Awp conference & Bookfair 2018 Tentative Accepted Events

Free Speech on Campus (Suzanne Nossel, James Tager, Inam Sakinah, Mary Ann Franks, Adeline Lee)

Following their report on diversity, inclusion, and freedom of speech on campus, And Campus For All, PEN America invites writers to join in discussing this complex and volatile issue. Academic institutions face widening controversies about how to advance inclusion and equality while safeguarding intellectual and academic freedom. Our panel of socially-engaged literary professionals, students, and professors will consider the vital questions raised by this debate.

From Best Friends Forever to Toxic Bonds: Digging Deep into Complex Female Friendships in Young Adult Literature (Amy Reed, Marcy Beller Paul, Anica Mrose Rissi, Sarah Nicole Smetana, Kit Frick)

Five YA authors from debut to established discuss the complex, three-dimensional friendships that populate their work: Blurred boundaries between friendship and obsession; shattered friend groups; lasting friendships tested by difficult new relationships; girls from diverse backgrounds uniting to fight misogynist culture. Panelists discuss one another’s work and the choices that have inspired theirs when writing fiercely good and withstanding to fiercely fraught and destructive teen friendships.

From the Stanza to the Paragraph: Poets Who Write Prose (Jill Bialosky, Nick Flynn, Gregory Anthony Pardlo, Harriet Millan, Marilyn Chin)

Why do poets turn to writing prose? What can a poem say that prose cannot and vice versa? Is the reason one chooses to write in one genre over the other about audience? About subject matter? What steps or process does a writer take to move from poetry to prose? How does being a poet impact one’s prose style? This panel will explore these questions and others. Five panelists will offer words of caution, success and despair learned from their journeys in writing in more than one form.

From Thesis to Published Book (Mieke Eerkens, Nicole Walker, Dean Bakopoulos, Catina Bacote, Amy Butcher)

In MFA writing programs, students work hard on theses, often embarking on the longest writing projects they’ve completed. But what happens when they graduate? This panel focuses on turning the MFA thesis into a book and landing a publishing contract. The panelists have written books that found their geneses in MFA/PhD programs and will discuss agents, editors, proposals, hurdles, and best practices for going from thesis to book in the transition from MFA to professional writer and/or academic.

The Frontier as a Trope in Florida Writing Past and Present (Greg Byrd, Deborah Hall, Polly Buckingham, Michael Trammell)

The frontier as a literary trope is widely used by such Florida authors as Hurston, Rawlings, Hemingway, Joy Williams and Peter Mattheissen. This panel will review the literary history of an early and persistent frontier in Florida which is often seen as ahistorical. It is useful for contemporary writers, both in Florida and elsewhere, to be aware of the possibilities of the expression of this trope as they experiment in their fiction writing.

Fulbright Fellowship Information Panel (Katherine Arnoldi, Laurel Fantauzzo, Josh Weil, Erika Martinez, Laura Joyce Davis)

The Fulbright Information panel is composed of past Creative Writing Fulbright Fellows who tell of the application process, the experience and the professional, creative and personal benefits of this prestigious award. The Fulbright Program funds undergraduates, graduates and at large writers to study, conduct research or pursue creative activities abroad for a year. Our panelists went to the Philippines, Paraguay and the Dominican Republic writing poetry, memoirs, non-fiction, and novels.

The Future (of Kid Lit) is Female: Female Protagonists and Voices in Youth Literature (Sarah Aronson, Micol Ostow, Nova Suma, Cynthia Smith, Dhonielle Clayton)

Whether they are dismantling old tropes, solving crimes, seeking social justice, or leading armies into battle--whether their stories are humorous, satirical, or suspenseful--today's female protagonists are offering diverse role models of what it is to be a feminist. The panel of writers of picture books to YA novels will examine their processes for uncovering these voices, ideas about responsibility to their readers, as well as possibilities for future books.

The Future of Forms (Stephen Burt, Monica Youn, Kazim Ali, Sandra Beasley)

Poets in each generation—in classrooms and elsewhere-- reject, or adopt, or remake the forms we learn to recognize. Some new forms take off (golden shovels; erasures). Others emerge, through imitation and admiration, before they get names. Some reflect new demographics; others, new media (are there distinctive Tumblr poems?). We’ll see how, and ask why, forms rise or fall, and for whom, looking at our own work, at our elders, at emerging writers, and at new-to-English and digital forms.

The Ganesh in the Room: Speaking of Faith in the Literary Community (Richard Chess, Amy Frykholm, Shadab Hashmi, Amy Gottlieb)

While contemporary American literary culture embraces multiculturalism, mainstream publishing tends to favor a secular, agnostic worldview. Faith-infused literature doesn’t always fall into prescribed categories, yet nuanced, non-dogmatic explorations of theology, belief, and doubt are central to the intercultural literary conversation. A Muslim poet, Christian essayist, and Jewish novelist explore these tensions from the perspectives of their own traditions and genres, sharing common ground.

The Gatekeepers: Behind the Scenes of Literary Agencies (Emily Smith, Michelle Brower, Lucy Carson, Allison Hunter, Erin Harris)

The world of literary agents can seem murky and impenetrable to authors beginning the publishing process, but it doesn't have to be that way! This panel will focus on candidly exploring how authors and agents actually find each other in the real world. What do agents do, why do they do it, and what does it take to get their attention? With an extended question and answer session, writers will have the opportunity to ask our panel of actively acquiring agents their most burning questions.

Gathering Crumbs From The Lost Cake: Channeling Mood, Melancholy And The Muse (Lisa Mecham, Linda Gray Sexton, Morgan Parker, Patty Yumi Cottrell, Brandon Taylor)

Of his depression, the poet Robert Lowell wrote, “Most of the best poems, the most personal, are gathered crumbs from the lost cake.” While mental illness can have a debilitating impact on the writer’s temperament and output, it can also push the work to extraordinary places. Exploring the myth of the tortured artist, four writers will share how they have channeled turmoil, stigma and shame into works of insight, compassion and deeply meaningful expressions of the human condition.

Getting the Word Out: How to Approach Book Promotion to Actually Reach Readers (Johnny Temple, Rebecca Gradinger, Melissa Febos, Cynthia Shannon, Jessica Greer)

As a writer, all you want is for the writing to speak for itself. But readers, reviews, and book sales don’t magically appear the moment your book is published. Nobody reads a book they haven’t heard of, and most book promotion occurs months prior to the publication date. Learn what you need to do to get your book discovered by the right audience. Understand the timeline of book marketing, what questions to ask your marketers, and how to focus your efforts on what really matters.

Giving Voice to Nontraditional Populations through Storytelling (Deborah Finkelstein, Robert McKenzie, Alfonso Ramirez, Charles Rice-Gonzalez)

How do we give voice to nontraditional populations? Through storytelling. We will discuss successful methods of working one-on-one or in groups with members of nontraditional populations including the elderly, veterans, the incarcerated, young adults with special needs, and multi-lingual speakers. We’ll demonstrate exercises for sharing stories with actors to create a collaborative piece as well as methods for individuals to write their stories as short stories, monologues, poetry, and plays.

The Glories of Impossible Translations: International Perspectives on Creative Process (Helene Cardona, Sidney Wade, Hilary Kaplan, Willis Barnstone, Christopher Merrill)

Is it cliché to say that translation is impossible? Can one ever truly translate the likes of Sappho, Lorca, or Baudelaire with their sophistication, cleverness, and verbal music? Working with Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Hebrew, Greek, French, Spanish, and Turkish, this panel’s poets, translators, and scholars discuss their roles as intermediaries, technicians, and alchemists dancing between languages to create inspired texts spanning cultural differences, geographic distances, and time.

Go Home! Asian American Writers Imagine Home Beyond a Place (Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Gina Apostol, Karissa Chen, Rajiv Mohabir, Esmé Weijun Wang)

For many immigrant writers, home is more and less than a place. Home might be found in a language that one is losing one’s grasp of. Home might have been lost in the aftermath of war. Home might be an impossibility. The writers on this panel, who have all contributed to the new anthology Go Home!, discuss how they navigate ideas of home in their writing. How can fiction, non-fiction, and poetry approach home? What does it mean to write for people with different ideas of home?

Going Viral: Marketing and Promotion in the Digital Age (KMA Sullivan, Kristine Somerville, Megan Rowe, Marie Gauthier, Ron Mitchell)

Directors of sales and marketing, editors, and publishers from The Missouri Review, Southern Indiana Review, Tupelo Press, Vinyl, Willow Springs Review, and YesYes Books will interrogate habitual industry promotional practices and address both expected and unexpected changes in the publicity landscape. Topics will include maximizing social media platforms, booking reading tours, building relationships with critics and reviewers, and developing unique advertising and marketing campaigns.

Good Grief: Creating Art through Tragedy and Loss (Seema Reza, Afaa Weaver, Sebastian Mathews, Anne Edelstein)

How do you confront a life-threatening accident or the death of a loved one? To achieve healing, artists have the rare opportunity to transform their trauma into something beautiful and helpful to others. Retelling personal hardship is a vulnerable and challenging endeavor that must resist solipsism. Join this diverse panel of authors as they share their personal experiences with writing about and through grief and discuss its importance as a painful yet transcendental journey.

Graphic Women: The Evolution of Literary Comics (Kristen Radtke, Danica Novgorodoff, Mira Jacob, Amy Kurzweil)

“The graphic novel is a man’s world, by and large,” wrote Charles McGrath in a New York Times Magazine cover story in 2004. He was right—in a way. Most successful graphic artists and writers were men, and the comics industry today remains exceedingly male-dominated. So what happens when women write and draw in a medium that has represented them so poorly? Four female artists and writers explore how the exclusionary landscape of American comics is changing.

Gulf Coast Noir: Dark, Sweltering Justice (Lynne Barrett, Mary Anna Evans, Vicki Hendricks, Jeff Newberry, Alex Segura)

Writers of noir novels and stories set in the Gulf States will discuss how centering fiction on crime allows exploration of class, race, gender, environment, and the difficulty of achieving justice in a region famous for both its beauty and its troubles. We’ll look at how to build tension through the revelation of secrets and motives, and, using classic and contemporary examples, examine how the choice of point of view constructs the reader's journey into darkness and, perhaps, redemption.

Halo-Halo: What Goes into the Successful Global Conference? (Tim Tomlinson, Jacqueline Bishop, Fan Dai, Sanaz Fotouhi)

Halo-halo is a dessert of many ingredients. It translates, roughly, as "mixed together," or (mistakenly) "mixed up." Both translations might apply to the global workshop/conference. What goes into the creation and execution of the successful global conference? How does the conference ensure a little energy, a little synergy, a little craft, a little theory, while at the same time providing flavorful measures of local experience?

A Haunting Gaze: Writing About and Toward Others (Lisa Birnbaum, A. Onipede Hollist, Mildred Barya, Donald Morrill)

Creating characters outside one’s direct experience, beyond one’s cultural, gender or regionally constructed identities, presents a vital moral and aesthetic conundrum fraught with the perils of misrepresentation and the question of exclusive rights to subject matter. Four writers who have published fiction and poetry that engages the challenge discuss its demands and imaginative possibilities.

Have MFA, Will Teach: Create Teaching and Outreach Opportunities Outside Academia (Kim Suhr, Jacque Brown, Alejandro Ramirez, Annette Marquis, Maria Luisa Arroyo)

With the proliferation of MFA programs (and their grads), permanent academic teaching positions have become fewer and farther between. Fortunately, opportunities to teach and support other writers have not. This panel will present various creative ways writers can use their MFA training to build writing communities through formal classes, public readings and other outreach models. We will discuss startup logistics, pitfalls to avoid and possibilities for generating income from our efforts.

Have Your Cake and Eat It Too: Working Professionals Writing Professionally (M.L. Doyle, Matthew J. Hefti, Andria Williams, David Chrisinger, Drew Pham)

We all need to eat, but most writers don’t make enough bread from writing alone. Shall we simply eat cake? No, instead our writing often coexists with other full-time or paid work. The panel will discuss the many professional and artistic challenges and benefits encountered by a writer with a day job. This inclusive group addresses problems for writers that are nearly universal and provides strategies from panelists that are diverse across race, gender, genre, age, and profession.

Heads in the Cloud: A Consideration of Poetics and Technology, hosted by Submittable (Rachel Mindell, TJ Jarrett, Jessica Mehta, Neil Aitken, Lynne DeSilva-Johnson)

Surprise: poetry and technology don’t have to be antithetical. In fact, poetic intelligence and computer science can complement, stimulate, and intersect with one another in meaningful ways. Poets with expertise in digital technology will share their creative work and discuss fruitful junctures between verse and code, overlooked benefits of poetic thinking in tech spaces (and vice-versa), career development, and how digital literacy can serve writers of all kinds.

Her Poetic Voice: Women Translating Women (Katherine Hedeen, Kristin Dykstra, Michelle Gil-Montero, Jeannine Pitas, Carina Schorske )

Questions about how and why gender matters in translation are current, yet far from exhausted, in field-wide conversations. This panel contributes to the dialogue by gathering women translators of Spanish language women poets to consider the complexities of bringing female poetic subjectivity into English. Topics to be discussed include poetic expression, gendered language, the ideological implications of our choices, and the role of woman translators as both creators and promoters.

Here Comes the Flood: Research and Writing in the Anthropocene (Julia Spicher Kasdorf, C. S. Giscombe, Lisa Sewell, Joan Kane, Brian Teare)

In the next century, three-quarters of those living in Tampa will suffer costal flooding driven by climate-changed rises in sea level. How can we use our concerns—for earth, humans and animals—to transform anger and anxiety into new writing and cultural change? What is a writer’s responsibility to the future? the past? Five poets will share projects that confront values of place, race, and memory; extraction and extinction. Join us in conversation about sustaining our work and commitments.

The Historical Women: Reimagining Past Narratives through the Contemporary Female Perspective (Chanelle Benz, Amelia Gray, Min Jin Lee , Megan Mayhew Bergman, Lidia Yuknavitch)

“Women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I believe that you must become its soul,” said Coretta Scott King during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. What can we learn from reimagined female historical narratives? What is their timely relevance in the current political climate? This panel will also discuss the craft of shaping a nonfiction tale to a modern day story, and how to create female characters that break barriers and make a history of their own.

Hitting the Jackpot: How Judges Select Winning Poetry Collections (Josephine Yu, Kaveh Akbar, Kim Addonizio, David Kirby, Jane Satterfield )

Submitting poetry manuscripts to book contests can be time consuming and costly, but this process is how many first books are published. As the reading fees add up, you may feel like you’re feeding money into a slot machine. Is there any rhyme or reason to the selection process? Our panelists discuss their experiences judging contests, revealing the qualities that drew them to manuscripts, submission pitfalls to avoid, and insights to help you improve your odds of winning a book contest.

The Hollywood Equation: Building Your Screenwriting Career and Finding Your Writer’s Voice through Peer, Mentor and Comm (Lisanne Sartor, Susan Cartsonis, Mike Salort, Maggie Malone)

Numerous retreats exist that enable prose writers to hone their craft and connect with established writers, publishers and agents. CineStory retreats are among the few exclusively for screenwriters. They include craft and professional development seminars, one-on-one mentorship and an active alumni community. CineStory panelists will explore how screenwriters can build their careers and find their writers’ voice through their peer, mentor and community relationships.

Horizon on Fire: The Poet as Journalist Here and Abroad (Jeffrey Brown, Christopher Merrill, Tom Sleigh)

This will be a panel presentation/discussion/reading that will explore and exemplify the ethics and aesthetics which effect poets who are also journalists. The panel members represent print and broadcast media. They will talk about how a TV news story or a piece of journalistic writing can end up being transformed into a poem—or vice versa.The panel will also talk about how ethical and artistic demands on writers are altered in an era in which facts are routinely ignored in favor of ideology.

How Creative Writers Can Work with Archivists: A Crash Course in Cooperation (Pamela Pierce, Erin Wahl, Jennifer Sinor, Sean Hill, Jennifer McCauley)

This panel provides concrete suggestions for how writers can work effectively with archivists. Writers from three genres will share how they made their research experiences successful and the variety of approaches they took with primary sources. Creative writing from primary materials can also result in archivists going along for the journey. Librarians from two different institutions will contribute their own experiences working with writers, highlighting both physical and digital archives.

“How difficult it is to remain just one person”: Translating the Autobiographical Poem (Michelle Gil-Montero, Don Mee Choi, Sasha Dugdale, Valerie Mejer Caso, Anna Deeny Morales)

This panel gathers poet-translators to discuss the complexities of the contemporary autobiographical poem. How might translation reveal the lyric self as fluid, elusive, and relational? Through translation, this conversation will explore questions of authority and embodiment in the autobiographical poem itself. Poet-translators from Spanish, Korean, and Russian—will highlight the personal and cultural dimensions of shifting subjectivity, and the dissonance of lived vs. written experience.

How Do I Know When This Thing Is Done? (Rakesh Satyal, Anjali Singh, Michelle Brower, Annie Hwang, Maria Gagliano)

The only thing harder than writing a book is revising that book. Your first draft may have glaring issues that are easy enough to fix, but then what? Perhaps trusted friends will read it, or a writing workshop will offer extensive feedback. But you still face the overwhelming challenge of revising the thing. Where do you start? Whose advice do you keep or ignore? From what angle do you hit this beast? Editors, agents, and authors discuss the messy and imperfect process of revising a manuscript.

How Many Selves Does It Take to Write a Personal Narrative? (Jennifer Sinor, Bruce Ballenger, Ricco Villanueva Siasoco, Lad Tobin)

Theorists of autobiographical writing have long explored the complexity of self representation in the personal narrative. Rather than a singular “I,” there are at least three selves at work: the remembered self, the remembering self, and what we are calling the “Third I,” or the author who created the other two. This panel will explore some of the tensions between these multiple representations of self and explain how they shape our own personal essays.

How Short Story Collections Are Born: Demystifying the Process of Publishing Your Debut Collection (Marian Crotty , David James Poissant, Manuel Gonzales, Rion Amilcar Scott, Amina Gautier)

From big houses to small presses, from contests to agented submissions, short story writers have several options for publishing first collections. The implications of these choices, however, are seldom clear until the process is complete. This panel will discuss the different paths by which four authors published debut collections, as well as the lessons they learned about editing, publishing, and promoting their books along the way.

How to Be a Literary Activist (Or Advocate) (Kyle Dacuyan, Jenny Mayer, Glory Edim, Katie Freeman)

Join PEN America to discuss how – and indeed whether – to harness your skill and passion as a writer and an advocate for free expression. Many writers believe they have both the power and the responsibility to speak out; others wonder if an activist role aligns with their art. Our panel of socially-engaged literary professionals takes on this question and shares what they have found to be tools and techniques for “speaking (or writing) truth to power”.

How to Fail: On Abandoning a Manuscript, and Not (Arna Bontemps Hemenway, Rachel Yoder, Kerry Howley, Rebecca Makkai, Danielle Evans)

When should you quit on a writing project, and how do you know? And if you do move on, how should you do so in order to be successful going forward? And what about a massive overhaul instead? Successful writers rarely speak about their failures; the books, stories, and essays that never were. On this panel, five accomplished writers in both fiction and nonfiction try to pull back the curtain on what it means and doesn’t mean to quit on a project, as well as how to persevere when you need to.

If Only I’d Known: Advice for Navigating the Publishing World (Jean Kwok, Celeste Ng, Mitchell S. Jackson, Rebecca Makkai, Julia Fierro)

From getting an agent to working with an editor to doing publicity, the life of a writer is filled with potential pitfalls. What are things you should do before you ever sign with an agent? What are definite no-no’s while trying to get an agent? How many of your editor’s changes do you accept? What are tips for a great reading? How can you do publicity best? These seasoned writers talk about their own experiences with different agencies and publishing houses and share their hard-earned advice.

If You Haven't Lived It, Can You Write It? (Patricia Smith, Virginia Pye, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Lamar Giles, Julie Wu)

As fiction writers, we are used to creating worlds and characters, if not from scratch, then from some merging of memory and imagination. But what happens when our story ideas veer toward experiences and worlds beyond our own? When can research fill in for lived experience? And what is our responsibility to “get it right?” What are some things we can do if we get it wrong? When is the story not ours to tell?