017 awp conference & Bookfair February —11, 2017 • Washington, dc

Eastern Woodlands Natives Reading from When Spirits Visit and I Was Indian (Before Being Indian Was Cool). (Susan Deer Cloud, Monty Campbell, Jr., James Stevens, Denise Low)

Four Eastern Woodlands Indigenous writers read poetry and prose from MariJo Moore’s When Spirits Visit and Deer Cloud’s I Was Indian (Before Being Indian Was Cool) anthologies, evoking the 19th century ghost dance Native people once did to make a stand for their lives and defy vanishing forever. These 21st century word warriors read work that embodies how the ghost dance prevails in their poems and stories that shine on in affirmation of Mother Earth, the spirits and the ancient beauty ways.

Eco-Writing: Plotting a Way Forward in Three Genres. (Clinton Crockett Peters, Toni Jensen, Megan Kaminski, Roger Reeves, Kurt Caswell)

“Nature writing" has sometimes had a storied history as a privileged pursuit, occasionally ignorant of social justice. “Eco-writing” is a new brand, one that acknowledges ecological and social embeddedness. This panel will feature a cross-genre reading of essays, poems, and stories interested in the entwinement of human with the more-than-human world. The featured work incorporates social justice and escapes, as much as possible, the baggage of privileged outdoor pursuits.

Essaying the Body Electric: A Reading & Conversation. (Kim Dana Kupperman, Therése Halscheid, Sheryl St. Germain, Thomas Gibbs, Colin Hosten)

A project of Welcome Table Press, Essaying the Body Electric is an online space showcasing nonfiction narratives and art that offer frank, arresting, meaningful portrayals and interpretations of the body. This reading features work that sings various electricities in fresh ways, essaying anew anorexia and memory, love and atrophy, motherhood and violence. After the reading, participants will address the fears, challenges, and triumphs of writing the body in the age of privacy gone public.

From the Fishouse: A Bilingual Reading of Poets from Around the World. (Matthew O'Donnell, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Piotr Gwiazda, Katherine Young, Ani Gjika)

Since 2004, From the Fishouse has provided the public greater access to the poems & voices of emerging US poets by using online audio archives, simulcast readings, & other media to bring poetry into the home & classroom. Our revised website now features emerging international poets & translators. This bilingual reading will showcase poets writing in Russian, Polish, Spanish, Albanian & Filipino, as well as a translator discussion about process & the joys & challenges of this important work.

George Mason Alumni Poetry Reading. (Peter Streckfus, Ranjani Murali, Betsy Andrews, J. Michael Martinez, Danielle Cadena Deulen)

These five prominent poet alumni of George Mason University have been celebrated by the most prestigious first book awards in the United States and internationally. Crossing cultures and engaging hybrid as well as traditional forms, together their work bends our expectation of the traditional English lyric. Their voices reflect the rich diversity of George Mason University as well as the wider Washington D.C. poetry community.

George Mason Poetry Faculty Reading. (Eric Pankey, Jennifer Atkinson, Sally Keith, Susan Tichy, Peter Streckfus)

The five poets on the permanent faculty of George Mason University's BFA and MFA programs are an eclectic group, with interests in hybrid, documentary, eco-poetic, spiritual, political, research-based, visual and conceptual poetries. These poets reflect part of the range of aesthetics practiced in the lively metro D.C. poetry scene.

Girls Who Run the World: Readings of Women in the Apocalypse. (Alexander Lumans, Claire Vaye Watkins, Lucy Corin, Manuel Gonzales, Sandra Newman)

Imperator Furiosa, Michonne, Alice Abernathy. To ignore the role of women in apocalyptic literature is to deny over half the world’s population their opportunity to survive, let alone thrive. In this panel, five established and emerging fiction writers give voice to female protagonists in dystopian landscapes ranging from a giant sand dune to a regional office. Through individual readings of their apocalyptic visions, these writers challenge outdated versions of women at the end of the world.

Going for Gold: Five Novelists Rewrite the Sports Narrative. (Anelise Chen, Shivani Manghnani, Sung Woo, VT Hung, Gabe Habash)

What does the figure of the athlete represent? How have depictions of athletes, in media and culture, shaped the ways in which we think of hero narratives? How do sports reinforce the idea of “Americanness”? And what models are there for sports stories that fall outside of the triumphalist arc championed by a largely white and male-dominated genre? Join this diverse panel of writers as they read from their novels about characters who succeed and fail at boxing, tennis, wrestling, and swimming.

Good Grief. (Heid Staples, Janet Holmes, Steven Karl, Prageeta Sharma)

Faced with the loss of a beloved, people struggle with overwhelming emotions and feelings of disorientation, often vacillating between anger and despair, and at times reaching a state of acceptance and gratitude. This panel investigates the role of poetry in articulating and transforming one’s loss, exploring how poetry can translate the intimacy of grief into a shared experience between author and reader. Four writers share their recent work and discuss their navigation of the grief process.

Hands, a Flurry of Words: A Reading by Deaf Writers. (Raymond Luczak, Tonya Stremlau, Christopher Jon Heuer, Pamela Wright Moers, Kristen Ringman)

How many Deaf writers do you know? One, two? No? How about five? These five Deaf published writers will welcome you with their poems and stories on communicating and treated differently. Having this many Deaf writers together for a single reading and perform their work in American Sign Language (ASL) is an extraordinarily rare event anywhere. Come treat your eyes and ears for a bit of literary history!

Imaginary Vessels. (Elaina Ellis, Paisley Rekdal, Bob Hicok, Natalie Shapero, Alex Dimitrov)

This reading lifts up the poem as a vessel and peeks inside to discover: what is carried by the body of the poem, the house of the poem, the city of a poem, the skull of a poem? After brief introductory comments, each poet will read from a new collection, with a selection of poems that showcase containment and leakage within and outside the “imaginary vessels” of pages, titles, lines, and words.

Iranian Diaspora Writers As Cultural Ambassadors: Engaging Iran After the Nuclear Agreement. (Persis Karim, Sholeh Wolpe, Anita Amirrezvani, Jasmin Darznik, Soraya Shalforoosh)

This dynamic panel features writers/translators who engage Iran and Iranian culture through poetry, fiction, nonfiction and translation. By sharing their work, these Iranian-American writers offer a literary window at a time when we need cultural ambassadors to shape a powerful dialogue about US-Iran relations. Panelists read from their work, discuss the challenges and opportunities for publishing, translating, and participating in a cultural shift as diaspora writers in both the US and Iran.

It’s the End of the World As She Knows It: Apocalypse Poetry by Women. (Maggie Smith, Dena Rash Guzman, Meghan Privitello, Leah Umansky)

Four poets discuss and read from recent, timely collections of poems focused on doomsday and depictions of disaster in American culture. How are these popular, hyper-masculinized narratives and tropes treated--and twisted--by women? How do feminist, futuristic, and dystopian themes intersect? Employing varied formal and conceptual approaches, these poets engage with the environment, religion, politics, and popular culture.

Kaylie Jones Books: A Reading. (Kaylie Jones, Patricia Smith, J Patrick Redmond, Barb Taylor, Laurie Lowenstein)

Kaylie Jones Books, an imprint of Akashic Books, was established in 2013 by writer Kaylie Jones, with the goal of publishing good books that take on subjects often overlooked by mainstream publishers. Since its inception, KJB has published nine books of fiction and nonfiction to critical acclaim, including Best Summer Read and an ALA award. Come hear four KJB authors read from recent work and talk with the publisher.

Legacies of the Badass: Black Feminist Writing in the Millennium. (Ruth Ellen Kocher, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Dawn Lundy Martin, Duriel Harris, Khadija Queen)

This reading features five black women writers who represent the legacies of innovation, experimentation, and political conscience characteristic of such pioneering poets as Jayne Cortez and June Jordan. The increasing visibility of a poetic practice that is bold, brave, radical, subversive, progressive, and very much black and female indicates a cultural continuum that embraces the fearless social interrogations and influence of black feminist writers of the past, present, and future.

Literary Hybrids: Transgressing the Traditional. (Nickole Brown, Casandra Lopez, Ching-In Chen, Julie Marie Wade, Allison Hedge Coke)

What is it about hybrid writing that lends itself to diversity, that makes way for the work of queer writers and those marked by multiplicity—of mixed culture, race, and class? Through readings and discussion, this panel of four authors will investigate how (and why) the in-between, liminal space offered by cross-genre writing provides various communities the freedom to more adequately express themselves, transgressing the traditional boundaries of discourse and genre.

Making Space - A Hmong American Writers' Circle Reading. (Khaty Xiong, Yia Lee, Anthony Cody, Ying Thao)

4 Members of the Hmong American Writers Circle will share recently published work and lead a discussion on their experiences conducting public creative writing workshops that make space for and foster marginalized voices. The writers will also discuss what it means for them to pioneer Hmong American literature when no known popular writing system existed prior to the 1950’s.

Milkweed Editions Reading. (Daniel Slager, Dan Beachy-Quick, Deni Ellis Béchard, Melissa Kwasny, Chris Dombrowski)

These outstanding writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry showcase the range, depth, and uniqueness of the Milkweed Editions publishing list—from the personal to the political, imperial misadventure to ecological destruction, the sacred to the unspeakable. Introduced by Milkweed Editions publisher and CEO Daniel Slager, each writer will read from recent work.

New Writers Award 45th Anniversary Reading. (David James Poissant, Beth Ann Fennelly, Tarfia Faizullah, Ander Monson, Brad Watson)

The Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award is one of North America’s oldest, most celebrated first book prizes. Now in its 45th year, the award has launched the careers of Alice Munro, Louise Erdrich, and Jorie Graham, among many others. To commemorate the award, five winners from three decades will read their poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. The reading will be followed by a Q&A.

No, You Tell It! True-Life Tales with a Twist. (Minna Proctor, Heather Lang, Mike Dressel, Jessie Vail Aufiery, Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons)

No, You Tell It! is a nonfiction reading series dedicated to performing true-life tales with a twist: Each participant develops their own story on the page and then flips scripts with a partner to present each other’s story on stage. A hybrid of a literary series and storytelling show, No, You Tell It! blends the collaborative process of creative writing workshops with the intimacy and immediacy of theatrical performance to provide the audience with a charged evening of personal stories.

Noemi Press: 15th Anniversary Reading. (Evan Lavender-Smith, Sandy Florian, Carolina Ebeid, Ryo Yamaguchi, Gabriel Blackwell)

Noemi Press was founded in 2002 to publish and promote the work of emerging and established writers, with a special emphasis on writers traditionally underrepresented by mainstream publishers, including writers of color, women writers, and genre-defying writers. On the occasion of Noemi’s 15th anniversary, the founding editor will talk about the press’s history and mission, and four Noemi authors will read from and discuss their work.

Old School Slam. (Jason Carney, Bill Schneider)

AWP welcomes students to return to the roots of Slam! Open mic, special guests and then undergraduate and graduate students partake in a hardcore-break-your-heart-strut-out-the-good-stuff slam competition. Students are welcome to sign up to participate on Thursday February 9, 2017 and Friday February 10, 2017 at the Wilkes University/Etruscan Press booth and read original pieces (three minutes or less with no props) at the Slam later that night. Sponsors: Wilkes University and Etruscan Press.

Orion's 35th Anniversary: Nature Writing at the Edge. (H. Emerson Blake, Pam Houston, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Dorianne Laux, Eula Biss)

For 35 years, Orion has become a focal point in an extraordinarily rich period of nature writing. Orion magazine was founded with the conviction that humans are morally responsible for the world in which we live, and that the individual comes to sense this responsibility as he or she develops a personal bond with nature.These diverse writers read work that shares this conviction and will share thoughts about Orion's place in the past, present, and future of our natural and literary landscapes.

Page Meets Stage. (Taylor Mali, Patricia Smith, Sarah Kay, Carolyn Forché, Ross Gay)

Where the Pulitzer Prize meets the poetry slam. Taylor Mali and a new group of four diverse poets will refute in verse the tired claims that page poets can’t read, and stage poets can’t write. Based on the New York City series that’s been running for 12 years, this event is not a competition. But neither is it a reverent wind whistling through the windows of an ivory tower. It’s a celebration of commonality between two modes of poetic expression that haven’t always embraced each other.

Parenting the Poems & the Babies. (Ellen Hagan, Aracelis Girmay, Matthew Shenoda, Maya Pindyck, Mitchell L. H. Douglas)

How do you craft poems in the middle of parenting? How has being a poet shaped who you are as a parent? How have your kids shaped you as a poet? What shifts or changes have happened in your work? Five poets join up to talk about the madness & glory of parenting & share work about & inspired by its brilliant chaos. Join us to revel & bemoan, to celebrate, to share & help each other get from the babies to the poems.

Pitt Poetry Series Reading: The Northeast Quadrant. (Sharon Dolin, Afaa Weaver, Jan Beatty, Alicia Ostriker, David Wojahn)

Poets with recent books in the Pitt Poetry Series, living in the Northeast, read from their work.

Poetry As Invocation. (Marie-Elizabeth Mali, Airea D. Matthews, Ada Limón, Rachel McKibbens)

Henry David Thoreau said, I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung. On this panel, four poets will read their work and explore the poetic impulses of women as a magical or quasi-magical act. The audience is invited to discuss how poetry lures a reader into its casted spells and illuminates the necessary darkness we carry inside us.

Poetry in the Age of the Drone: A Reading. (Corey Van Landingham, Solmaz Sharif, Philip Metres, Nomi Stone, Jill McDonough)

How does poetry function in the age of the drone? Can poets avoid the anesthetizing remove enacted by the drone when writing about political subjects from a safe distance? What is the role of poetry in a time of perpetual war—does it, as Auden says, make nothing happen? Five poets read work that shows the different ways poetry reacts to, and interacts with, the idea of the militarization of the drone, targeted killing, and the difficulty of writing about war from afar.

Queer Journeys: A Celebration of the University of Wisconsin Press’s 80th Anniversary. (Raphael Kadushin, Alden Jones, Brian Bouldrey, Lucy Bledsoe, Guillermo Reyes)

The University of Wisconsin Press has long been dedicated to publishing the strongest works of fiction, poetry and nonfiction by and about LGBTQ writers. It has also shown an ongoing engagement with issues of travel. Join five UW Press authors as they read from their work in celebration of UW Press’s 80th anniversary, spotlighting its commitment to ethically engaged literature that explores how LGBTQ people move through our ever-changing world.

Raising Hell: Writing from the Extremes. (R. O. Kwon, Roxane Gay, Celeste Ng, Téa Obreht, Laura van den Berg)

Terrorists! Cult leaders! Violent criminals! Psychopaths! This reading presents fiction writers who have given voice to the baleful extremes of human experience. What are the joys, risks, and responsibilities of writing sinister characters whom many readers might have trouble understanding? How should fiction writers think about depicting evil? What are potential difficulties? Join us as we share our perspectives and read our work.

Repaving the Pan-American Highway: Tía Chucha Presents Voices from the Diaspora. (Luis Rodriguez, Rubén Martínez, Sheila Maldonado, Leticia Hernández-Linares, Carlos Parada Ayala)

Tía Chucha Press presents the first comprehensive anthology featuring Central American Diaspora writers in the U.S. Until now, the literary landscape has yet to contextualize and amplify the voices of this distinct, bilingual, yet diverse group of writers. Editors and contributors with an investment in the historical and geographic context they write from, present readings from this groundbreaking collection that reflects a broad range of immigration experiences, languages, and cultures.

Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines - Radical Caretaking as Essential to Creating Revolutionary Communities. (Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, Lisa Factora-Borchers, TK Karakashian Tunchez, Autumn Brown)

Inspired by the legacy of radical and queer Black feminists of the 1970s and ’80s, Revolutionary Mothering places marginalized mothers of color at the center of movements working toward racial, economic, reproductive, gender, and food justice, as well as anti-violence, anti-imperialist, and queer liberation. Join the co-editors and contributors to discuss powerful visions and futures of collective liberation.

Search and Recover: A Reading from Queer Children of Vietnamese Immigrants. (Paul Tran, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Lauren Bullock, Alex-Quan Pham, Chrysanthemum Tran)

Forty-two years later, the Vietnam War continues to haunt all aspects of American life. This is especially true for children of Vietnamese immigrants growing up between cultures, between homelands, between the colliding past and present. Five poets who identify as LGBTQIA will perform recently published and nationally award-winning work and discuss how their families’ inability to talk about the War informs not only their desire to exhume the past but their important craft decisions as well.

Small Press, Big City: 45 Years of Washington Writers Publishing House. (Kathleen Wheaton, Robert Williams, Patricia Schultheis, David Ebenbach, Melanie Hatter)

Washington Writers Publishing House is a unique literary venture—a cooperative press staffed by previous winners of an annual contest and committed to discovering and promoting diverse voices from the Washington, Baltimore, and Northern Virginia area. Five recent fiction winners will read from their WWPH books and discuss the workings of a small, shoestring press.

Solo en Español: An All-Spanish Reading and Craft Discussion. (Jose Faus, German Perilla, Norma Cantu, Maria Diaz)

This reading and craft discussion celebrates work from the Spanish-language anthology, Antologia Literaria. The multi-genre anthology features work by the Latino Writers Collective members living in the Midwest who have roots across the Americas and Spain.

Esta lectura y discusión celebra el trabajo de la antología en Español, Antologia Literaria. La antología de múltiples géneros, presenta la letra de miembros del Colectivo de Escritores Latinos con raíces a través de las Américas y Espana.
Stakes is High: The Urgency of Intersectional Poetics. (Aziza Barnes, Nate Marshall, Mahogany Browne, Lauren Whitehead, Adam Falkner)

The Dialogue Arts Project (DAP) is a pioneering new diversity consulting initiative that utilizes the literary and performing arts to generate difficult dialogue across lines of identity and difference. This dynamic chorus of facilitators from the project–award-winning writers, professors and performers—will present new work that highlights DAP’s mission, prioritizing vulnerable personal narratives around socialization connected to race, gender, sexual orientation, social class, and more.

Tell the Truth and Lie to Me. (Bob Hicok, Meghan Daum, Lisa Glatt, David Hernandez)

What happens when a novelist obviously mines from her own life, or a nonfiction writer invents whole scenes that never occurred, or a poet convinces the reader of bearing witness to a fabricated experience? Is there an ethical agreement between reader and writer that dictates these parameters or does Art conquer all? In this panel, writers from three different genres read from their own work and discuss how factual accuracy shapes their writing.

That's My Mami We're Writing About: A Reading by Latino Male Authors. (Jose B. Gonzalez, Rich Villar, Gerardo Mena, Noah Warren, Carlos Parada Ayala)

This reading challenges the notion that writing by Latino male authors is paternalistic and that Latino cultures and families are predominantly and primarily influenced by male figures. Representing diverse voices with roots in Cuba, Mexico, El Salvador, and parts of the U.S, including Puerto Rico, this reading by authors who have published books about lives in inner-cities, war-torn countries, and nature, reestablishes the roles of mothers in society and in the Latino male poetic imagination.

The Critique of Violence in Contemporary Canadian Poetry. (Sonnet L'Abbé, Jordan Abel, Moez Surani, Alessandro Porco)

This reading event showcases new work by contemporary Canadian poets who respond to the history of ecological, colonial, and military violence in Canada. They subject literary, popular, and historical documents (e.g., Shakespeare’s Sonnets, American pulp westerns, and the United Nations’s official and unofficial military operations) to counter-methods of reading, producing multi-vocal poetry that doubles as cultural criticism.

The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses--An Anthology Reading and Celebration. (Cecily Parks, Jennifer Chang, Janice N. Harrington, Lisa Olstein, Leila Wilson)

The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses reveals how the rich poetic history of grass spans centuries, including the pastoral visions of ancient Rome, the battlefields and prairies of the New World, and the vanishing, politicized, and policed wildernesses of the present. This panel invites four contemporary poets featured in the anthology to share selections from the book and offer commentary on the vitality and versatility of the poetic tradition of writing about grassy places.

The House of RedBone: A 20th Anniversary Reading. (Lisa C. Moore, Samiya Bashir, Sharon Bridgforth, Ana-Maurine Lara, G. Winston James)

Founded in 1997, Washington, DC-based RedBone Press publishes award-winning black gay and lesbian literature. RedBone authors are poets, playwrights, essayists and fiction writers, all with some form of performance experience at their root. Come celebrate 20 years of independent publishing with a sampling of literary work from four RedBone Press authors.

The Librotraficantes: Defying the Censorship of Banned Books. (Gianna Mosser, Martin Espada, Luis Rodriguez, Tony Diaz)

In 2010, Arizona state legislators signed into law HB 2281, a ban on teaching Mexican-American Studies. In Houston, Texas, a group of Chicano writers, poets, artists, and activists hatched an idea: They would bus those banned books into Tucson. “Librotraficantes,” they’d call themselves—book smugglers. Tony Diaz will speak about founding the movement, and Luis Rodriguez and Martín Espada will relate how their works were banned by the Arizona legislation, as well as read from the banned books.