Awp conference & Bookfair 2018 Tentative Accepted Events

Destruction and Creation: Addiction, Recovery, and Writing (Kelly Thompson, Melissa Febos, Terese Mailhot, Rob Roberge, Vanessa Martir)

The addiction story, though centuries old, is a breaking one. Five authors who write from the edges present addiction perspectives and offer their approaches, both practical and emotional, to writing about addiction and recovery and the role addiction plays in their creative lives. The addiction myth operates in profound ways both historically and presently in the lives of writers. How do vocation and addiction intersect? How do we write in and through addiction spaces, images, and narratives?

A Different Drummer: Thoreau’s Legacy on the Bicentenary (Tom Montgomery Fate, John Price, Michael Branch, Diane Freedman, Elizabeth Dodd)

In the bicentennial year of Henry David Thoreau’s birth, and amid the current assault on the natural world, this panel will consider Thoreau’s modern relevance––in print and in person. What does the sage artist-activist’s life and work reveal about the evolving tension between the personal and the political for nature writers in the 21st century? From “Civil Disobedience” and “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” to Walden and “Walking,” few writers have had a more enduring impact.

Difficult History: Jewish Fiction in the Alt-Right World (Emily Barton, Simone Zelitch, Irina Reyn, Amy Brill, Anna Solomon )

What is Jewish fiction? Who can write it? Until recently, the answer looked much like Philip Roth: white, male, and Eastern European. But recent novels by women have subverted and reimagined Jewish narratives, challenging cultural norms and creating alternative histories with modern resonance. This panel explores what signifies fiction as Jewish, even in a secular story; the role of Jewish stories in unsettling political times; and the complexities of female authorship in patriarchal cultures.

Digitizing the MFA: In Support of Diversity, Practicality, and the Facilitative Workshop Model (Joan F. Smith, Dr. Sharon Califano, Jane Friedman, Brooke McIntyre)

Digitizing the MFA offers a robust opportunity to historically underserved writers hindered by financial and geographical limitations. In this session, panelists will discuss their experience transforming the traditional MFA program by integrating digital tools, shifting the power dynamic of the creative workshop, and building an engaging writing community into an evolved, fully-online MFA, addressing practical strategies to support attending writers in sustaining a fulfilling writing career.

Disability in Children's Literature: Not an Anomoly; an Imperative (Melissa Hart, Beth Vrabel, Naseem Jamnia, Brian Tashima)

Children and young adult readers deserve realistic characters reflective of themselves and the people around them. Yet, too often, kids with physical or intellectual disabilities are absent from literature for young readers-or if present, the disability is the focus of the book. We'll discuss how authors can responsibly integrate characters with varying abilities into their work so that the disability isn't the story, but merely a challenge that a particular character faces within the narrative.

Disabled and D/deaf Writers Caucus (Jim Ferris, Sheila F. Black, Molly McCully Brown, Ellen McGrath Smith, Jess Silfa)

The Disabled and 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.

Dispatches from Flyover Country: Building Literary Community in Far Off Places (Allison Joseph, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, Penny Guisinger, Katie Mertz, Silas Hansen)

It’s easy to find a literary community in places like New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco—but what about the rest of us? In this panel, five writers and active literary citizens from small towns and mid-size cities in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Maine will talk about their communities (both inside and outside of academia): what’s working, what isn’t, and how you might jumpstart a community if you live off the beaten path.

Diverse Voices, United Purpose: The Literary Journal in Undergraduate Creative Writing Programs (Keya Mitra, Erika Jo Brown, Audrey Columbe, Ian Schimmel, Abigail Cloud)

In undergraduate creative writing programs, how do we promote diversity and unheard voices in literary journals while also focusing on unity and inclusion? How do we teach undergraduates to become strong, global readers and editors to keep the literary magazine relevant in today’s academic/political climate? Editors from internationally distributed/award winning literary journals share strategies for cultivating diversity in a multi-tiered editing and publishing environment with undergraduates.

"The Dividing Line": Blending Research In Personal Narratives (Jon Pineda, Kerry Howley, Joni Tevis, Greg Bottoms, Colin Rafferty)

This panel will gather together creative nonfiction writers who mix various types of research into their personal narratives. Inherent in their creative process is a burgeoning integration of both the shared and the personal. The panel’s discussion will focus on the way each writer approaches this “dividing line,” the space between the material that comes forward through extensive research and the material pulled from the writer’s unaided memory.

Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From: Exploring Beauty and Bravery in Stories about Muslims (Kirin Khan, Laleh Khadivi, Sarah A. Harvard, Tanzila "Taz" Ahmed, Mohja Kahf)

In response to the current political climate, writers from Muslim backgrounds, especially women, are often called on to discuss who they are rather than what they do. This panel will talk less about hijab and regimes and more about the courage to write freely and the transformative power of art. Discussion will focus on the telling of daring, beautiful, and impactful stories about Muslims, asking the question: Can stories about people from marginalized communities ever be viewed as universal?

Donald Justice: An Appreciation (Eric Pankey, Jerry Harp, Carol Frost, David Koehn)

A panel of Donald Justice's former students from both the University of Iowa and the University of Florida will discuss his reputation as a poet, as an expert on poetic form, and as an innovated teacher. Justice has been described by the Poetry Foundation as "one of the twentieth century's most quietly influential poets." The panel will investigate and illuminate his ongoing posthumous influence.

Draining the Swamp: The Future of Environmental Writing on a Changing Planet (Taylor Brorby, Pam Houston, Nick Neely, Alison Deming, Joe Wilkins)

This panel explores environmental creative writing in the midst of radical political and climatic change. If stories help us imagine alternatives to how we live, then inspired and strategic writing is our best hope to keep this planet alive and healthy. These five cross-genre writers will discuss environmental writing’s Transcendental roots, its strides towards greater inclusiveness, and where it must go now given rising tides, species loss, and overall environmental injustice and instability.

Draining The Swamp: Writing as Resistance and Social Responsibility in a Post-Truth Era (Keith Kopka, Ruben Quesada, Javier Zamora, Heather June Gibbons, Arisa White)

Writing has always served as a form of social and political resistance. From the ghettos of warn-torn Warsaw to the American civil rights movement, writers have historically been a voice for the unrepresented and catalysts for social change. This panel will explore how our current social & political landscape has galvanized this traditional role of the writer, ways to get involved with current movements, and the importance of writing as a political act.

The Dream Work of Poetry (Bruce Beasley, Brian Teare, Dana Levin, Saskia Hamilton)

"The dream," says Jean Paul Richter, "is an involuntary form of poetry." Four poets known for their dreamlike forms discuss how the work of dreams and the work of poems overlap through such shared techniques as metaphor and metonymic substitution, hyperassociation, parataxis, puns and other wordplays, radical condensation and juxtaposition, multiple meanings, homophones, allusion, resistance to paraphrasable meaning, and granting of permission for strange and jarring new ways of making sense.

Economics of Publishing (Glory Edim, Margot Atwell, A.M. O'Malley, Manjula Martin, Hajara Quinn)

Writers spend years learning their craft and working to get published, but that doesn’t prepare them for the career of being an author. Knowledge of the finances behind publishing is critical to authors, whether they are writing articles, short stories, books, or all three. This panel will discuss the ins and outs of publishing finance, including advances, royalties, returns, book tours, print costs, crowdfunding, and more.

The Ecstasy and The Laundry: Gender, Families, and the Writing Life (Jess Row, Elizabeth Kadetsky, Imad Rahman, Kate Tuttle, Emily Raboteau)

What happens when writers commit to sharing the challenges of their careers and the work of raising a family? In a world that privileges male genius and fetishizes female domesticity, how do we work toward relationships and family structures that do neither? On this panel, four distinguished writers reflect on their imaginative lives, their families, who buys the groceries, who does carpool, and who cleans the lint out of the dryer.

Editing an Anthology: Representation, Aesthetics, and Responsibility (Jason Koo, Tina Chang, Amy King, Joanna Valente)

An anthology can serve as a powerful force of inclusion for underrepresented writers, but just as easily can instantiate exclusionary value systems. What kinds of responsibility do editors have to seek out and include underrepresented writers in putting together anthologies? How do they balance this responsibility with their own notions of aesthetic value? How do editors counteract their own biases? Four editors of recent anthologies with an inclusive mission discuss these questions and more.

Editing in an Era of Climate Change: A Q&A with Five Environmental Editors (Anna Lena Phillips, Scott Gast, Sheila Squillante, Simmons Buntin, Debra Marquart)

The past year has brought climate deniers into the White House just as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reach a tipping point. Editors of five environmental journals— Ecotone, Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment, The Fourth River, Orion, and Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built + Natural Environments —will discuss how their journals have responded, how they balance activism with art, and what they look for in submissions now.

Eight Mistakes Screenwriters Make: and, How to Fix Them (Leslie Kreiner Wilson, Tom Provost, Gregg Bachman, Claire Hutchinson, Andres Orozco)

In this panel, screenwriters examine the common problems they see in the work of the emerging script writer and offer strategies to correct those issues. This session helps both writers and instructors identify and fix their own work or the work of their students.

The Enhanced Memoir: When It Happened to Me Isn't Enough (Kim Brooks, Lucas Mann, Deanna Fei, Kiki Petrosino)

This panel will look at the rise of the enhanced or hybrid memoir, the writer who merges a personal narrative with social commentary, cultural criticism, or reportage. As more writers arrive at the the memoir after working in other forms, the genre has become less defined by traditional narrative, and more marked by the writer’s willingness to borrow from the novelist’s, essayist’s, or journalist’s toolbox. The panel will focus on the form's rewards, challenges, and shifting boundaries.

Erasures, White Shame: We Need to Talk (Natalia Trevino, Wendy Barker, Rita Dove, Allison Hedge Coke, Ching-In Chen)

A panel discussion by poets who have confronted erasures that led to shame, subjugation, and silence. Each of these writers, from various backgrounds who are at various stages in their careers, will briefly discuss how discussing racial negation, rejection, and dehumanization must be addressed for healing, wholeness, and renewal to happen not only within marginalized groups but also for our national society.

Essaying Beyond the Page: Intermedia Essays (Sarah Einstein, Karrie Higgins, John Bresland, Sarah Minor, Gretchen Henderson)

The essay—in its vocal shifts, its digressions, its lyricism and its flexible forms—is a genre particularly well-suited to works that exist off, or beyond the page. Intermedia essaying is a genre on the rise. On this panel, writers and artists who compose video, concrete, material and performed essays will discuss new issues of creation, performance and reception. They’ll talk about print journals, performance spaces, and the process of making work that essays beyond the page.

Everyday Magic, Community as Protagonist, and Other Narrative Strategies from the Rest of the World. (Tracey Baptiste, Susan Power, Tony Eprile)

The Western world’s approach to fiction is predominantly a Hamlet-like exploration of the individual psyche as if that psyche is isolated from the surrounding culture, an approach so frequently seen as to have become the default assumption that this is what literature has to be. This panel explores how alternative conceptions and storytelling modes--such as how community makes us who we are, or "magical events" as an everyday reality--informs the work of writers from other cultures.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know (But Were Afraid to Ask): Secrets of the Job Market (Michelle Herman, Christopher Coake, Joe Oestreich, Ann Townsend, Leni Zumas)

Five writer-professors share their collective wisdom/advice based on their experience chairing/serving on search committees for creative writingteaching positions. Representing institutions ranging from the largest to among the smallest, from highly selective MFA programs to liberal arts colleges serving undergraduates only, we tackle every aspect of the job search and answer your questions about how the process works, from letter of application to successful hire.

Everywhere, A Poem: Poetry as Public Art (Barbara Cole, P. Scott Cunningham, Noah Falck, Yolanda Wisher)

Drawing on inspiring examples from three cities—Buffalo, Miami, & Philadelphia—panelists explore a broad spectrum of public art projects designed to democratize access to poetry by bridging communities and reaching under-served audiences. Projects include: the Outbound Poetry Festival, a collaboration with Amtrak’s 30th Street Station; poems printed on rooftops and beaches; readings in a 90-year-old abandoned grain elevator; and literary art sculptures in community gardens and public parks.

Experiments in Joy: Women of Color on Collaborating on and off the Page (Gabrielle Civil, Zetta Elliott, Rosamond S. King, Janice Lee, Michelle Naka Pierce)

Although often solitary, writing today invites and requires collaboration. From jump-starting process to navigating practicalities, collaboration can be co-writing, coaching, editing, translating, publishing, performing, or working with illustrators. Arriving from poetry, fiction, memoir, and children’s literature, women of color speakers will present fruits of their labor and share what works for them in working with others. Each has collaborated on more than one project, on and off the page.

The Facts About Alternative Facts (Lina Ferreira, Sarah Viren, Inara Verzemnieks, Lucas Mann)

After Kelly Anne Conway uttered the now infamous phrase “alternative facts," a conversation concerning language, accuracy, and the verifiable experience suddenly became both ubiquitous and urgent in the media and the classroom. In some circles, a finger was pointed at creative nonfiction for “falsifying history” and opening us up to a loose and dangerous interpretation of the truth. In this panel we’ll discuss the responsibilities and debts of nonfiction writers in the era of alternative facts.

Failure: The Taboo Element of Craft (John McNally, Hannah Tinti, Valerie Laken, Eric Wilson, Sheree Greer)

If you think of failure as a necessary part of the creative process, you begin to see it as an essential element of craft, the gateway to writing the thing that does work. Eventually, the connection between writing that succeeds and writing that fails illuminates itself, and you use this to your advantage. The five writers on this panel will address the various ways that they view failure as an inevitable and therefore important part of the process, and how they've accommodated for it.

Faith, Fervor, and Fundamentalism: How Writers Are Impacted by Their Religious Beliefs (Deirdre Sugiuchi, Sabrina Orah Mark, Garrard Conley, Yvonne Brown, Daniel Khalastchi)

How is writing impacted by one’s faith of origin? If a writer no longer practices their faith of origin, what aspects of religion remain? Writers who grew up practicing Islam, Judaism, and fundamentalist Christianity and who work in poetry, prose, and hybrid forms discuss how their faith of origin can be a source of inspiration, illumination, or darkness, and how they use the teachings of their faith to reclaim the stories that need to be told.

Feminist Flash: Five Women Talk Flash Non-Fiction (Nicole Cooley, Daisy Hernandez, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Beth Ann Fennelly, Dawn Raffel)

The micro memoir. The brief essay. The object portrait. The sequence of tiny texts. Our panel, composed of a diverse group of five women -- writers, teachers and editors -- will look at all of these new non-fiction forms. We will explore writing "short" at the intersection of feminism, immigration, environmental justice and the body. Our panelists write from both research and personal experience, and we will talk about how all of our flash non-fiction is inflected by gender.

Find Your Writers Community No Matter Where You Live: Writers Centers, Conferences, and Retreats 101 (Michael Khandelwal, Gregg Wilhelm, Andrea Wilson, Melissa Wyse)

Writers Centers are not places to help undergrads edit papers, they are a thriving writers community with outposts across the nation. In addition to literary centers, writers retreats and conferences offer connection for writers while they hone their craft. Being a professional writer in today’s world is often a solitary practice, but by taking advantage of the resources, continuing education, and networking these organizations offer, writers find the support they had in an MFA program.

Finding Funding for Your Writing: Grants, Fellowships, and Other Ways to Get That Cash (Julia Phillips, Edgar Kunz, Darley Stewart, Lysley Tenario, Brittany K. Allen)

How do you get paid to write? If you’re writing fiction, creative nonfiction, or poetry, the question seems moot: everyone knows there’s no money in literature. But this panel offers an answer. Five writers explain how they secured grants, fellowships, and arts funding from sources ranging from nonprofits to universities to the federal government. They share ways to strengthen your applications for funding at every stage of your writing career, from emerging to established.

Finding The Understory: What Connects A Collection (Meghan Kenny , Josh Weil , Mia Alvar , Laura van den Berg , Nina McConigley)

Story collections can gain resonant coherence through the very tissue that connects their individual pieces and yet remain unequivocally collections, resisting novelization or overt linkages such as recurring characters. What are the risks and rewards of writing a story collection with thematic through-lines? This panel will discuss collections that are unified by thematic currents but squarely resist novelization.

First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage: When, Why, and How Short Stories Become Novels (Katie Cortese, Julianna Baggott, M. Evelina Galang, Chigozie Obioma)

According to Lorrie Moore, “A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage.” And as in a romance, sometimes one leads to the other, as in Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge (originally, “The Beau Monde of Mrs. Bridge”) or Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! (“Ava Wrestles the Alligator”). While most published stories stay short, writers sometimes see in a select few the potential for more. The authors on this panel will describe their experience of writing novels that evolved from short forms.

For Your Freedom and Ours: Three Soviet Poets-Dissidents. Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Yuli Daniel, and Vadim Delaunay (Irina Mashinski, Mihaela Moscaliuc, Mary Jane White)

The panel will focus on the life and craft of three late poets-dissidents of the post-Stalin USSR: Gorbanevskaya, Daniel, and Delaunay. Gorbanevskaya and Delaunay participated in the 1968 Red Square Demonstration to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia; Daniel was arrested earlier. Each panelist will translate several poems of one of these poets and will talk about his or her legacy. The panel is dedicated to poets in all totalitarian regimes, where poetry itself becomes a subversive activity

Forthcoming: Debut Novelists on What They Wish They’d Known before Publication (Jessie Chaffee, Lisa Ko, Esmé Weijun Wang, Tiffany Jackson, Rachel Lyon)

You have a book contract—now what? What can you expect and how can you make your book stand out in a noisy, crowded market? Recent debut novelists—of adult and YA, published by large and small houses—share advice on the run-up to publication, from the nuts and bolts of the process to savvy marketing. Topics include: publication timeline; navigating editorial and marketing conversations; websites; blurbs; reviews; independent publicists; creative promotion; book tours; and finding your readers.

Forum for Undergraduate Editors Caucus (Catherine Dent, Rachel Hall, Reed Wilson, Amy Persichetti, Michael Cocchiarale)

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 topic will be “Representation and Resistance”. Bring ideas and journals to exchange.

The Fragmented Truth is Nothing but the Truth: Women Writing Trauma (Melissa Grunow, Chelsey Clammer, Leif E. Greenz, Ming Holden)

Abuse. Neglect. Sexual assault. Addiction. Death. Bearing witness to or experiencing trauma leaves women writers vulnerable in a misogynistic and culturally violent society. Consequently, the psychological stress of traumatic events creates an often-fractured memory, a perceived roadblock for creative nonfiction writers who are committed to truth. This panel will focus on both writing about and through trauma in a way that is healing rather than triggering, even in the face of backlash.

Framing Life: Notes on Structuring the Book-Length Memoir (Heather Kirn Lanier, Kelly Sundberg, Steven Church, Jill Christman)

Both a book and a life are finite, but one is far unrulier than the other. How can the memoirist contain the messiness of life in a single manuscript? Where might the story begin and end? How can the writer employ or disrupt narrative chronology to keep the reader turning pages? Four writers discuss structural approaches to memoirs they’ve written as well as memoirs they love. Failed attempts and lessons learned will be unabashedly included.

Free and Constrained: Writing, Translating, and the Creative Process (Don Bogen, Geoffrey Brock, Martha Collins, Mira Rosenthal)

While poets writing and revising their own work can be relatively free, poets translating face the constraint of the original. What's carried over from the struggle with a poem in another language to the struggle with a draft or the blank page? Four poet-translators discuss how their creative processes differ in each mode and what each offers the other.