328-329, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T131. This panel of writers, with their varied backgrounds and connections to south, east, and southeast Asia, will explore and discuss the myriad ways their specific ethnicities have shaped their writing as current denizens of the United States whose specific locations range from the Bay Area to south Texas to upstate New York to the rural Midwest. The panel will focus on common themes, hardships, and obsessions linked to their various Asian backgrounds and multicultural experiences. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Albert Abonado is the author of JAW (Sundress Publications). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Albert lives in Rochester, New York with his wife. Twitter Username: albertabonado Minyoung Lee writes fiction and essays in Oakland, California. Her work appears in TriQuarterly, Passages North, and Asian American Writers Workshop, among others. Her prose chapbook Claim Your Space was published by Fear No Lit. Born in Seoul, Minyoung has lived in fourteen cities across four countries. Twitter Username: minyoungleeis Tayyba Maya Kanwal is a Pakistani-American writer and fiction editor at Gulf Coast. Her work appears in Witness, Meridian, Quarterly West, and others. She is an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow at the UHCWP MFA program, completing a short story collection and a novel. Twitter Username: mayakanwal Website: http://mayakanwal.com Keith Lesmeister is the author of the story collection We Could've Been Happy Here. He is a founding editor of Cutleaf (a literary journal) and EastOver Press. He received his MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches writing and literature at Northeast Iowa Community College. |
Room 337, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T136. As poets and readers embrace the necessity of hearing a multiverse of human voices, it’s also necessary that we embrace the multiverse of the nonhuman. Though challenging, finding ways to "hear" the nonhuman can only enrich our writing. We will explore how that ethos, a new perspective on and attention to the nonhuman, has shaped the consciousness and work of contemporary poets, and what strategies we have found successful. Marybeth Holleman is author of the poetry collection tender gravity and nonfiction books including The Heart of the Sound and Among Wolves. Raised in the southern Appalachians, she transplanted to Alaska's Chugach after falling for Prince William Sound just two years before the oil spill. Twitter Username: mbhalaska Website: http://www.marybethholleman.com/ Gretchen Primack is the author of three poetry collections, Visiting Days, Kind, and Doris's Red Spaces, and a chapbook, and she is the coauthor of the memoir of Jenny Brown, The Lucky Ones: My Passionate Fight for Farm Animals. Mandy-Suzanne Wong is the author of Drafts of a Suicide Note (Regal House), a Foreword INDIES finalist; Listen, We All Bleed (New Rivers), an EcoLit Best Book of 2021; and Awabi, winner of the Digging Press Chapbook Award. Her novel The Box is forthcoming from Graywolf in 2023. Twitter Username: MandySuzanneW Website: www.mandysuzannewong.com Megan Kaminski is a poet and essayist—and the author of three books of poetry, most recently Gentlewomen, and Prairie Divination, an illustrated collection of essays and oracle deck (with artist L. Ann Wheeler). She is an associate professor in English at the University of Kansas. Twitter Username: megan_kaminski Website: http://www.megankaminski.com/ Donald Vincent is a poet and author of Convenient American (Broadstone Books 2020). He currently teaches at Emerson College–Los Angeles and has previously taught at UCLA and University of La Verne. He received his BA in writing from Loyola University and MFA from Emerson College. Twitter Username: Mr_Hip |
Rooms 343-344, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T138. Queer art has always been at the forefront of cultural movements, pushing boundaries and expanding our ideas of what art and industry can look like. What does queer literature look like today across the publishing industry, and what are our hopes, dreams, and plans for its future? Join the publishing professionals who are revolutionizing queer literature for an in-depth discussion on the expansive possibilities of queer publishing. Download event outline and supplemental documents.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). She lives in Brooklyn. jeannethornton.com. Twitter Username: TruckLesbian Website: http://fictioncircus.com/Jeanne Margot Atwell (she/her) is a writer, editor, publisher, and community funding expert. She is the executive director and publisher at Feminist Press. She's the author of Derby Life, coauthor of The Insider's Guide to Book Publishing Success, and writes the On the Books newsletter about money and arts. Twitter Username: MargotAtwell
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 L.D. Lewis is an author and editor of speculative fiction. She also serves as a founding creator and project manager for the award-winning FIYAH iterary magazine, director of FIYAHCON and the Ignyte Awards, awards manager at Lambda Literary, and researcher for the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. Twitter Username: ellethevillain |
Rooms 345-346, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T139. Four creative writing instructors explore the challenges and rewards of being first-generation college graduates working in and navigating the academy. We’ll explore the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability among first-gen teachers and students; how to best reach and serve our fellow first-gen students while advocating for ourselves; invisible labor, especially among contingent faculty; institutional classism; imposter syndrome; and making space for our own creative work. Melissa Faliveno is the author of the essay collection Tomboyland, named a best book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library, and 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 Natalie Lima is a Cuban-Puerto Rican writer, with work published in Longreads, Guernica, Brevity, The Offing, Catapult, Sex & the Single Woman (Harper Perennial, 2022), Body Language (Catapult, 2022) and elsewhere. She recently joined the faculty at Butler MFA as assistant professor of English. Twitter Username: natalielima09 Danielle Geller's first book, Dog Flowers, was published in 2021. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The New Yorker, and Brevity. She teaches creative writing at the University of Victoria and is a faculty mentor at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Twitter Username: dellegeller 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 Dantiel W. Moniz is the recipient of a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Award and a Pushcart Prize. Her debut collection, Milk Blood Heat, is a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and she teaches fiction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Twitter Username: dantielwmoniz |
Rooms 347-348, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T140. While many craft guides and articles address fiction workshop pedagogy, few address the difference between successful semester-long workshops and successful week-long programs or conferences. In this panel discussion, accomplished instructors who work in both MFA classrooms and conferences will discuss how they successfully foster effective, inclusive workshops in the intense environment of short-term programs. Charlotte Wyatt serves as fiction director for the Napa Valley Writers' Conference. Angela Pneuman, MFA, PhD, is the author of the novel Lay It on My Heart and the story collection Home Remedies. A former Stegner Fellow, she currently teaches creative writing in continuing studies at Stanford and directs the Napa Valley Writers Conference. Twitter Username: angelapneuman Website: angelapneuman.com Lan Samantha Chang is the author of The Family Chao (2022), All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (2010), Inheritance (2004), and Hunger: A Novella and Stories (1998). The recipient of a 2021 Berlin Prize Fellowship, she is director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Andrea Bewick is managing director of the Napa Valley Writer's Conference. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and she has received fellowships from MacDowell and Stanford. She teaches English and creative writing at Napa Valley College. Peter Ho Davies is the author of the novels, A Lie Somone Told You About Yourself, The Fortunes, and The Welsh Girl, two story collections, plus The Art of Revision. His fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper's, Granta, The Paris Review, Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry Prize Stories. |
Rooms 427-429, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T141. This panel of authors who have published with small and large traditional publishers and one hybrid press discuss their own publicity efforts and costs transparently, including which investments paid off and which were a waste, what kind of support you can realistically expect from small and large press publicity departments, which gaps to prioritize if you can’t afford to do it all, and how to leverage book promotion into paid opportunities to earn back at least some of what you spend. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Rachel King is the author of the novel People along the Sand and the linked short story collection Bratwurst Haven. Her short stories have appeared in One Story, North American Review, Green Mountains Review, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. She lives in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. Twitter Username: rachelkingpdx Emilly Prado is a writer and DJ based in Portland, Oregon. Her debut essay collection, Funeral for Flaca, is a winner of the 2022 Pacific Northwest Book Award and has been called, “Utterly vulnerable, bold, and unique,” by Ms. magazine. She is a current Blackburn fellow at Randolph MFA. Twitter Username: emillygprado EJ Levy's Love, In Theory won a Flannery O'Connor Award. Her anthology, Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New American Writers, won a Lambda. Her essays on sex, gender, and motherhood are in Washington Post and Best American Essays. Her 2021 debut novel, The Cape Doctor, was a NYTBR Editor's Choice. Twitter Username: EJLevy Website: www.ejlevy.com Cassandra Lane is author of We Are Bridges: A Memoir (Feminist Press) and winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize. She received her MFA from Antioch University. Her stories have been appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and elsewhere. She is editor in chief of L.A. Parent magazine. Twitter Username: casslanewrites Website: cassandralane.net |
Room 430, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T142. To celebrate thirty years of independent publishing, Four Way Books gathers five writers who represent not just its own legacy of broad-ranging aesthetics but the depth and diversity of contemporary American literature itself. Featuring panelists from all around the country, readings will traverse genres, forms, subjects, and styles, showcasing the unique voices and literary dialogue that define the collective strength, lasting impact, and longevity of a small press from Tribeca founded in 1993. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Rigoberto González is the author of twenty books. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English and director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey. He is the series editor for Camino de Sol, a Latinx Literary Series. Allison Benis White is the author of four books of poetry, most recently The Wendys, and Please Bury Me in This, winner of the 2018 UNT Rilke Prize. She is an associate professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. Victoria Redel is a first generation American author of five books of fiction and four books of poetry, most recently Paradise which draws on family histories of exile and expulsion. A recipient of numerous awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim and NEA, she teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Twitter Username: victoria_redel Website: victoriaredel.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 |
Rooms 431-432, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T143. The Western US is one of the world’s most diverse regions, but the literary scene remains a “mainly white room.” In what ways is it the duty of West Coast indie journals and micro presses to find and publish writing that upends the norms of institutional gatekeeping? LA-based editors from sin cesar (formerly Dryland) and Indicia discuss their experiments with equity, intersectionality, and digital collaboration to publish crucial work that challenges hidden biases of audiences and the editors themselves. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Krishna Narayanamurti is a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California. His essays and poems have appeared in LAist, Killing the Buddha, and The Northridge Review. He is a former fiction editor at Gold Line Press and currently edits prose for Indicia. Marcus Clayton is an Afro-Latino writer from South Gate, California. He holds an MFA in poetry from CSU Long Beach, and is currently earning a PhD from USC's literature and creative writing program. He is an executive editor for Indicia Literary Journal, and has had multiple genres of work published. Twitter Username: marcussomething Website: https://marcus-clayton.com/ Viva Padilla is a poet and the founding editor of Dryland, an independent print literary journal founded in South Central Los Angeles and owner of the bookstore and cultural center Re/Arte Centro Literario. She is a first-generation Chicana, a daughter of immigrants who crossed the border. Twitter Username: anotchka AJ Urquidi is a Southern California writer originally from Monterey whose work has been featured in Faultline, Posit, and Chiron Review, among others. Copydesk chief for LA Review of Books and a Gerald Locklin Prize winner, AJ is also the cofounder and editor of experimental online journal indicia. Twitter Username: indicialit Amanda Orozco is a literary agent based out of L.A. at Transatlantic Agency. She has worked in academic publishing, publicity, and subsidiary rights in New York, and currently serves as assistant editor for Dryland, where she aims to amplify marginalized voices from the literary underground. Twitter Username: oczoroadnama |
Rooms 433-434, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T144. A tribute to Ed Roberson, whose career rose amid the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and '70s, which inspired him to challenge language and expectations of what a Black poet “should” be. A self-described nature and visual poet, he inspires us to be in conversation with and see our environment anew. A formally educated poet, Roberson is known for creating structures of layered voices that capture complex internal conversations. Four renowned scholars will speak, followed by Roberson reading. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Evie Shockley’s poetry books include semiautomatic (Pulitzer Prize finalist), the new black (Hurston/Wright Legacy Award winner), and the forthcoming volume suddenly we. Her book of criticism is Renegade Poetics. She is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English at Rutgers University. Twitter Username: seminewblack Phillip B. Williams is the author of the poetry collections Mutiny (Penguin, 2021) and Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books). A recipient of a Whiting Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Lambda Literary Award, he currently teaches at Randolph College low-res MFA. Twitter Username: pbw_poet Douglas Kearney has published eight books of poetry, essays, and libretti. He teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His honors include a Griffin Poetry Prize, a Campbell Opera Librettist prize, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award. Nathaniel Mackey is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and editor whose honors include the National Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University. Ed Roberson is the author of a dozen books of poetry, most recently MPH and Other Road Poems and Asked What Has Changed. The recipient of many honors, including the Jackson Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Roberson lives in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. |
Rooms 435-436, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T145. While the influence of literature on film is ubiquitous and clear, film’s influence on literature is often under-discussed. Given that film and cinematic effects have had a significant effect on literary fiction, genre fiction, and even creative nonfiction, we will discuss the whys and hows of this trend. We'll break down several classic films from the 20th century and highlight how they have come to influence 20th- and 21st-century writing styles, citing examples of specific literary works. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Jonathan Penton edits the journal Unlikely Stories and its print arm, Unlikely Books. He is the technical director for the New Orleans Poetry Festival and Rigorous, and has worked in management and technical roles for a number of arts organizations. His most recent chapbook of poetry is Backstories. Twitter Username: USDotOrg Rosalyn Spencer, educator and advocate holds a BA in English, MLS in public library and MEd in educational leadership. She directs youth art programs and teaches ELA in Greater New Orleans. She is a grant writer, advocate, and supporter of the arts in education and equitable curriculum. 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, Bomb, and elsewhere. Shavers is also a fiction editor at Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora. Twitter Username: roneshavers Website: www.roneshavers.com Tara Stillions Whitehead is a filmmaker and author of three books: Blood Histories, The Year of the Monster, and They More Than Burned. She has 8,000 hours of production and producing experience, and is assistant professor of film, vdeo, and digital media at Messiah University in Pennsylvania. Twitter Username: MrsWhitehouse74 David Byron Queen has an MFA from the University of Montana, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. His work has appeared in VICE, Paste, Split Lip magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Hobart, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. He lives in New York and runs the publishing company word west. Twitter Username: byron_queen |
Room 437, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T146. Join other teaching writers and writer-in-the-school programs to discuss the rewards and challenges of the field at this moment. Goals for this meeting are to forge stronger connections within the network of WITSA organizations and practitioners and to set the coalition’s agenda for the year ahead. Time permitting, WITS community members will be invited to share their students’ writing. Download event outline and supplemental documents. |
Rooms 440-442, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T147. During the pandemic, podcasts, online journals, virtual classrooms, and online arts organizations became vital community hubs. These virtual spaces provide access to the literary community across barriers like geography, income, disability, and parenthood, and are uniquely positioned to build inclusive communities. Representatives from Breaking Form Podcast, Think in Ink, Couplet Poetry, Wednesday Night Poetry, and Night School Bar consider the work, joy, and struggles of building virtual community. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Rebecca Lehmann's poetry collections include Ringer (Pitt Poetry Series) and Between the Crackups (Salt). Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Tin House, Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, and other venues. She is assistant professor at Saint Mary's College, and editor of the journal Couplet Poetry. Twitter Username: rebeccalehmann Website: www.rebecca-lehmann.com James Allen Hall is the author of two books of poems: Romantic Comedy (Four Way Books, 2023) and Now You’re the Enemy (2008). They also authored a book of lyric essays, I Liked You Better before I Knew You So Well. They teach at Washington College and direct the Rose O'Neill Literary House. Twitter Username: jamesallenhall Website: notbeauty.blogspot.com Kai Coggin (she/her) has authored four poetry collections, is a Queer POC, and a K–12 Teaching Artist with the Arkansas Arts Council. Named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, her fierce poetry has won Best of the Net 2022 and been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize, three time for Best of the Net, and Best American Poetry 2015. Twitter Username: skailight Khalisa Rae (she/her) is an author of three books, one debut forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Her recent work has been seen in Damaged Goods, Tishman, Sundog Lit, Crab Fat, and Glass Poetry. She is the managing equity and inclusion editor of Carve magazine and writing director at Shaw University. Twitter Username: k_lisarae |
Rooms 443-444, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T148. What is YA literature and how is the voice different from an adult novel? Or from a children's or middle-grade novel? In this session, four diverse YA novelists will discuss how they constructed the voice of their stories. We will discuss characterization, POV, language, and other craft considerations in constructing the voice of the YA novel. We'll talk about pitfalls to avoid. We will also address how a YA audience is different from other genres. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Patricia Park is the author of the novel Re Jane and the forthcoming YA debut Imposter Syndrome & Other Confessions of Alejandra Kim. She was a Fulbright scholar, Jerome Hill fellow, and Center for Fiction fellow. She is assistant professor of creative writing at American University. Twitter Username: patriciapark718 Website: www.patriciapark.com Jennifer De Leon is the author of Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From (Simon & Schuster, 2020) and White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, & Writing (UMass Press, 2021). She is a creative writing and Latinx literature professor, editor, speaker, and consultant. Twitter Username: jdeleonwriter Marie Myung-Ok Lee is the author of the novel The Evening Hero, Finding My Voice (YA). Fiction has appeared in Kenyon Review, FiveChapters, TriQuarterly, Witness, Joyland, 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
Twitter Username: ErikaLSanchez Website: erikalsanchez@gmail.com |
Rooms 445-446, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T149. Join these writers to explore different approaches to chronic illness across nonfiction, poetry, and fiction. Whether drawing from or challenging an extended metaphor, crafting a crucial detail that creates the larger reality, or mustering the clarity or energy the writing process demands, these writers talk honestly about the challenges and successes in finding form and language for the experience of chronic illness. In the process, the panel re-envisions expectations and literary conventions. Presenters on this event prefer all attendees wear a mask while in attendance at the event. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Emily Alta Hockaday's first full-length collection, Naming the Ghost, touches on chronic illness, grief, and parenthood. It was published September 2022 by Cornerstone Press. Her second collection is forthcoming 2023, and she is the author of five chapbooks. www.emilyhockaday.com/@E_Hockaday Twitter Username: E_Hockaday Allison Blevins is a queer disabled writer. She is the author of the collections Handbook for the Newly Disabled, A Lyric Memoir and Slowly/Suddenly. She is also the author of four chapbooks. Allison is the director of Small Harbor Publishing and the executive editor at the museum of americana. Tina Jenkins Bell is a published fiction writer, playwright, journalist, and literary activist. Her work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies. She's worked with writing/arts organizations, authors, and bookstores to offer free literary programming on Chicago's south side. Twitter Username: tinajbell Eshani Surya's writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, [PANK], Catapult, and Joyland, among others. She was a 2021 Mae Fellow and Semi-Finalist for Key West Literary Seminar’s award for novel-in-progress. Eshani is a flash fiction editor at Split Lip magazine. Twitter Username: __eshani |
Room 447-448, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T150. In a form characterized by compression, what does it mean to write at length? Can such works cleave to standards of precision and concision as they extend beyond the standard one-pager? What kinds of world-building, expansiveness of thought, or complexity of experience might be achieved in multipage or even book-length poems? Panelists will read briefly from their work, discuss both formal and free-verse approaches to writing long poems, and offer strategies for generating and sustaining them. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Melissa Crowe is the author of the poetry collection Dear Terror, Dear Splendor (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). She's coordinator of the MFA program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she teaches poetry and publishing. Twitter Username: melissamcrowe Meg Day is the 2015–2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a 2013 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level. Day is an assistant professor of english and creative writing in the MFA program at NC State. Twitter Username: themegdaystory Website: www.megday.com Paisley Rekdal is the author, most recently, of Appropriate: A Provocation and Nightingale. A Guggenheim fellow and Utah's Poet Laureate, she teaches at the University of Utah, where she edits the web archive project Mapping Literary Utah. Twitter Username: paisleyrekdal Sumita Chakraborty is a poet, essayist, and scholar, and the author of the poetry collection Arrow. Following three years as the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan, she is now assistant professor of English and creative writing at North Carolina State University. Twitter Username: notsumatra |
Terrace Suite I, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T151. In recent years, writers with rich and varied backgrounds, lived experiences, and perspectives have pushed back against narrow media portrayals of Appalachia, giving voice to the diversity of its literary landscape. This panel discussion will explore five Appalachian authors’ strategies and experience in boldly queering and disrupting these narratives in their books about the region. Download event outline and supplemental documents.W. David Hall is CEO and president of The BreakBread Literacy Project. He has directed the Kenyon Young Writers Program for 21 years. He teaches high school English in Los Angeles and co-coaches his school's slam poetry team. He has also published Culture and Context, a writing guide. Carter Sickels is the author of the novels The Prettiest Star and The Evening Hour. He is assistant professor of creating writing at Eastern Kentucky University. Twitter Username: cartersickels Website: cartersickels.com Mesha Maren is the author of Sugar Run (Algonquin Books). She is the Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and her short stories and essays appear in Tin House, Oxford American, and Crazyhorse. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Ucross. Twitter Username: meshamaren Neema Avashia, the daughter of Indian immigrants, was born and raised in southern West Virginia. She has been an educator and activist in the Boston Public Schools since 2003. WVU Press published her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, in March 2022. Twitter Username: AvashiaNeema Jamie Lyn Smith is a writer and editor. The recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, she is also fiction editor at BreakBread magazine and a consulting editor at the Kenyon Review. Her short story collection, Township, was published by Cornerstone Press in January 2022. Twitter Username: jamielynwrites Website: http://jamielyn-smith.squarespace.com/ |
Terrace Suite II, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T152. Roe v. Wade empowered generations to choose their reproductive futures. It also enabled choices important to creating literary selves, communities, and spaces. Now, on the cusp of 50 years, this landmark court decision may be overturned. Five poets and writers will read from their work and reflect on Roe’s impact on their imaginations and writing lives. How did Roe change the literary culture in which each panelist came of age? What are strategies for writing in a post-Roe world? Q&A to follow. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Jennifer Kwon Dobbs is the author of Paper Pavilion, Interrogation Room, and the chapbooks Notes from a Missing Person and Necro Citizens (German, English). A cotranslator of Sami poetry, she is also senior poetry editor at AGNI and professor of English at St. Olaf College. Twitter Username: jkwondobbs Website: www.jkwondobbs.com Lisa Lewis's books of poetry include The Unbeliever, Silent Treatment, Vivisect, Burned House with Swimming Pool, The Body Double, and Taxonomy of the Missing. She teaches in the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University and serves as editor of the Cimarron Review. Twitter Username: aliswisel Lynn Emanuel is the author of five books of poetry, Hotel Fiesta, The Dig (National Poetry Series Award), Then, Suddenly- (Eric Matthieu King Award Academy of American Poets), Noose and Hook, and, in 2016, The Nerve of It: New and Selected Poems (Lenore Marshall Award, Academy of American Poets). Nahal Suzanne Jamir’s writing has been recently published or is forthcoming in journals like Cincinnati Review and Crazyhorse. Her first fiction collection In the Middle of Many Mountains is available from Press 53. She currently teaches at Rollins College and Mississippi University for Women. Twitter Username: nsjamir11 Carol Muske-Dukes is the author of 16 books (poems. novels, essays). Her most recent book of poems is Blue Rose. She was a 2019 long list Pulitzer Prize finalist and the former Poet Laureate of California. She is recently retired from USC where she founded the creative writing / literature PhD program. She has been awarded Guggenheim and NEA grants, and won Pushcart Prizes. She writes for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker. She has been a National Book Award finalist. Twitter Username: carolmuskedukes Website: www.carolmuskedukes.com |
Signature Room, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 5 |
T153. The Smithsonian, in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, has embarked on a year-long project to examine the literary arts field, generate new ideas, encourage cross-sector communication, and offer approaches and solutions to nurture a more just and financially viable ecosystem. Panelists will provide an overview of this effort and its origins, and invite project advisors and participants into the conversation. Download event outline and supplemental documents.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. Amy Stolls is the director of literary arts at the National Endowment for the Arts. Twitter Username: amystolls Fred Sasaki is the art director for Poetry magazine; a gallery curator for the Poetry Foundation; cohost of Homeroom's School Night info show; an organizer for Prison Neighborhood Arts Project (P+NAP), and writer of funny loving things. Twitter Username: FredSasaki |
Bookfair Stage, Sponsored by the Dramatists Guild, Exhibit Hall 1 & 2, Summit Building |
T154. Naugatuck River Review, a journal of narrative poetry, is celebrating 15 years of publication in 2023. Wordpeace.co, a multigenre digital literary project dedicated to peace and social justice, is celebrating 8 years. Winners and finalists from Naugatuck River Review's 14th annual narrative poetry contest (judged by Lisa Kwong) and writers from Wordpeace will share the stage! Download event outline and supplemental documents.Lisa C. Taylor, MFA, is the author of two collections of fiction, Impossibly Small Spaces and Growing a New Tail, and four poetry collections, most recently Interrogation of Morning. She received a Hugo House New Fiction Prize and the Elizabeth Shanley Gerson Lecture at UConn with Geraldine Mills. |
12:10 p.m. to 1:25 p.m. | |
Room 327, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T155. In this panel, women writers, translators, educators discuss how non-Western literary practices inform their work. Their perspectives on literary traditions from around the world address how contemporary literature has long been informed by non-Anglophone traditions, which have largely been erased, ignored or relegated to the “periphery.” Their conversation of the present nearness of these traditions raises questions about prolonged global inequities both on and off the page. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Farukh Niaz is the founder and editor in chief of Style Files, a fashion blog highlighting independent designers and ethical fashion—stylefiles.us. Farukh is an avid reader and devoted admirer of Brown female writers. She hopes to emulate their bravery in her own work soon. Maha Ahmed is an English literature and creative writing PhD candidate at the University of Houston specializing in poetry and empire studies. She is the poetry editor for the Beirut-based magazine Rusted Radishes. Her critical and creative work explores the Arab-American diaspora and global feminism. Twitter Username: mahaahmed81 Zarlasht Niaz is an organizer, translator, and educator from Minneapolis. She is a founder of the nonprofit Afghan Refugee Aid as well as an MFA candidate at the University of Houston. Her writing is published in the anthology What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories on Food and Family. Kartika Budhwar is a doctoral fellow in creative writing and literature at the University of Houston, and editor at Ripe Fiction and The South Asian Avante-Garde. She has received awards and publications in journals such as the Indiana Review, Arts and Letters, and Blue Mesa Review. Twitter Username: Kartika_Budhwar Kaitlin Rizzo is a writer, researcher, and translator working on a series of projects related to the life of Baroque painter, Artemisia Gentileschi. Her most recent writing can be found in the form of a retrospective essay in the anthology, Shreela Ray: On the Life and work of an American Master. |
Rooms 328-329, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T156. A lively and provocative literary present shapes our possible futures. For its 50th anniversary, Copper Canyon Press looks to its newest debut authors, who represent the many edges of poetry’s future. Ancient Chinese idioms transcend time in an immigrant’s poems of desire and grief. A librarian-artist perfects play in diverse self-expressions. A former medical editor explores the body in illness and pleasure. And a policy advisor aches with forbidden love while living in a surveillance state. Shangyang Fang grew up in Chengdu, China, and writes both in English and Chinese. He is the author of the poetry collection, Burying the Mountain (Copper Canyon Press, 2021). Twitter Username: shangyangfang Amanda Gunn is a PhD candidate in English at Harvard where she works on Black pleasure and ephemerality. Her poems, whose subjects include women's labors, mental illness, addiction, and desire and the fat body, appear in Poetry, Poetry NW, and The Baffler. She is currently a Stegner Fellow. Twitter Username: amandathegunn
Ryo Yamaguchi is the publicist at Copper Canyon Press. He is the author of The Refusal of Suitors (Noemi Press), and has been a book critic for Harriet Books at the Poetry Foundation and Michigan Quarterly Review, among others. His poems have appeared widely, including The Best American Poetry 2020. Twitter Username: ryo964 |
Room 331, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T157. This panel focuses on errors in translation to raise urgent questions about race, class, power, and literary values. It will engage the fraught situation of heritage speakers who often feel shame when making translation mistakes. It will confront and redress dominant ideas of accuracy, authority, and authenticity. Diverse panelists will discuss navigating their own translation errors and/or their experiences teaching, editing, or mentoring emerging translators. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist writer, poet, and performance artist. She is the author of Swallow the Fish, Experiments in Joy, (ghost gestures), the déjà vu, and In & Out of Place. She has premiered over fifty performances artworks worldwide. The aim of her work is to open up space. Sawako Nakayasu works at the intersection of writing, translation, and performance. Publications include Pink Waves (Omnidawn), Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From (Wave Books), and Say Translation Is Art (Ugly Duckling). She is as assistant professor in literary arts at Brown University. Twitter Username: sawakonakayasu Website: http://sawakonakayasu.net/ Madhu H. Kaza is a writer, translator, and educator based in New York. She is the editor of Kitchen Table Translation, an anthology of writing by immigrant and diasporic translators. She directs the Bard Microcollege at Brooklyn Public Library and teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University. Twitter Username: afmaeli JD Pluecker is a writer, translator, artist. Their most recent translations are Writing with Caca, Gore Capitalism, and Antígona González, and they have published zines, chapbooks, and a book of poetry and image, Ford Over. Twitter Username: JDPluecker |
Room 332, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T158. As members of underserved populations, community college students are often overlooked as potential writers by the writing community and themselves. Students may underestimate the value of pursuing a creative writing class, program, or career. Panelists from institutions across the country who teach diverse, high-risk, low-income students will discuss the challenges of recruiting students into creative writing programs and how they overcome various obstacles while fostering literary citizenship. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Courtney O’Banion Smith has a master of fine arts in creative writing-poetry from Texas State University-San Marcos. Her work has appeared in various publications including Relief, Barren magazine, and The Ocotillo Review. Currently, she teaches literature and writing in Houston. Twitter Username: cobanionsmith Website: www.cobanionsmith.com Marlys Cervantes serves as department chair of Humanities & Communication and director of the creative writing program at Cowley College in Arkansas City, Kansas. She teaches literature and writing courses, and serves as codirector of the Multi-Cultural Scholars Program and as an academic advisor. Twitter Username: MsCerv Maria Brandt teaches creative writing at Monroe Community College in Rochester, New York, where she advises students from pre-entrance through the Capstone experience. She has published a novella, a short-play collection, and several short stories, along with materials supporting other program advocates. James Ducat is a poet and associate professor of English at Riverside City College, where he is editorial advisor to the literary magazine, Muse, and teaches creative writing and composition. He holds an MFA from Antioch University, L.A., as well as an MA in composition/rhetoric. Twitter Username: jamesducat Victoria Moore is faculty adviser of Hive Avenue, NorthWest Arkansas Community College's student lit journal. She is also the coordinator of NWACC's AFA in creative writing. |
Rooms 333-334, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T159. The intersection of creative writing and community engagement through the arts is a potent combination for social change with the capability to affect how we interact with one another and imagine the world around us. Through public art projects, community activism, and our own writing, how can the written word be used as a vehicle for empathy and social change? What is the power of bringing people’s words into public spaces as well as creating new worlds through our own fiction and poetry? Download event outline and supplemental documents.Chiwan Choi is the author of three books—The Flood, Abductions, and The Yellow House. In 2015, he wrote, presented, and destroyed the novel Ghostmaker. Chiwan is also founding partner of Writ Large Press, a DTLA based indie publisher that uses books and publishing to resist, disrupt, and transgress. Twitter Username: chiwanchoi Website: http://chiwanchoi.com Melanie Faranello is an award-winning fiction writer and founder of Poetry on the Streets. Recipient of an Artist Fellowship Award in Fiction, a Creative Community Fellow with National Arts Strategies, teaching artist certified in Kingian Nonviolence, she leads public art projects for social change. Twitter Username: MelFaranello Roya Marsh is a poet, performer, educator, and activist. She is the author of dayliGht, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry, and works feverishly toward Queer liberation and dismantling white supremacy. Felice Belle is a lecturer at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York, and director of communications for the global nonprofit Narrative 4. As a poet and playwright, she has performed at the Apollo Theater, Joe’s Pub, and TEDWomen. Her poetry collection, Viscera, is forthcoming from Etruscan Press. Twitter Username: analogurl |
Rooms 335-336, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T160. How do poets and essayists write and connect landscapes to the body, and what other metaphors do we find inspiring for describing the natural world? Our panel will discuss ways to deepen our understandings of landscape through language, writing against a backdrop of climate crisis, issues of land ownership, historical and racial controversies, and overcrowding. Are our metaphors personal, political, or preservationist? Can relating the body and self to landscape evoke a deeper care for the land? Download event outline and supplemental documents.Allen Gee is the DL Jordan Endowed Professor of creative writing and editor of CSU Press at Columbus State University. He is author of My Chinese-America (essays), and At Little Monticello (a forthcoming biography of James Alan McPherson). Twitter Username: allenrgee Website: www.allengee.com CMarie Fuhrman is the author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems (Floodgate 2020) and coeditor of Native Voices (Tupelo 2019). CMarie is director of Elk River Writers Workshop and faculty in the graduate program in creative writing at Western Colorado University. Renata Golden has published numerous essays online and in print about the natural world. She is working on an essay collection about the Chiricahua Mountains where the borders of two states and two countries meet. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston, and she lives in New Mexico. Twitter Username: RenataMGolden Website: renatagolden.com Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and a professor at the University of Michigan and in the MFA in interdisciplinary arts program at Goddard College. Her third poetry collection is Gut Botany (2020), and her first speculative fiction collection is Ice Bar (2018). Twitter Username: OlimpiasDance Website: www.olimpias.org Sean Hill, the author of two books of poems, Dangerous Goods and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, directs the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference. His honors and awards include a fellowship from the NEA. His poems have appeared in journals and in anthologies including Black Nature and Villanelles. Twitter Username: adamalzeal Website: http://www.seanhillpoetry.com |
Room 337, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T161. Recent creative nonfiction storytellers speak out about being queer and/or trans in the military and how sharing their stories has helped shape public perspectives of LGBTQ+ people in the armed forces. Panelists discuss the challenges with sharing queer and trans stories, contributions of queer and trans voices to military literature, film, and storytelling, and strategies in creating social change through advocating for more diverse voices in the writing and documenting of military experiences. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Bronson Lemer (he/him) is the author of The Last Deployment: How a Gay, Hammer-Swinging Twentysomething Survived a Year in Iraq. His work has appeared in Guernica, Creative Nonfiction, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at the University of Minnesota Rochester. Twitter Username: lastdeployment Katherine Schifani is an Air Force veteran who spent seven years on active duty as a maintenance officer and instructor of English. She currently spends the winters skiing and climbing in Colorado and the summers guiding in the Cascades. Anthony Moll is the author of Out of Step: A Memoir, (winner of a Lambda Literary Award and the Non/Fiction Collection Prize) and You Cannot Save Here (Winner of the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize). They hold an MFA in creative nonfiction, and they are finishing their dissertation for a PhD in English. Twitter Username: toneemoll Máel Embser-Herbert, veteran and professor of social justice and social change at Hamline University, is coeditor of With Honor and Integrity: Transgender Troops in Their Own Words and author of "'Welcome! Oh, wait…’ Transgender Military Service in a Time of Uncertainty" in Sociological Inquiry. Twitter Username: msheridaneh Website: maelsheridan.com
|
Rooms 338-339, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T162. In this panel, Vietnamese-American poets discuss the legacy of Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American poetics and how they see themselves honoring, disrupting, and expanding the landscape of Vietnamese-American literature. Panelists will cite work from notable Vietnamese-American poets, discuss the influence of the Vietnam War, and how certain poetic forms help with carrying on Vietnamese traditions. Joshua Nguyen is the author of Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press), winner of the 2021 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and winner of the 2022 Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Poetry Award. He is also the author of the chapbook American Lục Bát for My Mother (Bull City Press, 2021). Twitter Username: joshuanguyen03 Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, from Penguin in the US and the UK. They are an assistant professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Twitter Username: speakdeadly Susan Nguyen is the author of the poetry collection Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press), which won the 2020 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and a 2022 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. She is currently the Senior Editor for Hayden's Ferry Review. Kimberly Nguyễn is a Vietnamese-American poet originally from Omaha, Nebraska and currently living in New York City. She was a 2021 Emerging Voices Fellow at PEN America, and she has a collection published in October 2022. Twitter Username: knguyenpoetry |
Rooms 340-342, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T163. The brevity, accessibility, and fluidity of flash creative nonfiction engages worldwide readers by defying conformity in language, form, and content, but how does lyric flash nonfiction reinvent storytelling and use poetry to break Western literary boundaries? This panel’s BIPOC, Queer, and multinational voices will interrogate the interplay between poetry and flash creative nonfiction with a focus on orality, mixed media, and how the lyric escapes the borders of Euro-patriarchal forms. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Sayantika Mandal (she/her) is an Indian writer. She completed her MFA from the University of San Francisco and is pursuing her PhD in English (creative writing) from the University of Georgia. Her writing has appeared in The Citron Review, Indian Literature, Cerebration, Times of India, and others. Twitter Username: Sayantikatweets Kathryn Kysar is the author of two books of poetry, Dark Lake and Pretend the World, and she edited Riding Shotgun: Women Write about Their Mothers. A previous AWP board member, Kysar is the founder of the creative writing program at Anoka-Ramsey Community College in Minneapolis. Twitter Username: darklake Website: https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/kathryn_kysar Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate 2007–9, is author of The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival and Shadow Light (poems, a Red Mountain Press award). She is a Midwessay curator for Essay Daily. A former AWP board president, she is on the board of Indigenous Nations Poets. Twitter Username: deniselow9 Website: www.deniselow.net April Gibson is a Black poet, writer, and educator. Her work has been published in The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in creative writing and currently teaches English at Malcolm X College in Chicago. Twitter Username: aprilreenea Sun Yung Shin is the author of four poetry collections including The Wet Hex; editor of three anthologies: What We Hunger For: Refugee & Immigrant Stories about Food & Family; A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota; and Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, and author of two picture books. Twitter Username: sunyungshin Website: www.sunyungshin.com |
Rooms 343-344, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T164. In a world that celebrates writers who publish early and often, it can be easy for slower or older writers to feel the deck is stacked against them. Experience shows, though, that patience and persistence often pay off. Authors who spent ten years or more on their manuscripts will discuss their experiences with writing and revising their books, as well as the process of finding agents and being published, and will offer advice to those deep in their long-term, long-form writing projects. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Katie Cortese is the author of Girl Power and Other Short-Short Stories and Make Way for Her and Other Stories. Her work has recently appeared in Redivider, Gargoyle, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Texas Tech University and is the faculty director of Texas Tech University Press. Twitter Username: KatieCortese Website: www.katiecortese.com Deborah Taffa is the director of the MFA creative writing program at IAIA in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Winner of the PEN Jean Stein Grant, her memoir Whiskey Tender is forthcoming from HarperCollins Harper in 2023. A Public Space, MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Tin House, and Kranzberg Fellow, she's from the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo. Twitter Username: deborahtaffa Website: www.deborahtaffa.com V.V. Ganeshananthan's debut novel, Love Marriage, was long-listed for the Orange Prize and named one of Washington Post Book World's Best of 2008. Her work has appeared in Granta and the New York Times, among others. A 2014 NEA and Radcliffe Fellow, she teaches at the University of Minnesota. Twitter Username: V_V_G Website: www.vasugi.com Melissa Duclos is the author of the novel Besotted. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Salon, and The Offing, among other venues. She is the cofounder of Amplify Writers and has an MFA from Columbia University. Twitter Username: MelissaDuclos Jai Chakrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World (Knopf, 2021) and the forthcoming story collection, A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness (Knopf, 2023). His short fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, the O.Henry Prize Stories, and awarded a Pushcart Prize. Twitter Username: JaiChakrabarti |
Rooms 345-346, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T165. Storytellers go back to the beginning of human history: wandering bards, a grandmother at the kitchen table, sailors watching the stars from the bow of a ship. Yet in contemporary times, agents and publishers seem to prefer the deep dive of a novel over the compact form of the story collection. In contemplating the merits of short fiction as a genre in its own right, this conversation among four dynamic short story writers will explore the ins and outs of writing and publishing the short form. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Leslie Kirk Campbell’s debut short story collection, The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs, won the 2020 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction. Her award-winning stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Arts & Letters, Southern Indiana Review, and The Thomas Wolfe Review. She has received fellowships at Ucross and Playa. Twitter Username: lesliekirkcamp Daniel Olivas is the author of ten books including How to Date a Flying Mexican: New and Collected Stories (2022), and The King of Lighting Fixtures: Stories (2017). Olivas has also written for the New York Times, the Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, and La Bloga. Twitter Username: olivasdan Website: http://danielolivas.com Sidik Fofana is a graduate of NYU’s MFA program and a public school teacher. His work has appeared in The Sewanee Review and Granta. Stories from the Tenants Downstairs, his debut short story collection, will be published by Scribner in August 2022. Erica Plouffe Lazure's short story collection, Proof of Me and Other Stories, won the New American Press fiction award and was published in March 2022. She is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks, Sugar Mountain (2020) and Heard around Town (2015). She teaches and writes in Exeter, New Hampshire. Twitter Username: ericaplouffelazure Website: https://ericaplouffelazure.com/ |
Rooms 347-348, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T166. The authors on this multigenre panel, each of whom has published a creative writing textbook, will not actually be battling one another. They will, however, discuss why they decided to write / edit their textbook, the niche they hoped to fill, and the ways in which their textbook authorship has affected their own teaching and writing. For aspiring textbook authors, the panel will address practical matters of writing a proposal, compiling an anthology, and finding a publisher. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Michael Kardos is the author of the novel Bluff, as well as two other novels, a story collection, and the textbook The Art and Craft of Fiction. He is a professor of English and codirector of the creative writing program at Mississippi State University. Twitter Username: michael_kardos Website: http://www.michaelkardos.com Hadara Bar-Nadav is an NEA fellow and author of several poetry collections, most recently The New Nudity, Lullaby (with Exit Sign), The Frame Called Ruin, and Fountain and Furnace. She is also co-author of Writing Poems. Bar-Nadav is a professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Twitter Username: Hadarabar Website: www.Hadarabar.com Jennifer Pullen is an assistant professor of creative writing at Ohio Northern University (PhD Ohio University, MFA Eastern Washington University). She has a chapbook, A Bead of Amber on Her Tongue with Omnidawn Press. Her textbook, Writing Fantasy Fiction, is upcoming from Bloomsbury Academic. Twitter Username: Jpullen19 Joe Wilkins is the author of a novel, Fall Back Down When I Die; a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers; and four collections of poetry, including When We Were Birds and Thieve. Wilkins lives with his family in Oregon, where he directs the creative writing program at Linfield University. |
Rooms 427-429, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T167. Fairy and folk tales always belong to the next generation, while preserving the imprint of previous iterations. Told and retold across eras, these stories of kinship and metamorphosis—birth, death, marriage—make ideal sites for revisiting family legends, traumas that predate our arrival, the limitations of memory, false legacy, and the ever-evolving morals of snow child, bear father, sister and brother lost in the wood. Gregory Howard's fiction and essays have appeared in WebConjunctions, The Collagist, Harp & Altar, and Tarpaulin Sky, among other places. He teaches fiction writing, contemporary literature, and film at University of Maine. His novel Hospice was published by FC2. Lily Hoang is the author of six books, including Underneath (winner of the Red Hen Fiction Award), 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 Porochista Khakpour is the author of the forthcoming memoir Sick, and the novels Sons & Other Flammable Objects and The Last Illusion. She received fellowships from the NEA, Ucross, Yaddo, and more. She writes for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bookforum, WSJ, VQR, and more. Twitter Username: Pkhakpour Website: www.porochistakhakpour.com Richard Mirabella is a writer and civil servant living in Upstate New York. His work has appeared in American Short Fiction online, Story, Split Lip, and elsewhere. HIs first novel, Brother & Sister Enter the Forest, will be published in March 2023 by Catapult. Twitter Username: rpmirabella Danielle Pafunda is 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. |
Room 430, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T168. Five writers from Ukraine, Russia, the Baltics, and other former Soviet republics stage a response to the war in Ukraine and the traumas of the totalitarian upbringing it has reawakened. In reading from our fiction, poetry, memoir, and journalism work, we present a deeper view of the region and offer textural solutions to making the political personal. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Sasha Vasilyuk is a Russian-Ukrainian-American journalist and author of the forthcoming novel Your Presence Is Mandatory, set between Hitler’s Germany and post-WWII Ukraine. Her writing has been published in the New York Times, Time, NBC, Harper's Bazaar, Los Angeles Times, Narrative, and USA Today. Twitter Username: SashaVasilyuk Website: www.sashavasilyuk.com Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, a Russian-Armenian, won 2020 Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Prize for her first story collection, What Isn't Remembered, long-listed for the PEN/Bingham Prize and short-listed for W. Saroyan International Prize. Her debut novel, The Orchard, was published in March of 2022. Twitter Username: kgnewberry Anna Halberstadt is a poet and a translator, 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 translations of American poetry—Selected Selected by Eileen Myles and Nocturnal Fire by Edward Hirsch. Anna Fridlis is a US-based, Soviet-born immigrant writer. She graduated from The New School with a nonfiction MFA in 2014 and has been teaching first-year writing at her alma mater since. She's working on a memoir in essays about immigration, trauma, family, and identity. She edits for Seventh Wave magazine. |
Rooms 431-432, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T169. Literary fame is not something most writers confess to seeking, but it often lurks in the background of our work. Is fame even worth pursuing? Does seeking fame warp us as writers, as human beings, or as members of a literary community? Or is the quest for recognition a motivator that keep us active and sharp? How much renown is enough? Four writers reflect on how they handle the desire for fame, and whether they find it most useful to cultivate it or to remain aloof from it. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Zack Rogow is author, editor, or translator of more than twenty books or plays. His ninth book of poems, Irreverent Litanies, was published by Regal House. His play Colette Uncensored ran in London and San Francisco. He serves as a contributing editor for Catamaran Literary Reader. www.zackrogow.com Twitter Username: @ZackRogow Website: www.zackrogow.com Dion O’Reilly is the author of Ghost Dogs and Sadness of the Apex Predator. Her poems appear in Rattle, Cincinnati Review, The Sun, and The Slowdown. She is a member of The Hive PoetryCollective, which produces podcasts and events. She leads workshops with poets from all over the United States. Twitter Username: dionoreilly Website: dionoreilly.wordpress.com Richard Blanco is the youngest, first Latino, gay person to serve as Presidential Inaugural Poet. Author of two memoirs and five poetry books & awards from University of Pittsburgh, PEN, Paterson Prize, & Lambda Literary. He is Education Ambassador for the Academy of American Poets and Miami Poet Laureate. Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, New York, in 1954. He is the author of eight poetry collections including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize, and Brutal Imagination. He holds the Miller Chair at the University of Missouri and is cofounder of Cave Canem. Twitter Username: roughband Website: http://blueflowerarts.com/artist/cornelius-eady/ |
Rooms 433-434, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T170. The tech tsunami transforming our world isn’t new—but change is accelerating. Tech may feed into intersectional crises in race, environment, disinformation, and intolerance, amplifying inequity and colonialist tropes. Five Asian American voices tackle all of the above, drawing on roots in the tech space and in their race, gender, immigrant, and sexual identities. We’ll explore the challenges of writing about tech with courage and authenticity, while exploring humanity’s love affair with tech. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Shankar Narayan explores identity, power, mythology, and technology in a world where the body is flung across borders yet can still transcend them. He awakens to the wonders of Cascadia every day, but his heart yearns east to his other home, Delhi. Connect with him at shankarnarayan.net. Franny Choi is the author, most recently, of The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco). Honors include the Lilly/Rosenberg Fellowship, the Holmes Prize, and the Elgin Award. The founder of Brew & Forge, she is a poetry editor at Massachusetts Review, and she teaches at Bennington College. Twitter Username: fannychoir Website: www.frannychoi.com Elizabeth (Betsy) Aoki is a videogame producer and National Poetry Series finalist. Her awards include: Artist Trust, City of Seattle, Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, Hedgebrook, Clarion West Writers Workshop. Her debut poetry collection about women in technology, Breakpoint, launched in 2022. Twitter Username: baoki Neil Aitken is the author of two books of poetry, Babbage's Dream and The Lost Country of Sight, winner of the 2007 Philip Levine Prize. A past Kundiman fellow, he is the editor in chief of Boxcar Poetry Review and co-director of De-Canon: A Visibility Project, and works as a creative writing coach. Twitter Username: neil_aitken Website: http://www.neil-aitken.com Margaret Rhee is the author of chapbooks Yellow (Tinfish Press, 2011), Radio Heart; or, How Robots Fall Out of Love (Finishing Line Press, 2015), and full length collection Love, Robot (The Operating System, 2018). She is an assistant professor at The New School. Twitter Username: mrheeloy |
Rooms 435-436, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T171. Kari Gunter-Seymour’s Women Speak anthologies and I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing, funded by the Academy of American poets, create spaces for marginalized writers within Appalachia and beyond. As editor, Gunter-Seymour describes the process of intentionally creating books that support all writers within Appalachia and women, Affrilachian, and LGBTQ+ authors in particular. Authors from the collections discuss how activist anthologies support their individual works and personal activist goals. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Hayley Mitchell Haugen is a poet and professor of English at Ohio University Southern. She is the editor and publisher of Sheila-Na-gig Editions. Her most recent collection, The Blue Wife Poems, is available from Kelsay Books. Kari Gunter-Seymour is Ohio's Poet Laureate, a 9th generation Appalachian, the author of three books of poetry, editor of ten anthologies, an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, 2020 Ohio Poet of the year, and the founder/executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project. Twitter Username: KGunterSeymour Website: www.karigunterseymourpoet.com Mark Youssef is a poet and physician practicing in the Cincinnati area. In addition to his MD, he has an MA in English and is working toward his MFA in poetry, joining an impressive lineage of physician poets. Mark was born and raised in Kentucky. Barbara Marie Minney is a transgender woman, award-winning poet, retired attorney, and quiet activist. Her first collection of poetry, If There's No Heaven, was the winner of the 2020 Poetry Is Life Book Award and was selected by the Akron Beacon Journal as a Best Northeast Ohio Book in 2020. Lynette Ford is a fourth-generation Affrilachian narrative artist with the Ohio Teaching Artists Roster and Creative Aging Project, an award-winning writer and anthologist, a storytelling and creative-writing coach, and a member of the National Association of Black Storytellers’ Circle of Elders. Twitter Username: LynFord84 |
Room 437, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T172. Acclaimed poets from the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, St. Lucia, and Grenada, will share their award-winning work, and discuss how their Caribbean roots inform their poetics, pedagogies, and practices. Lauren K. Alleyne is author of Difficult Fruit (2014) and Honeyfish (2019), and coeditor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (2020). She is assistant director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and professor of English at James Madison University. Twitter Username: poetlka Shara McCallum is the author of six books published in the US and UK, most recently No Ruined Stone. Her work appears internationally and has been translated into multiple languages. She teaches at Penn State University and in the Pacific Low-Residency MFA and was the 2021–22 Penn State Laureate. Vladimir Lucien is a poet, critic, and actor from St. Lucia. Lucien's work has been published widely, including in the PN Review, Poetry International, Washington Square Review, Wasafiri among others. He was the 2015 winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Twitter Username: vladimirlucien Safiya Sinclair is the author of Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers' Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award in Literature, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Her memoir, How to Say Babylon, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster (August 2023). Twitter Username: SafiyaSinclair Malika Booker's poetry collection Pepper Seed was longlisted for the OCM Bocas prize and shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre prize. Winner of the Forward Poetry single poem prize and a Cholmondeley Award, she is currently a creative writing lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. Twitter Username: malikabooker |
Rooms 440-442, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T173. Poetry is a great connector for creating community locally and globally. Join current and former poets laureate and other writers who create their own fields for poetry in public schools, in youth detention centers, buses, community centers, libraries, universities, publishing, editing and guest editing, and in their own front yards. Poetry walks in tandem with many purposes including social justice advocacy, education, bridging distances, and healing. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Angie Trudell Vasquez is the Poet Laureate of Madison, Wisconsin ('20–'24). She holds a MFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her third collection of poetry, In Light, Always Light, was released by Finishing Line Press in 2019, and My People Redux, her fourth, in January 2022 Margaret Rozga hosted workshops and write-ins open to all as 2021 artist in residence at the UW Milwaukee at Waukesha Field Station and curated the campus exhibit, Our Field Station & the Earth. As 2019–20 Wisconsin Poet Laureate, she led statewide workshops on writing social justice themed poems. Twitter Username: RozgaMargaret Raúl Sanchez is the former City of Redmond Poet Laureate. He teaches poetry both in English and Spanish through the Seattle Arts and Lectures (WITS), and Jack Straw Cultural programs. He volunteered for PONGO Teen Writing at the Juvenile Detention Center. His second collection is When There Were No Borders. Twitter Username: san96979803 Website: https://poetraulsanchez.com Maiah A Merino, a Chicanx Poet, recently coedited The Yellow Medicine Review’s Spring 2022 Journal: Miracles & Defining Moments. Her work appears in The Yellow Medicine Review and The Raven Chronicles. She is a 2021/2022 Writing the Land Poet, and recipient of the 2021 Artist Gap Award. Gregory Luce, author of five poetry collections, has organized community poetry events including Arlington Poets in Solidarity With Ukraine (May 2022). He serves as the board chair of Day Eight, a Washington, DC–based nonprofit founded to support local artists in writing about their work. Twitter Username: dctexpoet |
Rooms 443-444, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T174. Persistent political, racial, and religious divisions have made Naomi Shihab Nye's long-beloved poem "Kindness" one that repeatedly resurfaces with its gentle yet urgent call for human connection. Like the poem, Nye's vast body of work as a poet, essayist, anthologist, novelist, and children's book author transcends genres and bridges worlds. Panelists will use the poem as a spark to discuss Nye's impact on their own work and lives. Nye will then close the event with brief remarks and a new poem. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection and Barnes and Noble's Book of the Year, World of Wonders—and four books of poetry. She serves as poetry editor for Sierra magazine and is professor of English in the University of Mississippi's MFA program. Twitter Username: aimeenez Website: www.aimeenez.net Nathalie Handal's recent books include Life in a Country Album, which “illuminates the luxuriance and longing of deracination—a contemporary Orpheus,” and The Republics, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers." She is a professor at Columbia University. Twitter Username: TheCityWriter Website: www.nathaliehandal.com Hayan Charara is the author of four poetry books, including These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit. He edited Inclined to Speak, an anthology of contemporary Arab American poetry, and edits the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize with Fady Joudah. He teaches at the University of Houston. Jenny Browne's most recent collection is Fellow Travelers: New and Selected Poems, volume 17 in the Texas Poet Laureate Series. She lives in San Antonio, Texas, teaches at Trinity University, and is the 2020 Fulbright Distinguished Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Center at Queens University Belfast. Twitter Username: jennypoet Website: www.jennybrowne.com
Twitter Username: Cenote7 |
Rooms 445-446, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T175. In an adrenaline-driven culture rife with fearmongering and trauma porn, how do we write conscientious fiction about local, national or global issues and emergencies? Given the damage and desensitization linked to our constant exposure to bleed-and-lead news, many writers grapple with exercising awareness, optimism and empathy while shining a light on injustice, treachery, and tragedy. Five award-winning authors/editors discuss illuminating—vs. sensationalizing—real-life topics in fictional work. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Soma Mei Sheng Frazier's debut novel is forthcoming from Holt in 2024, repped by Victoria Sanders & Associates. She is founding editor of Subnivean, SUNY Oswego's undergraduate-staffed literary publication. Her work has appeared in or won nods from HBO, Zoetrope-All Story, ZYZZYVA, Hyphen, and Story. Twitter Username: somameisheng Website: http://enizagam.org Tomas Monz’s debut novel, Big Familia, was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway, the Lambda, and the Foreword Indies Awards. He edited the popular Rad Dad zine for over a decade and the book Rad Families. He’s a 2020 Artist Affiliate for Headlands Center for Arts and 2022 UCross Resident. Twitter Username: tomas_moniz Miah Jeffra is the author of four books, most recently The Violence Almanac and American Gospel, and coeditor of the anthology Home Is Where You Queer Your Heart. They are founding editor of queer and trans literary collaborative, Foglifter Press. Twitter Username: JeffraMiah Joseph Han is the author of Nuclear Family and a 2022 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. A recipient of a Kundiman fellowship, his work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Lit Hub, and Catapult. Twitter Username: hanjoseph Keenan Norris is a novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His books include the novel The Confession of Copeland Cane and the nonfiction work Chi Boy. His short work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, and Alta. He teaches at San Jose State University. |
Room 447-448, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T176. It can feel like a death when the book you’ve labored over has been widely rejected, orphaned, or stalled in publishing. This panel explores the choices writers face when the universe seems to have said a resounding no. Should you retool based on feedback or trust your vision? Should you wait for the zeitgeist to turn or consider alternative routes to publication? Or is it time to start something new? The writers gathered here have found various ways to bring moribund projects back to life. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Zoe Zolbrod is the author of the memoir The Telling and the novel Currency. She is the coeditor of the Sunday Rumpus and her essays have appeared in The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, Salon, Stir Journal, and elsewhere. Twitter Username: zoezolbrod Website: zoezolbrod.com Anne Liu Kellor is a Seattle-based author of Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Belonging, which won an IPPY Award and was a Foreword Indies Book of the Year Finalist in Multicultural Nonfiction. Anne has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Seventh Wave, Jack Straw, 4Culture, and more. Twitter Username: anneliukellor |
Terrace Suite I, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T177. In 2022, Seattle Escribe and Mineral School piloted a partnership for the first all-Spanish language residency in the US to take place at Mineral School in Washington during September, Hispanic Heritage Month. The residency provided an all-Spanish space for four writers to create and build community. We’ll explore the demand for spaces centered on the needs of non-English creative writers and offer insight into ways English-led organizations can collaborate with non-English-led organizations. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Jane Hodges, of Seattle, is a prose writer and the founder of Mineral School, an artists' residency near Mt. Rainier in Washington state. The author of Rent Vs. Own (Chronicle Books, 2012), she holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has published journalism widely in print and online media. Claudia Castro Luna is an Academy of American Poets, Poets Laureate Fellow (2019), Washington State Poet Laureate (2018–2021), and Seattle's first Civic Poet (2015–2017) She is the author of Cipota under the Moon, Killing Marías, One River, A Thousand Voices, and the chapbook This City. Twitter Username: ClaudiaC_L José L. Montero is a bilingual writer, editor, and advocate of Spanish-language literature in the United States. He holds MFAs in narrative and poetry and was part of the Jack Straw Writers Program. A former president of Seattle Escribe, he currently serves on the board of Seattle City of Literature. Twitter Username: PepeEscribidor Teresa Luengo Cid works for the King County Library System serving the Spanish-speaking population, creating reading clubs in Spanish and as a literacy workshop presenter for Latino parents. She coordinated an early literacy program in Spanish, worked as a parent educator and as a language teacher. Maria de Lourdes Victoria is a bilingual, award-winning author. She is the author of Los Hijos del Mar (Ediciones B, 2006), Más Allá de la Justicia (Entre Líneas, Libros y Palabras, 20210), and La Casa de los Secretos (Planeta México, 2016). The founder of Seattle Escribe, she is a Hedgebrook alumna. Twitter Username: MariaLVictoria Website: www.mariadelourdesvictoria.com |
Terrace Suite II, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T178. CLMP’s Firecracker Award winners and finalists in the Best Debut Magazine category share the ins and outs of launching a magazine, building a readership, and developing strategies for success and sustainability. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Montana Agte-Studier is the director of membership and NYSCA NYTAP at CLMP. Montana holds a BFA in jazz flute and a BA in literature/arts in context from The New School University. She lives in New York City, is associate publisher at The Mantle, and is currently working on a novel. Adriana E. Ramírez is a Mexican-Colombian writer, essayist, critic, and poet based in Pittsburgh. She won the inaugural PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize (2015) for her novella-length work of nonfiction, Dead Boys (Little A, 2016). Her full-length work of nonfiction, The Violence, is forthcoming. Twitter Username: zadri Website: www.aeramirez.com |
Signature Room, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 5 |
T179. Have you ever applied for a fellowship, residency, or grant and wondered if your application has what it takes to be a top contender? This is a rare chance to hear from a diverse group of authors who’ve served on selection committees for state and national grants as well as fellowships and residencies. You will gain a better understanding of what judges are looking for, what goes into the selection process and how you might identify which fellowships, residencies, and grants are the best fit. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Julayne Lee is the author of Not My White Savior, which has been taught in university freshman literature and race and ethnicity courses. She has spoken on adoption in the US and Korea and hosts writing workshops for adoptees and foster alumni. She has been a judge for national fellowships and residencies.@julayneelle. Twitter Username: julayneelle Website: http://www.julaynelee.com/ Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications) and is a former Steinbeck Fellow and Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner. She is the creator of the quarterly reading series Hitched and a cofounder of Women Who Submit. Twitter Username: xochitljulisa Angela Franklin is a retired management analyst who is also a poet, essayist, and grant writer from Los Angeles, California. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction from Antioch University Los Angeles, and was a recent evaluator for the California Arts Council's annual grant program for two cycles. Twitter Username: angelamfranklin Janice Lobo Sapigao (she/her) is a poet from San José, California. She is the author of two books of poetry, microchips for millions (Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc., 2016) and like a solid to a shadow (Nightboat Books, 2022). She was the 2020–2021 Santa Clara County Poet Laureate. Twitter Username: janicesap Amanda Galvan Huynh is the author of Songs of Brujería (Big Lucks) & coeditor of Of Color: Poets Ways of Making Anthology (Operating System). She has received support from The MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Sewanee Writers' Conference, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Squaw Valley. Twitter Username: amghuynh Website: amandagalvanhuynh.com |
Ballroom 1, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 5 |
T180. Join National Book Award–honored authors Donika Kelly (Bestiary, 2016 Poetry Longlist) and Danez Smith (Don’t Call Us Dead, 2017 Poetry Finalist) in a conversation about the power of poetry for both author and reader, and its influence on the evolution of their own writing across collections. Presented in partnership with the National Book Foundation, and moderated by the Foundation’s Executive Director Ruth Dickey. This event will be livestreamed. ASL interpretation and live captioning will be provided. Danez Smith is the author of three collections, most recently Homie and Don't Call Us Dead, a finalist for the National Book Award. They are the cohost of the podcast VS with poet Franny Choi. Twitter Username: danez_smif
Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry, and Bestiary, the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a founding member of the collective Poets at the End of the World. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.
Twitter Username: officialdonika
Ruth Dickey has spent over 25 years working at the intersection of community building, writing, and art, now as Executive Director of the National Book Foundation. Ruth previously had the pleasure of leading organizations in Washington, DC; New Orleans, LA; Cincinnati, OH; and, most recently, in Seattle, WA, as Executive Director of Seattle Arts & Lectures. An ardent fan of dogs and coffee, she served as a fiction judge for the 2019 National Book Awards, and holds an MFA in poetry from UNC-Greensboro, and a BS in Foreign Service and an MA in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University.
|
Bookfair Stage, Sponsored by the Dramatists Guild, Exhibit Hall 1 & 2, Summit Building |
T181. Founded in 2020, In-Na-Po—Indigenous Nations Poets—is a national Indigenous poetry community committed to mentoring emerging writers, nurturing the growth of Indigenous poetic practices, and raising the visibility of all Native Writers past, present, and future. In-Na-Po recognizes the role of poetry in sustaining tribal sovereign nations and Native languages. This reading celebrates our third year of operation and follows on our inaugural retreat in Washington, DC, at the Library of Congress. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Kimberly Blaeser, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of Indigenous Nation Poets, has published five poetry collections including Copper Yearning. An emeritus professor at UW—Milwaukee and MFA faculty member for Institute of American Indian Arts, she is Anishinaabe from White Earth. Twitter Username: kmblaeser Heid E. Erdrich is a poet, writer, editor, and winner of a National Poetry Series Award for Little Big Bully. She teaches in the low residency MFA program of Augsburg University. Heid is Ojibwe, enrolled at Turtle Mountain. Twitter Username: HeidErdrich Website: heiderdrich.com |
1:45 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. | |
Rooms 328-329, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T183. Perhaps no teacher has more profoundly shaped the investments of contemporary poetry than Eavan Boland, director from 1996 until her death in 2020 of the Stegner Program at Stanford and a frequent faculty member at the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences. Comprised of former students, colleagues, and critics, this panel assesses Boland’s legacy as a teacher and writer, focusing in particular on her enduring vision of what poetry can and should achieve in a contentious world. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Christopher Kempf is the author of the poetry collections Late in the Empire of Men (Four Way, 2017) and What Though the Field Be Lost (LSU, 2021), as well as the scholarly book Craft Class: The Workshop in American Culture (Johns Hopkins, 2022). A former Stegner Fellow, he teaches at Illinois. Amaud Jamaul Johnson is the author of three poetry collections, Imperial Liquor (Pitt Poetry Series 2020), National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Darktown Follies (Tupelo 2013), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and Red Summer (Tupelo 2006), winner of the Dorset Prize. Esther Lin was born in Brazil and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She was a 2022 artist in residence at Cité internationale, a 2020 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a 2017–19 Wallace Stegner Fellow, and author of The Ghost Wife (PSA). Twitter Username: Whalebaby Bruce Snider is the author of three poetry collections—Fruit; Paradise, Indiana; and The Year We Studied Women. He is also coeditor of The Poem's Country: Place and Poetic Practice. He teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Twitter Username: BhsniderBruce Website: www.brucesnider.com |
Room 331, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T184. This panel will discuss the world of crypto-poetry and our experiences: where we’ve been and where we’re headed with our literary NFTs on these dynamic new publishing platforms. The participants' backgrounds in artificial intelligence, poetry, visual art, and creating / minting / selling / buying on the blockchain provide a new way of presenting poetry to readers. Attendees will benefit from hearing about our own work in crypto-spaces: the technology, successes, obstacles, failures, and triumphs. Sasha Stiles is an acclaimed poet, artist, and AI researcher recognized as a pioneer of generative literature and blockchain poetics. She is cofounder of theVERSEverse, a literary NFT gallery, and author of Technelegy, a groundbreaking hybrid text that’s been hailed as an “instant techno-classic.” Twitter Username: Sashastiles Ana M Caballero is a first-gen Colombian-US poet whose work rips the veil off of romanticized motherhood and questions notions that present female sacrifice as a virtue. Her work has won the Beverly International Prize, Colombia's Jose Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Twitter Username: CaballeroAnaMa |
Room 332, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T185. Writers, editors, publishers, and podcasters from Santa Cruz, California (The Hive Poetry Collective, Catamaran Literary Reader, Viz. Inter-Arts, Xinachtli Journal, Santa Cruz Writes) will discuss strategies to create a thriving trans-cultural and trans-genre community of local and national journals, readings, interviews, conferences, radio shows, and other outreach. We offer our experiences as a way to stimulate others eager to seed local projects that connect across stylistic and cultural differences. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Dr. Victoria Bañales is a member of the Hive Poetry Collective, Writers of Color-Santa Cruz County, and is founder and editor of Xinachtli Journal—Journal X. A Macondo and VONA fellow, she is the recipient of two poetry awards. She is a professor of English at Cabrillo College. Twitter Username: BanalesVictoria Catherine Segurson is the editor of Catamaran Literary Reader, and publishes environmental writing. She has worked at two major literary magazines, Zoetrope All-Story, and ZYZZVA. She has worked as a visual artist exhibiting and selling her paintings in galleries in San Francisco and Santa Cruz. Farnaz Fatemi, an Iranian American poet, is a founding member of The Hive Poetry Collective, which produces podcasts and events in Santa Cruz. Her book Sister Tongue (Kent State UP, 2022) won the Wick First Book Prize. She taught writing at UC Santa Cruz for twenty-one years. Her poems are widely anthologized. Twitter Username: sasqitoon Website: www.farnazfatemi.com Roxi Power has taught for 23 years at UC Santa Cruz where she edits Viz. Inter-Arts—a cross-genre anthology series. She has a new manuscript,The Songs that Objects Sing. She has many poems in journals and books and writes/performs live film narration widely, including the Tennessee Williams Festival. Dion O’Reilly is the author of Ghost Dogs and Sadness of the Apex Predator. Her poems appear in Rattle, Cincinnati Review, The Sun, and The Slowdown. She is a member of The Hive PoetryCollective, which produces podcasts and events. She leads workshops with poets from all over the United States. Twitter Username: dionoreilly Website: dionoreilly.wordpress.com |
Rooms 333-334, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T186. Four teachers from Medgar Evers College’s Creative Writing / Literature program will talk about how they use and integrate “transgressive” texts in their classrooms to explore the intersection of sexuality, gender, social justice, and human equality. Panelists will discuss concerns and approaches in preparing students of color to develop an aesthetic inclusivity as they evaluate meanings of sexual and moral boundaries in their creative work. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Joanna Sit was born in China and grew up in New York City. She is the author of My Last Century (2012), In Thailand with the Apostles (2014), and most recently, Track Works. She teaches creative writing at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York. Holnes is the author of Stepmotherland and Migrant Psalms; his poetry has appeared in Poetry, 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 NYU. 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 Thaddeus Rutkowski is author of seven books, most recently Tricks of Light, a poetry collection. His novel Haywire won the Asian American Writers Workshop's members' choice award. He teaches at Medgar Evers College and received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Twitter Username: thadrutkowski Website: www.thaddeusrutkowski.com |
Rooms 335-336, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T187. It’s the dream of most writers to see their work on the screen—be it silver or plasma. Luckily, as streaming expands, there’s a growing need for content, especially when connected to intellectual property like, you got it, a book! This panel includes novelists at all stages of bringing their book to the screen—from filming a “proof of concept” to optioning a novel to seeing it become a film. Join us to chat about agents vs. managers, approaches to adaptation, options, production, and premieres. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Shawn Wong is the author of two novels, Homebase and American Knees, and the editor or coeditor of six anthologies of Asian American and American multicultural literature. He is professor of English and the Byron and Alice Lockwood Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington. Twitter Username: shawnwongwrites tammy lynne stoner is an award-winning screenwriter and author of the novel Sugar Land (Red Hen Press, 2018) who creates gritty, queer-centric stories. She is also the publisher of Gertrude journal, lives in Lake Oswego, Oregon, with her three kids, four pets, and one ladyfriend, and is most often found in the tub. Twitter Username: TammyStoner Website: www.TammyLynneStoner.com Carter Sickels is the author of the novels The Prettiest Star and The Evening Hour. He is assistant professor of creating writing at Eastern Kentucky University. Twitter Username: cartersickels Website: cartersickels.com Johanna Stoberock is the author of the novels Pigs and City of Ghosts. The 2019 recipient of the Artist Trust/Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award, 2016 Runner Up for the Italo Calvino Prize for Fiction, and a 2012 Jack Straw Fellow, her work has appeared in the Best of the Net anthology and elsewhere. Twitter Username: JGSauthor |
Room 337, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T188. In the creative writing classroom, students learn to structure stories and poems around an epiphanic moment, and in creative nonfiction they are taught to give reflection moments. These examples of strict prescriptive craft elements limit our notions of what these genres can do. This panel will share methods for writing and teaching within the genres as well as strategies for empowering students to interrogate established aspects of craft and invent new shapes capable of holding their experiences. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Rachel M. Hanson holds an MFA from the University of Utah and a PhD in literature and nonfiction from the University of Missouri. A former O'Connor Fellow in Nonfiction, she now teaches literature and creative writing at the University of North Carolina Asheville.
Eric Tran is a resident physician in psychiatry. He is the author of the forthcoming book of poetry, The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer, and the chapbooks Revisions and Affairs with Men in Suits. Twitter Username: rebelinslacks Ginger Ko is an assistant professor at Sam Houston State University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing. She is the author of Motherlover and Inherit, as well as several chapbooks. Her latest project is POWER ON, a book as interactive app. |
Rooms 338-339, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T189. The old literary tropes of the American West—the lone, white male nihilist-hero, corrupted cities, the hope of a new country—where are they now? Counterpoint Press, a longtime indie West Coast publisher, has become a leader in recasting Western lit with novels that are diverse, feminist, radical, time-bending, and darkly comic. Meet the new West as four Counterpoint authors discuss their groundbreaking projects and the region's evolving motifs, moderated by Counterpoint's editor in chief. Download event outline and supplemental documents.He is currently vice president, editor in chief of Counterpoint Press, one of the largest independent publishers in the country. He acquires and edits both fiction and nonfiction. Twitter Username: dansmetanka Natashia Deón is a two-time NAACP Image Award Nominee for Outstanding Literature, Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award Nominee in Fiction, a practicing criminal attorney, and author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Perishing and Grace, and is a professor at UCLA and Antioch University. Twitter Username: natashiadeon Website: www.natashiadeon.com Nawaaz Ahmed was born in Tamil Nadu, India. His debut novel, Radiant Fugitives, was a finalist for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and was longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Aspen Literary Prize. He currently lives in Brooklyn. Twitter Username: nawaazonthenet Tod Goldberg is the New York Times bestselling author of fifteen books, including Gangster Nation, Gangsterland, and The Low Desert. He is a professor of creative writing at UC Riverside, where he founded and directs the low residency MFA in creative writing and writing for the performing arts programs. Twitter Username: todgoldberg Website: todgoldberg.com Maria Hummel is the author of four novels, including Still Lives, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick and BBC Culture Best Book of the Year. Her awards include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, Bread Loaf Fellowship, and the APR/Honickman Poetry Prize. She teaches at the University of Vermont. Twitter Username: MariaHummel2 |
Rooms 340-342, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T190. In the face of rising white supremacist violence, nationalism, and xenophobia, this reading features Jewish poets who are reckoning with US and Israeli state violence. Panelists will read from their work and discuss the role of poetry in challenging Zionism and confronting white supremacy, Islamophobia, and anti-semitism. These poets envision a Judaism that includes many races, genders, sexualities, nationalities, and stands with all oppressed peoples. They ask: How can our poetics imagine a Jewish future rooted in diaspora and solidarity? Download event outline and supplemental documents.Shelby Handler is a writer, organizer, and educator living in Seattle on Duwamish land. Recent work has appeared in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Pank, Sugar House Review, and The Journal, among others. Twitter Username: shelbeleh Sara Brickman is a queer Jewish writer and performer from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Their poems and essays appear in Narrative, Indiana Review, Adroit, and Ghosts of Seattle Past. Their work investigates trauma, mental illness, and alternate realities. They live in Seattle, where they teach writing to youth. sam sax is a queer, jewish, writer, and educator. Author of Madness (National Poetry Series), Bury It (James Laughlin Award), and Pig (Scribner, 2023). They've received fellowships from Yaddo, Macdowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts. They're currently a lecturer at Stanford University. Twitter Username: samsax1 Website: www.samsax.com Tom Haviv is a Brooklyn-based, Israeli-born writer, multimedia artist, and organizer. His debut book of poetry, A Flag of No Nation, was by Jewish Currents Press in 2019. He is the founder of the Hamsa Flag Project, which intends to stimulate conversation about the future of Israel / Palestine. Twitter Username: tmhaviv Mónica Gomery is the author of Might Kindred, winner of the 2021 Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize. A Venezuelan American Ashkenazi poet, her work appears recently in The Iowa Review, Adroit, and Poet Lore. She is a rabbi at Kol Tzedek Synagogue, on unceded Lenni Lenape land in Philadelphia. |
Rooms 343-344, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T191. Linked short story collections have become more popular, perhaps in part because of their hybrid nature. They can employ recurring themes, characters, and settings to situate readers in worlds that move beyond the borders of many short stories while stopping short of the breadth and propulsion of a novel. Minding the gaps, or the spaces, is key in writing linked story collections. How does space function between and within linked collections, and what stories does one choose to tell and why? Download event outline and supplemental documents.Ramona Reeves won the 2022 Drue Heinz Literature Prize for her linked story collection, It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories. Her work has appeared in The Southampton Review, Bayou magazine, New South, Texas Highways, and others. She lives with her wife in Texas. Twitter Username: ramona_reeeves Leslie Pietrzyk is the author of Admit This to No One, Silver Girl, and This Angel on My Chest, a collection of short stories that won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. She teaches fiction at the Converse College low-residency MFA program. Twitter Username: lesliepwriter Website: www.workinprogressinprogress.com Camille Acker grew up in Washington, DC. She holds a BA in English from Howard University and an MFA in creative writing from New Mexico State University. She is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection, Training School for Negro Girls. Rion Amilcar Scott is the author of story collections, The World Doesn't Require You and Insurrections, which won the 2017 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. He earned an MFA from George Mason University and teaches English at the University of Maryland. Twitter Username: reeamilcarscott Toni Ann Johnson won the 2021 Flannery O'Connor Award for her linked story collection Light Skin Gone to Waste. She is a 2015 NAACP Image Award nominee for her debut novel Remedy for a Broken Angel and a two-time winner of the Humanitas Prize for her screenplays Ruby Bridges and Crown Heights. Twitter Username: toniannjohnson |
Rooms 345-346, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T192. Community-based writing organizations, especially those that engage marginalized writers, can provide essential consistency in lives shaken by change. How, as leaders of these organizations, do we weather our own maelstroms of insufficient funding and staff turnover without sacrificing program quality? Join a group of educators, advocates, and nonprofit administrators as we discuss the factors that can disturb consistency in a community writing program and how to combat or avoid such challenges. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Mallory Hellman is director of the the Iowa Youth Writing Project, a K–12 outreach organization based at the University of Iowa. Her work focuses on empowering marginalized communities through creativity and mutual aid. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a Capricorn, and a gardener. Alyesha Wise is a writer and poet from Camden, New Jersey. Currently residing in L.A., she is the cofounder of Spoken Literature Art Movement and the director of program development for Street Poets Inc. Alyesha is also the cofounder of The Philly Pigeon and has been seen on platforms such as OWN, BET, and PBS. Twitter Username: mswise Suma Karaman Rosen has nearly 30 years’ experience in corporate, nonprofit, and educational settings. She joined InsideOut Literary Arts in January 2017, and is inspired daily by the students the organization serves. She is dedicated to amplifying youth voice, from the classroom to the community. |
Rooms 347-348, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T193. Author Nicole Chung recently wrote in The Atlantic that Asian writers are expected to educate readers with their writing. Writers of color tend to be asked about racism rather than craft during events. We are Asian American writers who often don't write explicitly about race / racism, choosing instead to focus on other aspects of our experiences/identities. In this panel, we discuss the importance of recognizing and honoring the multitudes inside us even during a time of increased anti-Asian hate. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Dominic Lim's debut novel All the Right Notes, an LGBTQIA+ Asian rom-com, will be released in June 2023 by Forever (GCP/Hachette). He is a member of Actors' Equity, the Writers Grotto, and is one of the cohosts of Babylon Salon, the long-running reading and performance series in San Francisco. Twitter Username: J_Dominic_Lim Preeti Vangani is the author of Mother Tongue Apologize, winner of the RL Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Threepenny Review and Gulf Coast, among others. She is the winner of the 2022 Pen/Dau Emerging Writers Prize and has been a resident at UCross & Djerassi. She holds an MFA from USF. Twitter Username: Pscripturient A.H. Kim is an immigrant, graduate of Harvard College and Berkeley Law School, retired attorney, and author of A Good Family and an upcoming novel to be published in 2023. Her nonfiction writings on cancer have appeared in Zocalo Public Square, Saturday Evening Post, and several anthologies. Twitter Username: AHKimAuthor Rita Chang-Eppig received her MFA from NYU. Her debut novel about the infamous Chinese pirate queen is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2023. Her stories have appeared/are forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, The Best American Short Stories 2021, and elsewhere. Twitter Username: rche_types Website: rchetypes.com Vanessa Hua is the author of national bestsellers Forbidden City and A River of Stars, and Deceit and Other Possibilities, winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. A NEA Literature Fellow, she has received a Rona Jaffe Writers' Award and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing. Twitter Username: vanessa_hua Website: www.vanessahua.com |
Rooms 427-429, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T194. This panel will focus on teaching revision in the creative writing workshop by examining practices that empower students and enhance pedagogy. Panelists will discuss different workshop modes and levels, from graduate to introductory, drawing upon a range of techniques, from traditional to innovative. We’ll share perspectives from liberal arts colleges to HBCUs to large universities in order to present revision as an angle of vision useful not only in academics but also life beyond the classroom. Download event outline and supplemental documents.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, his work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Mid-American Review, Marathon Literary Review, and Barely South Review, among others. 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. 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. 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 Author of Black Indian, and a journalist for over twenty-five years, Shonda Buchanan 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 |
Room 430, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T195. Lyric essays are powerful tools for creative resistance. The essays selected for this reading and new anthology embody resistance through content, style, design, and form, representing of a broad spectrum of experiences that illustrate how writers and their identities can intersect, conflict, and even resist one another. Together, they provide a dynamic example of the lyric essay’s range of expression while showcasing some of the most visionary contemporary essayists writing in the form today. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Chloe Garcia Roberts is a poet and translator from the Spanish and Chinese. She is the author of a book of poetry, The Reveal, and the translator of two books of poetry by the poet Li Shangyin. She works as the deputy editor of Harvard Review and is a freelance translator of children's literature. Twitter Username: @CGarciaRoberts Chelsea Biondolillo is the author of The Skinned Bird: Essays and two prose chapbooks, #Lovesong and Ologies. Her work has appeared in Best American Science & Nature Essays, Orion, Brevity, Diagram, River Teeth, Passages North, and others. She is a former Colgate O'Connor and Oregon Literary fellow. Twitter Username: c_biondolillo Website: http://roamingcowgirl.com Molly McCully Brown is the author of the essay collection Places I've Taken My Body and the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. With Susannah Nevison, she coauthored the poetry collection In the Field Between Us. She teaches at Old Dominion University. Twitter Username: mmccullybrown Website: http://mollymccullybrown.com Hea-Ream Lee is a writer and teacher. She received an MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Arizona, where she edited fiction for Sonora Review and currently teaches undergraduate writing. Hea-Ream’s work appears in Shenandoah, Terrain.org, Popula, Hobart, and others. Twitter Username: heareamlee Michael Torres was born and bought up in Pomona, California, where he spent his adolescence as a graffiti artist. His debut collection, An Incomplete List of Names, was a National Poetry Series selection. Currently, he teaches creative writing in Minnesota. |
Rooms 431-432, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T196. The interactive panel discussion explores the challenges and rewards of running literary magazines led by and serving historically marginalized writers. Imagining our own systems outside of mainstream publishing, we aim to build mutually supportive coalitions to share resources and skills around publishing itself, as well as structural issues such as ethics around fundraising and financing operations. This event involves participation among not only panelists, but also audience members. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Mimi Wong is editor in chief of The Offing, which was awarded a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in The Believer, Catapult, Electric Literature, Hyperallergic, Joyland, Literary Hub, The Margins, and Refinery29. She teaches writing at The New School. Twitter Username: whoismims Alexandra Watson is a biracial writer living in Harlem. She is executive editor of Apogee Journal, a publication dedicated to highlighting underrepresented voices. She teaches writing at Columbia University, Baruch College, and at the Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. Twitter Username: watsonlexis Jyothi Natarajan is editor in chief of The Margins, the digital literary magazine published out of the Asian American Writers' Workshop. Jyothi has worked as an editor in book publishing, journalism, and community arts nonprofits for over fifteen years. Twitter Username: cupofjyo Angie Cruz is the author of the novels, Dominicana and How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water. She teaches at University of Pittsburgh and is the editor of asterixjournal.com. For more info: angiecruz.com. Twitter Username: acruzwriter
|
Rooms 433-434, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T197. Plural like our ancestries, genders, amd desires are our remappings of the re-territorialized borders between our lands, bodies, and waters. Resisting Euroheteropatriarchal constructions of the cosmos that perversely pastorally prefigure white / straight / cis-male-ness as exclusively normative in nature, womanist / LGBTQ writers, performers, and editors of color share geohistorical perspectives on where and when we re-enter, subverting dialogues around ecology, and decolonizing environmental literatures. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán is author of Archipiélagos; Antes y después del Bronx: Lenapehoking; and South Bronx Breathing Lessons. A CantoMundo, Macondo, RAWI, and Lambda Fellow, he is editor of Yellow Medicine Review's global queer Indigenous and Movement Research Performance Journal's Native issues. K. Ka'imilani Leota Sellers received her MFA from Eastern Kentucky University. A queer Samoan multigenre writer, her writing appears in Yellow Medicine Review and Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color. She teaches in Hawai'i and serves on the LGBTQ Writers Caucus leadership team. Twitter Username: KKaimilaniLS Website: http://www.hinarising.com/ Amy M. Alvarez is a Puerto Rican / Jamaican Affrilachian poet published in Ploughshares, PRISM International, The Acentos Review, and Obsidian. She is coeditor of Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology. A CantoMundo, Macondo, VCCA, and VONA fellow, she teaches at West Virginia University. Twitter Username: Amy__Writes Website: https://amymalvarez.com D. Keali'i MacKenzie is a queer Kanaka Maoli writer and Pacific Tongues Poet-Facilitator. He is the author of From Hunger to Prayer and coeditor of Bamboo Ridge's speculative issue. His work is in 'Ōiwi: A Native Hawaiian Journal; Foglifter; and Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English. MK Chavez is an Afro-Latinx writer and educator. She is the author of Mothermorphosis and Dear Animal. A Hedgebrook, VONA, and CantoMundo fellow, she received an Alameda County Arts Leadership Award, the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and San Francisco Foundation / Nomadic Press literary award. Twitter Username: mkchavez |
Rooms 435-436, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T198. Five women writing crime fiction discuss how they’re pushing boundaries and challenging assumptions, addressing the following questions: How does crime function as an element of narrative? How does gender interact with race, sexuality, gender identity, and disability within this genre? How does our work examine the explosion of interest in true crime? How do we think about women and violence in a society that denies women personhood? Most importantly, what is crime fiction and why do we love it? Download event outline and supplemental documents.Polly Stewart is the author of The Good Ones. Her nonfiction is forthcoming on Crime Reads. She runs The Craft of Crime Fiction interview series, usually on Instagram but sometimes on Twitter. Twitter Username: pollystew 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 Katie Gutierrez's writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Harper's Bazaar, Texas Monthly, and more. Her debut novel, More Than You'll Ever Know, was published by William Morrow in 2022. Twitter Username: katie_gutz Danya Kukafka is the author of the nationally bestselling novels Notes on an Execution and Girl in Snow. She works as a literary agent with Trellis Literary Management. Twitter Username: danyakukafka Kirstin Chen is the New York Times bestselling author of three novels. Her latest, Counterfeit, is a Reese’s Book Club pick, a Roxane Gay book club pick, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her previous two novels are Bury What We Cannot Take and Soy Sauce for Beginners. Twitter Username: kirstin_chen |
Room 437, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T199. What are divination poetics and how do they manifest in writing practice? Can divination tools such as the Tarot, I Ching, and Throwing the Bones influence modes of creation and assemblage? Does the written word have the same generative agency as a reading? When we read the spread or the signs are we also writing the story? Four writers and divination practitioners share the ways in which divination, intuition, and embodied knowledge influence, guide, and disrupt their writing. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Michele Battiste is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Waiting for the Wreck to Burn, which won the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press. She has taught workshops for Gotham Writers Workshops, Teen Ink, and Wichita State University. She currently raises funds to protect nature. Twitter Username: michelebattiste Website: http://www.michelebattiste.com Megan Kaminski is a poet and essayist—and the author of three books of poetry, most recently Gentlewomen, and Prairie Divination, an illustrated collection of essays and oracle deck (with artist L. Ann Wheeler). She is an associate professor in English at the University of Kansas. Twitter Username: megan_kaminski Website: http://www.megankaminski.com/ Selah Saterstrom is the author of the novels Slab, The Meat and Spirit Plan, and The Pink Institution. Her book of essays, Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics, was awarded the Essay Press Book Prize. She is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Denver. |
Rooms 440-442, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T200. Independent writers centers create community across the nation. In addition to literary centers, retreats and conferences offer connections for writers while they hone their craft. For MFA graduates, teaching at a center can be an artistically and economically enriching alternative to academia. Panelists from a variety of literary organizations will explore the unique opportunities writers centers, conferences, and retreats provide for all writers and teachers of writing. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Michael Khandelwal writes and publishes fiction and poetry and teaches workshops for The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, Virginia, for which he is the executive director (and co-founder). He is a columnist for Coastal Virginia magazine and a former webmaster for The American Council on Education. Rob Arnold (he/him) is a Chamoru poet, editor, and Interim Executive Director of Hugo House, Seattle's independent writing center. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Hyphen, Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, RED INK, Yes Poetry, The Ocean State Review, and The Volta, among others. Twitter Username: _robarnold Dariel Suarez is the Cuban-born author of the novel The Playwright's House and the story collection, A Kind of Solitude, winner of the International Latino Book Award. He is education director at GrubStreet and resides in the Boston area. Twitter Username: https://twitter.com/Darie Erika Krouse is the author of Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation (memoir), Contenders (novel), and Come Up and See Me Sometime (short stories). Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, and One Story. She teaches at Lighthouse and the Regis MFA. Twitter Username: ErikaKrouse Website: www.erikakrouse.com Jake Friedman is a poet, editor, and culture worker. Past affiliations / employments include the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at ASU, the City of Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture, and Four Chambers Press. He is currently an MFA candidate at Colorado State University. Twitter Username: friedmanandeggs |
Rooms 443-444, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T201. Contests offered by independent, small, and university presses have become one of the most common ways for authors of story, essay, and poetry collections to publish their books. Five editors of literary prizes will describe the contests offered by their presses, highlight the traits of successful submissions, and offer practical advice for authors. Presses represented include Willow Springs Books, Sarabande Books, University of Georgia Press, Gasher Press, and Texas Tech University Press. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Katie Cortese is the author of Girl Power and Other Short-Short Stories and Make Way for Her and Other Stories. Her work has recently appeared in Redivider, Gargoyle, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Texas Tech University and is the faculty director of Texas Tech University Press. Twitter Username: KatieCortese Website: www.katiecortese.com Jonathan Johnson's most recent book of poetry is May Is an Island. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry and numerous other anthologies and magazines. He migrates between Scotland, Upper Michigan, and Eastern Washington University where he is a poetry professor in the MFA program. Kristen Renee Miller is the incoming executive director and editor in chief for Sarabande Books. A poet and translator, she is the 2020 winner of the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation and the translator of two books from the French by poet Marie-Andrée Gill. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky. Twitter Username: kristenmill Website: kristenreneemiller.com Bethany Snead is an acquisitions editor at the University of Georgia Press, where she acquires trade creative works, literary studies, and environmental studies, and oversees their series-based literary competitions. She has worked in scholarly publishing since 2008. Whitney Koo is a PhD candidate in English- creative writing at Oklahoma State University and the founder and editor in chief of Gasher Press, a nonprofit literary press focused on representing emerging voices. Twitter Username: Whitney_Koo |
Rooms 445-446, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T202. "Identity tends to be used as a thing to pin us down ... but I am imagining ways to become unpinnable," Natalie Diaz once said. In this panel, five poets will discuss writing queer identity under the cis-hetero-patriarchal gaze—how they use direct address, performance, epistles, the collective I, and other subversive craft choices to pursue the unpinnable in their poetry. They will explore the generative approaches that worked for them as they broke open against perspective and form. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Sarah Blake is the author of three books of poetry: In Springtime, Let's Not Live on Earth, and Mr. West. She was awarded an NEA fellowship for poetry in 2013. She is also the author of two novels, Clean Air and Naamah, winner of a National Jewish Book Award. She lives outside of London. Twitter Username: blakesarah Rachel Mennies is the author of The Naomi Letters and The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry and finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. She works as an adjunct professor and freelance writer, and serves as a member of AGNI's editorial staff. Twitter Username: rmennies Website: http://www.rachelmennies.com Arisa White is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and author of Who's Your Daddy and Home Is Where You Queer Your Heart. She collaborates with other artists to expand readership for poetry and to center the narratives of queer IBPOC. White is an assistant professor of creative writing at Colby College. Twitter Username: arisaw Website: arisawhite.com C. Russell Price lives in Chicago and is the author of Tonight, We Fuck the Trailer Park Out of Each Other (SRP) and oh, you thought this was a date?!: Apocalypse Poems (Northwestern University Press). They currently serve on boards with the Ragdale Foundation and The Anarchist Review of Books. Twitter Username: C_Russell_Price 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: wochanofficial |
Room 447-448, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T203. The panelists are writers whose memoir and activist work centers on caretaking. They’ll discuss: Are they memoirists who became accidental activists or activists who use memoir to change the world? How do they stay true to the creative self when activism calls? How does the current trend in publishing, for memoirs to contain social critique, affect the caregiving memoirs the panelists ultimately sold? What are the challenges the panelists face holding these three roles? Download event outline and supplemental documents.Minna Dubin (she/her) is a writer and mother in Berkeley, California. She writes about identity and motherhood. Minna has been published in major news and literary outlets. She is the author of MOM RAGE: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood. Twitter Username: minnadubin Website: www.minnadubin.com Adiba Nelson is an author, TEDx speaker, and subject of the Emmy Award winning documentary, The Full Nelson. She wrote and self-published her first children’s book, Meet ClaraBelle Blue, in 2013, and her memoir, Ain’t That a Mother (Blackstone, 2022) is currently available in all formats. Twitter Username: adibanelson Angela Garbes is the author of Like a Mother and Essential Labor, called “a landmark and a lightning storm” by The New Yorker. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times and featured on NPR's Fresh Air. Garbes, who lives in Seattle, is also a community advocate for working families. Twitter Username: agarbes Sarah W. Jaffe is the author of Wanting What's Best: Parenting, Privilege, and Building a Just World. Her writing, which focuses on the child care and foster care systems, has appeared in The Rumpus, Slate, and Romper. She is an MFA student in creative nonfiction at The New School. Twitter Username: sarahwinifred |
Terrace Suite I, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T204. So, you didn’t win the Yale Younger Poets Prize after all. Did 35, then 40, even 50 pass you by—and still you have not published your first full-length book? It is far from impossible to begin a writing career in middle age. Panelists will discuss the paths they took to publication and offer strategies for keeping the faith through the dry spells—and for using experience to one’s advantage. They will share their approaches to publishing first books and even winning book prizes in “midlife.” Download event outline and supplemental documents.Wendy Barnes currently serves as Artist in Residence at the University of Central Oklahoma. She is the author of Landscape with Bloodfeud (2022), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry from UMass Press. She received a 2022 fellowship in prose from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. Twitter Username: @barnes_wendy Website: https://wendybarnes.net/ Xavier Cavazos is the author of Barbarian at the Gate, selected as part of the PSA's New American Poets Chapbook Series. A senior poetry editor for Poetry Northwest, Cavazos' third collection of poetry, The Devil's Workshop, is forthcoming from Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2023. 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 Joel Dias-Porter was the 1998 and 1999 Heads Up Haiku Slam Champ, he has been published in; Time, Poetry, Mead, The Offending Adam, Best American Poetry 2014, Callalloo, Ploughshares, Antioch Review, and Red Brick Review. His first book is Ideas of Improvisation. He lives in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Twitter Username: Diasporter 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. |
Terrace Suite II, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T205. What does it mean to be a mixed-race, Asian American writer in a time of increased violence toward Asian Americans? In what ways do we experience division and integration? How have our experiences as mixed-race, Asian Americans shaped us? Where do we find our authentic community? On this panel, five writers of mixed-race, Asian American descent will read from their work and engage in dialogue around these questions, focusing on the urgent need for building solidarity and understanding. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Joan Kwon Glass is the author of Night Swim, winner of the 2021 Diode Editions Book Contest. She has chapbooks with Small Harbor Publishing and Milk & Cake Press. She has been a social studies educator in the Connecticut public schools for the past twenty years. Twitter Username: joanpglass Website: www.joankwonglass.com Jessica Q. Stark is the author of Buffalo Girl and Savage Pageant, which was named one of the Best Poetry Books of 2020 in the Boston Globe and in Hyperallergic. Her poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry and others. She is a poetry editor for AGNI and the comics editor for Honey Literary. Twitter Username: jezzbah Patty Paine's most recent book of poems is Grief & Other Animals. She has published four collections of poetry, edited two anthologies, and is editor of Diode Poetry Journal and Diode Editions. She is director of liberal arts & sciences at VCUQ, in Doha, Qatar. Twitter Username: pattypaine |
Ballroom 1, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 5 |
T207. Pacific Islander literature has a rich history, abundant with poetic styles and oral storytelling traditions, exploring sustainability, imperialism, climate change, decolonization, and so much more. It is vital to discussions of American literature to read and honor the work of Pacific Islanders. Join Kundiman for a reading and conversation encompassing the multiple genres our featured authors write in, and celebrating the breadth of Pacific Islander literature today. This event will be livestreamed. ASL interpretation and live captioning will be provided. William Nuʻutupu Giles is an afakasi Samoan writer and arts educator from Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. They have performed poetry on stages across North America including the San Francisco Opera House, John F. Kennedy Center, and Broadway’s New Amsterdam Theatre. Will has facilitated poetry workshops across Oceania in Papua New Guinea, Guåhan, and Aotearoa. They were featured in the HBO documentary Russell Simmons Presents: Brave New Voices, where they helped the Hawaiʻi team win its first International Poetry Slam Championship. Will is also the first Pacific Islander to win the National Underground Poetry Individual Competition. Will’s work has been featured by NBC News, The National Parks Service, HBO, Bustle, LitHub, and Button Poetry. At home they have spent the last ten years working with Youth Speaks Hawaiʻi, giving back to the organization and community that helped them develop a voice. Kristiana Kahakauwila is a hapa writer of kanaka maoli (Native Hawaiian), German and Norwegian descent. Her first book, This is Paradise: Stories (Hogarth 2013), takes as its heart the people and landscapes of contemporary Hawai'i and was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Her middle-grade novel Clairboyance is due out from HarperCollins in 2024 and she is at work on a historical novel set on the island of Maui. A former magazine editor with Highlights for Children and Wine Spectator, Kristiana has more recently published essays and short fiction in Red Ink, Hunger Mountain, and GEO International, among others. Kristiana earned a BA in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. She was a 2015–16 Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study and is an associate professor in the department of English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She also teaches in the low-residency MFA at the Institute of American Indian Art (IAIA) in Santa Fe. Craig Santos Perez is a Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is the co-editor of six anthologies and the author of five books of poetry and a scholarly monograph. He is a professor in the English department at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa. Twitter Username: craigsperez Website: www.craigsantosperez.wordpress.com |
Bookfair Stage, Sponsored by the Dramatists Guild, Exhibit Hall 1 & 2, Summit Building |
T208. A reading and conversation with editors and staffers from San Francisco State University's literary magazine, Fourteen Hills. Participants will read from their own poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, while also discussing our new works-in-progress awards and giving a behind the scenes look at the conversations that go into producing a student-run literary magazine. Quinn Rennerfeldt Fairchild is a queer poet, parent, and partner earning her MFA at SFSU. Their work can be found in Cleaver, SAND, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in A Velvet Giant and Salamander. Her chapbook Sea Glass Catastrophe was released in 2020. They are the editor in chief of Fourteen Hills. Twitter Username: quinnfairchild Michaela Chairez is a poet from the Inland Empire. She holds a BA in English from Cal State Fullerton. Currently she's pursuing an MA in creative writing at San Francisco State University, where she's the lead poetry editor of Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review. |
3:20 p.m. to 4:35 p.m. | |
Room 327, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T209. Veterans have often been compartmentalized into an artistic corner, as white and male and PTSD-stigma-laden, often limiting writing to themes of war or hyper-masculine experience. Veterans are more than their situations, more than one category. They are a broader range and redefining the landscape of war writers. Four exceptional writers combine this panel with un-war-like discussion covering the joys and pitfalls of breaking through limiting conventions and enriching the literary conversation. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Rebecca Evans is a decorated Gulf War veteran. Her work has appeared in Gravel Literary magazine, Scribes Weekly Anthology, and is forthcoming in Fiction Southeast and War, Literature & The Arts. She’s pursuing an MFA in creative writing and is on the editorial staff of the Sierra Nevada Review. Twitter Username: RebeccaWrites Website: www.rebeccaevanswriter.com 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. Mariette Katharine Kalinowski is a former sergeant in the US Marine Corps. She deployed to Iraq in 2005 and 2008. She earned her MFA in fiction from Hunter College in 2014. Her story "The Train" appears in Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. She is still working on her first novel. Twitter Username: Skiattq Jan LaPerle’s new book of poetry, Maybe the Land Sings Back, was published in spring 2022 from Galileo Books. She completed her MFA from Southern Illinois University. She now lives in Kentucky with her husband and daughter where she serves on active duty at Fort Knox as an Army master sergeant. Twitter Username: jannasperle |
Rooms 328-329, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T210. This multigenre panel will feature four authors employing queer ecology as a framework for their creative approaches. Through lively discussion, we’ll look at queer ecology’s role in contemporary literature as a site of interrogation: how do identity, desire, and social and environmental justice intersect to form a queer perspective on nature? We will explore connection and relational experience with a queer ecological sensibility shaping the expansiveness of a new kind of nature writing. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Marco Wilkinson is an assistant professor of literary arts and cultural studies in the Literature department at UC San Diego. His focus is on creative nonfiction and eco-writing. He is the author of MADDER: A Memoir in Weeds and his work has appeared in Ecotone, Kenyon Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere Amie Whittemore is the author of Glass Harvest and an educator. She was an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow and her work has appeared in Queer Nature, Cold Mountain Review, Terrain: a Journal of Built & Natural Environments, Gettysburg Review, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere. Twitter Username: amiewhittemore Melissa Matthewson is the author of a memoir-in-essays, Tracing the Desire Line, from Split/Lip Press. Her essays have appeared in Literary Hub, Guernica, Oregon Humanities, and Catapult, among others. She teaches in the Eastern Oregon University low residency MFA program. Twitter Username: melmatthewson Alicia Mountain is the author of High Ground Coward, which won the Iowa Poetry Prize, and Four in Hand (BOA Editions, 2023). She holds a MFA from the University of Montana and a PhD from the University of Denver. Dr. Mountain teaches in the Writer's Foundry MFA at St. Joseph's University in Brooklyn. Twitter Username: HiGroundCoward Kemi Alabi is a Chicago-based poet and culture worker. They're author of Against Heaven, selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, and coeditor of The Echoing Ida Collection. Twitter Username: kemiaalabi |
Room 331, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T211. The Women's Caucus offers a space to network, plan events, and discuss issues concerning women writers (e.g., ways to support each other, lack of access to literary power structures, conference childcare, obstacles to publication, keeping literary events safe, etc.). The Women's Caucus is an inclusive space and welcomes the diverse perspectives of women writers. This meeting will be accessible to in-person and virtual attendees. |
Rooms 333-334, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T213. Reproductive rights are at risk more than ever. Memoirists, poets and novelists can play a pivotal role in highlighting the importance of reproductive rights through their work. Panelists will discuss how to create powerful literary narratives that are not polemic, yet can inspire change in thinking and action. Through brief readings and discussion between writers, we aim to foster an important conversation for writers across genres who want to center these critical issues in their work. Susan Ito coedited the anthology A Ghost at Heart's Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption. She is author of the memoir The Mouse Room. She is a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, and on faculty at Mills College and BayPath University's MFA programs. Twitter Username: thesusanito Website: http://www.susanito.com Abby Minor lives in central Pennsylvania, where she works on poems, essays, drawings, and projects exploring reproductive politics. Her first book, As I Said: A Dissent (Ricochet Editions, 2022), is a collection of long documentary poems concerning abortion, justice, and citizenship in US history. Kwoya Fagin Maples is a writer from Charleston, South Carolina. She is the author of Mend (University Press of Kentucky, 2018) which was named a 2019 Finalist for the Hurston-Wright Award for Poetry and a 2019 Finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. She teaches creative writing at the University of Alabama. Twitter Username: kwoya_maples Website: kwoyafaginmaples.com Amanda Uhle is publisher of McSweeney’s, known for its award-winning quarterly literary journal, humor website, magazines, and eclectic book publishing program. Uhle's writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Newsweek, ThinkProgress, the Boston Globe, Delacorte Review, and elsewhere. |
Rooms 335-336, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T214. Writers in English from the Arabic produce work that is both illuminating and exigent, but what does it mean to be a writer in a language that's not your “mother tongue”? How does the language of exile or distance truncate creativity and expression? What role does audience play? How do you navigate the space between translation and writing original texts? Four Arab heritage women poets and translators explore the nuances, freedoms, and shortcomings of an English language writing life. Download event outline and supplemental documents.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 NCBR Recognition Award. She's also coauthor with Marilyn Hacker of Diaspo/Renga. She won the Nazim Hizkmet Poetry Prize in 2018. Twitter Username: @DeemaShehabi Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her books include O, Louder than Hearts, and To Live in Autumn. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, Poetry, Ploughshares, and The Nation, among others. She's the cohost of Maqsouda, a podcast in Arabic about Arabic poetry. Twitter Username: zeinabeck Lubna Safi is a poet, writer, and graduate student living in California. Her poems and essays have been published in Guernica, The Journal, MIZNA, and elsewhere. Her first poetry collection, Your Blue and the Quiet Lament won the 2022 Walt McDonald First Book Prize in Poetry. Twitter Username: lubna_saf Lena Khalaf Tuffaha's book of poetry, Water and Salt, is published by Red Hen Press. Her chapbook, Arab in Newsland, won the 2016 Two Sylvias Press Prize. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Net, and the Rita Dove Prize. She holds an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at PLU. Twitter Username: LKTuffaha Website: www.lenakhalaftuffaha.com |
Room 337, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T215. Do intersectional identities and lived experiences become more accessible to readers when written collaboratively? Could collaboration be the ideal writing model to get us from the present to the future? Do these texts reach audiences dissatisfied with the single, alienated narrator? In this panel, multigenre POC and LGBTQIA+ writers will explore collaboration as a means for both the creation and publication of collaborative manuscripts. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Katie Jean Shinkle's books include Tannery Bay (with Steven Dunn); None of This Is an Invitation (with Jessica Alexander); Ruination, and others. She is an assistant professor in the MFA in creative writing, editing, and publishing program at Sam Houston State University. Steven Dunn is the author of the novels Potted Meat and Water & Power from Tarpaulin Sky Press. Some of his work can be found in Granta, Blink Ink Print, and Best of Small Fictions 2018. He is currently an MFA candidate at Goddard College. Twitter Username: ScDunnJr Natasha Marin is a conceptual artist whose people-centered projects have circled the globe and have been recognized by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, and others. She is the curator of Black Imagination (McSweeney’s 2020) and Black Powerful (2022). www.black-imagination.com. Twitter Username: melaninabundan1 Website: www.natasha-marin.com Amber Flame is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, activist, and educator. In her writing, Flame explores spirituality and sexuality, cross-woven with themes of grief and loss, motherhood and magic, and the interstitial joy in it all. Twitter Username: blkunic0rn Website: www.theamberflame.com |
Rooms 338-339, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T216. What lessons and hope can we take away from fictional depictions of historical youth activism? Authors of YA historical fiction discuss the youth activism of the 1989 Beijing Tiananmen Square protests, the post-WWII resistance of the Polish and Ukrainian people, and the resistance of Czech teens to the Soviet occupation during the cold war. They also discuss how these stories about youth-led resistance can inspire today's political protests. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Lyn Miller-Lachmann is the author of the YA novels Gringolandia, Rogue, and Torch and the coauthor (with Zetta Elliott) of the MG verse novel Moowalking. She translates picture books and graphic novels from Portuguese to English. She holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from VCFA. Twitter Username: LMillerLachmann Website: www.lynmillerlachmann.com Diana Ma is a Chinese American author of the Daughters of the Dynasty series. Her debut novel was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award in YA. She is a 2019 We Need Diverse Books mentee and has an MA in creative writing from UIC and is English faculty at North Seattle College. Twitter Username: DianaJunYiMa |
Rooms 340-342, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T217. As we guide students in their writing craft, how do our programs guide decisions and opportunities for students’ individual professional trajectories over a lifetime? With equitable access in mind, panelists offer rationales, approaches, and best practices for courses and programming in publishing, jobs and careers, literary citizenship, and/or sustaining a writing life. As part of this conversation, a free online Open Educational Resources textbook called Aspects of a Writer will be shared. Download event outline and supplemental documents.
Twitter Username: indelibly Website: https://davidkrausman.com/ Anna Leahy is a poet, nonfiction writer, pedagogy scholar, and medical humanities facilitator. Her books include What Happened Was:, Aperture, Tumor, and Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom. She directs the MFA in creative writing program at Chapman University and edits Tab Journal. Twitter Username: AMLeahy Terry Ann Thaxton has published three books of poetry: Getaway Girl, The Terrible Wife, and Mud Song, as well as Creative Writing in the Community: A Guide. She is professor of English at the University of Central Florida where she directs the MFA program. Twitter Username: terryannthaxton Website: www.terryannthaxton.com Ashley Mack-Jackson is a writer, teacher, and native Hoosier. She cofounded Word As Bond, Inc., an organization that provides free literary arts education to youth and historically marginalized communities across central Indiana. She also teaches in the College of Education at Butler University. Twitter Username: ashmackjack David Groff’s poetry collection Clay was chosen by Michael Waters for the Louise Bogan Award. An independent book editor specializing in fiction and narrative nonfiction, he teaches poetry, publishing, and literary citizenship in the MFA program of the City College of New York. Twitter Username: davidgroff Website: www.davidgroff.com |
Rooms 343-344, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T218. When we tell people about our academic support group, they ask if they can join. We know there's a need, and we want to help you start your own. In this panel, five members of Rage Against the Academic Machine will share why we formed a writers' academic support group, the personal and professional impact it has had the last five years, how it helps writers even outside the academy, and practical steps to create your own collective. Come alone or bring colleagues ready to build something. Download event outline and supplemental documents.L.M. Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas has creative nonfiction and a literary translation MFAs from the University of Iowa. She is the author of Drown Sever Sing and Don’t Come Back from Mad Creek Books. She is a Rona Jaffe fellow and works as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. Inara Verzemnieks is the author the critically acclaimed memoir Among the Living and the Dead. A member of the faculty of the University of Iowa's nonfiction writing program, she has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing and the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award. Twitter Username: inaraverz Website: inaraverzemnieks.com Sarah Viren is the author of the essay collection Mine, winner of the River Teeth Book Prize and the GLCA New Writers Award. A contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, she is also an assistant professor at Arizona State University. Twitter Username: sarahviren Website: sarahviren@wordpress.com Angela Pelster's essay collection Limber won the GLCA Nonfiction Award for new writers and was a finalist for the PEN Art of the Essay award. She's published in Ploughshares, Lit Hub, The Kenyon Review, and Granta, among others. She teaches in the MFA/BFA at Hamline University in St Paul. Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel is the author of the essay collection Fear Icons, winner of the inaugural Gournay Prize. A graduate of the University of Montana's Environmental Studies Program and the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, she teaches creative writing at Whitman College. Twitter Username: KishaSchlegel |
Rooms 345-346, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T219. Join us for an exploration of how lived experience of neurodiversity and mental health difference can translate into writing. What are the possibilities and constraints different genres and forms offer? Why do writers decide to use specific genres? How do multiple identities and practices inform and shape work? We will share our responses and writing that encompasses speculative fiction, found poems, choice-based game narratives, noir hybrid memoir, and retellings of horror novels. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Stephanie Heit is a queer disabled poet, dancer, teacher, Zoeglossia Fellow, and member of Olimpias, a disability performance collective. She codirects Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and is the author of Psych Murders and The Color She Gave Gravity. Twitter Username: stephanie_heit Website: https://stephanie-heit.com/ Nazifa Islam is the author of the poetry collections Searching for a Pulse and Forlorn Light: Virginia Woolf Found Poems. Her poems have appeared in publications including Gulf Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, The Missouri Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal. She earned her MFA at Oregon State University. Twitter Username: nafoopal Maya Beck is a broke blipster, lapsed Muslim, pan demigirl, socially anxious social justice bard, and speculative fiction writer pursuing an MFA at UCSD. Alum of programs at VONA, Kimbilio, and Tin House, her writing can be found at Strange Horizons, Mizna, PANK, NAT BRUT, and more. Twitter Username: mayathebeing Addie Tsai (any/all) has an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a PhD in dance from Texas Woman's University. Addie teaches creative writing at William & Mary. They are the author of Dear Twin and Unwieldy Creatures. Twitter Username: addiebrook |
Rooms 347-348, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T220. The letters LGBTQIA+ are a stand-in for the immense diversity in our community. What is poetry if not an expression either of or from our deepest sense of self? What does it mean to identify on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum? What does Queerness bring to and reveal about the journey of poets who so identify? How are we shaped? To what do we respond through the lens of our queerness? Join this panel of BOA Editions poets for a reading from and about their individual queerness. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Subhaga Crystal Bacon’s new book, Transitory, is forthcoming in the fall of 2023 from BOA Editions. She’s the author of two other collections, Blue Hunger (Methow Press, 2020) and Elegy with a Glass of Whiskey (BOA Editions, 2004). A Queer Elder, she lives, writes, and teaches rural north-central Washington. Nickole Brown’s books include Sister: A Novel-in-Poems, Fanny Says: A Biography-in-Poems, and two chapbooks—To Those Who Were Our First Gods and The Donkey Elegies. Currently, she teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters and is president of The Hellbender Gathering of Poets. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina. Twitter Username: nickolebrown Website: www.nickolebrown.com Dustin Pearson is the author of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud, Millennial Roost, and A Family Is a House. He is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Toledo. Twitter Username: dustinkpearson Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Children of the Land: A Memoir (Harper Collins), Cenzontle, (BOA editions), and Dulce (Northwestern University Press). He is a founding member of the Undocupoets. He teaches at the St. Mary’s College MFA program Ashland University. Twitter Username: marcelo_H_ |
Rooms 427-429, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T221. Literary agents are often called "gatekeepers" of the publishing industry, but we prefer to think of ourselves as "gate-openers." This panel aims to demystify the most opaque parts of traditional book publishing, beginning with the "slush pile" (unsolicited manuscripts) and ending far past "on-sale" (when a book is published). Literary agents wear many hats, but one of our most important jobs is to translate the industry for writers at every stage of their career, starting here. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Danya Kukafka is the author of the nationally bestselling novels Notes on an Execution and Girl in Snow. She works as a literary agent with Trellis Literary Management. Twitter Username: danyakukafka Iwalani Kim is an associate literary agent at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates. She represents adult upmarket and literary fiction and select narrative nonfiction. Her clients include Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, Patricia Patterson, Reena Shah, and Tina Vasquez. Twitter Username: IwalaniKim Annie Hwang is a literary agent at Ayesha Pande Literary where she represents literary fiction with teeth and mission-driven nonfiction. Her authors include John Paul Brammer, Franny Choi, Lilly Dancyger, and Sequoia Nagamatsu. Twitter Username: AnnieAHwang Stephanie Delman spent ten years building her list at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates before cofounding Trellis Literary Management in the fall of 2021. She represents literary, upmarket, and genre-bending adult fiction, including Zakiya Dalila Harris, Jenny Tinghui Zhang, Julia Fine, and more. Twitter Username: imaginarysmd |
Room 430, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T222. Alaska’s contemporary literature reflects richness of experience, ancestral ties to the land, and appreciations for history and heritage, culture, and the complexities of our modern world. It also relies on creativity and imaginative leaps to make life in the north “real.” Five Alaskan writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry will briefly put their recent work into context before reading from it. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Daryl Farmer's first book, Bicycling beyond the Divide, received a Barnes and Noble Discover Award. His recent work has appeared in many journals including The Whitefish Review, The Potomac Review, Hayden's Ferry, and Fourth River. He is an assistant professor at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. Nancy Lord is the author of environmental- and science-related books including the nonfiction Early Warming and Beluga Days and the novel pH. She teaches science writing for Johns Hopkins University and is a former Alaska Writer Laureate. Annie Wenstrup received her MFA in creative writing from Stonecoast (Summer 2022). She's a Smithsonian Arctic Studies Fellow and an Indigenous Nations Poetry Fellow. She serves on the Kachemak Bay Writers' Conference Advisory Committee. Twitter Username: akwenstrup Laureli Ivanoff, an award-winning journalist and columnist, writes from her hometown in Unalakleet. Published in the New York Times with a current High Country News column, she is writing a memoir sharing history of settler colonialism in Alaska and how it ripples into her life as an Inupiaq woman today. Twitter Username: laureliivanoff Tom Kizzia is author of three nonfiction books set in Alaska: Cold Mountain Path, Pilgrim's Wilderness, and The Wake of the Unseen Object. He has written for The New Yorker and the Columbia Journalism Review, and was an Anchorage Daily News reporter for twenty-five years. He lives in Homer, Alaska. |
Rooms 433-434, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T224. With representatives from many in-community retreats—the Jewish Symposium, Writing the Rainbow, Latinx Symposium, AAPI Retreat, the Diversity Fellowship, and more, this panel of diverse voices will celebrate ways to invest in and create programming for storytellers. This collection of writers and illustrators will dig into the challenges, successes, and most importantly the need for marginalized creatives to have safe, in-community spaces to grow their careers and amplify one another's work. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Alexandra Villasante's debut, The Grief Keeper, was an Indies Next, Indies Introduce, Junior Library Guild Selection and winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ YA Fiction. Her short stories will appear in the upcoming YA anthologies Our Shadows Have Claws and All Signs Point to Yes. Twitter Username: magpiewrites Daria Peoples holds a BA in English and a MA in education. She is an elementary school art teacher and an author and illustrator of many picture books. She was an inaugural Diversity Fellow for the Highlights Foundation. Linda Epstein is a senior literary agent at Emerald City Literary Agency and author of the middle grade novel, Repairing the World (Aladdin, 2022). She teaches at The Highlights Foundation and elsewhere, has an MFA in writing for children and young adults from The New School, and lives in Woodstock, New York. Twitter Username: lindaepstein Website: lindaepsteinauthor.com Alison Green Myers is a writer, poet, and teacher. She's the program director for the Highlights Foundation and a National Writing Fellow. Her novel A Bird Will Soar won the Schneider Family Book Award from the American Library Association, and was named the best book of the year for kids from PaLA. Twitter Username: alisongmyers Debbi Michiko Florence, a third-generation Japanese American and former educator, is the author of middle grade novels Keep It Together Keiko Carter, Just Be Cool Jenna Sakai, Sweet and Sour, and This Is How I Roll. She is also the author the chapter books series Jasmine Toguchi. Twitter Username: DebbiMichiko |
Rooms 435-436, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T225. For centuries, the Asian femme body has been a fraught site of violence, colonization and objectification. How does speculative fiction allow us to reclaim and rewrite harmful and false narratives we never consented to? How can bodily transformation (into monsters, robots, mythological creatures and more) desexualize, reimagine and liberate the Asian femme body? The panelists will explore how writing speculative elements in their work creates space for subversive and transformative narratives. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Elaine Hsieh Chou is a Pushcart Prize–winning Taiwanese American writer from California. A Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow at NYU and a NYFA Fellow, her debut novel, Disorientation, was published by Penguin Press, and her speculative short story collection, Where Are You Really From?, is forthcoming in 2024. Twitter Username: elainehsiehchou K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice novel Bestiary (One World/Random House, 2020) and the forthcoming short story collection Gods of Want. Isabel Yap is a Filipino author of fiction and poetry. Born and raised in Manila, she is currently based in the US. Her work was nominated for a Locus award and has appeared in venues including Tor.com, Lit Hub, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction. Her debut short story collection is Never Have I Ever. Twitter Username: visyap Silvia Park is a Korean/American writer and visiting assistant professor at Oberlin College. Their work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Tor.com, and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, among others. Their debut novel is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in 2024. Twitter Username: silviajpark Ploi Pirapokin is a Thai-born, Hong Kong-raised extraordinary alien. She is the nonfiction editor at Newfound Journal, and is featured in Tor.com, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, Gulf Stream magazine, and more. She's a 2018 Clarion Writers Workshop graduate, and holds an MFA from SFSU. Twitter Username: ppirapokin |
Room 437, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T226. This hybrid reading and discussion showcases writing and thought from four trans and nonbinary writers making work across genres. How do trans writers relate to labor when identity becomes a call to praxis, creating even more work? In a world that exploits and disappears us, how do we advocate for our bodies, genders, and disabilities? This event will explore the intersection of identity, asking how we engage with work in our creative work—and how to revolutionize it. Aditi Natasha Kini writes creative nonfiction, screenplays, and other text objects. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Rumpus, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a 2021 Jerome Award Alternate and an MFA candidate in cross-genre writing at UCSD. She is at work on her first book. Twitter Username: nansequiturs Sarah Madges is a Brooklyn-based writer and literary organizer whose work explores gender, sexuality, and trauma. They hold an MFA from the New School, copy edit for Guernica, and have words in The Rumpus, the Village Voice, A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault, and elsewhere. Neon Mashurov (NM Esc) is a writer from Brooklyn and the post-Soviet diaspora, and an MFA candidate at UCSD. Their writing appears in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, Black Warrior Review, Peach magazine, Hobart Pulp, and The Recluse. They edit Alchemy, UCSD’s translation journal. |
Rooms 440-442, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T227. What is an artist’s book in the hands of a poet? This panel brings together writers whose practice extends from bookwork through performance and installation. In their work, each brings the body of both reader and writer into view by dispersing their writing across multiple mediums. The artist-authors will present their interdisciplinary writing and book art practices, which range from films, to works of interactive public art, to artists' books. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Shin Yu Pai is the author of many books including Virga (Empty Bowl, 2021), ENSO (Entre Rios, 2020), and AUX ARCS (La Alameda, 2013). 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 Serena Chopra (assistant professor, Seattle University) is a writer, dancer, filmmaker, soundscape designer, and visual and performance artist. She has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Denver, and she is a Fulbright Scholar, Kundiman Fellow, and MacDowell Fellow. She has two books and two films. Amaranth Borsuk's most recent book is The Book (MIT Press, 2018). Previous books include Pomegranate Eater; Handiwork; and the collaborations ABRA, As We Know, and Between Page & Screen. She is associate director of the MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics program at the University of Washington Bothell. Twitter Username: amaranthborsuk Website: www.amaranthborsuk.com Elisheba Johnson is a curator, poet, public artist, and consultant that lives in Seattle, Washington. She currently co-manages Wa Na Wari, a Black art center in Seattle’s Central Area that uses the arts to build community and resist displacement. |
Rooms 443-444, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T228. No book enters the world on its own. Instead, authors and publishers work together to bring out the best in what ultimately becomes the published work. Join us for a conversation with the 2022 Firecracker Award winners in poetry and creative nonfiction to learn about what goes into forging an award-winning relationship between author and publisher. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Sunyoung Lee is the publisher of award-winning literary nonprofit Kaya Press, where she has worked for the past 22 years. Truong Tran is a poet, artist, and teacher living and practicing in San Francisco. His most recent works include 100 Words coauthored with poet Damon Potter (Omnidawn 2021) and the much anticipated Book of the Other (Kaya Press 2021). Allison Cobb is the author of After We All Died, Plastic: An Autobiography, Green-Wood, and Born Two. She was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and Oregon Book Award, and her work has appeared in Best American Poetry and many other journals. She co-curates the Switch series in Portland. Twitter Username: allisoncobb Website: allisoncobb.net |
Rooms 445-446, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T229. Saying “no” to unwanted distractions is hard for writers. So when we’re mid-poem or revising a chapter, how do we protect time and energy for our work without estranging others or feeling guilty? How do we frame our “preferring not to” as artistic self-advocacy? Set boundaries and resist burnout? E.B. White declined “for secret reasons,” but this mixed-genre panel will divulge how we quash the boss, nix parcheesi night, gently refuse those pushy students, and know when to say “yes.” Download event outline and supplemental documents.Jung Yun is the author of O Beautiful (St. Martin's) and Shelter (Picador). She's an associate professor of creative writing at the George Washington University, and her work has appeared in Tin House, The Massachusetts Review, The Atlantic, the New York Times, the Washington Post, among others. Joseph J. Capista is the author of Intrusive Beauty, selected for Ohio University Press’s 2018 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. He has received awards from the NEH, the Maryland State Arts Council, Sewanee, and Bread Loaf. He teaches at Towson University and lives with his family in Baltimore. Lisa Page is coeditor of We Wear The Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing (Beacon Press) Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, LitHub, Playboy, The Crisis, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and in anthologies. She directs the creative writing program at George Washington University. Twitter Username: LisaPag39212124 |
Room 447-448, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T230. The best essays and magazine stories about science feature unforgettable characters, sensory-rich scenes, carefully plotted arcs, and other narrative elements crafted to bring the writing to life. This panel gathers four writers and editors to discuss the artful deployment of storytelling techniques to create enthralling writing about science and the natural world, with examples drawn from the participants’ writing or editing on the Pacific and Inland Northwest and beyond. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Emily Benson is an associate editor for the magazine High Country News, which covers the landscapes, communities, and people of the Western US. She edits and writes features, essays, and more from her home in North Idaho, and is a graduate of the UC Santa Cruz Science Communication Program. Twitter Username: erbenson1 Jane C. Hu is an award-winning journalist living in Seattle. Her work has appeared in publications like Slate, High Country News, National Geographic, and The Atlantic, and in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2022. She teaches science writing at the University of Washington. Twitter Username: jane_c_hu Michelle Nijhuis is the author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, a history of the modern conservation movement. She is a project editor for The Atlantic and a longtime contributing editor of High Country News. Twitter Username: nijhuism Website: www.michellenijhuis.com Roberta Kwok is an award-winning freelance science journalist who has written for publications such as NewYorker.com, NYTimes.com, The Southern Review, Nature, New Scientist, Audubon, and U.S. News & World Report. From 2020–21, she was a Project Fellow at MIT's Knight Science Journalism Program. Twitter Username: robertakwok Ferris Jabr is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. Some of his work is anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing. He has received fellowships from UC Berkeley, MIT, and The Whiting Foundation. He is currently writing a book for Random House about Earth history. Twitter Username: ferrisjabr |
Terrace Suite I, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T231. An African language of connectivity and diversity, Swahili is spoken across east Africa and the Indian Ocean. The Swahili literary tradition is centuries-old, yet little of it has been translated into English. Three translators and one editor discuss their contributions to contemporary translated Swahili literature, including the new collection No Edges: Swahili Stories from Two Lines Press, and efforts to make it more widely available with the director of the Safal-Cornell Kiswahili Prize. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Munyao Kilolo is a writer and translator. He is the founder and editor in chief of Ituĩka - A Literary platform devoted to African languages and translation and is director of the Safal-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature. He previously served as the managing editor of Jalada Africa. Twitter Username: MosesKilolo Jay Boss Rubin is a writer and translator from Portland, Oregon. He's an MFA student at Queens College, concentrating in literary translation, and a recipient of a 2022 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. He's currently revising his translation of the Swahili novel ROSA MISTIKA, by Euphrase Kezilahabi. Twitter Username: gone2bongo Richard Prins has lived, worked, studied, and recorded music in Dar es Salaam. His poems, essays, and translations of Swahili poetry have appeared in publications such as Gulf Coast, jubilat, and Ploughshares, and received “Notable” mentions in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing.
Kelsey McFaul is a member of the editorial staff at Two Lines Press and a PhD candidate in literature at UC Santa Cruz, where she studies African literature. As a Humanities Institute Public Fellow in 2020–21, she worked with Two Lines to support and publish Swahili writers and translators. Twitter Username: kelseymcfaul |
Terrace Suite II, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T232. Leading school and/or community writing workshops can be deeply rewarding and inspiring work, and many writers make a living teaching in schools or in community settings, such as libraries, senior centers, and in the criminal justice system. But how do you get started? This discussion will explore ways a writer can break into the field of arts education, including training programs, writer-in-the-schools programs, and even striking out on your own! Margo Perin is the author of Plexiglass; The Opposite of Hollywood; Only the Dead Can Kill: Stories from Jail, and How I Learned to Cook, specializing in incarcerated and school to prison pipeline youth and adult writing programs. Twitter Username: margoperin Susan Terence has won several awards for her writing, including a DeWar’s Young Writer’s Award for Calif. She has been a writer / performer in residence for arts councils in California, Montana, Atlanta, North Carolina, and through California Poets in the Schools. Her poetry has been published widely, nationally.
Twitter Username: Righteoustpoet Website: www.javanjhoward.com Artivist Raie Crawford is ranked within the top 20 among the Women of the World Poetry Slam and top 25 within the rankings of the Individual World Poetry Slam. In 2018 she released her first book In Between |Space| which captures the journey and movement of black bodies in today’s society. |
Signature Room, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 5 |
T233. Two hundred and forty-five years after the Delaware Nation signed the first Native American/US treaty, what does it mean for Indigenous poets to write “from” tribal nations or as colonized or diasporic peoples? Recent publications such as Navigating CHamoru Poetry and The Diné Reader highlight important poetic qualities and distinctions. This panel explores how Indigenous history, culture, politics, and aesthetics and the very treaty language itself still marks contemporary poetry from the more than 570 tribes. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Kimberly Blaeser, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of Indigenous Nation Poets, has published five poetry collections including Copper Yearning. An emeritus professor at UW—Milwaukee and MFA faculty member for Institute of American Indian Arts, she is Anishinaabe from White Earth. Twitter Username: kmblaeser Elise Paschen, a founding member of In-Na-Po, is an enrolled member of the Osage Nation. The author of four books of poetry, most recently, The Nightlife, her poems have appeared in A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, Best American Poetry, and Poetry, among other anthologies and magazines. Twitter Username: ElisePaschen Crisosto Apache is an enrolled member of the Mescalero Apache Tribe with descent from Mescalero, Chiricahua Apache, and Diné (Salt Clan born for Towering House Clan). He has an MFA from IAIA. He teaches and pursues the advocacy of Native American / Indigenous LGBTQ social injustice. Twitter Username: Crisosto_Apache Website: http://crisostoapache.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 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. Twitter Username: JakeSkeets |
Ballroom 1, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 5 |
T234. Join Blue Flower Arts for a reading and conversation featuring Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Kwame Dawes, and Chigozie Obioma. The work of these three writers spans the borders of the United States, Nigeria, Jamaica, Cyprus, and Ghana and the genres of fiction, short story, and poetry. Together they will discuss the intersections of craft and personal experience across generations, continents, and realities. This event will be livestreamed. ASL interpretation and live captioning will be provided. |
Bookfair Stage, Sponsored by the Dramatists Guild, Exhibit Hall 1 & 2, Summit Building |
T235. Three poets of varied aesthetics read new work, with an emphasis on their relationships with the natural world and climate change as experienced through the lens of their different life experiences. Their work contemplates living on the land we now know as the United States—the altered landscape, the ongoing politics of extractive colonialism, and how the two are in inextricably linked. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Kerri Webster is the author of Lapis (Wesleyan University Press, 2022), The Trailhead (Wesleyan, 2018), Grand & Arsenal (University of Iowa, 2012), and We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone (University of Georgia, 2005). She teaches at Boise State University. Brenda Hillman has written eleven books of poetry, including Extra Hidden Life, among the Days and In a Few Minutes Before Later (2022). She is a Chancellor Emerita at the Academy of American Poets, teaches at St. Mary’s College of California and directs Poetry Week at Community of Writers. Twitter Username: brendalhillman Website: brendahillman.net 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 mentor at the Institute of American Indian Arts and assistant professor at UMass Amherst. Twitter Username: achabitnoy Stephanie Elliott Prieto is the publicist / web manager at Wesleyan UP. She served on the Equity, Justice, and Inclusion Committee of AUPresses (2020–2022). Twitter Username: weslpress |
5:00 p.m. to 6:15 p.m. | |
Rooms 338-339, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
Daily 12-Step Meeting. All in recovery from anything are welcome. |
Room 437, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T237. Do you teach at a two-year college? Interested in job opportunities at two-year colleges? Join us for our annual networking meeting. With almost half of all students beginning college careers at two-year colleges, and increasing numbers of MFAs landing two-year college teaching jobs, the future of creative writing courses and programs at our campuses looks bright. We will discuss teaching creative writing at the two-year college, hold a short business meeting, and provide tangible resources. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Michelle Cruz Gonzales is the author of The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band. She has published in LA Review of Books, Longreads, Razorcake, Mitu Fierce, Latino Rebels, and Hip Mama magazine. Michelle teaches English and creative writing at Las Positas Community College. Twitter Username: xicanabrava Sean Chambers teaches American literature, creative writing, and journalistic ethics at Valley Forge Military College (PA). He has a BA in English from UVA, and an MAW and MFA in creative writing from Manhattanville College. He is a Governor's Council on the Arts grant-winner (oral history) with reviews in Booklist and a residency in '23-Door County, Wisconsin. Marlys Cervantes serves as department chair of Humanities & Communication and director of the creative writing program at Cowley College in Arkansas City, Kansas. She teaches literature and writing courses, and serves as codirector of the Multi-Cultural Scholars Program and as an academic advisor. Twitter Username: MsCerv |
Room 340-342, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T238. The Disabled & D/deaf Writers Caucus allows for those who are disabled or living with chronic illness, and their allies, to network and discuss common challenges related to identity, writing, and teaching while professionally leading a literary life. By meeting annually at the AWP conference, we aim to archive our interests, challenges, and concerns in order to increase our visibility and emphasize our importance both to this organization and to the communities where we live, teach, and work. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Cade Leebron writes nonfiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, American Literary Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Twitter Username: CadeyLadey Website: www.mslifeisbestlife.com Jess Silfa is an Afro-Latinx, disabled, and queer writer, and poet. They graduated from Columbia University and are currently in the MFA program at Vanderbilt. They are currently working on their first novel about a tight-knit immigrant community as well as a chapbook of poems about the body. Twitter Username: jesilfa Molly McCully Brown is the author of the essay collection Places I've Taken My Body and the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. With Susannah Nevison, she coauthored the poetry collection In the Field Between Us. She teaches at Old Dominion University. Twitter Username: mmccullybrown Website: http://mollymccullybrown.com Emily Rose Cole is the author of the full-length poetry collection Thunderhead and the chapbook Love & A Loaded Gun, collection of persona poems in women's voices. She holds an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and is a PhD candidate at the University of Cincinnati. Twitter Username: EmilyColeWrites Website: www.emilyrosecolepoetry.com |
6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. | |
Cedar Room AB, Sheraton Grand Seattle, Second Floor, Pike Street Tower |
T238A. A reunion for the mentors and mentees of the Writer to Writer Mentorship Program and a celebration of its seventeen successful seasons. |
Willow Room A, Sheraton Grand Seattle, Second Floor, Union Street Tower |
T239. Calling all writers who have kids! Come hear about programs, fellowships, residencies, and other resources to help you stay on creative track. See old friends or make new ones. Newbies welcome. Writers at any stage with kids of any age. Stop by and say hi. |
Ballard Room, Sheraton Grand Seattle, Third Floor, Pike Street Tower |
T240. Madville Publishing invites friends and those who would like to become friends to join us for an opportunity to meet our authors. |
Capitol Hill Room, Sheraton Grand Seattle, Third Floor, Pike Street Tower |
T241. White Pine Press celebrates fifty years of publishing! Join us, along with MadHat Press, to enjoy an evening with our authors, translators, and friends. |
Issaquah Room AB, Sheraton Grand Seattle, Third Floor, Union Street Tower |
Western Washington University invites alumni from the English Department and beyond to attend this reception to celebrate the accomplishments of our undergraduate and graduate programs! |
Kirkland Room, Sheraton Grand Seattle, Third Floor, Union Street Tower |
T242A. Spalding friends and alums! Join us for a reunion and happy hour. Beer, wine, delicious snacks, and a chance to catch up with your Spalding friends. We can't wait to see you! |
6:30 p.m. to 7:45 p.m. | |
Room 437, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4 |
T243. The annual FUSE Caucus is where undergraduate student writers and editors, accompanied by faculty advisors and mentors, meet to network and discuss issues related to the world of undergraduate literary publishing, editing, and writing. Organizational updates are followed by an open discussion, elections, and event planning for the upcoming year. This year’s focus will be "How to Do This, That, and the Other Thing: Editing and Publishing in Transition." Download event outline and supplemental documents.Catherine Zobal Dent is the author of Unfinished Stories of Girls. She won a 2015 French Voices Award for her translation of Cyrille Fleischman. She teaches undergraduate writers and editors at Susquehanna University and serves on the faculty board of FUSE (Forum of Undergraduate Student Editors). Michael Cocchiarale is associate professor of English and creative writing at Widener University, where he teaches courses in American literature, fiction writing, and composition. He is the author of Here Is Ware (short stories) and None of the Above (a novel). Rachel Hall is the author of Heirlooms, a collection of linked stories, which was selected by Marge Piercy for the BkMk Press 2015 G.S. Sharat Chandra book prize. She is professor of English at SUNY Geneseo, where she holds two Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence. Twitter Username: Rach_H_writer Website: rachelhall.org Reed Wilson is the author of Orpheum, and his poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, The Cortland Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles, and teaches in the English department at UCLA. Emily Hizny is a junior creative writing and publishing & editing double major at Susquehanna University. She is the junior editor of SU's literary magazine Sanctuary, the vice president of SU's Slam Poetry Club, and the junior director of SU's FUSE chapter (Forum for Undergraduate Student Editors). Twitter Username: OctoEmily |
Room 340-342, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3 |
T244. The LGBTQ Writers Caucus provides a space for writers who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer to network and discuss common issues and challenges, such as representation and visibility on and off the literary page; and how to incorporate one’s personal identity into their professional and academic lives. The Caucus also strives to discuss, develop, and increase queer representation for future AWP conferences, and serve as a supportive community and resource for its members. Download event outline and supplemental documents.Derek Scheips is a multigenre writer and instructor who has taught and coached writing students at a variety of institutions, including University of Washington and University of Pennsylvania. He also has significance experience as a communications consultant for global advertising agencies. Twitter Username: derekscheips Website: https://www.derekscheips.com Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán is author of Archipiélagos; Antes y después del Bronx: Lenapehoking; and South Bronx Breathing Lessons. A CantoMundo, Macondo, RAWI, and Lambda Fellow, he is editor of Yellow Medicine Review's global queer Indigenous and Movement Research Performance Journal's Native issues. Belinda Kremer, a poet and the poetry editor of Confrontation, holds an MFA in poetry from the Univ. of Michigan. A Lecturer in UC Berkeley’s College Writing Programs, Belinda teaches composition and creative writing, and serves on the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on LGBTQ+ Communities at Cal. K. Ka'imilani Leota Sellers received her MFA from Eastern Kentucky University. A queer Samoan multigenre writer, her writing appears in Yellow Medicine Review and Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color. She teaches in Hawai'i and serves on the LGBTQ Writers Caucus leadership team. Twitter Username: KKaimilaniLS Website: http://www.hinarising.com/ Erin Sharkey is a cultural producer and the editor of A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars. She is cofounder of Free Black Dirt, an experimental production collective, and steward of The Fields at Rootsprings, a retreat centering BIPOC and LGBTQ+ folks in central Minnesota. Twitter Username: erinjaws |
8:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. | |
Ballroom 1, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 5 |
T245. Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award, and runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Lee is the recipient of the 2022 Manhae Grand Prize for Literature from South Korea, the 2022 Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the 2022 Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity and fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is an inductee of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. Lee is a Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College and serves as a trustee of PEN America and a director of the Authors Guild. She is at work on her third novel, American Hagwon and a nonfiction work, Name Recognition. Read more about Min Jin Lee. This event will be livestreamed. ASL interpretation and live captioning will be provided. |