This document with general conference information and the full schedule is displayed in high contrast fourteen point font or higher and designed to be readable by screen readers.
All event outlines and supplemental documents included on the schedule below have been created by each event’s organizer and participants. These documents may differ from the schedule in font type, font size, and layout.
Skip to ScheduleAWP welcomes diversity and the participation of individuals in its activities regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, socioeconomic status, age, disability, or religious or political belief. AWP encourages the contributions of all of its members and attendees at the conference, and we are proud to create an event that supports such inclusive participation.
Founded in nineteen sixty-seven, AWP provides support, advocacy, resources, and community to writers, college and university creative writing programs, and writers’ conferences and centers. Our mission is to amplify the voices of writers and the academic programs and organizations that serve them while championing diversity and excellence in creative writing.
AWP held its first conference in nineteen seventy-three at the Library of Congress. It featured six events and sixteen presenters. George Garrett, one of AWP's founders, planned the first gathering with help from the National Endowment for the Arts. Presenters included Elliott Coleman, founder of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University; Paul Engle, former director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and cofounder of the International Writing Program; poets Josephine Jacobsen and Miller Williams; and novelists Ralph Ellison and Wallace Stegner, among others. The conference grew steadily, and with the addition of the bookfair in the mid-eighties it became the foundation for what has become the largest literary conference in North America. This year's conference is host to five hundred fifty events, two thousand presenters, and more than eight hundred presses, journals, and literary organizations from around the world. Most conference events are organized by their participants and selected through an open, competitive submission process by AWP's conference subcommittee. Most featured events are organized and sponsored by member institutions and affiliated literary organizations.
AWP welcomes proposals for future conference events. Please visit the Event Proposals & Acceptances page for information about proposing an event, literary partnership, or sponsorship for next year's conference.
Both attendees who have registered in advance and attendees who have not yet registered may pick up their registration materials in the registration area, located in Exhibit Hall E, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 3. Please consult the maps in the conference 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 check in or register at our senior rate. A fifty-dollar fee will be charged for all replacement registrations.
Wednesday, February seven: twelve o’clock noon to seven o’clock p.m.
Thursday, February eight: eight o’clock a.m. to five o’clock p.m.
Friday, February nine: eight o’clock a.m. to five o’clock p.m.
Saturday, February ten: eight o’clock a.m. to five o’clock p.m.
If you have problems registering, require assistance, or have a question about accessibility services, please visit AWP’s Help Desk, located in the registration area in the Kansas City Convention Center.
Stay on top of everything happening at the conference by following AWP on Twitter (@awpwriter) and follow #AWP24 on all social media.
Unless otherwise noted in the program, you must present your registration to gain admission to all meetings, panels, readings, and receptions. You must also present your registration to enter the bookfair.
AWP’s bookfair is located in Exhibit Hall D & E, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 3. This year’s bookfair showcases more than five hundred presses, journals, and literary organizations from around the world. Please consult the maps in the mobile app for location details.
Learn more about AWP, meet our staff, and get to know our board members at booth number 1531. Find the official bookstore for the conference at booth number 1537.
Breakfast and lunch concessions are available inside the bookfair in the Kansas City Convention Center. Debit, credit cards, and tap to pay are accepted at all food and beverage locations. Please consult the maps in the mobile app for location details.
All found items will be turned over to Kansas City Convention Center Security at the close of registration each day. If you have questions, please visit AWP’s Help Desk, located in the registration area of the Kansas City Convention Center.
First Aid is located outside of Exhibit Hall D, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 3. Please consult the maps in the mobile app for location details.
The nursing lounge is located in Room 2213, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 2, and is available for any nursing parent to use.
Your hotel concierge likely maintains a list of recommended local providers.
Smoking is permitted in designated areas only.
Below is a list of events for the #AWP24 Conference & Bookfair in Kansas City, Missouri.
Skip to Wednesday Skip to Thursday Skip to Friday Skip to SaturdayNine o'clock A.M. to Ten o'clock A.M.
Five Autistic writers consider what it means to be excluded from professional writing spaces. Many Autistic people struggle with sensory overwhelm; this issue is exacerbated by large gatherings of people. Writing is the easy part for Autistic minds. Networking, public events, relationships—these present major hurdles for people whose minds work differently. The panelists will share their experiences navigating the inaccessible world of literary spaces. How can these spaces become more accessible?
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
Climate fiction is gaining popularity in African literature among indigenous African writers and those who reside in the diaspora. As a genre, this event aims to shed light and explore how the works of various writers engage with pressing ecological problems in Africa or the diaspora. To accomplish this, writers will have the opportunity to read either an excerpt of a long work or a short work. After which, there will be a panelist discussion facilitated by an appointed moderator.
This virtual event was pre-recorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
Event Outline
Throughout our lives, we encounter various health challenges and gender expectations on our bodies that test our physical and emotional well-being. However, there is beauty to be found in celebrating our bodies. This panel of poets shares and discusses poetry of resilience and celebration of our bodies to find meaning and perspective. The panel explores the transformative power of writing that honors the courage it takes to embrace the diversity of our bodies.
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
The perfect telling detail can bring heroes and locales to life. It’s crucial for writers to not only know where and how to conduct research, but also, what constitutes a juicy factual find. Five novelists at varied stages of their careers—who have all penned historical fiction with a pop culture bent, often with protagonists who must themselves excavate the past—reveal their research secrets.
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
“No one wants to hear from the ghostwriter,” says the ghostwriter of Prince Harry’s Spare. Except those wanting to know the secrets behind this lucrative way to support a creative career. Discover how to break into ghostwriting. Learn the nuts and bolts needed for a wheelhouse of services. Find out what to consider in taking on clients and what worked and what didn’t in seeing a project through. We’ll reveal the form’s challenges and joys and how it shaped (for good or bad) our writing journeys.
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
This multigenre panel explores ways in which women writers of horror, at various stages of their careers, uniquely interact with haunting, dread, healing, and conceptions of femininity in their work. Focuses include how “horror,” “haunting,” and “healing” intersect in each panelist’s writing, and in what ways the ever-changing female experience plays a role in her work. Panelists will also offer insight into how writers of any genre might approach haunting, horror, and dread in their writing.
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
Event Outline
For years, “brutal honesty” was the standard for feedback in writing programs and critique groups. Today, we hear talk of “feedback sandwiches” and the power of positive feedback, but how do these approaches serve? Our panel of instructors and authors will offer insights on how to give feedback in a way that serves and supports students across genres and backgrounds. Attendees can also expect insights on how feedback recipients themselves can manage the process to make the most of this resource.
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
Despite our temporal distance from the mythologies of the past, authors continually reconnect and weave our cultural legends together, contemporizing age-old tales and finding the roots where our shared human experience is most honest, urgent, magical, and intertwined. Our diverse panel of three fiction authors and a literary journal’s editor-in-chief discuss how legendary tales influence their writing and publication. Together we explore how stories of old speak to the pressing issues of today.
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
Join us for an enlightening and practical discussion on the life and work of Louis K. Lowy, a beloved Miami writer whose passing left a significant void in his local community. Through an exploration of Louis's prolific writing, mentorship, and friendship, panelists, including friends and fellow writers, will offer actionable insights and tips on how to build a lasting legacy, foster a supportive writing community, and navigate the emotional landscape of loss.
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
The reading event will feature three female poets from Ukraine and the United States, who will read from their latest poetry collections on the war in Ukraine. Today is a Different War, a short collection by Lyudmyla Khersonska (Arrowsmith, 2023) and Love Letters to Ukraine from Uyava (River Paw Press, 2023) by Kalpna Singh-Chitnis will offer fresh perspectives on War in Ukraine.
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
Event Outline
In the tapestry of human existence, where life entwines joy and sorrow, there lies a profound art, a sublime expression that transcends time and space. Poetry, like a true companion and friend beckons us to embrace and offers solace and healing in times of unspeakable trials—moments of trauma, war, and eventual peace. The event will explore how poetry bares wounds and echoes the weight of our collective suffering and communicates with those who contribute to our trials to bring transformation and healing.
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
Event Outline
The Asian and Arab community has been fraught with public and political violence directly enacted by colonization, displacement, and policing. What does it mean to uplift Queer Asian writers in a time of upheaval and resistance? What does it mean to rejoice queerness in the cusp of difficulties? How do we reframe narratives to compose transformation for our communities? Writers will share nuanced approaches to writing as they present complex, multiability, queer, and anticolonial writing.
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
Much as Walter Benjamin defines the politicization of aesthetics (in which art becomes a tool for perpetuating institutional power), so too has emotion become politicized and commodified. We are accepted and praised when we function efficiently, and when we conform to known categories. But our less palatable emotional tenors are essential to understanding the complexities of human experience. What new political frameworks and social possibilities might arise if we embrace emotional outbursts?
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
Many writing beliefs are ableist in nature, geared toward the neurotypical. Too often, writers who are neurodivergent, disabled, or suffer from chronic illnesses are marginalized. While this applies to all writing spaces, this panel will focus on the writing classroom. Our experienced panelists will share their own struggles with navigating the workshop as well as offering lesson plans, writing prompts, and/or teaching tips geared toward creating more inclusive writing workshops/classrooms.
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
Romani women writers share their rich experiences and provide valuable insights into the representation and misrepresentation of "Gypsies" in literature and beyond. The panelists come from various backgrounds, exemplifying a diverse range of Romani subgroups, including queer, disabled, and non-neurotypical writers, all working across multiple genres, from literary to speculative and mainstream literature and poetry. Panelists will share engaging multimedia presentations and bibliographies.
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2, Supplemental Document 3
Is the pandemic over? And if so, for whom? Is a 9/11’s worth of death a week in the U.S. simply the new normal, and is that because we undervalue most of the currently ill/dying: the elderly, the chronically ill and the disabled? Literature is a way to process our grief, isolation, fear, anger, and the tremendous cost of what happened. We’ll read work about what and whom we lost and what we felt. We will also urge the literary world to maintain the disability-inclusive aspects of virtual events.
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
Event Outline
Comics classes form an integral part of the UBC School of Creative Writing's multi-genre approach, from large undergraduate lectures to small graduate seminars. Comics instructors from the school will share their scaffolded approach to pedagogy within the undergraduate and graduate programs and explore how comics classes connect to other genres taught within the school. The students on the panel will discuss the impact of the school's comics pedagogy on their comics and writing practice.
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
Essays are a popular genre, and sometimes essayists consider turning their work into a collection. The thought of taking essays and forming a book can feel daunting and perhaps intimidating. What order and structure? Which essays belong? Do I have enough essays for a book? What about previously-published work? Is there pressure to categorize essay collections as memoir? In this session, panelists will discuss the ins and outs of creating essay collections—from initial idea to published work.
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
Forums of entertainment are often times wonderful ways to learn about the fascinating lives of real people all throughout history. In the event that you are creating a play or musical based on the life of a real person, have you ever wondered how to get permission before proceeding? Join the Dramatists Guild exploring business and craft, such as basic concepts of Right to Publicity, Right to Privacy, and relationship between the subject and their public image in commercial use.
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
This event convenes sick and disabled poetics to center celebration, climate, and critical social justice in writing that pushes against devastation in our daily lives. Here, disabled Black and of color poets discuss nuanced and intricate connections to disability and their writing practice. In this event, we will showcase a vast and complex sick and disabled poetics that center dynamic approaches to collective creativity. This reading and dialogue aims to expand poetry amidst a U.S. landscape.
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
Theatre has long been a gathering place where folks share stories in the hopes of seeing their own narratives, hopes, and dreams reflected back to them. For those who live in parts of the country becoming increasingly more hostile toward queer lives, it can also become a safe haven and beacon of hope for community and identity. Join the Dramatists Guild in conversation with a group of writers doing the work to share stories celebrating and uplifting the queer experience.
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
Writers set their novels in the recent past (late twentieth, early twenty-first centuries) for many reasons—to understand social change, to give voice to long-ignored voices, even to enhance plotting (no cell phones!). But what makes such novels resonate with the present? How can focusing on the recent past give us a clearer lens on our current era? And what considerations should writers keep in mind when writing about a time period that’s familiar, but also irrevocably different?
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
Russia's war against Ukraine brought a realization that the global literary community had limited knowledge of Ukrainian literature past and present, and also a keen interest to learn more. Obscured by centuries of imperial discrimination and entrenched prejudicial stereotypes, Ukrainian literary voices are finally beginning to be heard. This roundtable spotlights Ukrainian queer literary voices and the challenges of bringing Ukrainian queer texts to English-language audiences.
This virtual event was prerecorded. It will be available to watch on-demand online starting on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.
Noon to Seven o'clock P.M.
Attendees who have registered in advance, or who have yet to purchase a registration, may secure their registration materials in AWP’s registration area located in Exhibit Hall E, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 3. 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.
The exhibit hall at the Kansas City Convention Center will be open for bookfair setup. For safety and security reasons, only those holding a Bookfair Setup Access (BSA) registration, or those accompanied by an individual wearing a BSA registration, will be permitted inside the bookfair during setup hours. Bookfair exhibitors are welcome to pick up their registration materials in AWP’s registration area in Exhibit Hall E, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 3.
Two o'clock P.M. to Six o'clock P.M.
Stop being embarrassed of your author photo! A great portrait is not only flattering, but actively invites your audience to get to know you and your work. Returning for a fifth year at AWP, author photographer Adrianne Mathiowetz will be offering twenty-minute studio sessions on-site. See your proof gallery of images immediately; any portrait you choose will be fully processed and digitally delivered in high resolution for $125. (Conference discount: in Adrianne's Boston studio, hour-long portrait sessions with one image included are priced at $850.) Additional images: $75/ea. Fine processing (spot adjustments beyond usual file preparation): $175/file. Rush processing: $100/file. Put your best face forward on websites, book covers, social media, and published interviews. Advanced sign-up required: https://am-photography.ticketleap.com/awp24/dates
Three o'clock P.M. to Three-thirty P.M.
Join AWP conference staff for a tour of the Kansas City Convention Center. This tour will cover main event areas of the Kansas City Convention Center and will be an opportunity to ask questions about conference accessibility. This tour is great for someone who would like to get a sense for the distances between meeting rooms and to plan easiest routes. If you are unable to make it to this 3:00 p.m. tour, please email conference@awpwriter.org to arrange for a different time.
Five o'clock P.M. to Six o'clock P.M.
This event is for all independent literary magazine and small press publishers: seasoned professionals, those just starting out, and all in between. Learn what we're planning for the year and share your thoughts on how we can best ensure that our community thrives. Even if you're not yet a member of CLMP, but would like to find out more, please feel welcome to join us.
Six-thirty P.M. to Eight o'clock P.M.
Join AWP in celebrating the contributions of those honored through its various award programs: Intro Journals Project, Program Directors' Prize, Small Press Publisher Award, and the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature.
AWP is partnering with the Kansas City Public Library for this special event, and more details will be announced soon. RSVPs will be requested through the Library's website in the coming weeks.
Seven-thirty A.M. to Eight-forty-five A.M.
Daily 12-Step Meeting. All in recovery from anything are welcome.
Eight o'clock A.M. to Five o'clock P.M.
Coat check is available in Lobby 2200 on Level 2 of the Kansas City Convention Center. It is $5.00 per item checked. ATMs can be found in Lobby 2200, next to Room 2207, and in the Conference Center, across the hall from Room 2501A.
Attendees who have registered in advance, or who have yet to purchase a registration, may secure their registration materials in AWP’s registration area located in Exhibit Hall E, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 3. 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.
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
A darkened, quiet, and more private space for attendees to gather their thoughts, reset, or take a break from the lighting of the convention center.
The nursing lounge is located in Room 2213 on the Street Level of the Kansas City Convention Center, and is available for any nursing parent to use.
Eight o'clock A.M. to Six o'clock P.M.
Stop being embarrassed of your author photo! A great portrait is not only flattering, but actively invites your audience to get to know you and your work. Returning for a fifth year at AWP, author photographer Adrianne Mathiowetz will be offering twenty-minute studio sessions on-site. See your proof gallery of images immediately; any portrait you choose will be fully processed and digitally delivered in high resolution for $125. (Conference discount: in Adrianne's Boston studio, hour-long portrait sessions with one image included are priced at $850.) Additional images: $75/ea. Fine processing (spot adjustments beyond usual file preparation): $175/file. Rush processing: $100/file. Put your best face forward on websites, book covers, social media, and published interviews. Advanced sign-up required: https://am-photography.ticketleap.com/awp24/dates
Nine o'clock A.M. to Ten o'clock A.M.
Join Manisha Sharma, a certified yoga practitioner, for a gentle, one-hour yoga and meditation practice, appropriate for practitioners of all levels and abilities. The hour-long practice will focus on stretches, asanas, physical postures, breathing, relaxation, and meditation. Please come wearing comfortable street clothes; mats and yoga apparel are not necessary.
Nine o'clock A.M. to Ten-fifteen A.M.
Poet and editor Marianne Moore declared poetry a magic of pauses. Five poetry editors share how their varied editorial roles relate to their practices of poetry and cultural work, where their writing experience contributes to editing poems, and what conceptions of community have been born from working on journals and at presses, from established series to emerging spaces. The various pauses and magics that editing brings to writing is considered in terms of labor, time, and collectivism.
Event Outline
Five Kansas LGBTQ writers of memoir and poetry discuss how Kansas influences their writing in both representation and resistance. How do LGBTQ+ poets and writers draw on the landscape of Kansas, from the Tallgrass Prairie to the Flint Hills? How is memoir and poetry shaped by writing as survival? How has prose and poetry played a role in coming out? How does community play a role in subject matter and support in LGBTQ+ writing? This panel will be a lively conversation about Kansas queer writing.
Event Outline
There are some stories so unbelievable, so horrible, or merely awful, but they must be told, for survival. How do we write about the overwhelming without overwhelming the reader? We are five memoirists and poets who write about things others would probably rather not hear about, but we've mastered drama (and dramatic technique), the understatement, humor, the fable, the archetype, third-degree emotion. We will share these techniques that help us develop an audience that asks to hear more.
Documentary, or “research-based,” poetry provides writers with opportunities to present contemporary or historical complexities through wedded structure and content. The panelists include leading theorists and practitioners who will reflect on seminal texts within documentary poetry and examine the subgenre’s benefits, including how chosen forms can further a text’s message, demonstrate an artistic version of a truth commission, decenter hegemonic or colonial narratives, and chronicle the now.
As Kansas City and other locales organize fiercely against incessant attacks, this panel of regionally diverse, mostly LGBTQI/BIPOC authors share how activism and lived experiences inform their writing on topics such as incarceration, medical racism, intersex identity, mental health, immigration, queerness, and intergenerational trauma. We explore the craft of writing stories that contribute to deep, durable narrative change, restructuring the way people feel, think, and respond to the world.
You have an idea for a lit mag…great! Now what? Four founding editors share how they launched a literary magazine outside of academia. How do you fund it? How do you staff it? How do you sustain it over time? The editors of DIAGRAM, Honey Literary, In Short, and Lucky Jefferson will provide practical tips and advice for those looking to do-it-themselves.
Four fiction writers of color discuss how they researched and wrote multivoiced, multigenerational books drawing from both archival records and family lore, as well as the politics surrounding it. How do the novel and short story form lend themselves to the retelling of marginalized histories? Where and why do these writers blur the line between “truth” and fiction? How do they grapple with representing presumed stereotypes (e.g., “bad mothers,” slavery, and Black trauma)?
Over the course of ten days, five pairs of poets and visual artists from varied backgrounds exchanged work in the style of a cross-disciplinary exquisite corpse. The resulting collaborations are premiered in this panel, with reflections on the process by poets (in person) and artists (by statement or video) exploring the potential of ekphrastic exchange to nurture relationships, urge work in new directions, and expand our understanding of sound, color, and other tools of our respective crafts.
Literary centers create and nurture vibrant and diverse literary communities across the United States, bringing together both writers and readers inside and outside academia. In this interactive panel, directors from established and emerging literary centers in urban and rural areas will explore the programs, readings, classes, workshops, events, outreach, and networking which help them to enrich both established writers and those without traditional access to literary arts programming and education.
Jewish literary events often focus on the Holocaust, generational trauma, or antisemitism—vital topics of discussion. Yet how much is lost if we reduce Jewish writing to writing from trauma. What about the joy, wisdom, traditions, and ubiquitous humor that can be found in Judaism and Jewish culture? With a combination of readings and conversation, our panelists, who embody a range of engagement and representation, will speak to the many visions possible when writing through a Jewish lens.
How do you write your tale with compassion and love when it is a hard story to tell? These five writers will read from their works of memoir and autobiographical fiction touching on their own stories and their family stories of addiction, mental illness, trauma, neglect, and chaos. After, they will talk about how they were able to navigate the choppy waters of truth telling in their books, and how they use their voices for change and to highlight their own stories of redemption and forgiveness.
Event Outline
As the United States continues to diversify, state legislatures advance bills that target people of color and the LGBTQ+ community. Publishing is one of the only industries that gives a truer representation of the richly complex Latine populations in the U.S. and their contribution to culture, history, and literary landscape. This panel of independent publishers from the U.S.-Mexico border discusses the importance of publishing Latine, including LGBTQ+ Latine authors in Texas and the U.S..
Calvin C. Hernton (1932-2001) is renowned as an anti-racist sociologist, literary critic, champion of Black women, and a founder of Umbra, which was a model for the 1960s Black Arts Movement. He is less well-known as a poet but recent attention has generated much acclaim. Based on new appraisals of his stature as a major poet, this panel will reveal him as an overlooked but very important figure who insisted on combining the roles of critic, teacher, poet, race theorist, and social commentator.
When we discuss literature, literary communities clearly understand that going beyond national borders is integral. As writers we are inspired by works of translation, and many of us who are fluent in more languages read works in those languages. In this panel, editors of the South Asian Avant-Garde (SAAG), an internationalist magazine, South Asian-Americans hailing from four countries will discuss why literary magazines should aspire to be internationalist, and why that matters for representation.
The myth of the American West—a place to be tamed, dominated by narratives centering white men—is one of our most stubborn national fantasies. But five novelists are correcting the record. Their West is peopled with Black, Mexican, Asian, Indigenous, and Queer characters whose untold stories and unheard voices create a rich and complicated landscape that reflects the real American frontier as it was and is. We'll discuss research, resisting tropes, and fitting new stories into the canon.
Puerto Rico has long been a rich source of stories for those within and without its borders. This panel, composed of writers of Puerto Rican descent working in fiction, memoir, and other creative nonfiction, will focus on the challenges of writing about home, sometimes in another language, from the perspective of an expatriate, during a time of economic and political upheaval in their native country.
The word “canon” in literary studies was intended to refer to humanity’s greatest writings—those which all "educated" people should know. Thanks to the work of critics and scholars of color, however, we are now able to recognize the exclusions, the silences, and the gaps that exist in the traditional concept of the canon. The four poets/professors on this panel will read poems and discuss how to explore, expand, and explode the literary canon in one's work and in the classroom.
Accustomed to wielding multiple perspectives, many BIPOC, queer, and neurodivergent writers are drawn to fragmented or hybrid forms: multimodal cross-genre mosaics of personal experience, and cultural, social, political, or natural history. Our panelists work across poetry, performance, nonfiction, and folklore, and will explore the craft and challenges of fragmented forms, offering inspiration and motivation to embrace hybridity as a way to claim space for historically marginalized communities.
Five prize-winning authors will lead a discussion on crafting autobiographical novels/stories versus memoirs/personal essays. They will talk about the differences and similarities between fiction and nonfiction, what determines a writer’s initial narrative choice, and the challenges writers encounter while writing from their own experiences about cultural heritage, trauma, disability, violence, and sexual abuse.
Given the demands of the current job market, the importance of experiential learning cannot be overstated. Creative writing instructors are tackling this challenge by bringing publishing and its many multimodal facets into the classroom. From founding, to production, to print, our panel will discuss best practices in organizing, editing, and promoting published work. We will address the need for print and digital literary journals as well as other publishing venues on campus and beyond.
We’re a group of authors of color at various career stages who've taken winding roads to publication. We will share insights about the various paths each of us took to get our works out: self-publishing, hybrid publishing, or working with small presses. Topics will include finding editors and presses who understand your work, deciding whether you need an agent, marketing your work, avoiding our publishing missteps, and dealing with people considering your work "too niche" for their audiences.
After the debut book, what happens next? Where did everybody go? While some authors forge long-term relationships with agents and editors, others must start fresh with each book. This business-oriented panel offers insights on how to build a career book by book, whether at indie presses or commercial publishers. Panelists chart paths to publication, discuss relationships (or lack thereof) with agents and editors, and offer advice on continuing to publish books as an established author.
“Twat,” “cock,” and “motherfucker” too. You can say anything in a poem—use any word, broach any topic, and be obscene as you please, but what are you trying to blow up with your F-bombs? Such language functions as the repudiation of a lingual and cultural hegemony, so the question is whether the poem earns the use of such language. In this panel, poets known for their engagement with the taboo will read their work and discuss their use of the profane as a means of subversion.
Nine o'clock A.M. to Eleven-fifty A.M.
This meeting is for all directors of AWP member programs. Please join us for a light breakfast and an informal working session with your regional representatives. AWP Board Chair January Gill O'Neil will give a welcome and briefing before the breakout discussions begin.
Please note: program directors who are unable to attend may send a department representative in their place.
Nine o'clock A.M. to Five o'clock P.M.
With more than 500 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.
Breakfast and lunch concessions are available inside the Exhibit Hall in the Kansas City Convention Center. Debit cards, 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.
Stop by the AWP Membership Booth to learn more about the many year-round benefits of AWP. View a sample issue of the Writer’s Chronicle, ask questions about the annual Award Series or the Writer to Writer Mentorship Program, pick up some AWP swag, or just pop in to say hello and take a selfie!
In celebration of the Wick Poetry Center’s fortieth anniversary year, the Traveling Stanzas Makerspace offers conference attendees an opportunity to creatively engage with themes of health and healing, social and racial justice, nature and environment, and peace and conflict. This interactive exhibit invites participants to share their voice using a suite of digital expressive writing tools, such as Emerge (an erasure poetry app), Thread (community-generated poems), and the Listening Wall (thematically-driven touch-screen poetry displays). Visitors will be able to choose a theme, follow a prompt, then print and share their responses. More information can be found at http://travelingstanzas.com.
Ten-thirty-five A.M. to Eleven-fifty A.M.
Debuting is a fraught process and the experience and advice varies seemingly year to year in a rapidly changing literary landscape. This panel of novelists from various genres shares tips, tricks, and hard-won lessons from the months before and after their debuts—on everything from publicity and marketing to questions we wish we’d asked. Whether attendees are debuting their own novels next year or still dreaming the book into being, they’ll find fresh, urgent discussion about the processes here.
As “fly-over country,” the Midwest is imagined as corn fields and snow drifts, not the nexus of vibrant, innovative poetry. This diverse group of BIPOC poets from Chicago, Lincoln, Minneapolis, and Onigamiising will interrogate Midwestern stereotypes by breaking boundaries of language, image, and form. As Indigenous, Queer, immigrant, Black, nonbinary, and multinational writers, they will reimagine the concepts of place, space, and the intersectional landscapes that reside in us all.
Publishing writers working in kid lit talk truthfully about figuring out which age-based market their story fits into. Some intentionally wrote for one even if their story bent typical rules, others subbed stories in YA and A, some wrote the story and then figured it out. All have learned from their experiences and grown as writers. Panelists will have a lively conversation about what age-based markets mean, and how, over the course of a writing career, to move between them.
The pandemic was a collective experience of profound loss. Death is ubiquitous, yet the topic is avoided on the page and in life. What do we fear? Five acclaimed authors who think alongside the topic in genre-transcending ways that manifest as poem-films, martyrs, spirit lands, encyclopedias, and aliens, discuss why rendering death is crucial; its surprising humors, responsibilities, and joys. Their combined perspective includes social workers, poets, literacy researchers, and a death doula.
This panel will explore the possibilities of working with AI technology in creative writing classes, rather than fighting against its growth in popularity, by teaching students how to use AI as a tool for inspiration instead of a replacement for original human thought. Writers at the level of post-doc, assistant, and full professor, teaching across all genres at both liberal arts and STEM-focused institutions, will discuss research-based and practical approaches to using AI in their CW classes.
Long viewed as an outside genre, horror only rarely skirts so-called mainstream “artistic legitimacy,” as seen recently in the award-winning films of Jordan Peele and Ari Aster. How can poets use horror films to push, even transgress, the boundaries of verse, and explore intersections of body, identity, and sociocultural history? Five poets will share how horror films have shaped their work, from processing the body to translating trauma. Who will survive and what will be left of them?
It's not always possible for neurodivergent writers or those with physical or mental disabilities to follow popular writing advice. This group of authors shares strategies and workarounds that have helped them research, complete, revise, and submit writing projects. They will also address ways to maintain professional relationships when attending events or communicating with others is challenging—and urge the publishing and literary worlds to equitably include the disabled and neurodiverse.
In this workshop we will be discussing the Black Grotesque as a framework for confronting the physical, psychological, and spiritual horrors compounded by white supremacy, ableist, cis/hetero-patriarchy and late stage capitalism. We will offer a critical reading of work proposing the Black Grotesque as a method of thinking outside of the propertied logic of indexing and measurement that prize the single unit, a kind of individuation, and propose something porous and always assembling.
Attention novice and seasoned writers alike! Discover the answers to the top ten questions about audiobooks. In this workshop we will cover everything from: writing with audio in mind, how to find/hire a narrator (or narrate yourself), pros/cons of various publishing and distribution options, addressing AI in the audiobook industry, understanding the importance of casting diverse narrators, learn current sales data, and gain new marketing tips and resources. The workshop will conclude with a Q&A.
Poetry is witness and what better location to witness than at the kitchen table. It is an invocation of all five senses. The synesthetic aura leads to readiness
for nourishment and a spiritual setting enables gratitude. Ingredients, recipes, and rituals of honoring are a celebration and a meditation. Mealtimes hold us, as well as history. Every morsel is an activation process; nothing is as evocative as food. Stories have been buried within our pots and pans. Flavors of beginnings and endings.
Split/Lip Press is celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2024! For this reading, five authors from our catalog will read from their books. Split/Lip Press is proud to publish innovative, boundary-breaking prose; we've helped launch the careers of some of the most exciting prose writers of the last decade.
Event Outline
Latinx men who write on identity, culture, or those who grew up with limitations as to how they could express themselves, know how ones own culture plays a huge part in showing vulnerability, thus, creating perpetual feelings of shame affecting identity. As queer Latinx, we write because vulnerability is often seen as weakness; however, it’s necessary to address how it affects writing both from the writer’s and reader’s perspective.
The event will feature five Nepali immigrant anglophone writers writing in the United States and Canada: Rohan Chhetri, Khem Aryal, Samyak Shertok, Pushpa Raj Acharya, Saraswati Lamichhane. Spanning genres from poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, they will discuss the challenges of writing Nepali diasporic lives in North America drawing roots from Nepal and India, and their role as translators and anthology editors in building a robust and complex representation of Nepali literature in English and in translation.
How do we tell the stories of our lives? Five contributors from the award-winning anthology Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World, will discuss how personal narratives offer powerful testimonies as women of color owning their place in the world. The conversation will include discussions of identity, memory, otherness, ancestral heritage, place, and writing craft. Discussion and Q&A in the end.
Event Outline
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. This meeting is open to anyone interested in the work of writer-in-the-school teaching artists, programs, and organizations.
How can the ordinary forms we use in daily life—receipts, shopping lists, crossword puzzles—be inhabited to create compelling stories? Our panel will focus on how borrowed forms, called hermit crabs as they borrow the “shell” of a familiar text, can open up playful experimentation in our work and surprise by their hidden depth. We will look at stellar examples of both fiction and nonfiction and show how and why they work. We will also share techniques, ideas for forms to borrow, and prompts.
Four writers will discuss decolonizing American literature through the examples of literary works in the colonial languages of English and French from Black, brown, and Asian writers across the world, as well as literature in Indian languages, including Urdu and Bengali. Panelists will discuss the goals of decolonial anglophone literature and consider the challenges and strategies of writers confronting imperial patterns in American Literature.
Jacqueline Woodson says, “The more specific we are, the more universal something can become.” Does this apply to a themed magazine? Starting and running a lit mag is hard. Why make it harder by restricting its theme to something deeply specific? In this intellectually lively session, the editors of Slag Glass City, After the Art, Consequence, and Past Ten will discuss the pleasures and challenges of running themed lit mags. Come for inspiration and practical advice!
Lauded essayists discuss experiments with form, including fragmentary approaches to narrative, and how they leave space for both readers and writers to approach subject matter about difficult legacies. How does the use of fragments allow ways into incomplete or contested family and cultural narratives around war trauma; religious persecution; racial, sexual, and gender identity; and violence? How might fragmented narrative further the possibilities for sharing and transmuting difficult legacies?
One hundred years after his birth, Baldwin's legacy, influence, and relevance cannot be overstated. Panelists writing in several genres share work guided by the critic, activist, novelist, playwright, and poet, and discuss how we as writers and a society can make our way into communion with him.
Independent publishers publish some of the most dynamic and exciting books in the literary landscape, often launching debut writers’ first books or chapbooks. This panel, featuring publishing veterans from prominent independent presses, will demystify the process of submitting to and publishing work with an indie press. Panelists will share the benefits and challenges of working with an indie press, as well as tips for how to put your best foot forward when submitting your work to indie presses.
Literary magazines have historically been criticized for being dominated by white, cisgender, heterosexual voices, and too focused on the experiences of a privileged few. Editors from Solstice, Pangyrus, and AGNI will explore diversity, equity, and inclusion in literary magazines; specific challenges and opportunities, and how editors, writers, and readers can create a more inclusive and truly representative literary landscape.
All writers borrow from life: people we’ve known, things we’ve witnessed, and historical events inevitably find their way into the work. But when novelists explicitly set out to retell true stories, they face serious ethical and artistic challenges. What does it mean to "shape" reality? What do we owe the people whose lives are our source material? Is our responsibility to historical accuracy or to the meaning we find there? Five authors discuss the fraught process of turning fact into fiction.
Writing about real people comes with an obligation to consider the impact on those involved. Memoirists must write the authentic story that they need to tell, and yet doing so can be difficult when facing the risk of a lawsuit or a damaged relationship with a loved one. How can a writer maintain artistic integrity and truthfulness while minimizing the risk of hurting or angering the people who appear on the page? In this panel, authors and attorneys discuss the legal and ethical implications of memoirs to help you feel confident about writing your truth.
Four diverse memoirists come together for a discussion of the joys and perils of writing timely memoirs from the middle of the country, exploring issues related to voice, persona, research, and tension in developing a well-constructed memoir.
Did you know publishers and authors can use Bookshop.org? In this session we’ll show you how to create an account, generate revenue streams, and build your brand using Bookshop.org. By providing guidance on how to monetize your online presence, leverage your fanbase, and how you can work with your local indie or many or all indies to support their stores, you’ll leave this session ready support the publishing ecosystem while making some money.
Twelve-ten P.M. to One-twenty-five P.M.
Many aspire to “the writer’s life”—publishing books, realizing literary fame—an often inaccessible, even exclusionary, ideal. But there is another way: a life in writing. What paths exist for those not seeking agents or haunting literary magazines but whose writing ambitions and accomplishments are just as relevant? A panel of Kansas City writers—an undergraduate, assessment writer, educator/storyteller, and print/radio journalists—discuss their unique experiences embodying a life in writing.
How can fiction express trauma, both lived and witnessed? From “telling it slant” to employing metaphor and rhythm, to imbuing the very landscape with disturbance, fiction permits us to animate trauma in amazing ways. Drawing upon our collective experience as writers, editors, emergency room physicians, and members of the Latinx diaspora, we will describe our own approaches and that of other authors to writing about trauma.
What happens when the speaker becomes a collective? Or when the self fractures into multiplicity? Polyvocal and multivocal poetics demand that we explore not a first telling nor a retelling, but a faceted nonlinear narrative. Join panelists as they explore how expanding the speaker confronts the limitations of the self and the canon in search of solidarity and belonging.
"I'm not good at writing," "I don't know what to write," and "My English isn't good enough"—working with creative writers outside English departments requires shifts in expectations, approaches, and consciousness. This panel gathers those working in a variety of nontraditional settings: libraries, prisons, hospitals, and teacher certification programs. Each panelist addresses challenges they've encountered and strategies for success to teach with courage, creativity, and care.
As seen by the "BookTok" tables in Barnes & Noble, the effect that TikTok has on the literary landscape is undeniable. Using their experience growing up online, these undergraduate students explain why you should care about the platform currently rewriting the industry, and how to use it to market your work. From the generation largely responsible for TikTok’s reach, the panelists will tackle the beginnings of BookTok and its effects on the future of the publishing industry.
What new urgency does the fall of Roe v. Wade create for writers who experience miscarriage, child loss, and childbirth? How does the use of form and persona complicate and elucidate these topics? What can be gained by exploring racist and sexist institutions of reproductive care through poetry? How can poetry order the chaos of this kind of grief into art? Five poets will discuss their process of writing reproductive elegies, from individual poems to chapbooks and full-length collections.
Uniting attendees from across disciplines, the African Diaspora Caucus will provide a forum for discussions of careers, best practices for teaching creative writing, and obtaining the MFA or PhD. We will work with AWP's affinity caucuses to develop national diversity benchmarks for creative writing programs, and will collaborate with board and staff to ensure that AWP programs meet the needs of diaspora writers. This caucus will be an inclusive space that reflects the pluralities in our community.
Explore one Kansas City, Missouri independent high school’s dedicated week of creative writing where in all English classes, across all grade levels, students engage in professional and peer-led workshops, craft talks and readings, and have time and space to write—without a grade attached. Low-stakes creative writing experiences, especially in post-COVID years, are a way to develop social-emotional bonds, imagination, and writing skills. Learn about how to design and implement a program like this at any level.
The culturally-dominant conceptualization of masculinity is characterized by intermale dominance, relentless competition, emotional inexpressivity, and attendant violences (interpersonal, ecological). This damaging, hegemonic masculinity impacts every aspect of daily life, from the personal to the geopolitical. This panel confronts masculinity narratives, explores craft strategies to subvert destructive notions of “manhood,” and considers what it means to embody a poetics of tenderness.
In the popular depictions of India circulating in the United States, we rarely see the stories that the nation’s jingoistic governments have shoved under the carpet, stories of massive human rights violations committed by the Indian state in the country’s margins: military violence and Hindu fundamentalist oppression—nearly absent in the vast array of widely read work about India available in English in the U.S. The panelists will discuss how they represent this in their work and the challenges associated.
Writers across generations and genres read their work and discuss what it means to be an author from the Great Plains at this moment. Inspired by the public radio series This is Nebraska: Books That Tell Our Story, this panel will delve into what it's like to write, live, and persist in a place that's considered culturally homogenous “flyover” country but whose diverse population is often polarized and marginalized. How do we engage the region's traditions? How do we push back against them?
Experience the transformative power of four trans and nonbinary poets in a poignant reading of debut poetry collections. Amid rising anti-trans legislation and violence, these writers navigate the complexities of identity, resilience, and self-discovery. With vulnerability and strength, their diverse voices challenge societal norms and inspire change. Join us to celebrate and amplify marginalized perspectives, fostering empathy and understanding in a time when existence itself is a radical act.
Most first- or second-gen APIA stories are tales of perseverance. The American Dream fulfilled. But what about everyone else: the slackers, stoners, and screw-ups? This panel is five creators, working in a variety of prose genres, who will discuss the personal and artistic choices that led them to writing about APIA people in the margins. The discussion will delve into conversations around the consideration of audience, upending of the model minority myth, and writing complicated characters.
In this session, editors of five recently published, or publishing in 2023, anthologies will highlight the contributions of their anthologies and share ins and outs of editing an anthology and getting it published. The anthologies—South to South, Mid/South Sonnets, Already Gone: 40 Stories of Running Away, What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People, and Transmasculine Poetics: Filling the Gap in Literature & the Silences Around Us—cover a wide range of issues and all major literary genres.
Does it feel like your nonfiction book is taking too long to write? From the tenure committee to social media, from well-meaning friends to your own worst imagination—pressures to hurry up and write can easily overwhelm. What if you take so long your cultural criticism or memoir is no longer relevant? What if the fire burns out after years of research? Join five writers in the same boat as we create a space to explore and tackle some of the real versus imagined risks of the long-simmering book project.
Many of the poets who claim the French language and handle it in expansive ways come from non-French cultural backgrounds. Five translators of francophone poetry will read and discuss their translations of poets from Syria, Haiti, Algeria, Palestine, and Côte d’Ivoire who use French (and, through translation, English) and inflect it with a wider diversity of non-French cultural, exilic, and decolonial concerns, among others.
Divination and writing are both processes that draw from archives of knowledge, but divination opens us up to sources often difficult to access: ancestral, somatic, elemental, natural, spiritual, unconscious, silenced. By accessing these sources to inform and guide writing, our writing, in turn, generates meaning and connections that alter the archives in structure, content, and accessibility. We will explore how divination creates new paths to hidden ways of knowing and writing.
The rise of memoirs-in-essays is upon us, but what purpose does the form serve? What even is a memoir-in-essays? These four CNF writers discuss why they chose to inhabit the space between memoir and essays and the possibilities inherent in the subgenre. In this moderated Q&A, panelists will discuss the contours of the form, the freedom of liminality, and the challenges of writing the in-between.
Each year, the Unsung Masters Series publishes a book devoted to the life and work of a great but little known author. Volumes include large selections of the author's work printed alongside interviews, articles, drafts, photographs, and ephemera. This reading brings together the editors of four recent volumes who will read from the work of poets Shreela Ray, Tom Postell, Bert Meyers, and Laura Hershey. This event should lead to great discoveries for those who attend.
When does our imagination require fact checking? Curated facts vivify our made-up worlds, deepen authenticity, and ward off appropriation, while inaccuracy undermines our credibility. This diverse panel of fiction writers will detail their research methods and madnesses, addressing questions like, how can you tell when you’re writing into territory you need to learn more about? When do facts weigh down rather than elevate a story? How can we avoid—or learn from—rabbit holes?
Combating stigmas and shame culture surrounding mental health, writers share poetry, nonfiction, and cross-genre work that embraces autism spectrum disorder, Anxiety, ADHD, OCD, Bipolar, and depression. These writers refuse to hide from or mask within an ableist society and through content and form, call attention to the creative powers of neurodiversity. They will share their work and discuss how their craft choices transform neurotypical language into a neurodiverse universe.
You’ve finalized your manuscript and perfected your query letter, but now what? How do you know the etiquette or strategy to approach finding the right agent? And what comes after you’ve found the dream fit? Five seasoned literary agents offer insight about what they’re looking for, how they work with authors, and why you should never ever pitch them in the bathroom. The conversation will approach the agent/author relationship with transparency, candor, and care.
This event will take place in person in the Kansas City Convention Center. In addition to the in-person event at the conference, a prerecorded version of this event will be available to view on-demand.
Join 2019 National Book Award winner Susan Choi (Trust Exercise) and 2022 National Book Award finalist Sarah Thankam Mathews (All This Could Be Different) for a conversation on the impact of contemporary bildungsroman and what it means to grow up in adult fiction. Choi and Mathews read from their novels and discuss how and why coming-of-age stories capture writers and readers alike. Moderated by Ruth Dickey, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation. Presented in partnership with the National Book Foundation.
This event will take place in person in the Kansas City Convention Center and will be livestreamed for virtual audiences. All livestreamed events include open captions and ASL interpretation.
In our charged political climate, representatives from literary nonprofits located in so-called “red states” will discuss their pitfalls and their triumphs in literary programming. This panel will discuss the importance of nonprofit literary arts organizations in states with often-hostile political climates, what problems (from funding to program security) they face, and their current initiatives and future goals to foster a more inclusive community and uplift marginalized voices.
This panel of five BIPOC poets will share work that celebrates the hard-won strength that comes with facing adversity, then engage in a dialogue about the ways their poems and their platforms have become tools for confronting and navigating challenges such as systemic oppression, marginalization, and cultural erasure. This panel seeks to honor and uplift stories of resilience while showcasing the transformative power of poetry as a means of self expression, healing, and social change.
“Stay focused and stay in love with what it is that you are doing.” — Dianne Reeves, NEA Jazz Master. Writing is a lifelong journey. Often a writer’s success is measured by publication, accolades, and sales. But with all the ups and downs of the writing life—emotional, financial, physical, etc.—what motivates writers to continue sitting in the chair to do the work? And what sorts of habits are needed to create meaningful art for the long haul?
The forthcoming anthology In the Tempered Dark conveys the wide range of grief deemed urgent by contemporary poets from diverse backgrounds, at all career stages, exploring loss, trauma, addiction, marginalized bodies, the climate crisis, inter alia, through various styles and forms. As grief needs, from villanelle to epistle to golden shovel to erasure, these contributors’ poems show visceral links between unique bodies of/in grief and the shapes poems take on the page, transcending elegy.
Naugatuck River Review, a print journal of narrative poetry and Wordpeace.co, an online multi-genre journal dedicated to social justice issues present a reading of NRR's fifteenth annual contest winners and featured Wordpeace contributors from our issues celebrating bodily autonomy and LGBTQ+ writers and issues.
One-forty-five P.M. to Three o'clock P.M.
As literary publishing adapts to the rise of literary comics, visual essays, and intermedia fictions championed by indie presses and online magazines, editors are selecting for more writing that moves visually. But what makes a multimedia text? And what makes a good one? Which strategies make visual elements inextricable from rather than extraneous to text? On this panel, five writers discuss a wide range image-text forms, and demonstrate how they are thriving on pages and screens.
This panel will examine methodologies that foster exploration in interdisciplinarity, outlining projects and practices undertaken in the first four years of OCADU’s creative writing BFA program, including in-class experiences and exercises, public projects, curricular intersections, and student-led iniitiatives and publications, all of which encourage writing that seeks new spaces for text and engage with the precepts, materials, and processes of art and design practices.
Conventional approaches to nonfiction emphasize single stories, linear revelations, and verifiable facts, but pressure to conform to familiar narrative modalities can silence those who write from marginalized and non-normative perspectives. In this panel, five writers of hybrid and intersectional nonfiction discuss how their work disrupts norms, shatters singular narratives, and complicates facts—embracing instead the power of blended genres, multiple identities, and prismatic points of view.
torrin a. greathouse asks, “What tools can prosody provide us with for cultivating an embodied poetics of disability?" Jenny Johnson suggests “Prosody can be a space for wrestling with and wrestling off old scripts, and also for generating the new ones that we need.” Oliver de la Paz argues that prose poems offer a specific vantage point for the “political” gesture of sentence making, while Brian Teare suggests that a collage-based prose practice can wire our sentences to our nervous systems.
Writing and being a teaching artist can both be solitary professions, as much of the work of creating, planning, and leading classrooms is often done alone. How can writers find their people and build a writing community that will motivate and support their writing practices? In this panel, teaching writers will share their strategies for finding or creating writing communities, including generative writing communities such as writing groups and beta readers, mentorships and fellowships, fundraising, and career support.
How do you find the right publisher—and what happens next? Five writers who’ve published in different models, genres, and eras will discuss in frank terms what they wish they would have known on the publishing journey. Topics include relationships with publishers, how the money works, and will encompass how to manage expectations against realistic outlooks. With an overall goal of transparency, this panel will help writers at every stage ask questions that will best serve their projects.
In creative writing, the focus is product over process. Producing pages for publication is necessary, but when that goal takes over, what is lost? For women especially, writing solely to publish can lead to burnout. Generative writing might be an answer. These panelists, women who work in both academic and community spaces, champion writing for writing’s sake. Their interactive panel will reclaim writing as a process of discovery and invite attendees to try a few favorite generative prompts.
This panel will discuss how to foster digital literacies within creative writing projects. The goal of this panel will be to explore the following questions: in what ways can digital projects enhance creative writing students' rhetorical awareness of the unique author-audience interactions facilitated by online/multimodal platforms? How can this rhetorical awareness invite students to locate connections between their creative composing strategies and professional aims?
“I’ve entered LA to anti-erase, which is the work of resistance,” writes Courtney Faye Taylor in Concentrate. This panel of poets and nonfiction writers considers biography as an act of anti-erasure, recovering lives that systems of power seek to efface. Panelists discuss biography’s ethics, challenges, and possibilities, including redefining “archives,” reconciling evidence, interpreting gaps, and reimagining genre conventions to do justice to a subject’s lived experience.
As the intersection of literary form and performance art, spoken word engages underserved and marginalized communities through accessible language and culturally relevant subject matter. It is this accessibility that is affirming to both poets and audiences. Our discussion will explore the possibilities in coordinating and developing programs while considering effective collaborations and best practices and dream of what more we can accomplish in our communities.
Since 1991, the Affrilachian Poets—a multicultural group of writers who consider Appalachia home—have defied the stereotype of the region as rural and racially/religiously homogenous. Join members of this diverse collective for a multigenre reading of new and selected work that connects intersectional identities to family roots, culture, and deep connections to the land.
From 1975 until his death in 2023, Norman Dubie—who helped establish the MFA program at Arizona State University in 1985—served as a tireless, dedicated, and influential mentor to writers living and studying in central Arizona and the American southwest. Comprised of former students, colleagues, and critics, this panel examines Dubie’s legacy as both a poet and teacher, paying special attention to his inclusive pedagogy, devotion to students, and the genius of his poetic vision.
As a privileged global language, English provides a powerful tool for centering diverse voices who speak in new ways into English-language cultures. This panel brings together translators who understand their work in part as advocacy for poets writing in languages other than English. Our panelists translate from French, Sinhala, Spanish, Ukrainian and Russian, and from cultures across the globe: from the African diaspora in the Americas to South Asia to the post-Soviet sphere and its diasporas.
Oops—you married outside your race, didn’t get a high-status job, botched family traditions, moved far away, forgot your mother tongue, spilled family secrets, got divorced, can’t cook, didn’t have children. The list of sins is endless for immigrant daughters who walk a tightrope between assimilating enough to succeed while being judged by the values of their parents’ generation and homeland. These writers reject the model minority myth and portray the drama and humor of living across cultures.
Defying the notion that brevity diminishes impact, this panel celebrates the art of concise writing. Writing micro is an opportunity to cut to the chase, to distill what is most essential into a few carefully considered words, to center a single experience or thought. Defined as 300 words or less, micro essays/narratives/memoirs linger long after you’ve read them. Panelists will discuss how they’ve used micro in their work, and the publication options for micro. Discussion and Q&A at the end.
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Tasked to enrich and engage the University of Cincinnati campus and community, UC Libraries and Elliston Poetry Room partnered to create Poetry Stacked, a multimodal reading series staged in the stacks of UC’s Langsam Library and curated with twenty-first century values. Poetry Stacked brings faculty, staff, student, and community poets together in-person and live streamed. Panelists will discuss the planning and staging process, sharing lessons and adjustments, feedback and the future.
Poets Against Walls anthology/handbook features poetry and hybrid writings from the geopolitical spaces of the borderlands, along with a history of the collective’s social actions, discussions on craft, and writing prompts. In addition to reading short selections of their work and speaking on the value of writing directly about communities under attack, panelists will provide tips and strategies for writing what some may feel dissuaded from in workshop spaces: crafting work for social change.
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Kansas has a tradition of serving as a bellwether, showing the country and the world where we are headed, especially in difficult times. Listen to five past Kansas poets laureate talk about how the experiment of United States democracy encompasses advocacy for and through poetry and involves diverse communities and actions, including how to grow the arts in extreme political environments. "When something's going to happen in this country, it happens first in Kansas," says writer William Allen White.
Join four authors who have written about Kansas in new and imaginative ways, fleshing out the Sunflower State in their own innovative literary strokes. This innovation comes in the form of alternate histories injecting Islamic folklore into the plains and the metanarrative of a could-be Lawrence bomber, the emotionally-nuanced story of an animal-loving family in repair, and the dark tale of a supernaturally-touched farming family in decline.
The panel affirms revision as transformative practice. Writing across gender and genre, we will examine literary and human transition—the revision of form, language, narrative, and understanding. The panel will discuss the promise of reflective practice, away from perfection and legibility toward integrity and liberation. Topics will include conception, discernment, integration, and audience. Framing revision as iterative rather than linear, we consider what's at stake in revision: truth.
Event Outline
More anti-LGBTQIA+ bills are being introduced and passed at alarming rates, including book bans. In such a dark, dangerous climate, how can authors in that community feel motivated to keep writing stories? Five Young Adult authors bring a range of experiences to discuss the pull they feel to tell queer stories despite these challenges. We’ll talk about queer joy, relationships, and plots that drive us forward.
The hundreds of independent presses in the United States each publish beautiful, important, and high-quality books. Working with an independent press can be the beginning of a partnership that nurtures your writing and makes space for creative risk-taking. Indie presses’ dedication for their work allows them to compete with much bigger publishers for recognition in the literary world. Come learn why writers choose to trust their work to these essential publishers at all stages of their careers.
Death to the old cliché of the lush poet who destroys themselves and others in pursuit of their tortured genius. Here, four nationally-acclaimed poets from the Sarabande anthology, Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction & Deliverance, read their work and speak to writing and their experiences with (and near) addiction. This event celebrates the work of writers who have grappled, or are grappling with this disease, who do not glamorize addiction but instead live beside it, around it, through it.
This event will take place in person in the Kansas City Convention Center and will be livestreamed for virtual audiences. All livestreamed events include open captions and ASL interpretation.
Crime fiction has often struggled to be taken seriously in literature classes and creative writing workshops, even as the students themselves are avid fans of suspense, thrillers, true crime podcasts, and more. Professors who teach crime fiction as literature (class, race, and social justice as thematic cores) or use it as models for aspiring writers (plotting, pacing, getting readers to turn the page) explore the genre’s strengths for academia and offer tips on bringing it into the classroom.
In 2000, three members of this panel presented "What Is an Author—on the Net?" at AWP. The landscape has changed, and the question is different too. Online publishing is more inclusive and accessible, with greater outreach than a print-dominant approach tied to top-tier creative writing programs, and most writers, especially poets, make use of both. How has this changed the aesthetic standards of the poetry world? How has it changed the way poets approach their writing and careers?
It’s every writer’s dream to see their words published, so why is it so hard to get honest, practical advice? Five ethnically diverse authors with diverse pathways to success share their tips for navigating the publishing world. How challenging is it to get an agent? Do you always need an agent? How do you get a book deal? Are there alternatives to the Big Five? What are the pros and cons of self-publishing? Are the pathways different for poetry, children’s books, YA, fiction, and nonfiction?
Black women are authoring change as new and founding leaders of literary arts organizations throughout the country. Hear from the leaders of the Loft in Minneapolis, Hedgebrook in Freeland, Lambda Literary in New York, TruArtSpeaks in St. Paul, and CityLit Project in Baltimore about how their identities inform their values, perspectives, and approach to leadership within their organizations and communities.
Contrary to popular belief, a hen party is not limited to a bachelorette party and can extend to any social gathering of women. Four generations of poets: in their twenties, thirties, fifties and sixties, celebrate how women’s thoughts on career, relationships and body image change with age through the writing, discussion, and reading of their poems all the while getting to the heart of the matter—why is cross-generational dialogue necessary for the empowerment of woman-identifying people?
Event Outline
Three-twenty P.M. to Four-thirty-five P.M.
Artist collectives have long been places of professional knowledge sharing, resistance, and deep care, but in this era of COVID-19, inaccessibility, and increasing homophobia, collectives offer invaluable support for the writer. Whether virtual or in person, local community-originating or a national group unified by an ethnic, cultural, or Queer identity, collectives offer writers the ability to build a new society or way of relating. These five writers of color gather to share their experience.
Contemporary writers turn to hybridity to grapple with social upheaval and political uncertainty at this critical time. This panel looks at how poets hybridize their work and teach their readership to dissolve genre borders, while asking for a curious and active response from their audience to the way poetry blurs, disrupts, and alters genres. Authors of recent poetry collections will gather to read work that negotiates hybridity as a creative space through linguistic innovation and inquiry.
How can we decolonize the classroom through language? How can we resist the idea of English being the “universal language” when most academic conversations still happen in English? This panel will bring together several translators and writers who are also teachers at Queens College, CUNY, an institution at the forefront of multilingual writing education, to discuss translation as a pedagogical practice.
Demystify the journey of adapting your novel into a viable screenplay or play. As a novelist, you allow your readers an insight into characters' thoughts and inner monologues; yet, to be a successful screenwriter or playwright, you must master the craft of turning the internal into the visual. We will give you the structural, formatting, dialogue, and character tricks of the trade, and building blocks to successfully adapt your novel into a viable screenplay, teleplay or play.
Booksellers have a unique understanding of how books sell. Author publicity efforts often focus on social media, but what should authors do to support sales in brick and mortar stores? How can they inspire booksellers to stock, recommend, and promote their books? The answers have everything to do with cultivating relationships and being a good literary citizen. Writers who are, or were once booksellers, some publishing with indie presses and some with Big Five houses, will share their wisdom.
There’s an old lie about the arts: if you can’t live off your passion, you teach. This adage was true for writers who also built a life as professors in academia, but with tenure-track jobs shrinking and stable writing jobs low, how can one maintain a healthy life, writing career, and plan for the future? In this panel, five published authors in various genres discuss their different career paths in law, tech, nonprofits, and other fields while also writing.
This panel features writers who create programming and events that expand our impact beyond the boundaries of the literary world. Participants will share their experiences with programs that reach new communities or develop community in inclusive and nurturant ways. Our presenters, for example, have initiated creative writing in prisons; collaborated with a theater company bringing reader’s theater into schools; and worked with a literary arts organization devoted to developing young writers.
This panel explores inclusive innovations in creative writing workshop learned from remote instruction during the pandemic. Since "getting back to normal," an assumption has been made that we can and should return to previous pedagogical models. But should we? Has the traditional workshop model successfully served the growing diversity in classrooms? From varied subject positions and range of courses taught, panelists will elaborate on ways that workshop practices can and have shifted toward equity.
How do writers use poetry and nonfiction to explore reproductive choice, health, and loss? What are the unique challenges and risks raised in the act of writing about reproductive topics, including infertility, miscarriage, and abortion? How does the stigma of discussing the intimate emotional and bodily aspects of reproduction carry over to the page? How do these issues change across genre? Writers with a range of experiences and backgrounds will read from their work and engage these issues.
The arts should belong to everyone. Lucky Jefferson is excited to present research from ongoing focus groups and the surveying of Black-identifying writers and artists residing in Chicago. With support from Illinois Humanities, this research is a step towards advancing creative communities of color by raising awareness about the harms that continue to exist in publishing. Participants will be able to learn, offer insight(s), and copartner with us to develop new communities of practice.
Within the rich tradition of Jewish-American fiction, distorted and stereotypical depictions of Jewish women abound, often sourcing from male writers. This panel of award-winning Jewish women novelists will explore a more authentic, multidimensional vision of Jewish women on the page, one that captures the variety, complexity, and layers of truth about Jewish women’s lives. This craft panel is for all writers who create against patriarchal bias and cultural stereotypes.
How do we balance agency and boundaries within youth writing programs? How do we create, or allow our students to create, sustainable creative youth communities? Panelists from Grubstreet, The Muse Writers Center, and The Porch will discuss the nuances of creating spaces that balance teen writers’ growing need for creative and personal autonomy with the need for guidance and boundaries, as well as the importance of giving students the tools to create their own creative communities post-graduation.
The past years have upended how and who we think of as community. Locked down in our homes and tethered to Zoom, suddenly writers several continents and time zones away were as close as those next door. As poets, essayist, teachers, and editors we’ll explore the creation of community through difficulty. How do the exigencies of today’s convergent crises and new technologies put pressure on and also invigorate communities? We’ll discuss ways to persevere and find restorative and lasting exchange.
In this fun and engaging presentation, five parent writers share their most successful tips for how to write and publish fiction, nonfiction, and poetry while raising young children. We'll offer inspiring anecdotes to show how we achieved work/life balance, along with a wealth of resources covering everything from distraction blockers and reward-based writing software to how to train yourself to write anywhere, anytime. Handouts include a list of fellowships and retreats specific to parents.
The last American troops withdrew from Vietnam over fifty years ago, but the children of veterans and draft resisters—in this case, their sons—still walk in the long shadow of that war. In this panel Keenan Norris, Andy Smart, and J. Michael Martinez examine some of the disparate but undeniable effects of growing up with fathers who split their duties between family, country, and protest, and whose notions of manhood were forever linked—directly or otherwise—to violence.
This panel will present exercises for writing narrative video games from the introductory to the advanced level. We will cover a variety of topics such as character/avatar creation, plot/structure, and world building, as well as technical tools or AI generation that you can use in the creative writing classroom or in constructing your own narrative-driven video games.
Though community colleges typically enroll around forty percent of United States undergraduates, they are seldom discussed as sites of knowledge production or expertise. Panelists—active writers and community college professors—will talk about the pedagogical and creative implications of open access and community immersion; the knowledges, processes, and forms that emerge from teaching introductory courses; and career sustainability with heavy course loads and limited or nonexistent research support.
Writers are not only writers. They are parents, teachers, and organizers, among others. As a result, it can be a challenge to carve out dedicated time for the page, and when we do, a piece can sit untouched for months. A group of Asian American writers created a space to exchange work that requires minimal time while maximizing community building amid life’s other commitments. Panelists discuss the significance of safe writing spaces and how their mixed genre grouping allows for unique dialogue.
Queerness is everywhere. Yet so, too are attacks on queer lives, stories, and art. Too often, these attacks—and the erasures and gaps they leave behind—become what we know of queer history. But might introducing speculative elements into narratives allow us to recover a fuller past and future? The writers on this panel will discuss how we deploy imaginative, fantastical, and fabulist moments in our nonfiction, fiction, and hybrid work, transing both gender and genre to remake a queerer world.
A common problem writers grapple with is the ethics of writing the Other: characters, cultures, voices not of their own personal subject positioning. In the era of #ownvoices where writers are claiming their subject positionings and desiring to experience authentic voices on the page, this panel will address the strategies by BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ writers across various genres who have explored answers to the question: How do we ethically write the Other?
To know a society, you must first understand its crimes. Crime fiction in its various forms, from thriller to noir to historical, endeavors to understand society through the exploration of criminality and our criminal justice system. Four accomplished authors discuss how they employ genre storytelling to expose truths about troubling aspects of American culture, past and present, as a means of raising awareness of social problems, generational trauma, and victims’ stories.
Furious Flower commemorates its upcoming thirtieth anniversary, and previews the fourth historic Furious Flower Poetry Conference (September 2024), with a reading and conversation among three award-winning poets—Nikky Finney, Anastacia-Reneé, and Malika Booker—moderated by executive director, Lauren K. Alleyne. They will discuss the geographies, identities, and communities that influence their practice and craft, their relationships to the Black archive, as well as their work within and outside the academy.
This event will take place in person in the Kansas City Convention Center and will be livestreamed for virtual audiences. All livestreamed events include open captions and ASL interpretation.
In an industry that often tells us that short story collections are “hard” to sell, five writers will discuss what it means to publish one beautifully. This panel centers love for the story form, building collections, and the presses that publish them. What can university presses offer that other independent and Big Five houses can’t? This diverse panel will share our debut projects and answer questions that explore submission, editing, marketing, structuring, linking or not linking, and beyond.
Writing about trauma can be therapeutic, but revisiting painful subjects can also take a toll on the writer. Beyond therapy, what can a writer do? This panel of essayists, poets, memoirists, teachers, and coaches will share how they’ve structured their writing practices to integrate support and healing, strategies for delving into traumatic memories without deteriorating psychologically, and their reasons for choosing to write in the face of pain.
You write a book. An agent agrees to sell it. A publisher agrees to package and publicize it. A publicist pitches it to a book reviewer who reviews it or doesn't. The publishing game follows a well-tread path that first-time authors often don't understand. Too many writers run the race with a lot of questions only half-answered and unrealistic expectations. This publishing round robin covers the many decision points and thresholds that have to be crossed in order to get a book into the world.
Writers and editors of color remain underrepresented in the publishing industry despite a new wave of literature that centers the stories of marginalized peoples. These Texan publishers have created space outside mainstream avenues to reimagine what it means to uplift marginalized writers, editors, and publishers. This panel explores their experiences—impacted by criminalization, queerphobia, and racism—as they relate to self-publishing and literary community activism.
What does it mean for a writer to travel? And what does it mean for a writer to establish a home rooted in place? Is there a difference in the work of a writer who honors the call for departure and return, and the writer who remains firmly at home, and so comes to know her place intimately. In this conversation about the influences of travel and place on writing and the writer’s life, participants will explore how these seeming opposites may be more complementary and companionable than we think.
Five o'clock P.M. to Six-fifteen P.M.
Daily 12-Step Meeting. All in recovery from anything are welcome.
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 starting 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.
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 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.
Six o'clock P.M. to Seven-thirty P.M.
This is an open reception for friends and supporters of UMKC's creative writing program.
Celebrate nineteen seasons of the Writer to Writer Mentorship Program! Former mentors and mentees are invited for a reunion and celebration. Bring a plus one, mingle with fellow participants and AWP staff, and enjoy a drink and some light fare.
Join us in celebrating the AWP HBCU Fellowship Program’s second year! Enjoy refreshments, meet this year’s faculty and student fellows, and hear from #AWP24 creative advisor Rion Amilcar Scott.
Join your fellow Emersonians and conference attendees to connect and reconnect while celebrating the fortieth anniversary of our MFA program.
Lambda Literary is all about celebrating LGBTQ+ stories and writers. Come and connect with other writers, readers, editors, and more. Share your love of queer stories!
Join Aliki Barnstone, Gabe Fried, Trudy Lewis, Speer Morgan, Phong Nguyen, and Donald Quist for a gathering of faculty and students (past and present) of the University of Missouri's Creative Writing Program. Friends of the program, including prospective graduate students, are welcome!
Please join some of our MFA faculty, Igor Webb, Maya Marshall, Jan-Henry Gray, and the director, René Steinke, for writerly conversation and refreshments.
Six-thirty P.M. to Seven-forty-five P.M.
Indigenous writers and scholars participate fluidly in AWP by teaching and directing affiliated programs, working as independent writers/scholars in language revitalization and local community programming. Annually imparting field-related craft, pedagogy, celebrations, and concerns as understood by Indigenous-Native writers from the Americas and surrounding island nations is necessary. Essential program development continues in 2024.
Eight o'clock P.M. to Nine-thirty P.M.
Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Award in Poetry and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the 2009 American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, the New York Times, the New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies.
This event will take place in person in the Kansas City Convention Center and will be livestreamed for virtual audiences. All livestreamed events include open captions and ASL interpretation.
Seven-thirty A.M. to Eight-forty-five A.M.
Daily 12-Step Meeting. All in recovery from anything are welcome.
Eight o'clock A.M. to Five o'clock P.M.
Coat check is available in Lobby 2200 on Level 2 of the Kansas City Convention Center. It is $5.00 per item checked. ATMs can be found in Lobby 2200, next to Room 2207, and in the Conference Center, across the hall from Room 2501A.
Attendees who have registered in advance, or who have yet to purchase a registration, may secure their registration materials in AWP’s registration area located in Exhibit Hall E, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 3. 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.
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
A darkened, quiet, and more private space for attendees to gather their thoughts, reset, or take a break from the lighting of the convention center.
The nursing lounge is located in Room 2213 on the Street Level of the Kansas City Convention Center, and is available for any nursing parent to use.
Eight o'clock A.M. to Six o'clock P.M.
Stop being embarrassed of your author photo! A great portrait is not only flattering, but actively invites your audience to get to know you and your work. Returning for a fifth year at AWP, author photographer Adrianne Mathiowetz will be offering twenty-minute studio sessions on-site. See your proof gallery of images immediately; any portrait you choose will be fully processed and digitally delivered in high resolution for $125. (Conference discount: in Adrianne's Boston studio, hour-long portrait sessions with one image included are priced at $850.) Additional images: $75/ea. Fine processing (spot adjustments beyond usual file preparation): $175/file. Rush processing: $100/file. Put your best face forward on websites, book covers, social media, and published interviews. Advanced sign-up required: https://am-photography.ticketleap.com/awp24/dates
Nine o'clock A.M. to Ten o'clock A.M.
Join Manisha Sharma, a certified yoga practitioner, for a gentle, one-hour yoga and meditation practice, appropriate for practitioners of all levels and abilities. The hour-long practice will focus on stretches, asanas, physical postures, breathing, relaxation, and meditation. Please come wearing comfortable street clothes; mats and yoga apparel are not necessary.
Nine o'clock A.M. to Ten-fifteen A.M.
Queer stories break from traditional norms, so why wouldn’t their narrative shapes do the same? As our canon of queer memoir expands, memoir as a genre continues to open itself to experimental architectures that amplify narrative possibilities for all nonfiction writers. Three queer memoirists draw from their own work as well as the writers they love to explore the exhilarating possibilities for queer forms and how to find the containers that enable them to tell their truest stories.
Russia's war against Ukraine brought a realization that the global literary community had limited knowledge of Ukrainian literature past and present, and also a keen interest to learn more. Obscured by centuries of imperial discrimination and entrenched prejudicial stereotypes, Ukrainian literary voices are finally beginning to be heard. Leading translators from Ukrainian into English reflect on their efforts and challenges they face.
Among Puerto Rico’s great cultural traditions is literature, yet Puerto Rican writers past and present lack visibility in the United States and continue to face the effects and legacy of colonialism. Five award-winning recipients of the Letras Boricuas Fellowship share poetry and fiction that spans topics of identity, language, and climate disasters, among others. The presenters, from both Puerto Rico and the U.S. diaspora, offer readings in Spanish and English. ASL interpretation provided.
The meteoric rise of generative AI technology like ChatGPT has generated a flurry of legal questions. Are images and text these programs produce copyrightable? Will using them in your work affect your rights? Is training data for AI infringing? Drawing on our expertise in the field of copyright and AI, Authors Alliance leads an interactive session explaining what authors need to know about how copyright and AI fit together, and how AI can serve both as a creative tool and potential disruptor.
A generative poetry workshop can get you there or help you break through. This panel addresses best practices from both teacher and student points of view. Teachers: structure a generative workshop and deploy methods beneficial to and inclusive of a wide variety of workshoppers. Students: identify strategies for framing expectations and seek definitions of success beyond yielding a few solid drafts. Panelists will address their own experiences as teachers, students, and the blurred role between.
In this guided discussion, the audience will hear from a diverse array of participants who are currently operating in the genre-bending fiction space: a debut novelist whose novel was pitched as "literary science fiction," two literary agents, and two editors who specialize in books that defy easy categorization. We'll discuss the frustrations of categorization, and how to work around them, as well as how to find and build your own community even when convenient labels don't apply to your work.
All American literature might be read as intrinsically interracial because of how race thoroughly pervades our social realities. The writers on this racially diverse panel, representing both fiction and memoir, consciously interrogate interracial realities. How can we write stories to achieve relational depth and sensitivity? How do we address our challenges and limitations in portraying characters of other races? Which writers, past and present, offer us models for navigating the craft?
Many have a narrow view of environmental fiction; they imagine lyrical encounters with nature or speculative, apocalyptic tales. However, this genre can and should be a capacious, varied genre where writers and readers reimagine place, reflect on our climate crisis, and imagine possibilities for sustainable living. In this panel, editors and writers discuss their definitions of this genre, how all fiction might be environmental, and craft strategies for engaging with the more-than-human world.
How does a writer's book, stage play, or screenplay change when being made into a film? This panel features film professionals including director, editor, producer and writers who explain the process. For anyone curious on how different kinds of filmmakers interpret a writer's work and add their own spin to it, this is a great opportunity to learn more.
Adjuncts, assemble! Join us for coffee and conversation with fellow adjuncts and AWP board and staff members. Come prepared to talk about potential solutions—big and small—for the challenges facing this growing population of higher educators.
Though more widely acknowledged in her lifetime, May Swenson is now something of a “poet’s poet’s poet,” loved and admired by a select readership but generally overlooked by the wider public. This panel aims to elevate Swenson’s work, articulating the dynamics behind her richly varied oeuvre—lush, exploratory, imaginative, poised—and arguing for a twenty-first century return to this unduly neglected master and pioneering queer poet.
A master storyteller, Don DeLillo has engaged American culture with prescience, writing about terrorism, white men with guns, a culture saturated by images and capitalism, and the necessity of the artist on the margins. Despite critics who complain that he is “woefully influential” (James Wood) or guilty of “literary vandalism and bad citizenship” (George Will), the panel will interrogate how DeLillo’s novels perform cultural critique and what we can learn from his craft as teachers and writers.
Join four award-winning Asian diasporic poets for a celebratory reading of their debut poetry books. Whether excavating diasporic grief; reckoning with the silence of language; questioning the role of faith and belonging; complicating the translator’s agency—these unique poets challenge what it means to write and belong to the contemporary Asian American diaspora. The reading will be followed by a conversation about their writing journeys including their advice for poets working on their debut.
Each of the published writers on this panel has written about a family member with Down syndrome, and each of us will speak to the ethical and aesthetic complications of that process. But our panel will also include two of those family members: Laura Estreich and Sophie Stern, who will discuss their lives and advocacy. With this shared approach, we hope to trace links between advocacy, activism, and writing, showing that all can spring from—and foster—a common wish for connection.
The publishing world can be discouraging for middle-aged beginners or vocational pivoters—but also for those who’ve been writing diligently for a long time and still don’t have a book. This panel will showcase four writers who published their first book after age fifty, with a short reading of these debut works (poetry and fiction) followed by a discussion of the advantages/challenges of debuting as an older writer.
Scientific discoveries shape us and scientists themselves are driven and curious. Yet for all that dramatic potential, it can be hard to find fiction that incorporates science. Science is also not neutral, nor benevolent: it can be used for harm. These panelists take readers into the study of botany, nuclear research, anthropology, and more, exploring wonder, breakthroughs, prejudices, and ethical dilemmas. Writers and program directors share experiences and advice for writing science-informed fiction.
Five fiction writers from geographically far-flung homes discuss how our writing is influenced by where we grew up. These iconic places affect motif, rhythm, imagery, even the color palette of our prose. But how do writers embrace stylistic fingerprints without being limited by them? Bachelard says, “The house is our corner of the world. It is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.” We’ll offer practical ways to seek new universes without abandoning the aesthetics of home.
Our literary landscape tends to overlook and dismiss the experiences women of color encounter as they build writing lives. This reality can impact how some women of color see their writer selves. In this panel, women of color in various stages and places in their writing careers will discuss their journeys embracing their identity as writers. Panelists will consider questions of age, belonging, community, opportunities, the influence of non-writing backgrounds, and more.
Live storytelling professionals, teachers, and Moth champs discuss the craft and catharsis of writing for live audiences. We’ll explore live storytelling’s unique ability to break down barriers, connect, and heal. By sharing examples of how we select, compose, and perform pieces that open eyes and change perspectives, you’ll discover methods to clarify and amplify your own messages. C’mon! Take your writing off the page, and leave a lasting impact on the world—one live performance at a time.
As various states continue to pass restrictive and bigoted laws, the South is an increasingly hostile landscape for writers, particularly for queer and BIPOC writers. Writer-run reading series can help sustain these communities, serving as hubs for fellowship, creativity, and connection. Reading series organizers from across the American South will discuss the challenges and rewards of hosting live reading events and offer practical advice for those seeking to grow and develop a series.
Many Latinx stories that garner mainstream attention focus on the immigrant experience. While these perspectives are vital, other narratives including stories from Afro-Latinos, children and grandchildren of immigrants, and indigenous people must be shared to accurately reflect the Latinx population. Join these panelists as they discuss how their work expands upon the canon and the importance of diverse Latino/a/x literature.
Trans writers have long been aware of the power of the animal, the nonhuman and the monstrous—whether jinn or mycelium—not only as metaphors but as kin. This panel brings together four trans authors whose genre-bending work interrogates the boundaries between human and nonhuman to resist the narratives that would erase those who live in their margins. We will discuss the craft of writing about embodiment and what can only be revealed by dissolving the boundary with the more-than-human world.
The editors of five Missouri literary journals—Boulevard, Laurel Review, The Missouri Review, Moon City Review, and New Letters—discuss how the Show-Me State has established a long-standing and eclectic history, from Mark Twain to Maya Angelou, as well as how they're tackling the challenges of the present and future. Literature is alive in Missouri, and these five editors will break down its proud tradition, as well as how they're helping to keep Missouri at the forefront of American letters.
Bookstagram, #BookTwitter, #BookTok, #Booktube, and book-related Substacks are the fastest-growing venues for contemporary readerly conversation. These communities don’t only spark sales, they expand the field of literary criticism to include diverse voices. In this panel, literary influencers and authors will discuss how this dynamic landscape is reshaping and sustaining the culture of literacy outside of traditional media and the most effective way for authors to engage with these communities.
Why and how do we make anthologies? What do anthologies allow us to share and see that single-authored volumes do not? How can building an anthology be an act of community building or resistance? And, importantly, what is the path to building an anthology in real life? Remembering that the word anthology means at its root "bouquet of flowers,” we will talk about the work of curating sharp and meaningful gatherings. We will also give practical suggestions for doing this work in future projects.
Nine o'clock A.M. to Five o'clock P.M.
With more than 500 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.
Stop by the AWP Membership Booth to learn more about the many year-round benefits of AWP. View a sample issue of the Writer’s Chronicle, ask questions about the annual Award Series or the Writer to Writer Mentorship Program, pick up some AWP swag, or just pop in to say hello and take a selfie!
Breakfast and lunch concessions are available inside the Exhibit Hall in the Kansas City Convention Center. Debit cards, 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.
In celebration of the Wick Poetry Center’s fortieth anniversary year, the Traveling Stanzas Makerspace offers conference attendees an opportunity to creatively engage with themes of health and healing, social and racial justice, nature and environment, and peace and conflict. This interactive exhibit invites participants to share their voice using a suite of digital expressive writing tools, such as Emerge (an erasure poetry app), Thread (community-generated poems), and the Listening Wall (thematically-driven touch-screen poetry displays). Visitors will be able to choose a theme, follow a prompt, then print and share their responses. More information can be found at http://travelingstanzas.com.
Ten-thirty-five A.M. to Eleven-fifty A.M.
A chapbook is often a prelude to a first book—or so the conventional wisdom goes. But what if a chapbook comes along later in an established career? Or if it marks a turning point from scholarship to original poetry or from prose to poetry? Or if it is a way of introducing a writer in translation to English-language audiences? Four writers and publishers will discuss breaking the rules on chapbooks, what the future holds for this format, and how a well-timed chapbook can reshape a career.
What is this urge that drives us toward oral history, archives, and documents—to turn them into something else we’ve shaped and spun? What are our ethics and motivations? We will read and discuss our documentary poems, plays, librettos, and essays. As descendants of people who fled persecution, we take particular interest in historical record; as a people others attempt(ed) to erase, we explore the impetus to document and save. But, to quote a venerable rabbi: "If I am only for myself, who am I?"
This panel explores the impacts of legislative restrictions on academic freedom by sharing productive classroom assignments that encourage critical/creative thinking and writing in various genres amidst a hostile environment. One panelist recounts the impact of incorporating anti-DEI legislation into the classroom. Another's intro students selected a controversial work to study/discuss, regardless of perceived threats. The third panelist considers the dangers of policing creative expressions.
How can you place your manuscript with a good publisher if you don’t have a literary agent? A group of writers from diverse backgrounds will explain their process. This discussion will identify presses that consider unsolicited manuscripts and will explain how to find reading periods and contests. The focus will be on narrowing targets and submitting at low cost. Panelists are prose writers or poets who have successfully placed one or more books with a reputable independent publisher.
This event will take place in person in the Kansas City Convention Center. In addition to the in-person event at the conference, a prerecorded version of this event will be available to view on-demand.
Event Outline
This panel will focus on the publishing industry from the perspectives of two current AALA board members. They will walk attendees through the process of securing representation and publishing a book—from first draft up to publication. The presentation will have a special focus on ethical representation as laid out by the AALA's "Canon of Ethics" and the organization's DEI initiatives and anti-racism work.
This panel focuses on the generative links between translation and the writing process—two joint crafts that each inform the other. We are particularly interested in considering how the act of translation is in and of itself an act of creative writing, and how our work as poets, playwrights and interdisciplinary artists is expanded and enhanced by our practices in translation.
How can poetry account for the material conditions of the environment, tethering regional circumstances to questions of conservation, extinction, or the nonhuman? This panel of Midwest poets will consider what forms—ode, mess, palimpsest, somatic, plein air—might best connect a region’s particulars to global transformation. Poets will share experiences of writing their region and useful place-based prompts, texts, or fieldwork for landscapes that combine the urban, industrial, and agricultural.
In this panel, five distinguished writers will each share a draft of a published piece along with its final version, and discuss the decisions made to get there. We’ll consider the cascading effects of the smallest changes, and how to maintain the equilibrium and disequilibrium one seeks in a finished piece—as well as how to remain committed to surprise, endeavoring not to polish a piece of writing into mediocrity. Our goal will be practical: to show the thinking behind revising.
It can be challenging for small-press books to find their way to readers. Four small-press authors will share why supporting other small-press authors is important to them and how they do it, but the bulk of the event will provide participants with a chance to connect and to brainstorm generous, creative ways to support small-press authors. For the purposes of this event, we’re defining “small press” as anything other than Big Five or self-publishing.
Notoriously hard to write, the heroic crown is a tightly linked sequence of fifteen sonnets that offers poets a chance to prove their virtuosity on the page. In this panel, five sonneteers who have enlarged the tradition of the heroic crown will discuss a range of strategies for approaching the form. Through an examination of techniques such as extended metaphor, lyric fragmentation, and formal flexibility, they will provide tools that other poets can employ when attempting their own heroic crowns.
The publishing world uses genre to classify creative output. As useful as these classifications can be, they also create silos within the literary world, systems that rely on exclusionary criteria. Bisexual writers—whose sexuality is shaped by a rejection of exclusionary rhetoric—may feel hemmed in by traditional genres and driven to experiment across genre boundaries by hybridizing aesthetics and subverting convention. This panel will explore the approaches bisexual writers bring to genre.
This reading will focus on ways of writing about (non)motherhood. The participants will share work (including nonfiction, fiction, and poetry) that thinks through the various and difficult questions, concerns, griefs, and hopes of choosing—or not having the freedom to choose—whether or not to become a mother. Through sharing their writing, these authors will present possibilities for considering (non)motherhood in diverse genres and forms.
This panel will explore the frictional spaces between craft, memory, and trauma. Poets and prose writers will discuss writing about personal and cultural trauma, and how that writing can center people and experiences often marginalized. How do limits of memory, including institutional memory, necessitate alternative approaches to hegemonic literary craft? This panel approaches craft in opposition to silence embedded within such constructs as linearity, truth, and singularity of voice and vision.
In October 2022, the National Book Award–winning Jewish poet Gerald Stern passed away at the age of ninety-seven. This panel of Stern’s friends and students will reflect on the impact of his work—from his breakout book Lucky Life to his last book I., a mischievous refraction of the biblical book and figure of Isaiah. The conversation will celebrate his life, delve into the Jewish valences of his work, and explore what his troubling of the prophetic mode reveals about his intertwined politics and poetics.
In the age of increasing hate attacks, systemic oppression, pandemic isolation, and AI, how can writer-teachers strike back with creative interventions? From scavenger hunts to social media to comics, we’ll dive into divergent resources to creatively resist and harness the power of play as both teachers and writers. In this generative session, we’ll invite the audience to collaborate and create a map of creative teaching resources.
KidLit has embraced expanding representation so that characters in stories now better reflect the demographics of our cities and schools. But how do you successfully craft characters whose identities are intersectional and oftentimes multiply while still telling a story with a great plot and excellent pacing? This panel will consider the craft of writing characters in YA, in both short stories and novels, whose identities are shaped by more than one marginalization.
In 1893, when Lola Rodríguez de Tió wrote “Cuba y Puerto Rico son / de un pájaro las dos alas, / reciben flores o balas / en el mismo corazón,” she acknowledged the two island territories’ shared fates—from Spain’s final Caribbean colonies to early testing grounds for the United States’ evolving empire. This event brings together poets from Cuba and Puerto Rico’s collective diasporas to read from their work and discuss how diaspora and the politics behind it inform their poetics.
Join Rion Amilcar Scott, a fiction writer and the creative advisor to AWP's HBCU Fellowship Program, currently in its second year. HBCUs have left an indelible mark upon the face of literature. This lecture discusses what it truly means to be a part of that legacy. This lecture will be followed by a book signing.
Originating in nineteenth-century France as a subversive form “supple . . . and rugged enough to adapt . . . to the lyrical impulses of the soul,” prose poems are now taught in writing classrooms across the globe. Has their popularity changed their capacity for surprise, radicalism, and (non)sense? How are contemporary poets troubling the contradictions inherent in the form’s name? This diverse panel of poets will consider these questions and trace their relationships to the indefinable prose poem.
Writing queer sex has always been an act of power. In a new era of anti-trans and homophobic legislation, queer sex is resistance, subversion, imagination, celebration, style. bell hooks reminds us that “the queer self is at odds with everything around it” and must “invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” In this panel, five writers read from their work and discuss specific ideological and craft choices that inform how they write queer intimacy.
Simultaneous with the contemporary Land Back movement of Tribal Nations is an equally urgent call for Indigenous literary sovereignty. This focus on writing Indigenous includes a strong push for creators to employ tribal languages and their inherent structures—for Language Back. Poet contributors to The Diné Reader, Jake Skeets, Luci Tapahanso, and Esther Belin, will read recent work and discuss how their creative work maps itself at the intersections of tribal language, poetic form, and place.
This event will take place in person in the Kansas City Convention Center and will be livestreamed for virtual audiences. All livestreamed events include open captions and ASL interpretation.
Fabulism and speculative literature have long employed the bizarre, unexpected, and impossible to better reflect human experience. Recent political and societal changes, such as anti-trans laws, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the attack on no-fault divorce make the seemingly impossible much more expected, and these genres feel increasingly relevant and prescient. Join us for a reading by writers who use the weird to reflect on what it means to be female in an increasingly fraught world.
Recreating our lives in creative nonfiction includes depicting our romantic partners. How do approaches vary in choosing what to include or omit? What are the ethics of documenting conversations, including arguments, and asking permission? What happens if a lover becomes an ex—sometimes midway through the publication process? Five authors of memoir and personal essays discuss the challenges of sharing intimate relationships on the page, and give the audience takeaway tips for their own projects.
Ghosts. Sacrifices. Monsters. Mothers. What do we hide inside our houses, and what do our houses hide from us? How do we tell the same family stories in new ways? In this panel, five writers of literary horror discuss the domestic as a place of invention, myth-making, and witnessing. Drawing upon examples from their own novels and short stories, the panelists share strategies and tools from graphic novels, manga, films, and other mediums that have helped them bring their hauntings to life.
For a book to make it to market, it must be assigned to a recognizable genre or category. Writers of unconventional stories that blur genres/integrate disparate subject matter face an uphill battle within the mainstream literary ecosystem (agents and publishers) that tends to reject projects that defy labels as they’re considered unmarketable. If you’ve ever found your book shelved in the wrong section; had trouble finding comps; or been advised to rewrite in another genre—this panel is for you.
Stephen Rowley will read from The Lost Coin: A Memoir of Adoption and Destiny and discuss his lifelong search for identity. KelLee Parr will read from Mansion on a Hill: The Story of the Willows Maternity Sanitarium and the Adoption Hub of America—founded in Kansas City in 1905. The authors will discuss the differences between the diverse destinies of adoptees and the common, primal wound that adoptees carry invisibly within. We hope to uncover new stories of adoption from the audience.
Twelve-ten P.M. to One-twenty-five P.M.
In Story (1997), Robert McKee proposed the Hero's Journey serves as a universal outline for many stories and encouraged its use for screenplays. In this panel, we will explore if this is still true. What are the steps in the HJ? How have screenwriters borrowed from its structure? What films deviate from the HJ norm and how? What other "journeys" can screenwriters use when crafting their stories? The panelists will include films which focus on diverse represenation to discuss these questions.
Event Outline
Ekphrastic poetry places text in conversation with image and sound. In the practice, a dialogue emerges between the two and creates a third space, one that questions how embodied experience is intimately connected to witness and gaze. In this panel, five Indigenous poets will discuss how they employ that third space in their own poetics, complicating the underlying power dynamics between gaze and object, by sharing examples of their own work and engaging with the audience.
How do we decide when to fold in the language we grew up with in our poetry? What effects do the use of our “other” languages have, and what does it make possible? This often becomes a question of negotiation and balance. We’ll shift that paradigm into one that puts not the audience, but the poet first. We’ll discuss the joys and unanswered questions we have about this process, how we’ve learned and changed our view on this, and, of course, the delightful surprises that come along the way.
The most cringeworthy aspect of transitioning from writer to published author is mastering the art of self-promotion. The market appears to demand shamelessness and narcissism as a way forward. But there are alternatives that can center sharing your work without losing your soul. Join us to learn the best strategies to reach readers. We’ll cover social media, trade and online marketing essentials, how to leverage your network, all while staying focused on your work.
There is no correct or unique way to write or publish memoirs as fragments of our lives. The memoirists in this panel will discuss their diverse processes in the publishing industry. From cooking-themed to realistic-paintings and borderlands memoirs—this group of writers brings a collage of stages of writing by discussing how one can start crafting a memoir or a nonfiction piece. How to know when it should be fiction or CNF? Why are our stories relevant? And how can they be published?
Join queer poets Chen Chen, Nicole Tallman, Dior J. Stephens, Caridad Moro-Gronlier, and J.D. Isip for a discussion and reading focusing on the importance of voicing our existence in the face of recent anti-LGBTQ+ legislation across the nation (and the world). Come add your voice to the discussion and to the chorus of queer voices who refuse to go quietly into another age of erasure.
Event Outline
Like many marginalized authors, Caribbean writers are challenging colonial storytelling patterns. One challenge we face in incorporating local languages into our work is that, while our lived vernacular adds authenticity to our literature, some say it hinders comprehension. In this panel, five Caribbean authors and editors discuss dialect's role in establishing setting, character, and plot; how they respond to demands for “standardized” language; and how they find balance in their own work.
Prison writing programs often focus on the knowledge and expertise instructors bring to those who are incarcerated. In this panel, we consider the other pole: what insights and practices do teachers and practitioners gain, and how can working inside be a fertile creative, scholarly, and restorative practice for all involved? Panelists have taught classes in such facilities as Rikers Island, MCI-Concord, and Texas State prisons, and will discuss their experiences and share their work in response.
The deadline for published poets to apply to the National Endowment for the Arts for a creative writing fellowship is March 13, 2025. Would you like to know more about this opportunity? Staff members from the NEA’s Literary Arts Division discuss and advise on all aspects of the program, including how to submit an application, how winning poets are selected, and the ways in which the NEA supports poets through other initiatives and grantmaking. Plenty of time will be allotted for questions.
How does a writer maintain hope, energy, and belief when their book takes longer than they ever expected to complete and publish? This panel of “long-haul” fiction and nonfiction writers will discuss how they persevered in the face of industry obstacles and everyday life, and share how and why they didn’t give up and ultimately succeeded. Audience members are encouraged to share their own challenges and solutions in a moderated conversation with panelists who kept going until publication.
For decades, the struggle of American identity has played out in the literature of Jewish immigration. Collisions of class and culture, personal and economic sacrifices made for survival. What does it mean to forge this identity on the page? How do we continue telling these familiar yet necessary stories? Do we resist or embrace pressures to assimilate? In this conversation, panelists of varying genres, and varying generations from the Old Country, discuss writing the Jewish experience.
Event Outline
Disabled and chronically ill writers are writing vital work, especially in lieu of the COVID-19 crisis. But the writing world, through its in-person events, MFA programs, and tireless publishing expectations, often does not accommodate our needs—meaning that our voices are all too easily lost. Join us as we discuss how disabled writers can protect themselves from the industry’s ableism, as well as how the larger writing community can better support and uplift disabled writers.
The craft of translation is more than a merely faithful replication—it has potential as an originary form. We ask how translation can spark the writing process, prompt revision of the source, and trouble the concept of authorial genius, while also bearing in mind the practical and ethical pitfalls that a disruption of originality can bring. Current practitioners of "generative translation" share how their work seeks to transcend the limitations of loss by focusing on what can be gained.
These Chicana/x feminist poets, memoirists, artists, administrators, and professors have invested a collective ninety years on projects that lingered long past their anticipated finish dates. Because we represent communities whose stories might not otherwise be heard, the writing process can be especially daunting. We’ll talk about how we got it done, the communities that supported us, how we handled rejection, how we navigated this long relationship, or how we finally let go and moved on.
This meeting is an opportunity for members of Writers’ Conferences & Centers to discuss potential changes to AWP's service to WC&Cs. AWP’s WC&C Chair, Mimi Herman, will conduct this meeting.
How do we as prose writers navigate our current fragile and complex world? What stories do we want to tell with prevalent issues like global migration, climate change, class biases, limited gender roles, restrictive borders, hunger, poverty, language loss, vanishing histories, and the persistent question of American involvement to consider, and how do we best tell and nurture those stories? Five engaging writers offer advice for those who want to travel and expand their writing perspectives.
The inaugural group of five LGBTQ poets-in-residence at the Arts Club of Washington discuss how to partner with organizations to create community residencies. Historically, LGBTQ writers have formed nurturing communities, such as Natalie Clifford Barney in Paris, the Bloomsbury Group in London, and Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos. The need for this type of joyful, visible representation becomes more essential with the sharp rise of anti-LGBTQ legislation nationwide.
Is life after your MFA not what you thought it would be? Do you have nausea, heartburn, and indigestion about your future post-degree? We’re told to aim for traditional expectations. When this doesn’t happen it is easy to despair. But the truth of what success can look like after receiving your degree varies from person to person. This candid panel covers a range of perspectives on what life can offer in the next chapter. What opens up when you change your preconceptions of what’s possible?
Writers and translators of fiction often put themselves in the shoes of some "other"—someone of a different culture, gender, time period. How do we understand this "other" and represent them with sincerity and respect, balancing artistic expression against a risk of cultural appropriation? The Armenian author and translators from French and Yiddish of three books with cross-cultural themes, all newly released in English, explore the line between "writing what you know" and depicting "the other."
It is so much more than recommending queer texts to inspire students; as queer educators we’re called on to do much more than our colleagues. As a population that isn’t raised by our own (we mostly have straight cisgender parents) we’ve had to create our own narratives, and are called on by our students to help them invent theirs. This is made more difficult by attempts to limit bodily autonomy and ban our stories. This panel is for folks seeking to thrive and find queer joy.
“If you opened me up, you’d find Ohio,” writes Maggie Smith. Writers from all coasts wrestle with the question of how to write place, but it’s especially charged in the Midwest, where our forests and lakes, our asphalt and industry are so often called fly-over country. How can stories dig deeper into the truth of this place and its people? Whether we’ve been here our whole lives, left and returned, or never want to go back, the Midwest lives in the body, not in our heads but our bones.
These five Black women writers have crafted works that center those most often removed from history or those that are splayed across it as specimen, silent and reluctant. Hybrid texts help illuminate the forgotten and missing or can create a collage of the living, serving as rescue and reclamation. The poets featured here have embodied, reckoned with, and reinvented the archive: sometimes they raise the dead, sometimes they build a spectacular future, but they always refuse to look away.
This event will take place in person in the Kansas City Convention Center and will be livestreamed for virtual audiences. All livestreamed events include open captions and ASL interpretation.
Three indie booksellers give a behind-the-scenes look at how they learn about independently published books and literary magazines, how they decide which titles to carry, and their special promotional efforts—from handselling to author events. Learn how to connect with bookstores as an author or publisher to create lasting relationships and get books in readers’ hands.
Great characters remain essential to any work of fiction. They are a combination of a writer's knowledge, skill, and imagination. Five diverse award-winning authors of realistic and speculative fiction will examine the process of creating strong, multi-dimensional characters, as well as the principles and techniques that can effectively improve and/or define characters, avoiding cultural clichés and hackneyed stereotypes.
Most students don’t become professors, yet the only professional skill most creative writing programs prepare students for is teaching. In this panel, we will share methods for teaching the skills and knowledge—like publishing, freelancing, marketing, etc.—that students need to persevere as working writers outside the ivory tower. Panelists will share practical strategies and assignments for instructors so that when your students graduate they can answer the toughest question of all: “Now what?"
Writers from Kansas City and Tulsa whose work cuts to the heart of two Midwestern cities with parallel wounded histories. From the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre to Kansas City's storied history of racism and segregation to the 2023 Kansas City shooting of a Black teenager who rang the wrong doorbell, the work of these award-winning poets and fiction writers scours politics, contradictions, injustices, and inequalities in their cities' similarly riven pasts and wounded present.
Illness, grief, divorce, burnout: the years between forty and fifty (and beyond) can be particularly fraught for women—but female midlife and its attendant crises and discoveries are rarely depicted honestly or directly in popular culture. Join us for a reading by poets whose work addresses the realities of these years, which may include epiphanies and crises of love and faith, but also feature a second coming-of-age and a more confident and assured sense of self.
One-forty-five P.M. to Three o'clock P.M.
If grad school is supposed to prepare students for professional life or train future academics, what happens when that work and that academy cease to exist? And what about new students with altogether different expectations? As managers replace writers with LLMs and universities slash humanities budgets and teaching jobs, our panelists consider the promises and pitfalls of graduate education and explore how we must evolve to meet the needs of today’s diverse students in and outside the classroom.
Event Outline
"What's YA Literature—and What's Not?" discusses genre traits of YA literature by sharing innovative texts that have stretched the boundaries of the field. "Writing the YA Novel" explores the differences between middle grade and YA novels, how to craft an authentic voice, and writing exercises and assignments. "YA Graphic Novels" discusses essentials of writing graphic novels, their potential as champions of diverse voices, and how to engage student writers in a comic-based curriculum.
Join Furious Flower Poetry Center, the nation’s first academic center dedicated to educating, celebrating, and preserving Black poetry, for a thirtieth anniversary poetry reading and conversation! Camille T. Dungy, Joel Dias-Porter, and Nate Marshall, who participated in Furious Flower's conference held in 1994, 2004, and 2014, will share their work and experiences. Executive Director Lauren K. Alleyne will forecast the 2024 conference in September and Assistant Director L. Renée will moderate.
Audre Lorde wrote, “We cannot fight old power in old power terms only.” How can we attempt a different, better model of the writing workshop that honors participants unique storytelling traditions? A reimagined workshop imparts a pedagogy of deep listening while honoring sidelined narratives of people of color, differently abled, and LGBTQ writers. These authors and educators discuss how to foster a community of kinship that empowers writers while honoring their diverse influences.
We all dream of holding our first published book, bound and beautiful, in our hands. But how does that stack of printed-out pages on your desk turn into a finished book? Four debut poets from a range of backgrounds will offer detailed, transparent recounting of their journeys to a debut collection, addressing questions of manuscript preparation, publishing process, complications encountered, and post-publication advice. Audience Q&A will follow the presentations.
While independent presses may not offer the big money of the Big Five publishers, publishing with IPs can offer significant benefits, including freedom with content, form, style, and objectives, as well as (some) control during production and marketing. Working with IPs also require more effort and responsibility from writers. Having published with ten IPs, with diverse missions, from social justice to experimental form, we discuss the strategies, challenges, and delights of working with IPs.
What do we as poets and essayists listen to and experience while out in nature to create the metaphors and language for our writing? What do our known landscapes bring out in our work that nowhere else does? How do we best learn about new wilderness areas? Our panel will share different ways to nurture inspiration through how we speak on the page against the issues of our times, such as climate crisis, preservation, endangered species, historical and racial controversies, and overpopulation.
Poetry and playwriting are linked crafts—and not only in the hands of the famed Bard of Avon. What happens when poets set out to write plays? How does the craft of poetry translate to the stage, and what can the idea of the stage teach us about the poem? In this panel, four poets with playwriting projects discuss the joyful learning curve of entering theatrical spaces, reflecting on how this crossover affects everything from craft to collaboration.
In this panel, we discuss what it’s like as a literary magazine editor moving through the slush pile: sins we’re willing to forgive, and those we’re not. We’ll also look at tools to finding literary magazines that are a best fit for your work, how to rate them, and when to submit to what. We’ll also look at strategies for submitting to contests. If submitting is a numbers game, then we’ll help you figure out your best odds.
Story to Game is an immersive experience where attendees submit their original stories for a chance to have them transformed into a live tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) session. Our team of actors and Dungeon Master collaborate to bring these stories to life, creating a dynamic gaming experience full of audience participation. This event is a celebration of creativity, collaboration, and the magic that happens when narratives merge with gameplay, letting us enjoy the joy of storytelling. Call for submissions: https://santiagomarquezramos.com/awp2024/
2024 brings the centennial of two very different writers born in Kansas City. Evan S. Connell emerged from a prosperous white family. Vincent O. Carter grew up on the Black side of town, far removed from Connell’s world. Their respective fictional portrayals of Kansas City—Connell’s two novels of the Bridge family; Carter’s posthumous novel Such Sweet Thunder—serve in yin-yang fashion to illuminate how economic and racial differences operate in works of the imagination.
Children have so much narrative potential. They see the world with fresh eyes, use language in fascinating ways, and often feel more deeply than adults who have been desensitized to the injustice and heart-break of our world. At the same time, children are easy characters to flatten and idealize, and they change on a different time scale than adults do. How do we write dynamic, authentic, fully-fleshed-out children? This panel will discuss strategies for writing strong fictional children.
The term "narrative" has sometimes been used pejoratively to describe poetry that is lacking in innovation, just as "feminine" has been used to describe language that is indirect or internal. This panel challenges these notions, exploring narrative as a radical poetic technique that gives voice to complexity and the lived experience of women. Panelists will discuss how they use storytelling in their poetry, suggest approaches to narrative poetics, and read from their work.
Thousands of books are published each year. We're often led to them by intelligent, engaging, well-made book reviews, which not only investigate and articulate the mysteries and pleasures a literary text offers, but also please the reader with their style. Five widely published writers/critics/editors will discuss the review as a genre in its own right, a unique artistic form that contributes to a book's reception, raises the level of public discourse, and establishes critical reputation.
While writers may consider teaching FYW courses tangential to their creative pursuits, working with these students can benefit instructors by providing them with insights into their own artistic visions and processes. Creative writing experiences can also promote meaningful change for students by helping them identify and mitigate unconscious bias. Panelists will share practical advice on using creative writing techniques in FYW classes and discuss the benefits for both them and their students.
In celebration of the tenth anniversary of the University Press of Kentucky (UPK) New Poetry & Prose Series, which features award-winning books by unique voices, four authors will read from their short story collections in the series. Set in diverse locales from Africa to Middle East and North America, and ranging from realist to surrealist, their lyrical stories about ethnicity, gender, immigration, race, and sexuality highlight some of the stunning writing this acclaimed series has published.
Event Outline
This panel brings together a diverse group of authors who have also worked in some form of journalism: as reporters, producers, writers, reviewers, and columnists. They will discuss how they made their career transitions or developed side gigs as fiction or creative nonfiction writers, and how the practices of journalism and creative writing can inform and enhance each other.
Four writers and poets read their original works and discuss the challenges of being first generation college students, all of whom went on to earn advanced degrees and become published authors and professors. Specifically, the panel will present work relating to feelings or notions of being behind and struggling with a sense of belonging, while also finding joy in cultivating their own writerly voices despite these challenges.
Guiding others on their memoir journey is an act of profound importance for social change and inclusion, with the potential to end silences and heal individuals and communities. In sharing the art of creative nonfiction with students of all ages and identities around the world, the writer/educators on this panel have transformed their personal creative processes into conceptual frameworks and powerful prompts that illuminate the path for others. Attendees receive a packet of exercises discussed.
This reading features four poets from Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry (Green Linden Press, February 2024), which includes one hundred poets who illustrate the brilliant range of poetry being written today: Frank Bidart, Jericho Brown, Franny Choi, CAConrad, Natalie Diaz, Mark Doty, Nikki Giovanni, Ocean Vuong, and many others. The Essential Voices series aims to make less insular the various poetries of the world and to correct mis- or underrepresentation in the broader culture.
How do you teach in the days after incidents of racial trauma, another mass shooting, deportation threats for your students, legislation targeting the rights of trans youth, limited abortion access, white supremacy, and so much more? This panel will offer practical strategies for sustaining yourself as a writer, a person, and a professional to avoid burnout and set clear boundaries so we can support our students, selves, and our community.
Putting together an essay collection is like arranging an album—each piece should be its own work of art, with its own unique effect; but the pieces should also build on each other so that the collection as a whole has a sense of flow, momentum, and resonance. How do you do both? In this session, five authors of essay collections will discuss considerations like thematic vs. chronological structure, repetition vs. redundancy, and balancing variety with cohesiveness.
Blue Flower Arts is proud to present GENERATIONS: a reading and conversation with four essential Asian American poets spanning several generations, featuring Tina Chang, Chen Chen, Marilyn Chin, and Kimiko Hahn. In partnership with the Asian American Writers Workshop, and with a conversation moderated by AAWW Executive Director Jafreen Uddin, these four BFA poets showcase the breadth and impact of Asian American writing, exploring urgent themes such as tradition, culture, belonging, politics, race, and queer identity. This reading pays homage to the urgent concerns of each generation as they radically imagine, resist, and transcend through creative expression and future-facing experimentation.
This event will take place in person in the Kansas City Convention Center and will be livestreamed for virtual audiences. All livestreamed events include open captions and ASL interpretation.
This panel of BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ writers honors intersectional and intergenerational communities, the safe spaces we hold for each other, the creation, expression, and celebration of their stories. We move together from darkness to light, from banning to expression—by opening doors and inviting diverse communities to the page and to the microphone to lead, speak, read, share, and celebrate with love.
This event will take place in person in the Kansas City Convention Center and will be livestreamed for virtual audiences. All livestreamed events include open captions and ASL interpretation.
Four diverse women writers near sixty will discuss the complications and pleasures of aging and creativity, asking, in essence, what conditions allow the inner life to flourish? How does past creative work empower or inhibit them in a publishing market that privileges youth and middle age? How do they contend with setbacks of the creative will including illness and caretaking? How do they build a multi-ethnic, nonbinary platform of writers whose support will add to the tropes of literature?
Midwest author Sarah Smarsh said, "You can pay an entire life in labor, it turns out, and have nothing to show for it. Less than nothing, even: debt, injury, abject need.” Five writers, all with Midwestern and working-class ties, share their approach to showcasing this "life in labor" through storytelling. The panelists will discuss why they write these stories and how, and what precious language and poetry can be mined from what has been called gritty, dirty realism.
Literary agents from three different agencies speak about their experience in crafting their MSWLs, client strategy, and the querying process. Additionally, in light of the recent discourse (as of May 2023), we provide an inside view of the agents' submission process to editors, as well as the working agent/author relationship in general. How do you know your agent is the right fit for you? What does a successful agent/author relationship look like? And what do you do if issues arise?
Like everything in publishing, book reviews are in flux, with mainstream venues reducing reviews in exchange for fawning interviews and book roundups that feel like marketing fluff pieces. This panel of book critics will discuss why they write book reviews, the state of book reviewing today, the need for diversity in book reviewers and in books reviewed, and how criticism can help reshape an often myopic and inequitable industry.
Entrusting your education with an untested MFA program is a bit like sailing your ship off the map—there are dragons, but you may also discover new lands. Meet some of the risk-takers who braved the new Alma program and the director who started it all.
Three-twenty P.M. to Four-thirty-five P.M.
Hybrid poetry embraces cross disciplinary work, combining poetry, prose, plays, visual art, collage, documents, to address and challenge dominant narratives. This panel focuses on the ways in which Asian American poets have invigorated hybrid forms to respond to uneven distributions of power, relay experiences of marginalization, oppression, and injustice as well as uphold joy, kinship, and devotion through the examination of cross-genre and interdisciplinary work as a practice of survival.
Featuring Queer/Trans SWANA (Southwest Asian North African) writers, this multiple genre panel centers a discussion of how we build bridges, defying orientalist narratives by writing into the complexities of our hybrid identities. At a time when our communities continue to be marginalized in the United States, we will focus on the tension between homeland and diaspora, the power and violence of myths, and our need to queer form to represent ourselves, breaking convention and narrative in the process.
While care work sustains human life on our planet, it took COVID-19 and a global lockdown to acknowledge, if only briefly, the essential labor of mothers and caregivers at large. This panel will focus on stories of motherhood within contemporary American and global literature to reimagine essential labor, social justice. and literary forms—especially when parenting isn’t restricted to a biological phenomenon and mediated by factors of race, class, sexual orientation, place and/or migration.
Native relationships with water involve complex cultural beliefs. Likewise, Indigenous Hydropoetics has many tributaries. This panel will begin with a collaborative video poem and then consider how cultural traditions and place-based experience influence poetic form and content. We will discuss our efforts to write with rather than about water—to enter into dialogue on the ways reciprocity informs our writing, living on and off the page, including as eco-activism and multi-media expressions.
Publishing is about relationships. Writers who approach editors and agents with good will, courtesy, and a readiness to jump with both feet into the publishing and marketing processes are more likely to form long-term professional relationships—and sell books. The panelists, hailing from both sides of the writer-publisher dynamic, will talk about what can sour a relationship and what can help it thrive.
In this panel, writers and editors will share their experiences publishing and editing Latinx literature online today. This discussion will include the editors of Latin@ Literatures and a panel of writers. The diverse group of writers will also have an opportunity to discuss genres, themes, language in Latinx literature, and the ways in which Latinx literary journals can provide a sense of “literary community.”
Inspired by Helena Maria Viramontes’s AWP 2020 keynote address, Women Who Submit’s third anthology, TRANSFORMATION, centers work that speaks to the ways writers and other artists can promote change in the world. By focusing on generosity and collaboration, shared leadership and mentorship, and inclusive partnerships, panelists discuss how Women Who Submit makes this change a reality not just in the writing they publish but in the ways they edit, publish, and promote their writers.
FlowerSong Press and Mouthfeel Press are just a small representation of the Latinx-owned independent presses creating vibrant work in the Borderlands. Both founded in Texas, these presses publish new, emerging, and established writers who’ve historically gone underrepresented, but whose words hold the power of resilience and transformation. This poetry reading celebrates contemporary Latinx poets and their books of struggle, truth, and hope as a call to elevate diverse voices and spread cultura.
Podcasting classes are an exciting addition to the MFA curriculum but teaching them can be a pedagogical challenge. How do you explain sound editing to poets? What are the best narrative podcasts for essayists? Our panelists include the authors of Podcasting in the Creative Writing Classroom and cohosts of the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast. They’ll outline how they created first-of-their-kind podcasting courses and how these classes can open up new vistas for MFA students and enrich their work.
To continue the work we began at #AWP23, expanding access to AWP for aspiring writers associated with HBCUs, this event focuses on aspiring creatives from marginalized writing communities. Students burning with words to write are outside the constellation of channels like AWP. The discussion will cover the continuum of issues facing writers of color and student writers of color—from "genius moments" as creatives to "unaware and invisible" looking for opportunities. Open discussion is the goal.
Black poets who are fathers are currently asserting their voices against historical silences. Examining poetic theory and practice through the lens of Black fatherhood, this panel examines the effect of a poet's race, gender, and parental status on poetic form, content, and process. How do Black father-poets reflect on and speak back to generations of denigrating rhetoric surrounding Black masculinity and fatherhood to carve out healthier, more joyful spaces for their families and themselves?
Women, nonbinary, and BIPOC writers exploring deep emotions are haunted by the label of "melodrama," that is, an excess—of sensation, sentiment, immersion—which supposedly exposes their lack of discipline in craft. This panel discusses how fear of straying into melodrama impacts the handling of intimacy and sex in fiction. How does the "specter" of melodrama determine artistic respectability and marketability of BIPOC women and nonbinary writers? How can we reclaim our right to render joy?
The Armenian and Persian diasporas of the eighties had an indelible effect on the populations that were displaced. Much like any people that have lost, or were removed from their homelands, a generation of children have grown and matured seeking the words to describe what they experienced, and continue to experience. This panel explains how artists have used their experiences, not as trauma fodder, but instead to examine the core of existence and reclaim their own agency.
The Emerson MFA program, located in the heart of the Boston Literary District, celebrates its fortieth anniversary with readings from five alumni writers from Texas, DC, Chicago, Boston, and Kansas City. The panelists discuss how their work in publishing—founding journals; founding transnational literature series; and advocating for inclusive children’s lit—informs their writing. Readings showcase work they have published across genres: poems, essays, stories, novels, YA, and translation.
Nonfiction books that combine memoir with research are populating the lists of prize winners and readers. Research methods such as fieldwork, interviews, and historical deep dives can do more than enhance a personal story; they can capture complexities, advocate for social justice, and inspire necessary cultural change. Five diverse nonfiction writers will discuss their reasons for, challenges with, and approaches to weaving extensive research into their personal narratives.
The literary world has grown more conscientious about including incarcerated writers in occasional projects, but their work is still siloed at best. What perspectives can literature gain when mainstream books are built by incarcerated writers? What can we learn when disappeared citizens take control of the narrative? Learn about the book American Precariat (Coffee House Press), and the team behind the first-ever anthology compiled and edited by incarcerated writers, for readers in the free world.
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.
How is the braided essay form innately subversive, in realms of interiority, the classroom, society? It can be a "social justice action" for marginalized/minoritized writers; an assertion of queer lives’ complexities; a feminist refusal of linear hero’s journeys; and a way for students to weave empowering threads (i.e., memoir, research, cultural critique) together in one piece. Three innovative essayists who also teach will showcase braided essays' dynamic, hegemony-undermining possibilities.
Collaboration is a deeply enriching, inspiring, and challenging experience for writers seeking creative connection and growth. The exchange of ideas and trust within a collaborative book project is intimidating, but it can have transformative effects on writers' voices and visions. In this panel, five authors of collaborative books across a range of genres will shed light on the process of writing, editing, and publishing collaboratively.
The path from selling a book 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 from late 2023 through early 2025—will discuss all aspects of this journey, including 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.
In the queer community where chosen family can be a vital lifeline, mentorship and influence go beyond craft and career to show us not only how to write but also how to live and love more fully. In this way, queer poethood can resemble a kind of parenthood where artistic lineage becomes a true kinship. This panel will dig into our own queer family trees and the ways that mapping those creative and cultural lineages has helped us to inhabit our bodies and poems freely and with a shared joy.
This panel will explore representations of mental illness in poetry and the complex relationship between mental illness and the artistic temperament. While the “mad poet” archetype is flawed, a poet’s mental state and the poetry they produce are inextricably linked. After reading a sampling of their own work, panelists will share their experiences with writing about mental illness, including a discussion of craft, therapeutic benefits, destigmatizing mental illness, and intersectionality.
Who chooses what poems will ultimately be remembered—editors, prize committees, the collective force of social media? This unique reading puts the decision with the artists themselves. Four award-winning poets consider their body of work and bring forward the poems they think matter most. Offering an intimate window onto intrinsic measures of success and failure, this reading—and the anthology that inspires it—upends notions of canon and curation by putting the poet front and center.
This event will take place in person in the Kansas City Convention Center and will be livestreamed for virtual audiences. All livestreamed events include open captions and ASL interpretation.
In its fiftieth anniversary year, the National Book Critics Circle gathers literary critics who have been defining the future of contemporary cultural criticism. Two NBCC criticism award chairs, who have had their fingers on the pulse of critical engagement for the past decade, are joined by three NBCC-honored critics in a reading and wide-ranging conversation about the future of the form.
This event will take place in person in the Kansas City Convention Center and will be livestreamed for virtual audiences. All livestreamed events include open captions and ASL interpretation.
Many industry professionals counsel against debuting with a short story collection, and urge fiction writers to "wait until they have a novel." The writers on this panel all had successful debuts with story collections. On this panel we will discuss the benefits and pitfalls of debuting with a collection, how to successfully market your first book, and what craft benefits came with debuting with a story collection.
Memory is fragile cargo, easily fragmented by time and distance. Traditional memoirs can appear to avoid this reality by presenting a flawless reconstruction of lived experience. But writers have many tools that embrace and emphasize memory’s flaws and limitations. Panelists will discuss their unique approaches to the questions of memory and the memoir impulse, revealing the challenges of writing, revising, and publishing.
How do presses and authors successfully partner to market and publicize books? What should authors and publishers expect from one another before and after publication? And when should authors engage outside publicity for their books? On this panel, marketing and publicity directors from indie presses share how they promote new titles, best practices for presses and authors looking to improve their publicity strategies, and more.
Who has the right to grow up in American literature? On this panel, authors discuss the joys, challenges, and importance of writing and publishing diverse narratives about American girlhoods. Getting these stories past the gatekeepers, who often misunderstand and reject them for being “too quiet” or “too small,” requires courage and persistence. When our own inner critics tell us such stories don’t truly matter, how do we push beyond our doubt and continue writing on a path to publication?
Join us for a celebration of Habitats by Katharine Whitcomb, just published in January 2024 by Poetry Northwest Editions and chosen as the third volume in the innovative Possession Sound series! This event will feature Katharine reading from her new book and readings by Possession Sound press-mate and acclaimed poet, essayist, and editor Elizabeth Bradfield, as well as Poetry Northwest senior editor and award-winning poet Xavier Cavazos, author of The Devil's Workshop, and other special guest readers.
Four-forty-five P.M. to Six-fifteen P.M.
Join AWP for a reading, reception, and book signing to celebrate the 2022 AWP Award Series winners and the partner presses who publish their winning manuscripts. The AWP Award Series is an annual competition for the publication of excellent new book-length works in four categories: poetry, creative nonfiction, novel, and short fiction.
2022 AWP Award Series Winners:
Sahar Muradi— Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, published by University of Pittsburgh Press
Jessica Hendry Nelson—Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction, published by University of Georgia
Parul Kapur—AWP Prize for the Novel, published by University of Nebraska Press
E.P. Tuazon—Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, published by Red Hen Press
Show your support for the decades-long AWP Award Series legacy and meet the winning authors, sponsoring presses, and AWP staff. See you there!
Five o'clock P.M. to Six-fifteen P.M.
Daily 12-Step Meeting. All in recovery from anything are welcome.
At one time, AI was more prevalent in the visual arts. Now it permeates the study and work of writing. Is ChatGPT a barrier to our students’ learning, or is it another tool that they—and we—need to master? Does AI stifle creativity, or might its judicious use cultivate it? In our annual art & design school caucus, faculty discuss the emergence of AI in our classrooms and professional practices, addressing issues of ethics, pedagogy, and craft.
Latinx writers are becoming increasingly visible in literary spaces. However, there is still work to be done to address inequalities in access and visibility. The Latinx Writers Caucus creates space for new, emerging, and established writers of varied Latinx identities to network, discuss obstacles to publication (e.g. active oppression and the cultural marginalization of Latinx writers), and to discuss panel and event planning that will increase Latinx participation at future AWP conferences.
Six o'clock P.M. to Seven-thirty P.M.
Our open house reception is a great place to meet other writers who have kids! Come (with or without your children), have a bite, relax with a drink, and learn how Pen Parentis and Sustainable Arts support and build community among writers with kids. Enter our raffle! All are welcome; kid-friendly!
A gathering to celebrate the incredible work being done at writers' conferences, centers, festivals, retreats, and residencies across the US and internationally. Come have a drink, learn more about these programs, and connect with their directors.
We welcome all Sewanee Writers' Conference alumni and guests to catch up with friends at an open bar.
Join NYU Creative Writing Program faculty, students, staff, and alums for a festive reception.
Join us for food and drink as we celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Scarlet Tanager Books with authors, contributors, and friends old and new.
An informal reception for students, faculty, and alums of the University of Nebraska Omaha MFA in Writing. People interested in learning more about the low-residency program are welcome to attend. No reservation required.
A meet and greet with our poets whose new collections are out with Salmon Poetry in February and March.
Six-thirty P.M. to Seven-forty-five P.M.
Undergraduate student writers and editors, accompanied by faculty advisors and mentors, meet at AWP’s FUSE Caucus 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 "Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?" which was the theme at the annual FUSE Conference, hosted by SUNY Geneseo.
This will be a town-hall style meeting, creating a much needed space for SWANA writers to build and connect within AWP. We invite established and emerging writers, editors, students, scholars, and organizers, and aim for the caucus to facilitate networking and exchange on Arab American literary endeavors, craft, publishing, poetics, and praxis. Our caucus seeks to empower and center the voices of underrepresented Americans with roots in the Arab world.
Seven-thirty A.M. to Eight-forty-five A.M.
Daily 12-Step Meeting. All in recovery from anything are welcome.
Eight o'clock A.M. to One o'clock P.M.
Stop being embarrassed of your author photo! A great portrait is not only flattering, but actively invites your audience to get to know you and your work. Returning for a fifth year at AWP, author photographer Adrianne Mathiowetz will be offering twenty-minute studio sessions on-site. See your proof gallery of images immediately; any portrait you choose will be fully processed and digitally delivered in high resolution for $125. (Conference discount: in Adrianne's Boston studio, hour-long portrait sessions with one image included are priced at $850.) Additional images: $75/ea. Fine processing (spot adjustments beyond usual file preparation): $175/file. Rush processing: $100/file.
Put your best face forward on websites, book covers, social media, and published interviews. Advanced sign-up required: https://am-photography.ticketleap.com/awp24/dates
Eight o'clock A.M. to Five o'clock P.M.
Coat check is available in Lobby 2200 on Level 2 of the Kansas City Convention Center. It is $5.00 per item checked. ATMs can be found in Lobby 2200, next to Room 2207, and in the Conference Center, across the hall from Room 2501A.
Attendees who have registered in advance, or who have yet to purchase a registration, may secure their registration materials in AWP’s registration area located in Exhibit Hall E, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 3. 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.
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
A darkened, quiet, and more private space for attendees to gather their thoughts, reset, or take a break from the lighting of the convention center.
The nursing lounge is located in Room 2213 on the Street Level of the Kansas City Convention Center, and is available for any nursing parent to use.
Nine o'clock A.M. to Ten o'clock A.M.
Join Manisha Sharma, a certified yoga practitioner, for a gentle, one-hour yoga and meditation practice, appropriate for practitioners of all levels and abilities. The hour-long practice will focus on stretches, asanas, physical postures, breathing, relaxation, and meditation. Please come wearing comfortable street clothes; mats and yoga apparel are not necessary.
Nine o'clock A.M. to Ten-fifteen A.M.
The revision process can feel mysterious, even terrifying, to new writers. Panelists who write in multiple genres and employ a variety of teaching strategies will ask questions of each other and the audience, as they work toward new teaching models. How can we encourage students to identify their work’s aesthetic and rhetorical purpose and revise toward it? How do we encourage play—the practice of invention and reinvention—as a route to discovery, given the workshop’s time constraints?
Literary programming means more than offering a workshop or hosting a reading. In this interactive panel, directors from established and emerging urban and rural literary centers will explore innovative programming that illustrate the power of the literary arts in the larger world, including creating writers groups, networking events, themed readings, celebrations, and targeted outreach to underserved and at-risk populations, among others.
For the last thirty years, the creative writing faculty at the University of Miami has remained steadfast in our mission to celebrate diversity and promote freedom of expression. Join a panel of faculty and recent alumni as we discuss how the MFA program at UM fosters an environment that encourages multilingual writing, explores the immigrant experience, and engages with histories rooted in race, gender, and sexuality, proposing how other programs might achieve similar goals.
When it comes to podcasting, writers have a distinct advantage: they already understand the power of voice. But how do you move from writing on the page to writing for the ear? Four podcast producers—a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, Forbes writer, Stanford podcasting lecturer, and humor author—share the secrets that made their shows successful. From crafting story arcs to growing an audience and winning awards, these four women writers pull back the curtain on creating top-ranked shows.
Absolutely everything. While many view grief only as tragedy, these four writers dive in to find connection, community, love, and joy. An exploration of their writing shows the value of investigating grief and specific ways of doing so on the page. In this moderated Q&A, panelists showcase how they approach grief, the importance of doing so, the ethics of including those gone, and the various craft techniques used to find value in mourning.
This queer, multigenre panel focuses on the art of drag and the ways in which concepts of hyperbole, metaphor, lyricism, and musicality can be directly applied to literary work. Panelists will discuss their work as drag artists and the way it informs their writing practice, or the ways in which they participate in linguistic drag to render categories of gender and genre malleable. Focuses will include what drag can teach writers about persona, considering an audience, and "erotic havoc."
What poetry can emerge from writers working in languages that are not their mother tongues? How is language and meaning metamorphosed through translingual verses, creative translation, disruption, resistance, distances, experimentation, and/or play? The poets in this panel will discuss their experiences cohabiting with the languages in their lives, their relationships with English, and how these have informed their approach to craft throughout their careers.
tatiana de la tierra (1961–2012) was a Latina lesbian writer and trailblazer. In the nineties, she cofounded Esto No Tiene Nombre and Conomoción magazines featuring Latina lesbians in the United States and abroad. She later authored her iconic For the Hard Ones: A Lesbian Phenomenology. In 2022, Redonda y radical: antología poética de tatiana de la tierra was published in Colombia (Sincronía Press). This panel features some of tatiana’s literary coconspirators to discuss her dangerously delicious life and works.
In Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (Giragosian and Konchan, eds.), Diane Seuss asks: “Might your book's arrangement, taken far enough, be you?” This craft talk will look at various ways poets have engaged in the amorphous process of arranging, scrubbing, and sewing together poems. The panelists will examine how poems can cohere and create necessary movement and coda throughout a collection, and how the sounds, cadences, and colors of a place can ground a written work.
Three leading critics and translators—Sarah Chihaya (book critic and author The Ferrante Letters), Laura Marris (translator of The Plague), and Justin Rosier (chair, National Book Critics Circle Criticism Committee)—will discuss the challenges and benefits of reviewing translated literature with Words Without Borders Books Editor Adam Dalva. The conversation will focus on both the ethics of reviewing books in translation and practical tips on how to best write compelling contemporary criticism.
Hear from writers who pen “the voice of resistance.” Poet Alice Notley has famously said, “It’s necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against ... everything.” Essayist Phillip Lopate has identified “the curmudgeon.” There are many reasons to be disobedient in memoir, essays, reportage, and criticism—to raise awareness, to shine light on buried histories, to give voice to impassioned appeals. But if the objective is to connect, how do we make our defiance work for a broader audience?
Studies in publishing appeal to student writers eager to share their own work or who want a writing-adjacent career, but few resources exist to prepare educators to teach in this dynamic field. Instructors with a range of experiences will offer advice to build publishing into writing courses, propose new courses and programs, and oversee student publications. Topics include strategies for mentoring, teachable moments, and addressing less obvious aspects like circulation and community engagement.
Despite the innovative art South Asian writers are creating, the United States writing world often expects our work to fit into the same single-story immigrant narrative that has been in vogue for decades. Join five South Asian writers of various intersectional identities as we discuss what South Asian fiction looks like in the 2020s, how we respond to and/or critique our lineages, how we navigate the Western publishing industry, and what we envision for an inclusive South Asian writing community.
Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Reimagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters (fall 2023) edited by Danielle Legros Georges and Artress Bethany White represents a celebration and reconsideration of Wheatley’s eighteenth-century poems by twenty award-winning Black contemporary poets. This anthology, meant to enhance the poet’s legacy for today’s readers, contains a selection of Wheatley Peters’s original poems, translations/re-inscriptions of those poems, and a short reflective essay by each poet.
Doctoral programs that incorporate creative writing elements to their program (such as PhDs in creative writing or PhDs in literature with a creative writing dissertation) have become increasingly popular. Yet, as ever, the merits and challenges of earning a doctoral degree are fiercely debated. Is it worth the time and investment? Does the academic environment support creative writers? Panelists will share their experiences earning a PhD and discuss the pros and cons of completing a doctorate.
Indigenous, womanist, and queer/trans people of color share strategic insights into applying to, critically re-envisioning, and transforming artist residencies within and beyond the United States. How can residencies positively impact our intersectional projects and creative careers? What program/site variables must we consider to ensure best fit? What crafted components render applicants competitive? How can residencies be Indigenized, decolonized, queered, engendered, made more accessible, transformed?
Faculty, particularly women and marginalized groups, are facing escalating misogyny, racism, intolerance, and outright threats in creative writing classrooms. In courses designed for self-expression, the current cultural climate is bringing out the worst in some students, causing a contentious and fearful behavior. Often institutions offer no support as first amendment rights come into play. This panel is a grassroots effort to spotlight this growing issue and offer possible ways forward.
Big isn't always better, or even available. Writer panelists will share how they found their small presses, what fit and what didn’t about the experience, how engaged they were in marketing, the role (or lack thereof) of agents and publicists, etc. Cornerstone Press editor will address the publisher’s side of the experience, detailing how their press selects manuscripts, what makes a successful writer/publisher partnership, etc. All panelists will talk logistics, from query to final product.
At some point in our careers, we might be called upon to give a craft talk. The prospect of such a task can inspire both excitement and trepidation. In this lively discussion, panelists will speak to their experiences devising craft talks, and we'll explore nuances of this genre, addressing questions such as: What is a craft talk? How do you write one? Are there certain conventions? Do you subvert those conventions? We'll also discuss how to repurpose a craft talk for publication.
Sex in writing has often been seen as taboo. On the occasions sex appears in literary works, it is often written through a white/straight/cis-male lens. This narrow gaze has dictated what types of sex scenes are “acceptable” in literature, and how intimacy can be described in a “literary” way. This panel aims to subvert the notion that sex is smut, and answer, through craft, the question: What might the description of beautiful bodies and radical acts of love look like when we change the gaze?
Two pairs of published writers and their editors will discuss the experience of editing manuscripts to publication, from developmental to sentence-level edits and fact checking all the way to galleys and jacket copy. Coming from various cultural and professional backgrounds, panelists will shed light on both practical and emotional aspects of the process, sharing approaches, mistakes, obstacles, and the satisfaction of carrying a book across the finish line.
The world doesn’t know what to do with us. Publishers, politicians, etc.—everyone is wondering what transness is, why it exists, and projecting fears onto trans people in the process. So, what is the role of a trans writer, and how can we be free today? On this panel, trans writers discuss gender/genre, theme, tokenization, and how audiences do/don’t engage with trans writing. Through performance and conversation, this panel explores the state of trans lit to get to a future where trans people live.
Nine o'clock A.M. to Eleven-fifty A.M.
LitNet is a coalition of literary organizations from across the United States that works to promote the importance of the literary arts in American culture, build the capacity of the literary field, and broaden funding for the literary arts. Join us for a meeting from 9:00–10:15 a.m. to learn more about what we do, followed by a breakfast mingle with literary leaders and other advocates from the field.
Nine o'clock A.M. to Five o'clock P.M.
With more than 500 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.
Stop by the AWP Membership Booth to learn more about the many year-round benefits of AWP. View a sample issue of the Writer’s Chronicle, ask questions about the annual Award Series or the Writer to Writer Mentorship Program, pick up some AWP swag, or just pop in to say hello and take a selfie!
Breakfast and lunch concessions are available inside the Exhibit Hall in the Kansas City Convention Center. Debit cards, 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.
In celebration of the Wick Poetry Center’s fortieth anniversary year, the Traveling Stanzas Makerspace offers conference attendees an opportunity to creatively engage with themes of health and healing, social and racial justice, nature and environment, and peace and conflict. This interactive exhibit invites participants to share their voice using a suite of digital expressive writing tools, such as Emerge (an erasure poetry app), Thread (community-generated poems), and the Listening Wall (thematically-driven touch-screen poetry displays). Visitors will be able to choose a theme, follow a prompt, then print and share their responses. More information can be found at http://travelingstanzas.com.
Ten-thirty-five A.M. to Eleven-fifty A.M.
Considering a PhD in creative writing? Students, graduates, and professors dig into the details: applications, funding, teaching loads, prelim exams, finances, and balancing self-care with expectations to produce creative and critical work. We demystify how a PhD differs from an MFA, the variations in doctoral degrees, and common secondary concentrations like comp/rhet, critical theory, and ethnic studies. We clarify what a PhD in creative writing means, both within and beyond academia.
The particularities of the Korean language—from the disparities between spoken, written, and poetic Korean to the vast changes the lexicon has undergone within the past few generations—can make translating partnerships invaluable when working from Korean to English. Four cotranslators of poetry discuss their process and how having a partner of differing background, age, and familiarity with various versions of the language may lead to more accurate, creative, and engaging translations.
Courses in writing for children and YA are expanding across the country. Why? They teach writers valuable skills! Panelists will discuss the craft benefits of this coursework and the program benefits of offering them. Attendees will develop a new appreciation for YA-MG education in creative writing as author-teachers discuss voice, audience, writing for a contemporary, changing market, and witnessing their students’ growth.
Given our nation’s latest investment in suppressing both bodies and books, what is at stake—newly, historically—in the teaching of queer and trans poetics? Five seasoned poet-educators, working inside the classroom, libraries, and community centers, gather to discuss navigating threats on the poems they teach, the poems they make, and the bodies they occupy as they do both. Panelists will offer experiential commentary and strategies for protecting, generating, and sustaining queer and trans people and poems.
You've got an agent, you're on submission: now what? Panelists will address both excitement and angst while answering vital questions. What are the best ways to handle the uncertainty of publishing? What are best practices to combat imposter syndrome before, during, and after submission? How to begin new projects when you're not sure the one on submission will sell? Panelists will discuss many parts of the process, including what it means to "die on submission" and how to recover.
This panel will focus on teaching drafting in the creative writing workshop as an exploratory process. Panelists will provide techniques to uncouple generation from notions of linear progress that limit inquiry-driven creation and creative life. Instructors from small liberal arts colleges to HBCUs to large state universities will discuss different modes and levels of workshops, from graduate to introductory. We will draw upon a range of pedagogical approaches, from traditional to innovative.
Many writers struggle to find community, which can mean the difference between staying motivated through long projects or throwing in the laptop. In 2020, a group of writers who met at a residency for women of color came together virtually from around the world for accountability and encouragement. They've seen each other through publications, residencies, rejections, moves, even motherhood. Come find out how workshopping, sharing and support became a lasting sisterhood you might create, too.
Writing through and about religious trauma can incite powerful emotions, such as anger, grief, and resentment. Writers trying to convey their experiences may feel threatened at the prospect of confronting powerful institutions. The writers in this cross-genre panel discuss their varying perspectives from both inside and outside religious institutions, and how they’ve generated work that challenges dogma, redefines spirituality, and asks critical questions amid growing American extremism.
Poets & Writers presents a conversation with the authors selected for the inaugural poetry cohort of Get the Word Out, a publicity incubator for debut authors. They will be joined by the publicist who led the cohort and will discuss the strategies they learned and used to maximize the exposure of their first collections, from reaching readers to generating media buzz, and planning memorable events. Join us to learn about this exciting new program and pick up top tips on publicity for poets.
Writing about family requires balancing loving portrayals with exposure of more difficult truths. How do nonfiction writers balance an ethics of care and a freedom to tell their truths when the story involves family? How can we manage disclosures and input or lack thereof before and after publication? What unique pressures do writers from immigrant, LGTBQIA, and families of color face? This interactive discussion features a diverse panel of writers who have grappled with writing family secrets.
Writing is often considered a solitary—even lonely—act. Years of Covid lockdown and Zoom classrooms exacerbated this sense of isolation for many students. This panel will demonstrate how multi-genre, collaborative writing exercises can build community and unlock new creative possibilities through shared process, dialogic risk taking, and experimentation. Panelists will share their favorite collaborative exercises and discuss how their own work has been shaped by artistic partnerships.
Midwestern states cover large geographic areas, and people who serve as state poet laureates must find a way to serve as arts ambassadors across these large and diverse states. How can state laureates—and state arts organizations—reach both the urban and rural populations of their states? How can they offer the arts to historically underserved communities? And how are these roles being shaped by the state arts organizations that create them?
BkMk Press, Kansas City's oldest literary press, began in a public library print shop. It later operated under university sponsorship for almost forty years. When COVID budget cuts ended this support, it became a free-standing nonprofit once again. This reading features BkMk authors from Kansas City and beyond who published a book during the pandemic era and celebrates the resilience of all who published during this time.
This panel explores ways to shepherd a community college literary magazine with diverse, high-risk, low-income students. Topics of discussion include: staff recruitment, pedagogy, editing, layout, budget, advertising, submissions, course credit, and technological tools. The panelists reflect on obstacles—some common, some unique—and equity-minded solutions. Faculty advisors share experiences producing print and online student journals and fostering a vibrant literary community.
The archives of Black literary organizations are wellsprings of inspiration for aspiring writers, scholars, and activists. The works and archival collections of luminaries like Cornelius Eady, Toi Derricotte, Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, Yusef Komunyakaa, and more serve as guiding stars, illuminating paths of creativity and activism. Their archival collections document style, method, as well as their creative processes, and the historical context in which they lived. With The Cave Canem Foundation Records held at the Beinecke Library and a current oral history project underway, this panel will explore the multifaceted importance of Black literary archival collections, emphasizing their role in preserving organizational history, cultural heritage, promoting diversity and inclusivity, and empowering communities through literary works.
As survivors of traumatic events, writers often engage with the art of writing as a form of therapy. What is the relation between testimonial writing, the craft of producing a text that connects with readers, and the praxis of healing? To explore this question, a panel of women writers will discuss memory and healing. Through their stories, they will challenge biased assumptions about the seemingly harmonious relationship between writing and healing.
We want to believe that writing is cumulative—that we benefit from habit and repetition—and it’s true, the more we write, the more we know about writing. But what works on one project might not translate to the next. Much of the work we need to do is unlearning, a willingness to go back to not knowing, so we can explore the possibilities of not being fully sure of ourselves. In this panel, four novelists discuss their unlearning and what they left behind as they embarked on new projects.
In the United States today many of us are under constant attack by both the state and individuals. Anti-Black, -Indigenous, -woman, -trans, and -Queer violence; bans on gender-affirming care for adults and youth, bans on abortion; systemic racism, sexism, and fear-based decision-making at all levels of our communities cause degrees of harm physically and psychically. This group of poets will read and speak to these and other forms of body terrorism. We use poetry to speak out, speak up, and speak truth.
Event Outline
Most writers want to be writing more than they are, but life (jobs, kids, exercise, staring into the abyss) gets in the way. How do you create a writing practice that fits your life? How do you adapt when that plan inevitably goes awry? How do you find community and support? Five busy, productive writers share approaches to creative accountability, including: writing partners, work contracts, fake deadlines, sticker charts, designated writing space, an ongoing accountability cohort, and more.
It is dangerous to be trans in the United States—in our present political climate, what does it mean to portray the trans body ecstatic with pleasure? What does it mean to both cis and trans readers? How do authors balance the pressure to perform both their own marginalization and their own joy? Join trans authors across genre as we discuss what good sex writing is, what sex writing is good for. and the craft (and importance!) of writing trans sex. Buckle up: we’re reading the steamy scenes!
In Other People's Trades, Primo Levi describes his "vagabond and dilettantish curiosity" about jobs other than his own. This panel features writers who have thought deeply about what their characters do for work—at times fulfilling, at times dangerous, occasionally invented, and usually calling for arcane knowledge, skills, and habits of mind. From sponge diver to film professor, physicist to umbrologist, our characters' professions afford us uncanny access into their inner and outer worlds.
Alice James Books presents three celebrated, accomplished writers to share their most recent work and engage in conversation together. Brian Turner will read from his new trilogy of poetry books and Katie Farris from her acclaimed 2023 debut and memoir-in-poems. The reading and conversation will be led by Major Jackson, who will contribute poems in communion with their work and guide a conversation between the group about grief, illness, loss, and love as the ultimate act of resistance.
This event will take place in person in the Kansas City Convention Center and will be livestreamed for virtual audiences. All livestreamed events include open captions and ASL interpretation.
Authors read and discuss new works that reimagine significant experiences in American history—narratives previously dominated by non-Indigenous writers. Debra Magpie Earling paints a more authentic portrait of iconic figure Sacajewea in The Lost Journals of Sacajewea; Mona Susan Power explores the devastating Indian Boarding School experiences of her family in A Council of Dolls; LeAnne Howe recounts the tale of her grandmother's survival of a pandemic in her poetry collection 1918.
The plethora of memoirs by authors tasked with caregiving aging parents with dementia illnesses mirrors a growing genre and increased publishing interest in this topic. Authors from varying practices whose books explore this life-changing experience will discuss the emotional and technical hurdles faced in the writing of personal and family caregiving stories and provide candid advice and practical techniques for those using them as educational materials as well as those at work on memoirs.
Three psychotherapists and two creative consultants, all poets or fiction writers, discuss struggles common to the writing life. From the isolated desk to the pressured book tour, panelists draw upon their own experiences plus their work with clients to provide tips for preserving mental health and wellbeing. Topics will include envy and comparison, imposter syndrome, addiction, work/life balance, developing social support systems, and challenges specific to marginalized communities.
Neurodivergent poets face many challenges and still we hold joy. Our different rhythms are too often viewed as wrong, bad, inappropriate, uncaring, lazy, childish, pointless, and more. With our whole selves we disagree, and with our poems we resist and dismantle such negative framing. We sing our joy. This event features five neurodivergent poets who will be reading toward the depths of neurodivergent joy.
A panel of authors and editors talking with a moderator about writing your passion and working with an editor to create a published piece of work that will appeal to the masses. thereby helping the author monetize their mission.
Twelve-ten P.M. to One-twenty-five P.M.
Our panelists are writers who started making comics and collage to explore new ways of seeing the world—and our work. Our poems have exploded into collages; our characters speak in balloons; our metaphors are multi-sensory. Learn how graphic literature has energized our creative practices and clarified our voices and style. We’ll share our processes, materials, techniques, and drawing tips! Attendees will come away with strategies for transforming their own writing through comics and collage.
This year, the African Poetry Book Fund celebrates ten years of promoting and advancing the development and publication of the poetic arts of Africa. Women poets from Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Uganda will discuss their individual paths to publication and the unique challenges, lessons, and best practices they encountered. They will also discuss the influence of the African Poetry Book Fund on their careers and the promotion African poetry throughout the world.
Too often, conversations around queer people and religion is limited to trauma or blind fervor. This panel features a spectrum of queer and religious experience that moves beyond such binaries to consider the complexities of identity in particular and surprising ways. Panelists will speak on how their queer religious histories influence and show up in their own poetry and who and what they turn to for example and inspiration when creating new work.
Crafting useful feedback for student writing in workshops is one of our most important duties. However, poring over student drafts can be arduous and time consuming. How much should we comment at the macro and line level? How to inspire and encourage writers while also challenging them to revise? Five teachers across multiple genres will discuss sustainable best practices for providing feedback and why workshop comments are so unique in academia and worth the momentous efforts.
While there are numerous panels on writing a book or getting a manuscript picked up, what about what happens after? Some presses revise manuscripts—vital work that involves hours and hours of revisions, meetings, and mediation. Editors from Graywolf, Haymarket, Kaya, and Noemi Presses talk about how they roll up their sleeves and work on manuscripts—even prize winners—with their authors to bring them into the world. Each will discuss titles that changed how they edit and their overall goals.
Writing a long-form literary work can be a solitary and uncertain endeavor, but in the initial stages of creation, writers control their pace and drafts. Once a manuscript is ready for submission, though, connecting with a readership can be equal parts exciting and overwhelming as others become involved in the publishing process. This panel will feature an author, literary agent, editor, and publicist, each of whom will detail their role in making a book and offer advice to prospective authors.
Event Outline
At a time when public educators are increasingly under political pressure, panelists will explore what it means to portray complex truths, dispel myths, and talk honestly about how to stay creative within top-down school systems as they find form and language for their experience with youth in the classroom. This multiracial and geographically diverse panel centers writers, editors, and activists who put their K–12 classroom experience in conversation with their writing across multiple genres.
Community is essential to a writer’s growth, but what do you do when spaces are inhospitable to your community? Build your own! These innovative authors share how they’ve built thriving programs for diverse NYC fiction writers, global Muslim writers, women/nonbinary writers, domestic workers, and BIPOC+ authors. We share strategies and tools to empower anyone eager to create a nurturing space that centers writers of color, language justice, disability justice, and voices at the intersections.
The staff at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, a literacy nonprofit located in Lexington, Kentucky, realized supporting the Black community meant more than putting a BLM sign in the window. The staff and board begin to query their policies and practices, centering the question: are we doing enough for the Black community? The answer was an honest "no," and in the fall of that year, out of the ashes of the uprising, the Kentucky Black Writers Collaborative was born.
How have poets in Oklahoma, a bastion of conservative politics and low socio-economic indicators, been using poetry to serve diverse, marginalized communities outside of usual academic channels to effect positive social changes? And how can these strategies be employed elsewhere as well as improved in Oklahoma? This discussion room will be led by poets working with, in, and/or through literary nonprofit organizations, artist collectives, radio shows and other media, and prisons.
Gerald Locklin was a defining voice on the American poetry scene with over 3,000 published poems. Along with Edward Field, Locklin helped cultivate a style of poetry that was accessible, witty, humorous, and unpretentious, known as "Stand-Up Poetry." Sadly, in 2021, Locklin, like so many, lost his life to the Covid virus. This panel of five people, including writers, former students, and publishers, will pay tribute to his extraordinary life, writing, influence, and support of other artists.
How can coursework in literary editing and publishing, combined with hands-on experience working on a national publication, best support an undergrad or graduate creative writing curriculum? Five editors of literary journals who teach editing share strategies to engage students in questions of collaborative literary assessment, aesthetic judgment, representation and equity, and distinctive curation as they become stronger readers and writers through the discussion of manuscript submissions.
Two coeditors and three poets from The Art of Revising Poetry (Bloomsbury, 2023) share and discuss revision techniques. From false starts to how they tinker, cut, rearrange, and shape a poem, panelists detail what they changed and why, as they strove to wake their poems to full resonance. Providing a behind-the-scenes look into the creative minds of working poets, panelists reveal personal revision tricks, idiosyncrasies, and lessons learned through long practice.
From Twitter discourse to private group chats to varying successes, Young Adult publishing can feel like the Wild West. We oftentimes hear “there’s no normal in publishing,” but what does that mean? Is the journey from idea to publication really that different between houses? Five Young Adult authors from a range of background, genres, and publishers discuss their experiences as 2023 debuts. We’ll tackle the myths and shine a light on what happens behind the scenes from a writer’s perspective.
The panel brings together queer writers of diverse South Asian origins: Pakistani-American, Omani-Indian, Assamese, diasporic, and southern Indian. We read from their fiction, share the unique challenges we faced between writing our books and publishing them, and talk about how queer South Asian fiction is in dialogue with queer writing being read in the United States, even as they tell unique stories rooted in the specificity of historical, cultural, and postcolonial legacies.
Writers' conferences are collaborative efforts with the shared mission of fostering writing communities. Conference and festival directors and staff will share their challenges and successes when creating, sustaining, and growing writers' conferences. This panel will candidly address establishing partnerships, seeking institutional support, cultivating inclusivity and equity, and selecting and managing speakers, faculty, and participants.
For decades, the transition memoir was the only readily available transgender nonfiction. The mainstream publishing world has been slow to catch up, but contemporary trans and nonbinary writers are breathing new life into nonfiction. These writers are telling their nuanced true stories beyond a linear transition narrative. This panel will bring together five transgender and nonbinary memoirists and essayists for an engaging discussion about trans stories and the future of trans nonfiction.
Four writer-mothers, working in different genres and mothering circumstances, describe how motherhood influences their writing practices and subjects. From returning to the page after becoming a mother to parenthood’s place on the page to how their children’s life stages affect their writing, these four writer-mothers explore how their writing continues to evolve as their roles as mothers evolve and how they manage—or don’t—to make the two work in tandem.
Language evolves. Words both gain and lose power with social movements, cultural expectations, and personal transformation. Sometimes vocabulary evades inspiring a search for a new expression to hold all our meanings. In this panel, five poets will consider the role of poetry in the process of naming and renaming as personal, social, and cultural evolution demands shifts in how we speak about ourselves and contemporary themes.
Investigating inherited and historical trauma can provide abundant material, but mining the past requires ethical acuity. How might we research and write responsibly when the record is fragmented or erased? How do we care for our loved ones and ourselves while writing through our truths? How might we mitigate historical harm? How might we avoid causing further harm through appropriation? Multigenre writers discuss the ethics of breaking silence across creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry.
Addiction is a reality for many writers and the loved ones they write about. For memoirists who want to tell their stories, how they handle writing about their own and other people's addictions can be a tricky ethical minefield. Some writers must navigate issues of anonymity, a cornerstone of twelve-step recovery programs. Others must consider how their stories may raise issues of legal liability. How can we share these stories ethically? How can we balance truth telling and privacy?
Though writing about trauma can be therapeutic, it is not therapy. Too much discussion of writing about trauma focuses on the traumatic events themselves rather than the craft, form, and structure of the writing. Panelists will discuss techniques to help contain the unruly nature of traumatic experiences and consider how writers can stay grounded when confronting some of their most difficult experiences.
Award-winning poets Suji Kwock Kim, author of Notes from the North (Smith/Doorstop, U.K., 2021) and Notes from the Divided Country (Louisiana State University Press, 2003); Sara Daniele Rivera, author of The Blue Mimes (Graywolf Press, forthcoming 2024); and Nicole Sealey, author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure (Penguin, 2023) and Ordinary Beast (Ecco Press, 2017), read from their work. Ricardo Maldonado, Executive Director and President of the Academy of American Poets, will introduce the event.
This event will take place in person in the Kansas City Convention Center and will be livestreamed for virtual audiences. All livestreamed events include open captions and ASL interpretation.
Mizna hosts Palestinian British novelist Isabella Hammad and Egyptian poet Noor Naga in conversation with Mizna’s executive editor, George Abraham, exploring the ways transnational and multilingual narratives might reimagine the potential futures of the novel as a form. What are the difficulties and generative potentials of writing transnational stories within this historical tradition? What roles can Arabophone literature play in shaping the future formal trajectory of the novel in English?
This event will take place in person in the Kansas City Convention Center and will be livestreamed for virtual audiences. All livestreamed events include open captions and ASL interpretation.
Professors, writers, and activists David Bowles, Rudy Ruiz, Guadalupe Garcia McCall, and Tracey Flores gather to discuss the concept of mecachihualiztli, what the Nahua called, “cord-weaving,” as it pertains to crafting works that will effect change in the world. The panelists will discuss futurism and challenge attendees to question how by recalling, retaining, and repurposing the knowledge and wisdom of our ancestors, weaving them into our work, we might create a stronger, healthier future.
Missouri has recently made a dramatic turn toward repressive social policy, raising difficult questions for the state’s writers: how do I love a place that doesn’t love me back? How can I acknowledge Missouri’s rich literary history and use writing to address the current crisis? How can writing become part of the solution to the state’s problems? In this panel, five Missouri writers discuss their struggles to love and critique their home as they hope for its future renewal.
How a literary magazine invites writers to submit their work for consideration is not only a logistical question, but also a question of how to communicate with writers about a publication’s character and style. In this panel discussion, three literary magazines editors lead a conversation on different submission models, covering questions about reading fees, submissions caps and reading periods, agented, solicited, and unsolicited submissions, and more.
Non-celebrity writers are often told their memoirs are not marketable, but our panelists have found that research-driven memoirs occupy their own niche with crossover genre appeal. We will explore the ways research can break memoir open, offering readers a deeper, fact-driven understanding of both the author and themselves. Panelists will share ideas for using archival research, interviews, immersion journalism, and more to illuminate the wider realities that drive our experiences.
Many writers dream about the perfect writing spot, a location that will inspire ideas and the feeling of accomplishment that comes with words flowing. Carving out the time and managing real-life responsibilities can be overwhelming, let alone finding this mythical and affordable place to focus on writing. Join our panel of writers at different career stages and the founder of SabbaticalHomes.com to see how they experience a creative refresh by staying in new surroundings all over the world.
One-forty-five P.M. to Three o'clock P.M.
Over the past decade, authors, organizations, and literary adjacent areas have been more outspoken about the disparities and lack of transparency within the book industry. This presentation highlights the four quadrants of publishing (Creation, Production, Distribution, and Reception) alongside an in-depth discussion from publishing professionals and writers demystifying areas of impact and progress at every stage of the publishing process.
Poets who engage in more than one language consider why and when they switch into non-English languages. Equally important is how the poet negotiates between their languages while keeping in mind possible readers, and how the multilingual poem can deconstruct a monolingual American culture. Poets and translators who work in Chinese, French, German, Spanish, and Tagalog discuss their code-switching process and future in navigating the ethical burdens of serving as a medium between cultures.
Silence, long a sign of complicity and conformity, is being reclaimed by a new generation of poets as a revolutionary and innovative force. For these poets, silence adds an ineffable dimension to their subject matter, gestures toward the limits of the English language, and honors the unsayable by tracing its outline. This multicultural panel of poets will discuss the role that silence plays in each of their first books in an attempt to find shared and distinct understandings of its poetic use.
This panel explores the intersections between language and visual art through the lens of visual poetry. Our panelists will engage with questions about the role of design, typography, poetic images, so-called white- or negative space, and how visual elements can expand our understanding of poetic meaning. We will examine a range of visual poetry forms, including concrete poetry, collages, and multimedia works, to showcase the playfully diverse ways poets blend text and image to create meaning.
These writers have mental and physical disabilities that are not obvious at first glance. They will discuss new literary framings of disability in terms of social marginalization, "othering," and denial of agency rather than simply personal struggles to overcome. Do writers with unseen disabilities have an obligation to speak about their conditions? Is it enough to "raise awareness" about one's condition? How can writers also undermine ableist perspectives through their work?
While most fictional depictions of queerness focus on orientation and heterosexual models of behavior, the reality of the LGBTQIA+ community is more varied and includes identities of gender, attraction, and relationships. This discussion of queerness, both fictional and real, will explore orientations such as asexual, omni, and pan; trans, fluid, agender, and nonbinary genders; aromantic, platonic, and other attraction styles; as well as open, poly, and consensually non-monogamous relationships.
How do panelists center voices of students from underrepresented groups, and teach published work from underrepresented groups? Panelists will share best practices and discuss the mechanics of leading anti-racist discussions within the academy. Discuss the tensions between art for art’s sake and art that’s socially conscious. What are the challenges? What are the rewards? What do panelists consider when creating the course?
During this panel discussion, contributing authors from the Scenes From a Single Mom book project will share best practices, lessons learned, and their journeys to becoming authors and entrepreneurs through a cohort-style, collective model. Each author is a contributing author in one of the six memoir-style anthologies about single motherhood, who were able to cross the finish line because of the power of support of the hosting organization, sisterhood, and collaboration with two local universities.
Place based writing has a long tradition in poetry; it also has considerable ethical concerns. What does it mean to claim a city as your own? When we write about location, what narratives are we creating or reinforcing? This discussion explores the archival nature of place-based writing while examining the impact of personifying place. What possibilities emerge when place becomes person? When land is given autonomy, what do we learn about it's values, culture, and residents?
African American professor-writers can experience microaggressions and even racism at their colleges and universities while they pursue tenure and promotion along with being present and available for their students. This panel will discuss the mental health challenges of black academic writers from collaboration with colleagues to exchanges with administration and how this affects their writing craft. Panelists will discuss how they cope with these issues while delivering excellence.
Marveling at the magic of words once spurred readers to write. Yet in our utility-obsessed, AI-influenced culture, today’s students can find reading passive, unproductive, even indulgent. This panel will re-establish the importance of time “spent” reading as an integral part of a writer’s education. Addressing the BA, MA, and MFA levels, five diverse faculty will reflect on challenges to student reading and reinvigorate colleagues with approaches that help students love reading as writers.
Religious scripture is among the oldest and widest-read written material; as such, it carries immense potential for poetic re-imagining. In their scriptural entanglements, these five poets explore and explode notions of gender and property, faith and belonging, violence and care. The literary canon is largely white and Christian, and this panel, led by poets across spiritual and religious backgrounds, pushes for a more expansive and inclusive practice of devotional engagement on the page.
Reading, particularly in translation, allows us insight into others' lives, cultures, and experiences. This event presents three books with cross-cultural themes, each set on a different continent. Originally published in Yiddish, Armenian, and French, all are newly available in English in their entirety for the first time. These works illustrate their authors' and translators' efforts to respectfully portray the "other"—those of a race, gender, culture, and/or time period other than their own.
This gathering of writers and scholars seeks to celebrate and honor the work of Afaa Michael Weaver and his storied career as a poet, essayist, playwright, mentor and much more. A number of presenters, including Dr. Tara Betts, Danielle Legros Georges, and Enzo Silon Surin will discuss poems by Weaver that have inspired them and facilitate a timely discussion about the impact that a writer can have off the page. Weaver will then close with brief remarks and a few new poems from his recent work.
This panel aims to provide intimate glimpses into the Arab American communities in the Detroit metropolitan region, which is home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the country. Through works of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, the panelists will discuss the creative process of dramatizing a diverse range of Arab ethnicities and voices, as well as capturing the complexities of community life.
Scarlet Tanager Books, founded in 1999, publishes work by West Coast authors. The press has a special interest in environmental writing and Native American literature. The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Poetry Reading will feature poets who celebrate the beauty and warn of the fragility of landscapes from Southern California to Alaska, and will include editors of Scarlet Tanager’s groundbreaking anthologies Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California and Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California.
The United States/Mexico border has long been a rich source of literature as well as a place of cultural convergence; it can also be a place of friction, division, and disagreement about who belongs where. Five writer-insiders from both sides of the border will share their work, discussing their inspiration and what they view as the most important new issues, themes, perspectives, and metaphorical possibilities for contemporary literature set at the border—and where this literature might go next.
Childhood trauma is powerfully determinative over the course of a life. How do we use psychological damage as a narrative engine, while avoiding the pitfalls of sentimentality and reductivism: characters as symptom sets, cardboard cutout villains, or would-be saviors? Through a queer lens, four authors share their experiences in humanizing the embodied memory of violence, homophobia, familial disruption, and ethnic and political dislocation to create fiction that is brutally honest, yet hopeful.
Join us in a nuanced and intimate conversation about the intersection of sex and shame. What does it take for us to write unabashedly about sex? How do we trace the roots of our shame? In this panel, five writers will talk about how they come to the page to address personal and collective stigmas surrounding sexuality. What do we gain from writing about sex? In what ways can we release trauma and unlearn that which we’ve been taught is deviant? How can writing free us?
So many poets have turned to writing prose—but the leap across genres can be intimidating. What does it mean to write “on spec”? What’s a fair fee for an essay, and how do you negotiate without annoying an editor? Panelists will address both practical concerns—when does it make sense to start querying agents? what’s included in a book proposal?—and issues related to craft, like adapting your process as you move across genres, or how the skills you’ve refined in poetry can translate to prose.
Literary realism has treated trans stories with skepticism, flattening trans lives to fit hostile narratives or excluding them completely. Trans writers have responded by embracing the fantastic. Join a panel of trans fantasists to discuss the uniquely transformative nature of our craft, themes, and readership in a time of artistic flowering and mounting danger.
Public discussions of memoir generally center on the difficulties—and ethics—of turning loved ones into characters. But the most challenging aspect of chronicling our lives tends to involve looking inward, rather than outward; facing our former selves with honesty and transparency, but without judgement or embarrassment. This brutal task is, ultimately, the backbone of all great memoir. In this panel, we give you the tools to confront and construct your most important “character”: yourself.
What does it mean to be a literary citizen? How can you get started as a critic, editor, publisher or arts administrator, while maintaining your artistic practice? Two accomplished writers with twenty plus years of experience share their stories as literary citizens. Opening with a reading of their work, the writers will then participate in a moderated conversation about their various roles championing literature, challenges they may have faced, and ways you can get involved in the literary community.
This event will take place in person in the Kansas City Convention Center and will be livestreamed for virtual audiences. All livestreamed events include open captions and ASL interpretation.
Join Kundiman as we celebrate our twentieth anniversary year with a special cross-genre reading and conversation featuring Kundiman writers Franny Choi, Megha Majumdar, and Srikanth Reddy, moderated by Kundiman cofounder Joseph Legaspi. This panel will discuss the history of Kundiman’s legacy, from its inaugural workshop retreat for poets at the University of Virginia in 2004, to its role today as a national nonprofit organization dedicated to nurturing generations of Asian American readers and writers. This intergenerational panel will discuss Kundiman’s role in shaping the landscape of Asian American literature, as well as how the literary arts can be used to explore and address the unique challenges that face the new and ever-changing diaspora.
This event will take place in person in the Kansas City Convention Center and will be livestreamed for virtual audiences. All livestreamed events include open captions and ASL interpretation.
Addiction, sexuality, incarceration, suicide, poverty . . . topics like these are common subjects of memoir. But the weight of the subject matter can make it difficult to write as we are forced to confront our losses, shortcomings, and social injustice in the work of crafting a narrative. It's common to feel stuck. It's vital we continue. During this panel, five memoirists will share their tools for making meaning and confronting shame in order to reach the first brass ring of memoir: completed.
Our bodies, whether we feel empowered or trapped by them, rule over us. Our sex. Our skin color. Our weight. Our height. Our ableness. Our health. They can create a pigeonhole that determines how we interact with the world, and how the world interacts with us—but writing about the body gives us the chance to reframe this interaction as we write on our own terms. Three authors read and discuss their body-themed nonfiction and fiction work with F(r)iction's editor-in-chief.
Let's face it—at some point in our writing lives, we're going to need to find a job that pays bills and buys groceries. When the adjuncting no longer cuts it, when the fellowships dry up, when the book doesn't sell as well as you hoped, we will still need to eat. Join four writers from wildly different backgrounds for a transparent discussion on the most taboo subject of all: money. How do you get it when you're a writer? How do you balance the reality of living with your artistic aspirations?
What forms do poets summon to wrestle with and queer kinship? In this reading, five queer poets of diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and poetics will share recent work on their experiences of parenthood and family-making: reckoning with questions of adoption, genetics, belonging, community, and fertility technologies. World-building beyond discrimination and across differences of class, race, and orientation, these poems offer alternate dreams of futurity.
Celebrating its fourth year at AWP, the event focuses on quick reads performed by published writers from the AWP Writer to Writer Mentorship Program. We invite you to enjoy a mix of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from these talented writers. Organized and emceed by alum P.D. Keenen.
Participant bios can be found at the following link in January 2024: https://pdkeenen.com/2023/05/30/awp24-lightning-readings-by-writer-to-writer-alumni/
Three-twenty P.M. to Four-thirty-five P.M.
Los Angeles-based creators and promoters F. Douglas Brown, Mike Sonksen, traci kato-kiriyama, and Luivette Resto will share strategies for promoting a diverse range of poets and communities they are passionate about to inspire others nationally to elevate the poets and artists in their regions. By working with schools, local neighborhoods, organizations, and friends, these educators, organizers, historians, and poets hone the power of the collective for a more vibrant world.
In an era of escalating violence against AAPIs, in the aftermath of imperialist wars and the Atlanta spa shootings, AAPI writers are crafting counternarratives. We’ll strike back against model minority and victim stereotypes with more complex stories: from Vietnamese refugee resettlement to South Asian feminist biography; from activism against transphobic and homophobic legislation to Chinese intergenerational resilience. We’ll also create a shared resource through the conversation and reading.
How can Indigenous writers resist the “western gaze” and honor the multiplicity of their identities while respecting their communities and cultures? In this panel, published poets and fiction writers discuss craft choices, ethical questions, and publishing and editing concerns that affect the Indigenous writer and their work. The panelists will explore the Indigenous literary canon, focusing on Western literary exploitation and objectification of Indigenous storytelling, and discuss its future.
The short fiction landscape is crackling with change. Excitement for flash and micro-fiction is as strong as ever but as many print magazines shutter, there seems to be an ever-tightening belt about the word counts of longer short stories. Panelists will discuss the challenges of writing and publishing longer short stories in today’s literary marketplace and how magazines’ shifting word count requirements are impacting the stories they tell and read.
When discussing what queer folks under attack in "red" states should do, one thing is always suggested: leave. While it may be ideal for some, for many, leaving means abandoning not only loved ones, but also their homes. Queer folks have always loved, lived, and created in hostile places, and fleeing is not something everyone can or even wants to do. In this panel, queer poets in or from deep red states talk and write through complex loves of home and the joys that can still be cultivated there.
The queer community has gained a measure of acceptance over time and also been dealt crushing blows in today’s sharply divided world. Queer literature allows us to tell our truths, our stories that show who we were, are, and hope to become. Four authentic and uneasily honest queer voices show our power is more in how we receive ourselves than in how the world receives us. Join us to explore stories of lives lived as our authentic selves in a world that does not fully embrace or understand us.
Five Eastern European Poets discuss how the war in Ukraine has transformed purpose in our work. Each participant will read one to three poems and then offer a brief discussion about poetry and/or translation of poetry as it pertains to the war in Ukraine. Panelists offer perspectives from each of their unique home countries/cultures with Croatia, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Russian Federation represented, respectively.
How do we think of ourselves in history, and when we do, what do we see? Three innovative poets consider how personal and public histories—Black histories in particular—are intertwined and how the combination of poetry and images can invigorate our exploration of their complexities. Examining the use of both archival materials and personal photographs alongside numerous poetic forms, this reading and conversation will encourage brave new ways of grappling with who we are and how we got here.
The “visual” poem untethers language from the traditional line, the left margin, linearity, the page, and sometimes even from the word itself. What happens when the poem becomes shape or object, beyond stanzaic structure? What power does the physical image lend to a poem’s argument, or the histories that it describes? Panelists will examine the formal tools that make the visual possible in a poem, as well as what might be freed—poetically, linguistically, and politically—in this process.
“Being healed is about feeling the appropriate emotions at the appropriate times and still being able to come back to yourself.” ―Stephanie Foo. How do we create art that is both necessary and cathartic without sacrificing the artist? What can we do as writers to stay grounded when writing heavy subject matter? Writers share how they protect their mental wellbeing, calm their nervous system, and feel safe in their bodies to write through grief and wounds to create art.
As translated literature commands greater interest in the United States, more literary magazines are looking to publish it. Words Without Borders Editorial Director Susan Harris will moderate a discussion on how to approach publishing and promoting literary translations in print and online magazines. The panel of editors and publishers from The Margins, Latin American Literature Today, and The Georgia Review will address editorial considerations, contracts, payments, and promotion and event opportunities.
The pressure on writers to be "productive" can feel relentless, both from within and without. This panel is the antidote: a love song to the long game from five fiction and nonfiction writers whose books took years to finish. We'll talk candidly about how time transforms structure, voice, and research; how to sustain the slow burn; how not-writing can be essential to writing; managing anxiety, ageism, and self-doubt; and learning to love the duration for the sake of the art.
For over twenty years The Believer has interviewed the artists and writers that define our culture. The magazine’s tone of candor and camaraderie fosters an environment where the reader often feels as though they are witnessing a rare and intimate conversation between friends. This panel will feature four acclaimed writers who have published interviews in The Believer, and will touch on how they approached the interview process and what makes a literary interview sparkle.
Contributors to the International Latino Book award-winning creative nonfiction anthology will read from personal essays that explore the range of Latina experiences in college and share their reflections since the groundbreaking collection was published a decade ago. These compelling narratives provide crucial insight into the complex intersection of race, class, and educational issues, dispelling myths, and showcasing the diversity of this community’s experiences in higher education.
Trans writers, editors, and performers have always had to navigate risk in this country, but the last few years have felt particularly perilous, both in the United States and globally. These nonbinary and genderqueer writers will discuss what it means to for us to exist as members of a literary community in the 2020s and what the transphobic policies being enacted (and the cultures in which they are being produced) mean to our pedagogies, our careers, and our lives.
Poets ranging in age from thirty-six to seventy-nine will read poems that address environmental issues and social justice. In addition to being multigenerational—Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, and Millennials—the poets reading are multicultural, bringing Latin American, Middle Eastern, European American, and Native American perspectives to some of the most important issues challenging humanity today. This diverse group of poets will create a conversation to inform, inspire, and provide insight for all of us.
Zines flourish at the intersection of self-expression and grassroots activism. Zine making welcomes writers and creatives of all levels to extend their authentic voices beyond the established publishing industry. Join our panel of zinesters, writing instructors, distro owners, community organizers, and small press editors as we discuss, show, and tell the empowering roles that zines play in our local writing communities.
Poets whose work complicates or writes against dominant narratives will discuss how the persona poem challenges historical erasure and revises both the past and present. Panelists will discuss the ethical implications of the personal poem, their decisions to use persona in their work, and their underlying methodologies and research in voicing the past.
How does a writer walk the tightrope between story and history when tackling a major world event, historical or contemporary? How do they make it their own? Four novelists and a poet discuss their unique approaches to describing Hawaii's colonization, the Russian Revolution, World War II, the 2016 election, and the current war in Ukraine. From balancing fact and fiction to creating a narrative that feels fresh, we will share our experiences whipping reality into a literary shape.
The literary world often reduces writers to oversimplified, manageable identities. Workshops, publishing, and marketing tend to place us into boxes that tokenize and dehumanize, silencing our intersectional selves. In this multigenre panel, BIPOC women writers will share how they resist such limitations and honor their complex identities in their creative work and the publishing process. They will explore how celebrating all that we are as writers can nourish us and open us, and readers, to joy.
Modern motherhood is a daily exercise in relinquishing control. But how do we mother when the supports that keep us and our families safe and cared for become increasingly elusive? And how do we write about motherhood in an era of fear and state control? These writers will read from their latest works that examine the body, pregnancy and postpartum, maternal anger and anxiety, and mothers searching for truth and solid ground when they don’t know who or what they can trust. Q&A to follow.
Literature itself can be a form of activism, but what is the relationship between literature and nonliterary activism? How is literature distinct? As the environmental and climate crisis threatens life as we know it, five writers explore the relationship between writing (sometimes across genres) and environmental justice. They’ll discuss ways writers can both celebrate their unique contributions and build bridges with other fields to form greater connection, community, engagement, and action.
In this session, five memoirists who built their stories around questions, writing into mysteries in their own lives or their families', will discuss the particular craft challenges that come up when writing a memoir that reads like a detective novel—with readers following along on a search for truth, clarity, or closure: from finding clues and remaining open to surprise, to the practical concerns of research, to how to write into questions with no definitive answers.
What does it take to fund your own film? Where do you start? And who should you hire? All that and more is answered in this panel featuring panelists who have been through the process themselves. This is a great opportunity to learn what you can expect as a writer who wants to see their story on the big screen, especially as an indie film. You'll also get to learn some of the differences between indie and big budget filmmaking, and how that affects you as a writer.
Whether we like it or not, the road to publication is paved with rejections—and in this panel, five publishing professionals will address the specter of “no,” offering insight and encouragement applicable to writers at all stages of the publishing process. We’ll consider how to mine rejections for useful feedback, when we might step away from a project, and instances where we should push through or push back in service of the work and its essential integrity.
“won't you celebrate with me/what i have shaped into/a kind of life? i had no model/born in babylon/both nonwhite and woman/ what did i see to be except myself?” —Lucille Clifton. The rise of memoirs by women of color is changing the landscape of publishing. How do we keep forward momentum in finding the beauty of our complex stories without being performative for the industry? Join a diverse panel of women of color memoirists for a reading and discussion on the exciting future of nonfiction.
Recognizing Tupelo's twenty-five-year commitment to diversity, we are proud to offer a reading by four exemplary poets, each offering poems from their recent Tupelo Press books: J. Mae Barizo, reading from Tender Machines, Iliana Rocha, reading from The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez, Rohan Chhetri, reading from lost hurt or in transit beautiful, and Kelly Weber, reading from We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place. Followed by Q&A, moderated by Jeffrey Levine, Artistic Director of Tupelo.
Five o'clock P.M. to Six-fifteen P.M.
Daily 12-Step Meeting. All in recovery from anything are welcome.
The caucus creates a space where teachers in K-12 schools, as well as those who work part time with young writers, can share their classroom experiences with the hope of helping one another understand the complex and diverse needs of young writers in the twenty-first century. The meeting will feature presentations by caucus members to help generate discussion around issues of pedagogy and how to build a creative writing curriculum that is accessible to students no matter their identity or background.
What does it mean to steward Asian American and Pacific Islander literature, organizationally, collectively, and individually? The annual Asian American Caucus is a town hall-style hangout and community space. Come meet other Asian American writers and discuss opportunities and resources available to support you. Organized by Kundiman, the Asian American Writers' Workshop, Kaya Press, Hyphen magazine, the Asian American Literary Review, and Smithsonian’s APAC.
Six o'clock P.M. to Seven-thirty P.M.
Celebrate twenty-plus years of Saturnalia Books with a reception honoring our beloved authors who appear in the Lords of Misrule anthology, as well as those who just joined our Saturnalia community.
Six-thirty P.M. to Seven-forty-five P.M.
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.