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

Degree of Change: Using Your M.F.A. in Social Justice Nonprofit Work. (Tara Libert, Julia Mascioli, Kathy Crutcher, Emma Snyder)

Three dynamic nonprofits using literature and publishing to elevate unheard voices and to share untold stories of marginalized communities describe the unique collaboration between their organizations' M.F.A. writers to bring about social change.Shout Mouse Press, PEN/Faulkner Writers in Schools Program and Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop facilitate writing workshops, publish original works and provide author visits in DC's poorest and most crime stricken neighborhoods.

Demystifying Copyright: A Crash Course on the Law of Literature. (Michael Wolfe, Rebecca Tushnet, Jessica Silbey)

Copyright controls authorship's inputs (how we can use the works of those who came before us) and its outputs (how others can use our work). But the law is too often arcane and its opacity can be disempowering. This panel of legal experts will outline important copyright basics and tackle some of the stubborn myths and misconceptions surrounding our copyright system.

Directions in Trans Publishing. (Kay Gabriel, Colette Arrand, SA Smythe, Cat Fitzpatrick, Stephen Ira)

Transgender literature has become increasingly prominent in recent years. This panel addresses the publishing side of this cultural moment, which taken the form of both new trans literary publications and a growing visibility of trans literature in cis-centric journals and presses. Five trans editors and publishers discuss their experiences in curating trans literature and the challenges of making spaces for it where few had existed before.

Disability Caucus. (Jim Ferris, Sheila Black, Ellen Smith, Kelly Davio, Jennifer Bartlett)

The AWP Disability 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. Building on our first meeting at the 2016 convention, 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.

Divided by a Common Language: Creative Writing in the US, Canada, Australia, China, UK and Europe. (Jen Webb, Joseph Kertes, Stephanie Vanderslice, Fan Dai, Paul Munden)

AWP regularly welcomes members of other national associations to its conference. Such internationalism is important, but the nature of creative writing—as a general pursuit, an academic discipline and focus of research—varies from one context to another, sometimes at the expense of productive exchange. This panel of leading representatives from key organizations will consider some of the differences encountered, and suggest how an increasingly meaningful conversation might proceed.

Does Gender Matter? Wrestling with Identity and Form in the Golden Age of Women’s Essays. (Jocelyn Bartkevicius, Marcia Aldrich, Barrie Jean Borich, Kyoko Mori, Jericho Parms)

In 2014, The New York Times asked if it’s a golden age for women essayists. Cheryl Strayed gave a qualified yes. But while a wave of women’s essays is shaping the literary scene, women are underrepresented in journals and the standard-bearer, Best American Essays. Our panel explores the literary fallout from this paradox, the shape-shifting nature of essays, why it’s tricky to identify as a woman writer, the effects on our work when asked to write as women, and the complications of invisibility.

Does Size Matter?: Corporate vs. Independent Publishers. (Nicholas Montemarano, Steve Almond, Fiona Maazel, Jay Neugeboren)

Four writers, each of whom has published books with both corporate and independent publishers, will discuss the pros and cons of their varied publishing experiences. Is a bigger publisher always better? What are some advantages of publishing with a smaller press? To what degree is commercial bookselling at odds with artistic innovation and risk? How are independent presses filling a void left by an increasingly risk-averse boom-or-bust corporate publishing enterprise?

Don't forget the day job: preparing creative writing graduates for lifelong careers. (Paul Munden, Jen Webb, Randall Albers, Deborah Campbell, Paul Hetherington)

The number of creative writing programs, and the numbers of students in those programs, are expanding significantly. But employment outcomes for creative writing graduates are poor: research shows that they either experience a working life characterized by precarity, low wages, and high volunteerism, or else must find employment in other areas. In this panel we discuss ways in which curriculum content can prepare students for a future that includes creative and professional success.

Don’t Stop the Presses: On the Enduring Value of the University Press. (rebecca hazelton, Claire Kirch, Ned Stuckey-French, Mary Biddinger, Peter Berkery)

University Presses provide a unique outlet for creative and scholarly works with great cultural value but not necessarily mass-market appeal. Once prized by universities, university presses increasingly face slashed budgets or even dissolution. Do these presses still matter? What options do presses, authors, and readers have when a university press is threatened? This panel will examine the issue from the perspectives of a press editor, author activists, and media and university press experts.

Double Bind: Women Writers on Ambition. (Robin Romm, Pam Houston, Erika Sanchez, Elisa Albert, Claire Vaye Watkins)

A woman must be ambitious in order to have a meaningful career in the arts. But ambition in women is often seen as un-feminine, egoistic, and aggressive rather than crucial to great work and identity. Until recently, no conversation has taken place to help women navigate this pervasive but unspoken double bind. On this panel, women across diverse backgrounds genres will provide both stories from the trenches and practical strategies for progressing in the arts, academia, and beyond.

Dr. STE(A)M-Love, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Technology. (Meggie Monahan, Elyse Eidman-Aadah, Virginia McErneny, Amy Swauger, Rick Brennan)

As digital technology becomes a given in classrooms of every discipline, educators are experimenting with a wide range of approaches to teaching. These national experts will share their successes and failures in the realm of education 2.0. Examples will include game-based learning, connected classrooms, and digital media production. Panelists will consider the ways in which technology can enhance or detract from student learning in the current STE(A)M environment.

Dreaming the World Through Translation: International Perspectives on Creative Process. (Helene Cardona, Martha Collins, Ming Di, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Ani Gjika)

Does the language we speak shape the way we think, our reality, our world, our dreams?

Do more words mean more thoughts? Can we think about things we don’t have words for? Working with Albanian, Chinese, French, Korean, Spanish, and Vietnamese, this panel’s poets, translators, and scholars discuss their roles as intermediaries, technicians, magicians, and alchemists working between languages to create inspired texts spanning cultural differences, geographic distances, and time.
Dylanology. (Toby Thompson, Ron Rosenbaum, David Kinney, Amanda Petrusich, Scott Warmuth)

Five authors discuss the pleasures and pitfalls of writing about Bob Dylan, how best to research material about his work, and what the impact of Dylanology has been on rock criticism and biography. Panelists debate the merits of rock writing in this era, as well as its relationship to the craft of literary nonfiction. Through the lens of Dylan criticism and biography, suggestions for how best to research, write and shape books about Dylan's and other songwriters' lives and work are offered.

Ecofiction: Spreading Ecological Literacy through Stories. (Laura Hitt, Priyanka Kumar, Pamela Christie, Ann Pancake, Elise Blackwell)

Stories are powerful tools for inciting social change. What role do stories play in spreading ecological literacy and scientific information? How do we craft narratives that foster ecological thinking and combat ecophobia? This panel will explore how different environmentally conscious writers address the natural world and our place within it through narrative, weaving ecological concepts seamlessly into novels and short stories that entertain, move, and inform.

Editors Engage the Digital Age: Transforming the Modern Lit Journal. (Robbie Maakestad, Speer Morgan, Jodee Stanley, Sarah M. Wells)

As readers increasingly turn to the internet for literary content, journals face a serious question: print or digital? For The Missouri Review, River Teeth, Ninth Letter, and Phoebe, the answer has been a mixture of both mediums. Editors discuss solutions, such as audio/podcast platforms, online issues, blogs, and digital archival, which their journals have implemented to fit the evolving literary landscape.

Emerging From The Slush: How To Get Your Short Story Published. (Robert Kerbeck, Sujata Shekar, Zach Powers, Michal Lemberger)

No Agent? No MFA? No problem! If we got published, so can you! Emerging From The Slush presents four authors who, in the last year alone, have published dozens of stories in top literary journals, won major contests, and had their story collections published. We'll share our methodology in achieving these results and provide specific solutions to assist those in attendance to do the same. In short, we'll share our secrets. Just don't tell anyone else.

Ensuring/Enduring Presence: Transgender People of Color Artists, Editors, and Publishers. (Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, Ryka Aoki, Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko, Trish Salah, A.J. Alana Ka'imi Bryce)

Trans artists/editors/publishers of color shepherd daily into the world innovative work that is highly crafted. Immersed in our present material conditions, decolonially reimagining our pasts and futures, temporally/geographically refiguring the wheres and whens of our storied bodies, responding to calls issued by our communities as we issue our own, this panel posits the possibilities of our presence, our generative genealogies, the care with which we consider our compositional/communal praxis.

Epically Distorted: Poets, poetry, and opera. (Maxine Chernoff, Douglas Kearney, Jaime Robles, Karen Weiser)

As opera moves through concert houses and warehouses with music ranging from classical to laptop beats, who’s writing the arias? Many poets bend their writing to opera; how are they making work that’s linguistically and theatrically engaging? What are some of the experiences—tragic and comic—of today’s librettist? Panelists include poets who work as librettists, discussing musical vacuum cleaners, Lizzie Borden, and lyrics at the edge of sense.

Ethnicity and Craft. (April Eberhardt, Anjali Mitter Duva, Marjan Kamali, Nomi Eve, Jennifer De Leon)

How do we write fiction that captures specific cultural experiences without giving in to stereotypes and branding? How do we negotiate the readers’ expectation that a writer is representing an entire culture on the page? Four authors whose books successfully straddle different cultures will explore how to balance writing on the hyphen. We will address how to capture cultural specificity and "difference," and how to be a writer of authenticity, not just ethnicity.

Expanding the Canon. (Brigid Hughes, Kevin Prufer, Lisa Pearson, Farnoosh Fathi, Kendra Sullivan)

How do we seek out great writing by authors whose work has been forgotten or ignored? What role does the magazine or book publisher play in expanding the canon? In this panel, writers, editors, and publishers who have been involved in highlighting work from the archives of unheralded writers come together to seek answers to these questions. We will discuss the discoveries and challenges of bringing this work into the world, and the importance of posthumous and later-life recognition.

Expanding the Literary Community: Writing Workshops For Underserved Populationss. (Bonnie Rose Marcus, Naomi Ayala, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Regie Cabico, Emily Rubin)

Writers with extensive experience teaching workshops reaching diverse and underserved populations, including seniors, teens, cancer survivors, and LGBT and multilingual individuals will discuss why they've chosen to do this work. Panelists will consider the rewards and challenges of teaching these workshops and their role in expanding the literary community.

Face Out: Maximizing the Visibility of Emerging Writers, Sponsored by CLMP. (Paul Legault, Alan Felsenthal, Emily Skilling, Stephen Motika, Ely Shipley)

Poets and their publishers discuss strategies they have learned through CLMP's FACE OUT program, which focuses on how these dynamic pairs can partner effecitvely toward increasing the readership of a book.

Facing Trauma: POC leveraging their experience in the academy to initiate community healing. (Kenyatta Rogers, Maya Marshall, Keith Wilson, Cristina Correa)

It is increasingly difficult for those in privileged positions (politicians, the academy, the media) to ignore the violence in America’s public sphere. Often, the responses to these structures of power are confined to exposure (media coverage, statistics, etc.) or punishment of offending parties. This panel discusses how POC leverage their MFAs in non-traditional ways to foster healing in communities with trauma via new media/video games, community workshops, and other modes of cultural healing.

Following the Thread of Thought. (Steven Harvey, Phillip Lopate, Ana Maria Spagna, Sarah Einstein, Mimi Schwartz)

How do writers follow the thread of a thought through the maze of events in an essay or memoir? What is the art of reflection? Writers of nonfiction may have more latitude than poets or fiction writers to tell as well as show in their work, but the challenge is to keep these ruminations from becoming dull, simplistic, or moralistic. Panelists will examine the way writers keep ideas lively and offer techniques for effectively weaving the thread of thought into the fabric of nonfiction.

Foremothers: Southern Women Writers. (Charlotte Holmes, Cary Holladay, Lisa Parker, Lisa Roney, Adrienne Su)

Harriet Arnow, Carson McCullers, Katherine Ann Porter, Lee Smith, Alice Walker, and Eudora Welty form a powerful coalition of influences for five Southern writers of later generations. We will discuss how the work of our literary foremothers helped us write our way into an understanding of the complex fabric woven from social, familial, and emotional relationships, and how the voices of the South’s different geographic regions—Deep, Middle, and Upper—continue to inform and shape our work.

Forum for Undergraduate Student Editors (FUSE) Caucus. (Amy Persichetti, Rachel Hall, Michael Cocchiarale, Reed Wilson, Greg Weatherford)

Calling all undergraduate students and faculty advisers engaged in editing and publishing literary journals, literary websites, chapbooks, and small presses. Come join FUSE for its annual caucus, which includes FUSE chapter updates followed by a roundtable discussion. This year’s two topics will be "Conferences and Networking" and “Literary Citizenship.” Bring ideas and journals to exchange.

Fourscore Feminist Fabulous Years: A Tribute to Alicia Ostriker. (Aliki Barnstone, Afaa M. Weaver, Monica Hand, Cynthia Hogue, Frances Payne Adler)

This tribute is in celebration of the 80th year of the great feminist poet, activist, critic, teacher, Jewish theologian, and mystic Alicia Ostriker. Four writers spanning the country, generations, and ethnicities will discuss Ostriker’s multifaceted contributions to American letters since she came to prominence during the era of Second Wave Feminism. The tribute capped by a brief reading by Alicia Ostriker.

Fractured Selves: Fabulism as a Platform for Minorities, Women, and the LGBT Community. (Sequoia Nagamatsu, Aubrey Hirsch, Brenda Peyando, Zach Doss, Ramona Ausubel)

Fabulist writers and editors define Fabulism (often used with other terms like magical realism and slipstream), illuminate individual approaches to the genre alongside brief readings, and discuss how fabulism can be a rich territory for expression, exploration, and power for minorities, women, and the LGBT community. What does it mean to write about the other from other worlds or hybrid spaces?

Fracturing Memory, Crossing Borders: Transnational Memoir Writers Discuss Hybrid Necessities. (Minal Hajratwala, QM Zhang, Amarnath Ravva, Abeer Hoque, Tania De Rozario)

For transnational writers who spend their lives constantly negotiating borders—geographic and personal—hybridity no longer becomes a choice. This panel features diverse writers whose experimental memoirs include non-linearity, multiple genres, photographs, and other multimedia. We will discuss how these hybrid strategies succeed or fail when trying to reconstruct family histories or address personal trauma, and how this can be especially challenging when moving between nations and identities.

From Flash Fiction to Microfiction: How Many Words Are Enough? (Pamela Painter, James Thomas, Nancy Stohlman, Grant Faulkner, Sherrie Flick)

The introduction to Flash Fiction asks: "How short can a story be and still be a short story? The answer was 750 words, but recently we have seen microfiction of 300 and 200 words, and the emergence of the 100-word story. How can such compression address character development, narrative arc, and tension? Does prose poetry show us indirectly how to accommodate narrative size? These panelists will discuss the limitations and rewards of writing "short" with urgency and artistic integrity.

From Margin to Center: Developing Diverse Leaders. (Michele Kotler, Ramiza Koya, Lauren Bullock, James Kass, Brandie MacDonald)

Most organizations and university departments seek a more diverse faculty and staff, but the path to diversity goes far beyond placing a classified ad. Despite challenges in creating meaningful change, how can we build opportunities and systems that fuel those most often marginalized? Panelists will discuss how their organizations are investing in leadership development models that nurture a new generation of diverse leaders.

From MFA to JOB: Making a Living, Making a Difference. (Alicia Craven, Stephanie Brown, Edward Nawotka, Mohamed Sherrif, Amy Storrow)

Tenure-track teaching, publishing, and authorship are often the dream of MFA candidates, yet the competition for jobs and literary achievements has intensified. Creative and nonprofit sectors hold employment possibilities that utilize the craft of writing while making a real difference for communities. This panel ignites the imagination around the journey to meaningful careers that allow MFAs to work within a community of writers and artists and make a decent living.

From The Bottom To The Top: Building, Rebuilding and Embracing an Inclusive Creative Writing Program. (Tonya Hegamin, Rachel Haley Himmelheber, Anjail Ahmad, Alexandra Chasin)

This panel will explore best practices of Creative Writing administrators and faculty committed to inclusive student engagement and recruitment.Panelists discuss curriculum to support diverse students in homogenous communities, as well as challenges in building intercultural competency and communication skills that transcend essentialist and myopic writing. Social Justice based integrative strategies to address student interests for teaching within and writing for non-traditional communities.

From the Margins to the Mainstream: Mixed Writers on Representation. (Emily Perez, Sun Yung Shin, Nina McConigley, Ammon Medina, Glenn Shaheen)

Writers who straddle multiple identities (Arab American, Ecuadorian/White, Indian/Irish, Mexican/White, Transnational Korean Adoptee) examine how race and culture translate into their work and writing communities. How do mixed identities compete and cooperate: for airtime, authority, and claims to authenticity? In what ways might mixed writers pass or pander? How might editors and publishers include mixed voices without either exoticizing or erasing minoritized positions?

From the Page to the Silver Screen: The Process and Pitfalls of Optioning Your Book Rights. (Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum, Isaac Marion, Claire Bidwell-Smith, Jason Mott, David Abrams)

These days it seems every popular book is optioned for TV/film, and, when we hear about it we think: Fame! Money! Success! Sometimes, this is true; other times, alas, it is not. Sometimes we are paid well for our work, sometimes not. Sometimes, we have a voice in the adaptation other times; sometimes none at all. An optioned book is just as likely to lead to literary distinction and fortune as it is…more of the same. Authors will share their stories of success and failure with the silver screen.

From Verse to Stage and Screen, Veterans Adapt. (Brian Turner, Benjamin Busch, Maurice Decaul, Jenny Pacanowski, Peter Molin)

This panel features four war writers who are adapting verse and memoir into more public modes of expression: stage, screen, opera, and performance. The panelists will discuss the challenge of moving beyond the word to theatrically present the events and emotions inherent to combat and military life. Offering insight into issues of craft and collaboration, the panel explores how private modes of literary representation can be transformed into dramatic artworks produced and experienced socially.

From Writing Student to Editor: Preparing Yourself for the Editorial Job Market. (Aaron Alford, Ariel Lewiton, Ashley Strosnider, Kyle Lucia Wu)

Not all graduate students in creative writing seek teaching jobs after graduation. How might you prepare for the editorial job market while earning your creative writing degree? The editors on this panel share how they landed editorial positions soon after (or even during) their graduate studies.

Full House: Managing multiple points of view and ensemble casts in young adult and middle grade novels. (Heather Bouwman, Laura Ruby, Marina Budhos, Megan Atwood)

Young adult and children’s novels, while often focused on a single protagonist and written primarily from a single point of view, can be fertile ground for experimenting with an ensemble cast of characters and/or multiple points of view. In this moderated discussion, four young adult and children’s novelists (one who is also an editor) discuss the difficulties and advantages of writing ensemble cast and multiple POV novels for teens and young readers.

Gender and Genre: How do our prejudices affect our preferences? (Jill McCabe Johnson, Kevin Clark, Srikanth Reddy, SJ Sindu, Viannah Duncan)

Do gender stereotypes influence literary tastes? Does a love poem from a male-identified poet seem more tender because it defies common gender assumptions? Does a critique from a female-identified writer feel more barbed for the same reason? What about writers whose identities or work blur society’s imposed gender distinctions? Join this panel as we explore whether we value writing more or less because of the perceived gender of the author, including how that may affect publishing decisions.

Get in Formation: Form in Young Adult Literature. (Pamela L Laskin, Marilyn Nelson, Tiffany Jackson, Suzanne Weyn, Caroline Bock)

Novels-in-verse have grown in popularity in the Young Adult Market, with verse reflecting the music of language and offering a cinematic intimacy in voice. Now writers have stretched the parameters of all facets of form to also include not only prosody(the sonnet; the ghazal; the pantoum), but also divergent voices; external media-based text; authentic interviews-and more! This has added a new, daring level of innovation to the already daring genre.