This document with general conference information and the full schedule is displayed in high contrast14pt font or higher and designed to be readable by screen readers.
Skip to ScheduleAWP welcomes diversity and the participation of individuals in its activities regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, socioeconomic status, age, disability, or religious or political belief. AWP encourages the contributions of all of its members and attendees at the conference, and we are proud to create an event that supports such inclusive participation.
Founded in nineteen sixty-seven, AWP supports literary authors who teach. AWP provides services, advocacy, resources, and community to nearly fifty thousand writers, five hundred and fifty college and university creative writing programs, and one hundred and fifty writers’ conferences and centers. Our mission is to foster literary achievement, advance the art of writing as essential to a good education, and serve the makers, teachers, students, and readers of contemporary writing.
AWP held its first conference in nineteen seventy-three at the Library of Congress. It featured six events and sixteen presenters. George Garrett, one of AWP’s founders, planned the first gathering with help from the National Endowment for the Arts. Presenters included Elliott Coleman, founder of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University; Paul Engle, founder of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; poets Josephine Jacobsen and Miller Williams; and novelists Ralph Ellison and Wallace Stegner, among others. The conference grew steadily, and with the addition of the bookfair in the mid-eighties it became the foundation for what has become the largest literary conference in North America. This year’s conference is host to five hundred and fifty events, two thousand presenters, and more than eight hundred presses, journals, and literary organizations from around the world. Most conference events are organized by their participants and selected through an open, competitive submission process by AWP’s conference subcommittee. Most featured events are organized and sponsored by member institutions and affiliated literary organizations.
In 2021, AWP hosted its first virtual Conference & Bookfair in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and in 2022, we are happy to provide both virtual and in-person registration options. All in-person registrations come with virtual access.
AWP welcomes proposals for future conference events. Please visit the Event Proposals & Acceptances page for information about proposing an event, literary partnership, or sponsorship for next year’s conference in Seattle, Washington. The deadline for event proposals will be in the spring of twenty-twenty-two.
All in-person attendees of the conference must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and provide proof of vaccination through CrowdPass. Additionally, all attendees must wear a mask for the duration of the conference, and agree to social distancing and room capacity guidelines.
When you arrive onsite in Philadelphia, please enter at 155 N. Broad Street to the Broad Street Atrium. Here, you will need to show your proof of vaccination through CrowdPass. If approved, you will receive your conference lanyard, which will indicate that you have been verified. Proceed to the registration & check-in area to complete the registration process.
Both attendees who have registered in advance and attendees who have not yet registered may pick up their registration materials in the registration area, located in Exhibit Hall E of the Pennsylvania Convention Center on the 200 Level. Please consult the maps in the conference planner or mobile app for location details. Students must present a valid student ID to check in or register at our student rate. Seniors must present a valid ID to check in or register at our senior rate. A fifty-dollar fee will be charged for all replacement badges.
Wednesday, March twenty third: twelve o’clock noon to seven o’clock p.m.
Thursday, March twenty fourth: eight o’clock a.m. to five o’clock p.m.
Friday, March twenty fifth: eight o’clock a.m. to five o’clock p.m.
Saturday, March twenty sixth: eight o’clock a.m. to two o’clock p.m.
If you have problems registering, require assistance, or have a question about accessibility services, please visit AWP’s Help Desk, located in the registration area in Exhibit Hall E on the 200 Level of the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
Stay on top of everything happening at the conference by following AWP on Twitter (@awpwriter) and #AWP22 on all social media. WiFi is available throughout the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
Unless otherwise noted in the program, you must present your registration name badge to gain admission to all meetings, panels, readings, and receptions. You must also present your badge to enter the bookfair.
AWP’s bookfair is located in the Exhibit Halls D & E of the Pennsylvania Convention Center on the 200 Level. This year’s bookfair showcases more than five hundred presses, journals, and literary organizations from around the world. Please consult the maps in the conference planner or mobile app for location details.
Below is a list of events for the #AWP20 Conference & Bookfair in San Antonio, Texas.
Skip to Wednesday Skip to Thursday Skip to Friday Skip to SaturdayNoon to Seven o'clock P.M.
The first stop at #AWP22 is the vaccination verification check-in, located at the 155 N Broad Street
entrance to the Pennsylvania Convention Center. All attendees must verify proof of valid COVID-19
vaccination through CrowdPass. Once you are verified, you will receive your #AWP22 lanyard, which will serve
as indication your vaccination status has been verified. Proceed to the Registration area in Halls D&E
on the 200 level to complete the registration process.
Attendees who have registered in advance or who have yet to purchase a registration may secure their
registration materials in AWP's registration area located in Exhibit Hall E, Pennsylvania Convention
Center, 200 Level. Please consult the bookfair map in the conference planner for location details. Students
must present a valid student ID to check-in or register at our student rate. Seniors must present a
valid ID to register at our senior rate. A $50 fee will be charged for all replacement badges.
The exhibit hall at the Pennsylvania Convention Center will be open for bookfair setup. For safety and
security reasons, only those holding a Bookfair Setup Access (BSA) registration or those accompanied by an
individual wearing a BSA registration will be permitted inside the bookfair during setup hours. Bookfair
exhibitors are welcome to pick up their registration materials in AWP’s registration area in Exhibit
Hall E, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 200 Level.
A Mamava lactation suite is located outside of room 126B of the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
Three o'clock P.M. to Three-thirty P.M.
Join AWP conference staff for a tour of the Pennsylvania Convention Center. This tour will cover main event
areas of the Pennsylvania Convention Center and will be an opportunity to ask questions about conference
accessibility. This tour is great for someone who would like to get a sense for the distances between
meeting rooms and to plan easiest routes. If you are unable to make it to this 3:00 p.m. tour, please email
colleen@awpwriter.org to arrange for a different time.
Four-thirty P.M. to Six-thirty P.M.
World of Wonders, an up close-and-personal evening with Aimee Nezhukumatathil and special guest January Gill
O'Neill, sponsored by Milkweed Editions. Reserve your ticket on the World of Wonders page of the AWP
website. Suggested donation $25. https://www.awpwriter.org/awp_conference/gala
Five o'clock P.M. to Six o'clock P.M.
This event is for all independent literary magazine and small press publishers: seasoned professionals,
those just starting out, and all in between. Learn what we're planning for the year, and share your thoughts
on how we can best ensure that our community thrives. Even if you're not yet a member of CLMP but would like
to find out more, please feel welcome to join us.
Six-thirty P.M. to Eight-thirty P.M.
Join AWP in celebrating small presses and #AWP22 exhibitors. We will also be announcing and presenting the
2022 AWP Small Press Publisher Award and celebrating the amazing finalists: American Short Fiction,
Ecotone, and Terrain.org.
Seven-thirty A.M. to Eight-forty-five A.M.
Daily 12-step meeting. All in recovery from anything are welcome.
Eight o'clock A.M. to Five o'clock P.M.
The first stop at #AWP22 is the vaccination verification check-in, located at the 155 N Broad Street
entrance to the Pennsylvania Convention Center. All attendees must verify proof of valid COVID-19
vaccination through CrowdPass. Once you are verified, you will receive your #AWP22 lanyard, which will serve
as indication your vaccination status has been verified. Proceed to the Registration area in Halls D&E
on the 200 level to complete the registration process.
Attendees who have registered in advance or who have yet to purchase a registration may secure their
registration materials in AWP’s registration area located in Exhibit Hall E, Pennsylvania Convention
Center, 200 Level. Please consult the bookfair map in the conference planner for location details. Students
must present a valid student ID to check-in or register at our student rate. Seniors must present a valid ID
to register at our senior rate. A $50 fee will be charged for all replacement badges.
Coat check is available outside of Halls D & E on the 200 level of the Pennsylvania Convention Center. It is
$3.00 per item checked, or $5.00 for two items. ATMs can be found in the Broad Street Atrium on the 100
Level, by the Business Center on the 200 Level, and near the Concierge on 200 level.
A Mamava lactation suite is located outside of room 126B of the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
The Lactation Room is located in room 110A of the Pennsylvania Convention Center. To access the Lactation
Room, please see the AWP Help Desk to obtain the key. For reasons of privacy and security, access to the
lactation room is granted with permission from AWP only.
A dedicated quiet space for you to collect your thoughts, unwind, and
escape the literary commotion. "There is a solitude of space, / A
solitude of sea, / A solitude of death, but these / Society shall be, /
Compared with that profounder site, / That polar privacy, / A Soul
admitted to Itself: / Finite Infinity."—Emily Dickinson
A second dedicated quiet space for you to collect your thoughts, unwind, and
escape the literary commotion. “There is a solitude of space, / A
solitude of sea, / A solitude of death, but these / Society shall be, /
Compared with that profounder site, / That polar privacy, / A Soul
admitted to Itself: / Finite Infinity.” —Emily Dickinson
A quiet space free of fluorescent lighting located in room 110B of the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
Nine o'clock A.M. to Ten o'clock A.M.
This panel discussion will examine how Indigenous and Native dramatists use their unique storytelling
structures to create work for the stage and illuminate their worlds. When non-Native theaters get to choose
what plays speak for the Native experience, even when they're not coming from a Native perspective, how can
this powerful community ensure they keep telling stories for the people they’re written for? And how
can non-Native audiences engage when Native perspectives are rarely seen?
Event Outline
Should people dare to dream with the forces of the world allied against them? Though “noir” has
morphed into a buzzword for any darkly themed thriller, its traditional elements are more specific: an
outsider perspective, economic insecurity, systemic injustice, distrust of the status quo, existential
despair. Five fiction writers and critics discuss the roots of noir and how writers today, both genre and
literary, can build on and transform this tradition to explore similar themes today.
Event Outline
Whether seen as adults or children, for pleasure or research, films can be as formative for a writer as any
literary text. They can shape our aesthetics and our relationship with language and can provide a sense of
lineage. They can awaken our civic consciousness and help us to see and be seen. In this panel, five poets
will explore how the cinematic world has informed their poetic one and how films have inspired their craft,
identity, and passion for the cross-pollination of artistic mediums.
Event Outline
Join the Chicago Quarterly Review for a celebration of its Anthology of Black American
Literature, guest-edited by National Book Award winner and MacArthur Fellow Charles Johnson. This
reading showcases the breadth of voices that have been brought together in this remarkable issue as well as
the Chicago Quarterly Review's commitment to special editions, the fifth in its history. Interspersed
with questions and commentary, five contributors of prose and poetry read from their included work.
Event Outline
Writing and publishing short creative nonfiction for magazines and newspapers trains us to be mindful of the
small, strange events in our life and turn them into compelling stories. Feral turkeys uniting a
neighborhood at dusk? Growing up in a museum with beer bottle walls? Hundreds of abandoned dog waste bags on
hiking trails during the pandemic? We wrote about them all, and editors and readers were thrilled! We'll
teach you to write and publish in a similar fashion.
Event Outline
For reasons economic and otherwise, there has been huge growth in the enrollment at community colleges. Many
students never get the chance to take a class dedicated to poetry and instead only experience it through
Basic Skills or Writing 101 classes. Four experienced community college faculty, poets themselves, will look
at motivating ways of mining the poetic talent from community college students. We will discuss methods of
eliciting remarkable writing from this often-forgotten segment.
Event Outline
Unless you’re writing in an intentionally anachronistic form, like steampunk, you probably know better
than to allow your Victorian characters to refer to fax machines or the Beatles. But staying in key involves
more than historical and technological accuracy—especially if you write cross-cultural fiction. This
panel discusses the many hidden dimensions of anachronism and how to avoid their false notes.
Event Outline
Nine o'clock A.M. to Ten-fifteen A.M.
There is such a profound cultural discomfort around women's anger, especially women's rage, that when it is
depicted, it is generally either sublimated or fetishized. Those who aren't are often coded as masculine,
mentally ill, or victimized (or all three). While many male protagonists are more antihero than hero,
"bad" women risk the deadly label of "unlikable." Five exceptional authors representing
fiction, nonfiction, and poetry discuss the pitfalls and joys of being unladylike on the page.
Event Outline
Poets and novelists who collectively speak ten languages will explore how words, phrases, and cadences in
other languages—in or out of translation—help create meaning, context, atmosphere, and
connection in English-language texts. Are there rules for writing with multiple languages? Who makes them?
Whom do they serve? What are practical, artistic, and ethical considerations for writers incorporating other
languages? How does language inform the way we navigate and write the world?
Event Outline
The workshop model has increasingly come under attack as a tool of power, privilege, racism, and
colonialism. Is this pedagogy—the basis of creative-writing curricula for more than eighty
years—on the verge of annihilation? This panel uses the idea of workshop apocalypse as both a lifting
away of old ideas and anew beginning to look at which elements of the workshop should be salvaged from the
wreckage—a subject explored in The Gift of Attention, forthcoming from the University of
Chicago Press.
In Louisville, KY, the city where Breonna Taylor was killed, the Kentucky Foundation for Women (KFW) resides
and promotes the importance of social change through feminist expression. In 2020 alone, KFW granted
$301,960 to KY artists. Panelists will share their funded projects that includes giving voice to BIPOC
women, telling the stories of incarcerated women, and exploring what it means to be queer in
Appalachia—and will show why more foundations like KFW are essential, especially now.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1
Most University Presses (UPs) can’t bestow six-figure advances, fly authors to events around the
globe, or dedicate months to building media buzz, but because they aren’t profit-driven, UPs take
risks and champion voices other houses may overlook. As a result, their creative titles regularly win
awards, break conventions, and enrich the literary conversation. The directors and editors on this panel
will discuss the many benefits of publishing with UPs as well as share manuscript wish lists.
Event Outline
All AWP program directors should attend this meeting to represent their programs and to hear from AWP's
board of directors and executive director about new and ongoing AWP initiatives that benefit their students,
alumni, and faculty. The chair of the AWP Board and chair of the Professional Standards Committee will lead
a review of the AWP Guidelines for Creative Writing Programs & Teachers of Creative Writing and ask for
feedback about any needed revisions from program directors. It would be helpful for program directors to
review this document before attending the meeting. Immediately after this plenary, directors attend
breakouts to review and provide feedback for the ongoing revisions of AWP Hallmarks.
In his 1983 “Letter to Prisoners,” James Baldwin writes: "What artists and prisoners have
in common is that we both know what it means to be free." For the writer and activist concerned with
social justice, the mass incarceration system in the US is the final frontier of arts programming and
writing workshops. Writers and educators within the system will discuss trauma-informed pedagogical
strategies, censorship, and structures you can implement for correctional engagement in your community.
Event Outline
Finding a publisher for a collection of short stories continues to be a daunting task. Five prize-winning
authors lead a discussion detailing their journeys to publishing their first books. They will talk about how
they landed their first publications, how they developed and shaped their short story collections, how they
began to look for publishers, and other related topics such as submitting fiction to journals and national
contests, querying agents, and overcoming rejection.
Event
Outline
Poems of place not only describe and document locations: they reveal how we internalize place and how it
impacts our lives. It can be said that where we are is who we are. Whether we are Indigenous, lifelong
residents, recent transplants, or just passing through, places change us, and we in turn change them. US
poets representing Alaska, Hawai‘i, the Mojave Desert, northern California, and the East Coast will
read and discuss poems showing relationship to place, including cities and wilderness.
Event Outline
What does it involve to be a poet laureate of a state, city, or county? The five laureates on this panel,
each of whom has received a laureate fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, come from diverse
locations and backgrounds, just as the style of their poems is diverse. What do they hope to accomplish as
their local poet laureate? What has it meant for them to be appointed poet laureate of their community, and
what has it meant for their community?
Event Outline
This panel discusses the complexities, challenges and opportunities queer writers can face when writing in
and about rural communities. LGBTQIA presenters of various walks of life and career stages explore this
question from perspectives that include multigenerational inhabitants of rural US communities and
transnational experiences. We consider the possibilities for creating queer writing alliances across social
differences, geographies, careers, and disciplines.
Event Outline
What role can writers play in an era of compounding environmental disasters? Some writers use their craft to
bear witness to an increasingly unlivable world; others go further, not only addressing the connections
between hazard and harm, violence and vulnerability, but also taking action to repair and compelling others
to do the same. These writers will discuss how our work makes possible (or fails to make possible) ways of
reimagining how we can evolve in this moment of unprecedented urgency.
Event
Outline
Writing students contend with reverberating questions about point of view, especially around issues of
representation and narrative ownership. Why first person versus third person? Why does one work call for
epic omniscience and another present tense? What happens when we give voice to those who are unlike us? This
panel asks professors of creative writing how they approach the pedagogy of perspective. What practices best
support our students’ critical thinking and imaginative abilities?
Event Outline
You've workshopped, revised, and even saved a "final draft" of your book-length work of
fiction—so now what? Five debut authors discuss when and how to acquire a literary agent,
considerations for going on submission to publishers, navigating auctions, international book sales, and
shopping film rights, and what happens between the book deal and publication. Panelists from a diverse array
of writing communities speak on their experiences to demystify the journey from writer to published author.
Event Outline
In an open chat, Periplus mentors Lan Samantha Chang and Adrienne Raphel and fellows Kimberly Wong and Dasia
Moore will share their experiences about mentorship. Formed in 2020, the Periplus Collective of more than
fifty writers is committed to mentoring fellows—promising BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color)
writers in the US who are at an early stage in their careers. Hear why Periplus was formed, what works or
not, and how to make the most of mentorship as a fellow or a mentor!
Event Outline
The event brings together five south Asian American writers writing in diverse registers. Kirtan Nautiyal
and Chaya Murali use their background in the medical profession to explore issues of class, racism, and the
human body. Anuradha Kumar reads from her latest collection described as "subtle, brief, quiet
even." Torsa Ghosal reads from her experimental fiction. Moazzam Sheikh reads from his fiction known
for mixing interiority with external events of life.
Event Outline
How do creative nonfiction writers craft layered or intricate essays by focusing on small spaces, or what
others might somehow overlook? A creek, a garden, a park, a tide pool, an ant hill, a sand dune, a
river’s reach, a prairie dog burrow, an owl’s nest—our panel will discuss how we apply
close observation and contemplation to reveal larger issues about the environment in our work. Protest or
preservation can take root in the most commonly known or miniature and otherwise unseen places.
Event Outline
Nine o'clock A.M. to Five o'clock P.M.
With more than 600 literary exhibitors, the AWP Bookfair is the largest of its kind. A great way to meet
authors, critics, and peers, the bookfair also provides excellent opportunities to find information about
many literary magazines, presses, and organizations. Please consult the bookfair map in the printed
conference planner or AWP mobile app for location details.
Breakfast and lunch concessions are available inside the Exhibit Hall in the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
Cash, debit, and credit cards are accepted at all food and beverage locations. Please consult the maps in
the conference program or mobile app for location details. Due to COVID-19 precautions, eating and drinking
is limited to designated areas.
The Wick Poetry Center’s Traveling Stanzas Makerspace offers conference attendees an opportunity to
creatively engage with themes of health and healing, social and racial justice, nature and environment, and
peace and conflict. This interactive exhibit invites participants to share their voice using a suite of
digital expressive writing tools, such as Emerge (an erasure poetry app), Thread (community-generated
poems), and the Listening Wall (thematically-driven touch-screen poetry displays). Visitors will be able to
choose a theme, follow a prompt, then print and share their responses. More information can be found at
http://travelingstanzas.com.
Ten-thirty-five A.M. to Eleven-thirty-five A.M.
How do you write the story of your life if words are not enough? Panelists interrogate traditional forms to
explore how resisting, reimagining, and rebuilding memoir expectations allows writers to more accurately
tell true stories. Panelists will discuss their diverse projects, including memoirs-in-essays, memoirs in
stories and essays, memoirs incorporating research and theory, memoirs using image, and illustrated memoir,
offering strategies for discovering the form for your memoir.
Event Outline
Join us for a discussion about and live performance of McSweeney's Quarterly's first ever audio
issue—a riotous exploration of audiovisual storytelling, coproduced with Radiotopia from PRX. We'll
talk about the the way sound and text can come together to create an immersive experience of story and
experience live excerpts of a handful of pieces in the issue.
Event Outline
Uprooted writers discuss themes of home, displacement, and rerooting in aid of diverse literature. These
authors had one more barrier: their work had to be translated or reconceived to reflect their uprootedness
for this book, giving us a view we seldom see: the path of the writer before he becomes acculturated. What
happens to the work of those "just-arriveds"? Is it lost? How can we prevent it if so? (This event
will be held mostly in Spanish.)
Event Outline
Five extraordinary poets will present and read from their new collections published by Graywolf Press, one
of the leading independent publishers in the country. In singular, profound voices, these poets reckon with
the gravity of what it is to witness and live through the vital struggles and issues of our
time—colonialism, domestic violence, police murders, racism, sexuality, existential grief,
mortality—and, with care, disrupt the borders between our interior and political realities.
Event Outline
Each of the poets on this panel uses mythology as a centering device in their own writing. Each poet will
begin by reading one or two poems. We will then explore questions such as: What is the mythic? What is the
value of writing through and alongside mythology for Asian diasporic poets? How can poetic myth and
mythmaking serve as productive scaffolding and sites of new narrative possibilities? How does myth allow
poets to access intergenerational, cultural, and communal discourses?
Event Outline
Ten-thirty-five A.M. to Eleven-fifty A.M.
If you are a program director or codirector of an AWP member of a traditional creative writing program, you
should attend this session that will review ongoing revisions and garner feedback on "AWP Hallmarks of
a Successful MFA Program in Creative Writing." It would be helpful for directors to review their
hallmarks before attending this breakout.
If you are a program director or codirector of an AWP member low-residency creative writing program, you
should attend this session that will review ongoing revisions and garner feedback on "AWP Hallmarks of
an Effective Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing." It would be helpful for directors to
review their hallmarks before attending this breakout.
As Audre Lorde said, “Our visions are essential to create that which has never been, and we must each
learn to use all of who we are to achieve those visions.” The “nature poem” was never just
about nature. When we look at anything, we put ourselves into that gaze. Five poets of diverse backgrounds
share poems that engage with the more-than-human world in ways that are accurate, ethical, nuanced, and
surprising, connecting gender, race, geography, sexuality, and culture.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2
If you are a program director or codirector of an AWP member BFA program or BA major writing program, you
should attend this session that will review ongoing revisions and garner feedback on "AWP Hallmarks of
an Effective BFA Program or BA Major in Creative Writing." It would be helpful for directors to review
their hallmarks before attending this breakout.
How does an arts-centric education affect a student’s development as a writer? How does teaching at an
art school influence a writer’s approach to craft? This reading features work by alumni and faculty
from the University of the Arts, a uniquely arts-based university in Center City Philadelphia and home to
the region's only Creative Writing BFA.
Event Outline
If you are a program director or codirector of an AWP member minor in the undergraduate study of creative
writing, you should attend this session that will review ongoing revisions and garner feedback on "AWP
Hallmarks of an Effective Minor in the Undergraduate Study of Creative Writing." It would be helpful
for directors to review their hallmarks before attending this breakout.
How can we move from discord to understanding and positive action? What practices can we use to scaffold
students towards high-level thinking and SEL skills? Listening and retelling someone else's story can be a
powerful first step.The Narrative 4 (N4) Story Exchange is an authentic process designed to bridge
difference. Through the lens of an N4 artist, educator, and student, this panel will explore practical
applications of the Story Exchange in classrooms and communities.
Event Outline
The flash format can do almost anything, but must so much of it be serious? In fact, writing in a small
space is perfect for absurd setups, shifts in perspective, comic riffs, and other tricks of the humor trade.
Proposition, extension, and payoff are not just for jokes. This panel includes a diverse array of editors,
teachers, and writers and emphasizes techniques for both fiction and creative nonfiction flash.
Event Outline
Folklore, fairy tales, and myths persist because they tell us stories about ourselves—where we come
from, what we should value, what we should fear. These stories exist to establish the boundaries of what we
see as possible, desirable, and laudable. As writers, we can also make use of folklore to define our own
stories—whether we embrace the cultural narrative or reject it. The authors on this panel will discuss
how to harness mythological figures and tropes to give shape to personal writing.
PhD programs require artists to deftly navigate academia in ways that are distinct from MFA programs.
Panelists will share what aspects of the PhD experience can aid the creative process and prepare candidates
for post-PhD careers. Topics include how to utilize critical research—such as course work and
comprehensive exams—to build a creative bank, how to establish a committee, and how to fashion an
inspiring writing community while fulfilling the challenging requirements of a PhD program.
Event Outline
If you are a program director or codirector of an AWP member creative writing program at a two-year college,
you should attend this session that will review ongoing revisions and garner feedback on "AWP Hallmarks
of an Effective Program in Creative Writing at a Two-Year College." It would be helpful for directors
to review their hallmarks before attending this breakout.
In light of this year’s cultural reckoning with anti-Asian hate, how do we acknowledge both recent
violence and longstanding history? How do we move forward in our writing practices and communities? This
panel will focus on how we address racism, violence, and stereotypes through poetry and
poetics—including lyric essay, ars poetica, and received forms—as a way to examine our
indoctrination into racism, unlearn and heal from harmful ideologies, and reteach ourselves and our
audiences.
Event Outline
In this presentation, several poets who are interviewed in the new film “Ruth Stone’s Vast
Library of the Female Mind” talk about why they wanted to participate in the filming and how Ruth
Stone influenced them, their lives, and their work. Though Ruth Stone won awards and accolades, many people
in the literary world still don’t know her name. The goal of the film and the event is to reveal
Stone's poetry and life to a wider audience, as well as to pay tribute to this wholly original poet.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2, Supplemental Document 3
Why do we write young protagonists? Are coming-of-age stories YA? What happens when our young protagonist is
defined as YA contrary to our intentions? What craft choices do we make when we intend to write YA?
Panelists discuss when writer intentions and reader perceptions coincide and when they diverge with respect
to writing young protagonists. They share the changes they did or didn’t make in the writing,
revising, and marketing of their work to satisfy their own intentions and perceptions.
Event Outline
The time of literary-realism’s dominance in the workshop is mostly passed. The number of students
submitting works that break the rules of both writing convention as well as physics grows every day and with
it, so does the desire among students to be taught the fundamentals and craft concerns of genres like
absurdism. Our panelists will discuss the challenges and opportunities of introducing this sort of work in
the classroom as well as address issues surrounding these ideas in workshop.
Event Outline
Brevity has been a celebrated home to flash nonfiction, publishing thousands of essays, craft pieces,
and blog responses over its two decades and counting. In an increasingly online era with the popularity of
flash rocketing forward, it is a good time to explore what’s next for this incredibly rich,
groundbreaking genre. Join our diverse panel of Brevity contributors for a reading and discussion
exploring future possibilities for the flash nonfiction form and genre hybrids just now emerging.
Event Outline
Poets and translators discuss how translingualism, defined by Dowling as “a set of strategies by which
writers engage with diverse linguistic codes in ways that are context-dependent,” can constitute
transgressive acts of resistance, in contexts where political, patriarchal, and settler colonial powers have
encoded hierarchical values to languages, bodies, and cultures. They consider interlingual dynamics and
tensions between translatability and untranslatability at play in translingual poetics.
Event Outline
Stage reading by poets Mary Lou Buschi, Jennifer Jean, Renuka Raghavan, Josette Akresh-Gonzales, Eric Hyett,
Frances Donovan, Robin Reagler, Judson K. Evans, Susan Berger Jones, and Gale Bachelder.
Event Outline
A reading featuring the 2020 AWP Award Series winners.
Twelve-ten P.M. to One-ten P.M.
This panel explores the process of building a digital anthology of South Asian creative work from beginning
to release, centered around the avant-garde. We address concept development, fundraising, community
building, and outreach, particularly through a progressive lens. We discuss the creation process during a
pandemic, navigating time zones, illnesses, and challenges in South Asia. We discuss how BIPOC creatives
draw from their radical traditions to build new creative forms and futures.
Event
Outline
What does inclusivity in the classroom (WITS/writer residency) program look like? From hiring to practice in
the classroom, this discussion will explore the landscape of inclusivity work in literary arts education.
Teaching artists will discuss what WITS programs can do to expand the notion of inclusivity with an
intersectional disability justice lens.
What is a "Jewish poem"? Come find out as we read from 101 Jewish Poems for the Third
Millennium, a new anthology, featuring voices that range from emerging to established, both Jewish
and non-Jewish, as well as several translations. The themes range from observing Jewish traditions to more
modern ones, such as same-sex marriage and nonfaith. With the rise in anti-Semitism and other hate crimes in
this country, it is more important now than ever before to celebrate diversity.
Event Outline
Five editors of published or forthcoming poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction anthologies offer advice
concerning how to propose an anthology for independent and mainstream presses, and how to query and
collaborate with contributors and acquisitions editors, which might include making calls for submissions,
setting and meeting deadlines, publicizing a new anthology, and handling contributor remuneration. They will
also discuss any pitfalls they've encountered during the editorial process.
Event
Outline
As recent events have demonstrated, Asian Americans are seen as perpetual foreigners in the US. Yet, owing
to complicated reasons around migration, many of us also feel like foreigners in our countries of origin. We
are five Asian American writers who have all sought to (re)connect with our cultural roots through writing
about family and/or regional histories. In this panel, we read from our works and discuss how we use history
to inform our fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Event Outline
Shifting to Zoom-based writing education during COVID had the side effect of improving accessibility for
many disabled people and raising awareness of disability inclusion. How can we maintain that momentum as we
gather again in person? This panel of authors and educators, some who have learning or other disabilities
themselves, will discuss strategies writing teachers and workshop leaders can use to help make writing
instruction accessible to those of all abilities and the neurodiverse.
Event Outline
Juxtaposing modes of expression, the hybrid poem allows for discursive, expansive thought. For these poets,
“hybrid” can refer to hybridity of genre, form, literary influences, and the use of
“unpoetic” materials, like scientific writing or computer programming. Hybrid poems explode the
syntactic, intellectual, and formal directions contained in every poem and make them visible to the reader.
This panel will highlight the ways the hybrid poem can stretch the boundaries of contemporary poetry.
Twelve-ten P.M. to One-twenty-five P.M.
Critically acclaimed authors Melissa Febos (Body Work, Abandon Me, and Whip Smart) and
Brandon Taylor (Filthy Animals, Real Life) dig into the radical power of personal narrative,
with special attention to the rigor of craft. A story must not only be well told, it must be well
constructed. But what does that mean for your work? This is less of a how-to and more a call to courage: for
great writing has the potential to be revolutionary. This event will be livestreamed. ASL interpretation and
live captioning will be provided.
What are the challenges and pleasures of building coalitions between community-based writing centers and
academic writing programs that share a geography? Join admins from Austin Bat Cave, Chippewa Valley Writers
Guild, Literary Cleveland, Lit Youngstown, and The Porch as they explore partnerships, internships,
mentorships, and other big and small “ships” with moat-crossing abilities between the proverbial
“town” and “gown.”
Event Outline
At a time when the many facets of Blackness are gaining recognition, the stories and language of Black
American Muslims are also coming to the fore. This multigenre reading by Black Muslim authors showcases a
variety of such perspectives. Listen to stories about love, family, magic, mystery, faith, and community as
readers share fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Nearly sixty years after The Autobiography of Malcolm
X, hear what it means to be a black American Muslim author now.
Event Outline
For thirty years, American Short Fiction has been publishing award-winning fiction by authors who push the
boundaries of the traditional short story and help us reimagine the landscape of contemporary fiction. Come
celebrate our anniversary with some of our favorite contributors, who will discuss how they interrogate the
limits of the short story by breaking form, building worlds, harnessing distinctive voices, and playing by
their own rules, pulling the peculiarity of existence into full focus.
Event Outline
Not even twenty years ago, flash fiction—also known as snap fiction, sudden fiction, short shorts,
etc.—was considered a new and experimental form. With flash fiction journals, workshops, anthologies,
and courses abounding, flash has taken its place among better-known genres and forms. Does this mean flash
has lost its edge? What does the future hold for the form? Five flash writers will discuss flash's past and
its status in today's literary landscape and share their thoughts on where the genre is headed.
Event Outline
Finding an agent is a key step in getting published by a major publisher. But what are agents looking for,
and what should authors know before trying to find one? This panel will feature five actively acquiring
agents and anextended Q&A session so attendees can get the specific information that they need, as well
as cover the process of querying, signing, and working with an agent.
Event Outline
Jane Alison’s craft book Meander, Spiral, Explode discusses narrative shapes beyond the
traditional climactic arc—but her examples are drawn from fiction. In this session, each panelist will
show, through both example and speculation, how Alison’s shapes (waves, cells, spirals, explosions)
can function in creative nonfiction. The session will include a series of generative writing prompts, and
end with a discussion of the ways that shape, pattern, and design can provoke and enrich CNF content.
Event Outline
Many translators now begin their careers in MFA programs, while those writing original texts in English are
increasingly finding their way into translation workshops. Even as translators learn their craft by writing
creatively, many writers learn come into their voice via translation and an engagement with international
literature. What can translation programs offer writers, and what can writing programs offer translators?
Event Outline
Literary organizations must reflect the growing call for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in their
workshops, events, readings, and outreach. Adopting a statement is the first step, but how do we create
socially relevant and diverse programming while ensuring equity and inclusive access to all? Join the
leaders of several literary organizations to discuss creating their own statements and how through
increasing and supporting DEI, the reach of the literary arts exponentially expands.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2, Supplemental Document 3
Cofounders of the award-winning literary nonprofit, One Story, share the highs, lows, and bumps in the road
on their twenty-year journey. Most literary magazines open and fold in three years, but in 2002, Maribeth
Batcha and Hannah Tinti launched a tiny zine celebrating the short story and eventually grew their
organization into a literary nonprofit that is still going strong. If you’re thinking of launching a
lit mag or facing challenges as a small press or literary nonprofit, this is the panel for you!
Event Outline
Authors are turning to podcasting to find new audiences and expand their platform—but podcasting isn't
just about promotion. A National Book Award finalist, a feature film novelist, an International Women's
Podcast Awards winner, and two NYT bestselling authors talk about what podcasting gave them that
publishing couldn’t: quick, consistent deadlines; tools to develop their craft; an antidote to
perfectionism; and a space to connect, critique the industry, and collaborate with fellow creators.
Event Outline
In 1997, when most readers accessed the Internet through dial-up—if at all—Don Selby and Diane
Boller launched an elegant, user-friendly website to help people discover poets and poetry they
like—and to help publishers spread news of their books, magazines, and journals to more readers. Join
Poetry Daily readers and members of its new staff and prominent editorial board as they read outstanding
poems, share Poetry Daily stories and visions, and celebrate the retirement of Don and Diane.
Event Outline
Many novelists want to transform their book into a marketable screenplay. This panel focuses on the
beginning concepts they will need to get started: genre considerations, loglines, beat sheets, treatments,
format, writing for a visual medium, the hero's journey, and more.
Event Outline
Many poets feel compelled to write about painful experiences, but we may approach such material with a
mixture of urgency and hesitancy. Finding the right language to convey trauma can be liberatory, but the
process is often painful. A fixed form—whether that be a villanelle, a golden shovel, or a grocery
list—can provide a strong container for writing about trauma and, more generally, memories that haunt.
This panel features five poets discussing their usage of fixed forms to approach trauma.
Event Outline
Responding to the controversy over American Dirt, author Jeanine Cummins claimed she wanted "to
humanize 'the faceless brown mass' of Mexican migrants coming to the US." Literary critics defended her
despite community outcry that it wasn’t her story to tell. This panel asks: Who gets to tell whose
stories? The goal of the conversation is to develop an onsite ethics of authorship that considers the agency
of racialized and gendered subjects within the field of storytelling.
Event
Outline
What can writing poetry about the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust do to address white supremacy?
How can Jewish poets—specifically mothers—rewrite a narrative of exceptionalism for future
generations while staying true to the particularities of Holocaust trauma? This panel takes up these
questions through the voices of five poets, all mothers, whose writing explores intersections of Jewish
trauma, inheritance, motherhood, and poetry’s capacities for antiracist work.
Event Outline
Teaching environmental writing is critical, rewarding, and often overwhelming. How can we urge students to
express deep-felt awe for the natural world and address urgent ecological crises? How can we nurture
creativity, offer solace, and spur action? How can we decolonize nature writing tropes? As writers, how do
we strike the balance of wonder and terror ourselves? In this panel, we grapple with these questions and
share practical approaches for the classroom and beyond.
Event Outline
While it is heartening to see publishers commit to publishing more work by writers from historically
marginalized groups, how do writers navigate the world of trade, indie, and university presses to find a
partner who will honor their voice, experience, and vision? Writers from different backgrounds who have
published with Mad Creek Books will read a section of their nonfiction work and discuss how a university
press can be a supportive partner, reflecting on the entire publishing process.
Event Outline
Panelists who work as both editors and writers will consider the balance between voice and conventions from
both sides of the process. How do editors encourage the unique voices of writers when they may not comply
with standard diction or syntax or may be experimental or stylistically different from a publication's norm?
How can writers best work with editors to strengthen their writing while maintaining their distinct voices?
Event Outline
Stage reading by Steven Riel, Chloe Yelena Miller, Cynthia Bargar, Jeff Oaks, Jennifer Badot, Mark
Jednaszewski, Christine Jones, Eileen Cleary, and Eric Roy.
Event Outline
One-forty-five P.M. to Two-forty-five P.M.
Historically, Muslim women made significant literary contributions. However, many of these contributions
have been muted, dismissed, or deliberately misused due to patriarchal constructs that suppressed vibrant
minority voices. Subduing women's literature manifested due to colonialism and patriarchal constructs around
the world, and it is prevalent up to recent day. Together, we will journey into the lives of female Muslim
literary legends, and unearth staggering accounts of rising women's voices.
Event Outline
W.W. Norton’s historic list of poets includes Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, A R. Ammons, Ai, Stanley
Kunitz, and Joy Harjo—poets who published books that reflect their social moment and resonate beyond,
yet not at the expense of craft and meaningful individualism. In this panel, midcareer and younger poets to
Norton will read their work and discuss what it means to be part of a socially conscious tradition of poetry
that adheres to democratic ideals of diversity and aesthetic innovation.
Being at the helm of a literary journal comes with plenty of rewards—and an equal amount of stress.
Costs range from financial to emotional to vocational. These literary journal editors discuss the hidden
obligations and labor of literary editing, including facing cancel culture, declining colleagues,
encountering poor behavior from submitters, and receiving retribution rejections from editors. In light of
these, they advise on best practices for ensuring inclusivity, diversity, and fairness.
Event Outline
This reading will feature contributors to The Poetry of Capital, a diverse new anthology in which
forty-four poets explore the contemporary American relationship to money, tackling subjects from global
economic crises to local tag sales, from the subversive effects of dark money on politics to the freedom
granted by summer jobs. Alongside the poems, the volume includes original essays about how capital shapes us
and our American experience. Poets will share selections from both their poems and essays.
Event Outline
Books featuring adoption have garnered attention in recent years, and yet many portrayals of adoptees in
literature continue to be one-dimensional. This panel takes a critical look at adoptee representations in
several examples of contemporary literature in order to interrogate the ways in which adoptee narratives
reflect broader understandings of adoptee identity. Panelists also examine the consequences that such
problematic depictions can have on US international relations and policy-making.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1
For too long, creative writing courses have held themselves outside politics and current events, invoking
ideals of the “timeless” and “universal.” But antiracist creative writing classrooms
can be sites of transformational action and resistance, led by students. Our cross-genre teaching methods
include an antiracist writing workshop, student-led projects, community-based fieldwork, student publishing
on digital platforms, collaborative storytelling, and intentional community building.
Event
Outline
One-forty-five P.M. to Three o'clock P.M.
Five pioneers of disability poetry in a reading and moderated Q&A that expresses different strains of
disability poetics. From the anticolonial to the queer celebratory, disabled voices are charting a poetics
of liberation that illuminates the intersectionality of body and identity and the forms of social control
and oppression that seek to correct or silence disabled bodies. Together, these four poets will explore, to
quote Kay Ulanday Barrett, “the potentiality in being multiple embodiments."
This event will be prerecorded and available on the virtual conference platform, in addition to being
screened onsite. ASL interpretation and captioning will be provided.
Drawing from their writing careers, which together span genres from playwriting, screenwriting, journalism,
criticism, and fiction, the two will explore a wide range of questions focused on storytelling and the
process of literary creation, as well as life in the theater seen from both the playwright and critic's
perspective. They will also discuss the role of the writer in the face of recent challenges to the freedom
to read in the United States, and the mounting threats to democracy and global free expression today. Akhtar
is a playwright, novelist, and screenwriter, whose most recent novel Homeland Elegies was a Finalist
for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal. Schwartz was the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona
Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing for 2014.
This event will be livestreamed. ASL interpretation and live captioning will be provided.
In an online class with international participants, one panelist was taken aback by a submission of creative
nonfiction that entered de Sadean realms of sexual exploration. Despite the writing's brilliance and the
scene's necessity, the panelist felt that a warning, at least, was necessary for those with less tolerance
for extreme behaviors and graphic description. This panel will discuss strategies for confronting that
moment in workshop.
Event Outline
To review a book connects readers with an unfamiliar text. And it’s an artistic project of its own.
Yet it also embarks on a critical engagement with the work. How can all of these things be simultaneously
true? Five writers and editors—a scholar of Black intellectual practice, a prizewinning poetry critic,
a PEN award-winner, an expert in horror and a former books editor of the L.A. Times—discuss the
art, craft and practice of book reviewing, exploring points of intersection and difference.
Event Outline
This panel—comprised of diverse female writers and academics—explores the narratives and
counternarratives intrinsic to the self: LGBTQIA+, the Latinx and Caribbean American voice, Black,
Caucasian, and biracial. We depart from the idea that it is imperative for authors to employ their culture
and gender of origin. Sometimes characters from different backgrounds inhabit our work. This raises
questions: Are we entitled to do this? Is a sensitivity reader sufficient? Is this acceptable—or not?
Event Outline
Even experienced writers struggle with putting together a manuscript that will be true to their project and
appeal to publishers they are interested in working with. The panel, consisting of award-winning editors and
writers, will cover a range of topics, from basics like font size and line spacing to more subtle aspects
such as poem ordering and how to manage the readers' experience as they move through your book. All in order
to give your collection the best chance of catching an editor's eye.
Indigenous peoples are those who have had the longest relationship with any given place. They have the
deepest knowledge of the plants and animals, and they are the longest-serving stewards of the land, often
for 10,000 years or more. Respect for the land is an integral part of Indigenous cultures. The panelists
will discuss what Indigenous writers bring to the broader conversation of poetry concerning environmental
preservation, ecosystem damage, and climate change and read representative poems.
Event Outline
Piyali Bhattacharya, Mira Jacob, Nayomi Munaweera, and Jafreen Uddin ask each other: why is it often
difficult to build writing coalitions of color? What does it mean to build artistic community among Asian
women, and why are these spaces so often riddled with drama? Is the root of the problem internalized racial
oppression? That white supremacy tells us "there can only be one?" If so, what can we do in our
writing communities to address this elephant in the room when or even before it comes up?
Over many years, a poet’s relationship to language, to self, and to society goes through many
changes, some deliberate, some unconscious. This is especially true for writers from marginalized
communities who often face biases that further complicate their lives—on and off the
page. Using their own recently published new and selected collections, the panelists—four
poets, two women, two men—will read original work and discuss the things that can sustain or
confound a life in writing.
Event
Outline
Did you think you’d finish graduate school and then score a great gig at an institution of higher
learning? But now you're tired of the hustle? For many of us, the dream is over as jobs in humanities
departments dwindle. So what are the options? Join this diverse panel of professionals who have let go of
academic aspirations—some happily, some not so much —and who have found new ways to work while
still maintaining their identities as writers.
Event Outline
This panel reading explores writers Jayne Cortez, Tyehimba Jess, Wole Soyinka, Monica Hand, Sonia Sanchez,
and Julia de Burgos, whose works engage African cosmology, culture, history, and spirits of the divine.
Panelists discuss African Diasporic identities and representative voices who resist colonial and oppressive
silence(s) to foster healing and explore local and global BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) who use
the word/craft as conduits of transformative justice.
Event Outline
What about the letter appeals to queer writers across multiple genres? How, when, and why do queer writers
turn to/make use of epistolary form? Working with and within the form of the letter, this diverse panel of
three transgenerational queer-identified writers reveals epistolarity as an aperture for vulnerability,
renewed intimacy with the body, and access for/to past and future selves. In writing to an imagined audience
of everyone, how might we use the letter to express desires yet to come?
Event Outline
World War I’s centennial offered chances for today’s war writers to reflect upon literary debts
owed to 1914–1918 poets in blogs, articles, and new work. This panel fuses history, literary analysis,
and creative writing to explore this phenomenon. Members include veteran poets addressing issues of
religion, family, sexuality, gender, and PTSD through WWI's lens. WWI poetry and contemporary war literature
experts propose insight into the intersections of personal experience, history, and literary craft.
Event Outline
The immigrant narrative has long posed questions about borders, traditions, assimilation, and multiple
identities. Writers and artists have worked across genres and media to create these experiential portraits.
In this conversation, we'll explore the effects, consequences, and stories that emerge when writers and
artists invoke characters from second- and third-generation immigrant heritages that journey through
intersectional communities while creating one for themselves.
The linked short story collection is capacious. By considering a range of formal possibilities—from
collections loosely linked by voice or theme to more traditionally linked collections united by place or
character to novels that make use of the form of the collection through, for example, the use of an episodic
structure—we will investigate ways to conceive of and begin (or finish!) book projects along this
spectrum, guided by a sense of what the writer wants to collect.
Event Outline
Childrens’ authors have the privilege and responsibility to tell stories that matter. These panelists
write stories that share the lived experiences of children and teens outside the mainstream, narratives that
transcend marginalizations—not by erasing them, but by embracing them. In centering outsiders, these
authors honor the craft of story and the art of humanity. This panel highlights the motivations, challenges,
craft, and artistry that contribute to the creation and success of their books.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1
Vivian Gornick instructs memoirists to capture complexity in the people they write about, even those who
cause great conflict or pain. “For the drama to deepen,” she asserts, “we must see the
loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.” Memoirists on this panel share their
experience portraying difficult people on the page and offer techniques for writing about them in rich and
multidimensional ways, resisting the urge to villainize while also not pulling any punches.
Event Outline
Three poets and one novelist reflect on the traumas of child loss, reproductive loss, and
geographical/genocidal loss through the lens of fatherhood. These writers will explore what it means to name
the unsayable nature of grief in their writing as both a craft and personal issue. Deconstructing societal
taboos around emotion and masculinity, these writers will explore the particular nature of fatherly grief,
what it means to “lose all father now” as the poet Ben Jonson wrote centuries ago.
Event
Outline
How do varieties of form inform poets’ performances? What are the sonic connections between visual
poems and villanelles? How can collage collect a community's attention? Join us for an innovative reading
exploring idiosyncratic approaches to form and its relationship to both composition and performance. We'll
engage the drafting process as well as final drafts. And, as each poet is also an accomplished teacher,
we'll discuss how diverse formal innovations enliven the community of the classroom.
Event Outline
Short fiction readings from faculty members of the Southern New Hampshire University Online MFA program.
Event Outline
In the wake of COVID, arts communities, including literary communities and artists, have been devastated. As
we emerge, arts activists are looking beyond relief to new modes for supporting artists and the arts. Can
there be a new new deal for artists? What might it include? Four thinkers explore how the arts build equity
and discuss art as labor, art as a component of repair and reparation, and current initiatives designed to
create a richer, more abundant future for working artists.
This virtual discussion room will take place live and will not be recorded for on-demand viewing.
Event Outline
Three-twenty P.M. to Four-twenty P.M.
Neuroqueer poets write poems amazingly expressive of their divergent selves and shaped by the practice of
neuroqueering. Think of e.e. cummings, who was dyslexic, jumbling words and scattering letters across a
page. Neuroqueer poets are expanding the boundaries of poetic communication and intention in ways that are
disruptive, vital, and celebratory. This panel brings together three autistic poets (Jai Hamid Bashir,
Hilary Brown, and Nathan Spoon) and an OCD poet (K. Iver).
Event Outline
Literature provides some solace, even after a global pandemic, widespread racial unrest, and the Capitol
attack. And while America’s still healing, the diverse anthology/edited collection is one substantive
and impactful way to unite voices. Now more than ever, more women, POC, and queer writers are leading and
creating our own spaces for diverse narratives. The editors in this panel discuss projects they directed
alongside the challenges and triumphs they faced organizing and pitching them.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2, Supplemental Document 3
The intersection of poetry and mental illness has a problematic history in the cultural imagination, from
Blake’s mythologized “madness” to Plath’s romanticized suicide. In recent years this
connection has been demystified, illuminating that the lived reality of writing with these disabilities is
complex—as is the relationship between one’s conditions and their art. How do mental illnesses
consciously and subconsciously impact poetics? This panel convenes five poets to discuss their experiences.
Event Outline
Most of the time, creative nonfiction books deal with something traumatic or brutal. As writers, how mindful
are we in recreating these scenes on the page? When we engage with topics like physical, mental, or sexual
abuse, rape, self-harm, debilitating illness, and deaths of our loved ones, how intentional are we when
narrating readers through these moments? Do we create a veil to protect our readers or draw the readers
right in as though they’re experiencing these things themselves?
Event Outline
Publishing with a small press with a limited promotion budget can leave an author feeling adrift and alone
when it comes to advertising and promoting their books. Some (who have the resources to do so) hire outside
publicists. This panel seeks to answer some hard questions about how to find the right publicist to promote
your work and how to gauge your success. What should a publicist cost? How many books will the author have
to sell to cover that cost? Is it worthwhile in the long run?
Event Outline
Why did Dodge Poetry, Mass Poetry, and Split This Rock call themselves festivals? Do they share some
fundamental goals for the kinds of events and experiences they want to create, voices they choose to
present, or the audiences they hope to reach? What distinguishes them from academic or professional
conferences? Past and present directors of some of our most vibrant poetry festivals discuss the hows and
whys of starting, sustaining, and keeping them alive and well.
Event Outline
Blended memoirs—or books or collections that incorporate other genres and forms into the personal
narrative—are increasingly common in today's literary market. But how to strike the right balance
between the personal and the critical, the reported, the illustrated, the researched? How to sell it? Our
panel will explore the creative process and blunt publishing reality of this emergent form.
Event Outline
Three-twenty P.M. to Four-thirty-five P.M.
AJB presents a tribute, celebrating Jean Valentine, author of thirteen books of poetry and recipient of
numerous awards and fellowships in recognition of her exceptional accomplishments in literature, including
the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 2017. Moderated by Anne Marie Macari, the tribute gathers a distinguished
panel as they celebrate Jean Valentine's extraordinary life and contributions to literature.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1
Just as astute fiction writers build their racial awareness to portray racial realities outside their own,
discerning literary critics can develop such awareness to review books with unfamiliar racial experience.
How can critics deepen understanding of an author’s racially informed artistic tradition? Should
critics seek editorial guidance to identify potential racial blind spots? This diverse panel brings together
critics and creative writers to explore these and other questions.
Event Outline
Short form fiction has an important part to play in children’s literature—particularly when it
can highlight the intersecting identities that make up the reality of our world. A diverse panel of authors
writing for children across age groups will discuss the impact that short fiction can have on readers and
how learning how to write short fiction can deepen and improve craft.
Event Outline
Haunted memoir unsettles traditional notions of memoir and nonfiction as it engages with ghosts, both
metaphoric and actual, to examine what haunts us collectively and individually. In this session, panelists
will discuss the various forms hauntings have taken in their work, how haunted memoir pushes against the
constraints of normative nonfiction, as well as discuss how they create their ghosts on the page.
Event Outline
Traditional notions of ekphrasis often give poet and poem passive roles like observing or reflecting. These
poets expand the aesthetics of ekphrasis into active modes of research and documentary, creating works that
are not so much products but processes of exploration and interrogation. Fusing the verbal and the visual
into a single lens, they go beyond the museum and gallery to elucidate not only other art forms but also the
social, political, economic, and linguistic forces shaping all.
Event Outline
Community is integral to a poet’s work, development, and identity. Poets who are K–12 teachers
often struggle to access the larger literary community and must find new ways of building support networks
and seeking creative opportunities, often doing so through their teaching practice. Five poets discuss how
to cultivate strong connections to the larger poetry world while using poetry to foster more caring
communities for their students, many of whom carry literary aspirations of their own.
Event Outline
Monica A. Hand (1953–2016) was a brilliant poet, playwright, book artist, translator, Cave Canem
Fellow, mentor, and activist. Her poetry books, me and Nina (2012), winner of the 2010 Kinereth
Gensler Award, and The DiVida Poems (A2018), reveal a profound, major voice for the experiences of
African Americans, women, and artists and for peace and social justice. Panelists will talk about her, read
her poems, and show images of one of our most beloved poets whose loss is felt all over the world.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1
In the decade since Occupy Wall Street, American writers have focused on questions of money and power to a
degree not seen at least since the 1930s. On this panel, five novelists will discuss how recent critiques of
capitalism have shaped their writing, their teaching, and their approach to the literary community.
How do writers decide between fiction and memoir? How does the process of writing shift when shifting
genres? In this panel, writers who have written and published in both genres will discuss the craft choices,
ethical questions, research inquiries, and publishing concerns that lie behind each. Rather than approaching
the topic as fiction vs. nonfiction, we will offer examples of how to navigate both and encourage people to
consider the possibilities that emerge from multigenre writing.
Event
Outline
Say the word "grammar," and most students flee, but attention to the mechanics of the sentence as
a dynamic form can illuminate new possibilities for writers in any genre. Four writer-teachers with
experience from grade school to grad school will speak about the generative potential that conversations
about grammar and syntax have in their classrooms and their own work. Challenging ideas of
“correctness,” they engage students in understanding how grammar underpins voice, vernacular,
and expression.
Event Outline
Broadsided Press has been publishing collaborations between writers and visual artists as monthly broadsides
since 2005; this year, Provincetown Arts Press is publishing an anthology of this groundbreaking work. Join
founder Elizabeth Bradfield and poets from the anthology Jennifer Perrine, Luiza Flynn-Goodlet, Margaret
Noodin, and John Nieves in a celebration of poems, art, and the synergy between. Images of the art will be
projected as the poets read work from the anthology.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2
Four writers translating between English, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, French, and Hebrew
(over)whelm the conventions that separate reading and writing, writing and translation. They reflect on how
their own writing continues their affective, political, and transcultural work of translating literary
texts. In their work, they attend to the consequent reconfigurations of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and
status that are marked by language and which change over time.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2
Viet Thanh Nguyen writes, “True justice is creating a world” where displaced people can
“tell their stories and be heard, rather than be dependent on a writer or a representative.”
This panel examines representational strategies for writing the stories of refugees and displaced people as
justly as possible. The panelists focus on developing a cowriting relationship, interviewing around trauma,
structuring narratives, challenging stereotypes, and creating space in a crowded publishing field.
Event Outline
Every magazine and press starts with an idea, an aesthetic, and a passion. Some also start with grants, a
network, and funding. Others don’t. Our presenters will give immediate and practical advice on
establishing and maintaining e-journals, print journals, and presses from one’s personal finances. We
will discuss web development, printing, distribution, sales, the business aspects of zero-budget publishing,
and free ways to expand audiences. Additional resources will be explored and provided.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1
To celebrate the 1970 founding of Medgar Evers College, the City University of New York, five teachers from
the college’s English Department will talk about how they integrate ideas of social justice and human
equality into their writing classrooms. Panelists will explore the intersection of artistic integrity with
social responsibility, and discuss their concerns and approaches in preparing students of color to develop
an aesthetic inclusivity.
Event Outline
In publishing's ongoing work toward greater diversity and access, fellowships and mentorships can be the
keys to doors many would otherwise see as closed to them. Focusing on A Public Space's fellowship
program as one model for supporting emerging writers and editors, panelists will discuss their involvement
with the program and how a fellowship can offer people from a variety of backgrounds and experiences the
tools to help shape a more diverse and vibrant publishing community.
Event Outline
Issues of race and culture are pressing topics in the US. However, mainstream commentary rarely considers
how these issues are illustrated in working-class literature. Writers from poor and working-class
backgrounds read stories and novel excerpts that address the various conceptual and literal conflicts their
characters face in their day-to-day lives along the Texas-Mexican border, California’s east bay, and
the rural Midwest.
Event Outline
The Women's Caucus offers a space to network, plan events, and discuss issues concerning women writers (eg.,
ways to support each other, lack of access to literary power structures, conference childcare, obstacles to
publication, keeping literary events safe, etc.). The Women's Caucus is an inclusive space, and it welcomes
the diverse perspectives of women writers. This meeting will be accessible to in-person and virtual
attendees.
Event Outline
The West Chester University Poetry Center is excited to showcase the most recent winners of the Donald
Justice Prize. Since 2006, the Justice Prize has been awarded to a book-length collection of formal poetry.
This panel features the work of four formalist poets from diverse backgrounds. It highlights personal and
familial issues as well as national and international cultural concerns.Their masterful approach to poetic
form and craft is shifting the landscape of contemporary American poetry.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2, Supplemental Document 3
The writer’s silence may be the writing workshop’s longest tradition. And yet a chorus of recent
scholarship problematizes this restriction and teaches us the value of bringing the writer’s voice
into the room. This discussion begins, then, not with the writer’s silence but with their speech. How
will writers speak in our workshops? Participants will have opportunities to voice their ideas, ask
questions, and respond to strategies suggested by the presenters.
This virtual discussion room will take place live and will not be recorded for on-demand viewing.
Event Outline
Five o'clock P.M. to Six-fifteen P.M.
Join Blue Flower Arts for a reading and conversation featuring Elizabeth Acevedo, Dawn Lundy Martin, and
Deesha Philyaw—three phenomenal women of color working across mediums to give voice to the most urgent
stories of our time. From novel-in-verse and YA lit, story collections and poetry, TV pilots, essay, and
memoir, these writers truly do it all, challenging the limits of genre and reflecting a diversity of stories
through a wide range of storytelling methods.
This event will be livestreamed. ASL interpretation and live captioning will be provided.
The annual two-year caucus meeting provides a space to connect, report, archive, and initiate conversations
about creative writing at two-year colleges as related to AWP. Additionally, this annual meeting gives the
caucus an opportunity to recruit and support new members, align our work with AWP, and plan and prepare for
AWP Conferences. The annual meeting is supported with an email list serve, webpage, and Facebook account to
continue and sustain the work until we can meet again. This meeting will be accessible to in-person and
virtual attendees.
Event Outline
Daily 12-step meeting. All in recovery from anything are welcome.
The Disabled & D/deaf Writers Caucus allows for those who are disabled or living with chronic illness
and their allies to network and discuss common challenges related to identity, writing, and teaching while
professionally leading a literary life. By meeting annually at the AWP conference, we aim to archive our
interests, challenges, and concerns in order to increase our visibility and emphasize our importance both to
this organization and to the communities where we live, teach, and work. This meeting will be accessible to
in-person and virtual attendees.
Six o'clock P.M. to Seven-thirty P.M.
An open reception and meet and greet for Rosemont College MFA in Creative Writing and MA in Publishing
students, faculty, alumni, and friends.
Calling all teachers, peer organizations, literary mentors, and youth advocates: Meet the editors, board,
and staff of the BreakBread Literacy Project. Join us to learn more about our work with young creatives.
First ten people in the door get a free copy of BreakBread Magazine.
Sponsored by Pen Parentis, this is a place to mingle with other writers who have kids (they don't have to be
with you!) Discover networking opportunities, fellowships, accountability groups, and other resources to
help you stay on creative track. Both newbies and alumni of salons welcome!
Six-thirty P.M. to Seven-forty-five P.M.
This presentation will examine teaching at the intersection of writing and visual art to help student
artists find meaningful connections between self, learning, and world. The goal is to share ways for art
school writing faculty to invite every student to build informed conversations about their work. This
meeting will be held virtually.
Event Outline
Latinx writers are becoming increasingly visible in literary spaces. However, there is still work to be done
to address inequalities in access and visibility. The Latinx Writers Caucus creates space for new, emerging,
and established writers of varied Latinx identities to network, discuss obstacles to publication (i.e.,
active oppression and the cultural marginalization of Latinx writers), and discuss panel and event planning
that will increase Latinx participation at future AWP conferences. This meeting will be held virtually on
the virtual conference platform.
Event Outline
Eight-thirty P.M. to Ten o'clock P.M.
Toi Derricotte is the recipient of the 2020 Frost Medal from Poetry Society of America. Her sixth collection
of poetry, "I”: New and Selected Poems, was published in 2019 and shortlisted for the 2019
National Book Award. Other books of poetry include The Undertaker’s Daughter, Tender,
Captivity, Natural Birth, and The Empress of the Death House.
Her literary memoir, The Black Notebooks, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction and was a
New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her numerous literary awards include fellowships from the
Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was awarded
the 2012 Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement, a Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts
Award from the United Black Artists, the 2012 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and the Lucille Medwick
Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. With Cornelius Eady, Derricotte cofounded the Cave Canem
Foundation in 1996. They are corecipients of the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, the City of
Literature Paul Engle Prize, and the MLA Phyllis Franklin Award. She is professor emerita from University of
Pittsburgh and a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
This event will be livestreamed. ASL interpretation and live captioning will be provided.
Ten o'clock P.M. to Midnight
AWP welcomes students to return to the roots of Slam! Open Mic, where 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, March 24, 2022, and Friday, March 25, 2022, 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.
Seven-thirty A.M. to Eight-forty-five A.M.
Daily 12-step meeting. All in recovery from anything are welcome.
Eight o'clock A.M. to Five o'clock P.M.
The first stop at #AWP22 is the vaccination verification check-in, located at the 155 N Broad Street
entrance to the Pennsylvania Convention Center. All attendees must verify proof of valid COVID-19
vaccination through CrowdPass. Once you are verified, you will receive your #AWP22 lanyard, which will serve
as indication your vaccination status has been verified. Proceed to the Registration area in Halls D&E
on the 200 level to complete the registration process.
Attendees who have registered in advance or who have yet to purchase a registration may secure their
registration materials in AWP’s registration area located in Exhibit Hall E, Pennsylvania Convention
Center, 200 Level. Please consult the bookfair map in the conference planner for location details. Students
must present a valid student ID to check-in or register at our student rate. Seniors must present a valid ID
to register at our senior rate. A $50 fee will be charged for all replacement badges.
Coat check is available outside of Halls D & E on the 200 level of the Pennsylvania Convention Center. It is
$3.00 per item checked, or $5.00 for two items. ATMs can be found in the Broad Street Atrium on the 100
Level, by the Business Center on the 200 Level, and near the Concierge on 200 level.
A Mamava lactation suite is located outside of room 126B of the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
The Lactation Room is located in room 110A of the Pennsylvania Convention Center. To access the Lactation
Room, please see the AWP Help Desk to obtain the key. For reasons of privacy and security, access to the
lactation room is granted with permission from AWP only.
A dedicated quiet space for you to collect your thoughts, unwind, and
escape the literary commotion. "There is a solitude of space, / A
solitude of sea, / A solitude of death, but these / Society shall be, /
Compared with that profounder site, / That polar privacy, / A Soul
admitted to Itself: / Finite Infinity."—Emily Dickinson
A second dedicated quiet space for you to collect your thoughts, unwind, and
escape the literary commotion. “There is a solitude of space, / A
solitude of sea, / A solitude of death, but these / Society shall be, /
Compared with that profounder site, / That polar privacy, / A Soul
admitted to Itself: / Finite Infinity.”—Emily Dickinson
A quiet space free of fluorescent lighting located in room 110B of the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
Nine o'clock A.M. to Ten o'clock A.M.
This panel will focus on erasure poetry in all of its myriad variations (procedural, self-erasure, blackout,
grayscale, etc). Questions we will consider include: When may one take liberties with someone else’s
text? How does one reconcile found texts with one’s own voice as a poet? How does one present erasure
material from a visual standpoint (meaning its layout on the printed page)? What questions of power and
privilege emerge within an erasure project, and how can we be more responsible?
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2, Supplemental Document 3
There has never been a panel from/by Apache writers who discuss their written, made, or spoken
discourses.The panel addresses ways we engage Apache culture, stories, symbols, and representation through
language (Apache, English). Panelists' conversation and poetry readings will make linkages between
Ndé identity, story, and historical remnants of mythologies, remaking the memorial, emergence and
resurgence of authority through the written word, and the inroads this makes for all Indigenous poets.
Event Outline
This panel will focus on innovative ways to create poetry programming beyond the traditional poetry reading
and slam/poetry performance stage. The panelists will discuss what makes their poetry programming and
community unique, what nurtures that programming and community, and what sustains that programming and
community long-term. The panel will consist of four curators with forty-plus years' experience combined and
significantly diverse followings varying in age, skill, nationality, craft, and culture.
Event Outline
June Jordan said, “To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value
yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.” The Write On Poetry Babes is a collective
of womxn whose truth telling has created protest initiatives and projects that support BIPOC womxn and LGBTQ
folks. The collective holds space for each other and the poetry community. This panel will discuss how our
experiences can help other communities empower themselves and effect intersectional change.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1
This panel explores the myths and realities of writers who work across multiple literary
genres—nonfiction, poetry, and fiction. Panelists will address the specter of genre mastery,
institutional pressures, and how genre pivoting influences personal and professional lives. Craft topics
will include the relationship between form and content, voice across genres, polygenre versus hybrid work,
and the persistence of genre. The panel affirms writing across genres as transformative practice.
Event Outline
The Akrilica series is the first of its kind, focused on innovative Latinx writing. Named after former
national poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera's essential text, this series seeks out Latinx writers working in
new ways that push us, both formally and conceptually. Hear from new and established writers in the Akrilica
series, each with a unique point of view.
Event Outline
Erica Vital-Lazare, editor of McSweeney's Of the Diaspora series, will discuss the series origin, selection
process, and publicity strategy for this remarkable program. Launched in 2020, it identifies and republishes
important previously published works by Black Americans with the goal of finding new contemporary audiences
for works whose perspectives are more urgent today than ever. Titles include novels like Tragic Magic
by Wesley Brown and historic photos with new essays by Lester and Aisha Sloan.
Event Outline
Nine o'clock A.M. to Ten-fifteen A.M.
Literary arts add playful, evocative, poignant, and memorable elements to traditional public art. Literary
centers from large and small cities spark ideas, such as installing a poetry or memory mural, poetry and
recordings on utility boxes, poems on sidewalks and buses, large-scale banners featuring acclaimed local
writers, a sculpture honoring a literary luminary, and more. Presenters will include tips on collaboration,
installation, public and private permissions, and securing funding.
Event Outline
The Kenyon Review Fellowships celebrates its tenth anniversary with a reading and Q&A featuring
five current and former fellows. The KR Fellows are a diverse group of younger writers who spend two years
at Kenyon College teaching creative writing, working on an individual project, and contributing to the
editorial life of the Review. They will gather to read from their recent work and answer questions
about the fellowships—the highs and the lows, the good and the bad—from audience members.
Event Outline
Feminist economist Heidi Hartman defines patriarchy as “relations between men, which have a material
base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that
enable them to dominate women.” Masculinity is one of the defining forces of our contemporary world;
its presence or absence is always a salient choice in prose. This is an exploration of craft choices across
genre that problematize masculinity with intentionality and artistic rigor.
Event Outline
Four MFA students (and a faculty moderator) show how the pandemic impacted their experiences in school and
inspired them to tackle issues of social justice and creative writing pedagogy. Students will address how
the pandemic exacerbated social inequities on a student-run press, impacted international students' visas
and travel, and inspired the formation of faculty/student working groups to advance anti-racist pedagogies
for discussing the craft and context of diverse literature of the Americas.
Event Outline
Reviewers, both traditional and graphic, consider literary labor in relation to other labors and reviewing
as an act of literary citizenship. Within the Republic of Letters, they will discuss the review’s
power to amplify voices and challenge dominate narratives. They explore the cerebral joy of reading a book,
considering it deeply, and constructing an argument about it. As editors, teachers, activists, they end by
sharing ideas for encouraging the next generation of reviewers.
Event Outline
“The literary history of the thirties,” George Orwell warned in 1940, “seems to justify
the opinion that a writer does well to keep out of politics.” Yet eighty years later, most literary
journals, like most presses and institutions, have felt the need to confront political realities, including
assaults on democracy, police brutality, sexual abuse, and more. Are there risks in embracing these aims?
What is the effect on the art they produce? Can journals remain relevant without becoming dogmatic?
Event Outline
In response to the Black Lives Matter protests and #publishingpaidme, many organizations promised to do
better, but what does doing better look like? This panel includes book and magazine editors, a multicultural
marketer, a bookshop owner, and an editorial director who will discuss the actionable steps they’ve
taken to rebuild the industry. They will also explain how to tap into a broad range of storytelling
traditions within our country's growing multicultural communities.
Event Outline
No one breaks your heart like a woman, especially when a woman breaks another woman’s heart. Female
friendships make or break us in ways no other relationship can. How do we draw from these experiences that
reverberate through lifetimes? How do they impact our work?
Four critically acclaimed authors dynamically engage with one another, drawing from their multigenre works
as well as their own experiences to discuss the role of authentically crafting these friendships in
literature and in life.
Event Outline
Five small press authors will speak to their experiences debuting in 2021 with small presses. They will
cover the benefits and challenges of their individual publishing journeys so far, as well as their own tips
for a successful book launch.
Event Outline
In Monster of God, science scribe David Quammen writes that monsters “keep us company.”
Sea beasts, serial killers, white supremacy, eugenics, xenomorphs—writers obsess over what looms. In
this panel, five CNF writers discuss the risks and rewards of confronting monsters. How do we write the
ultimate Other when the monster is us? How do we navigate narratives that paint us as monsters? Do we stomp
the construct? We offer tips for witnessing, approaching, confronting, and wrangling the fearsome.
Event Outline
Exploring multiple genres—poetry, essays, performance, and fiction—this panel opens up feminist
traditions to make connections and innovations towards a multiplicity of contemporary feminisms. We’ll
share work and talk about intersectional possibilities, including world- and identity-making as a
genderqueer practice, interspecies alliances and spinster ecologies, feminist lineages through chronic pain
and disability, psych survivor experiences, and quantum gender.
Event Outline
This reading features four of the most significant poets and translators of Iran or Iranian descent. They
are representatives of an anthology published by Green Linden Press in September, 2021, Essential Voices:
Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora, which includes 130 poets and translators from ten countries.
Collectively, the readers explore themes of identity, oppression, freedom, language, translation, and the
potential for poetry to help us understand and navigate social and political complexity.
Event Outline
Some stories are told from a single point of view, while others are told by many characters who take turns
giving us their own (sometimes conflicting) version of events. How do you decide when to use multiple
perspectives? Which characters should serve as narrators? And once you’ve decided on multiple
perspectives, how do you create voices that are strong and distinct? We will discuss the when, why, and how
of writing an effective multiple-POV story to deliver a powerful, layered narrative.
Event Outline
Why would a writer choose to experiment with different forms and work in multiple new and emerging genres?
Are there possibilities for newer technologies deepening stories we tell about social justice and change?
How can we encourage greater participation from writers with fewer resources or technological access? Four
writers will discuss their own daring, insightful work, along with the work of innovative writers Rachel
Eliza Griffiths and Duriel Harris, and the ways we build brilliant futures.
Event Outline
In writing nonfiction, we curate versions of ourselves and other characters, making choices as to which
aspects of personhood to include on the page. In this panel, writers highlight various aspects of their
identities from essay to essay based on subject, audience, style, etc., and discuss our responsibilities to
readers and to ourselves.
Event Outline
An ars poetica is a poem about poetry, one that makes an argument about what poetry should be or that
explores why we write. In writing an ars poetica, though, poets must also confess to craft, artifice, and
intention—to this strange thing we're doing, making art out of life. What else comes out when we pull
back the curtain on our own making? What does this form give us permission to say? Panelists will read and
discuss both their own work and key examples by others; audience Q&A will follow.
Event Outline
“Nature writing” has long been associated with privileged people enjoying pristine environments,
devoid of human influence, in ways that disregard more complicated realities of race, class, access,
colonialism, and more. A diverse group of panelists who publish and teach nature writing will discuss how
the old concepts of nature and nature writing have been replaced in recent years with a broader range of
writers, experiences, and ideas.
Event Outline
Nine o'clock A.M. to Five o'clock P.M.
With more than 600 literary exhibitors, the AWP Bookfair is the largest of its kind. A great way to meet
authors, critics, and peers, the bookfair also provides excellent opportunities to find information about
many literary magazines, presses, and organizations. Please consult the bookfair map in the printed
conference planner or AWP mobile app for location details.
Breakfast and lunch concessions are available inside the Exhibit Hall in the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
Cash, debit, and credit cards are accepted at all food and beverage locations. Please consult the maps in
the conference program or mobile app for location details. Due to COVID-19 precautions, eating and drinking
is limited to designated areas.
The Wick Poetry Center’s Traveling Stanzas Makerspace offers conference attendees an opportunity to
creatively engage with themes of health and healing, social and racial justice, nature and environment, and
peace and conflict. This interactive exhibit invites participants to share their voice using a suite of
digital expressive writing tools, such as Emerge (an erasure poetry app), Thread (community-generated
poems), and the Listening Wall (thematically-driven touch-screen poetry displays). Visitors will be able to
choose a theme, follow a prompt, then print and share their responses. More information can be found at
http://travelingstanzas.com.
Ten-thirty-five A.M. to Eleven-thirty-five A.M.
Furthering Indigenous, womanist, and queer/trans traditions of color, queer/trans Native men are creating
art detailing the struggles and beautiful survival of multiple sovereign territories. Transgender,
nonbinary, and queer writers/editors from the Americas, Pacific, and Palestine will discuss how Indigenous
interpenetrating bodies—terrestrial, cultural, physical—figure in their work, and how lands and
lovers are woven together, families and futures, and the surviving of genocide, intimately linked.
Event Outline
Writers and artists have always inspired and influenced the world through literature and art. Many have
taken the initiative to impact political and cultural shifts. However, their engagement in civic actions is
more needed than ever before. The panel will explore how writers, poets, and artists can join hands to
safeguard global interests and find solutions to concerns such as wars, human rights, hunger, illiteracy,
climate change, and more by working with the United Nations Associations.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1
For many writers, publishing work in a top journal can change the trajectory of one’s career. This
panel will take us behind the scenes at four of America’s best literary journals. Editors will tell us
what they look for in submissions, challenges they face in working with writers and running their journals,
how their publications have evolved over time, and advice they have for writers hoping to receive that most
wonderful of all emails: “We loved your submission and would like to publish it.”
Event Outline
What are the pluralities and contradictions we face in pandemic times when fissures the world over have been
exacerbated? Five transnational writers read from their works that straddle borders, engaging complex
histories of Canada, Haiti, China, India, the Netherlands, Pakistan, and the US. They tell stories rooted in
struggles for justice. Their decolonial writings carve out pathways toward solidarity across multiple
identities.
Event Outline
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, earn income, and sustain a writing life.
Women artists have long used raunch as a tool of empowerment and comedic relief to claim space and assert
identity in healing and transgressive modes. In this joyful and bawdy reading, five women poets will
celebrate sex, profanity, and raunch, asserting what Audre Lorde writes: “In touch with the erotic, I
become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to
me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.”
Event Outline
First published in 1978, Carolyn Forché’s poem “The Colonel," set in El Salvador as
the country spiraled toward civil war, has been widely read, critiqued, emulated, and anthologized. Thirty
years after the signing of the peace accords that ended the war and the poem's publication, five Salvadoran
poets born in El Salvador and in the US—of different generations and affinities with the
poem—discuss the impact of “The Colonel” on contemporary writing and on a generation of
Central American poets.
Event Outline
Ten-thirty-five A.M. to Eleven-fifty A.M.
The art and activism of young people flourished despite 2020’s political, social justice, civil
rights, and health crises. In media res, the BreakBread Literacy Project launched a national youth arts
organization: publishing BreakBread Magazine and providing free creative writing classes, events, and
literary apprenticeships for creatives age 14–24. Project founders will discuss the ups, downs,
lessons learned, and future of a literary organization that seeks to change the face of publishing.
Event Outline
Afrofuturism has experienced a second wave in the 21st-century mainstream propelled by the success of the
2018 blockbuster film Black Panther. This panel explores the impact of this second wave on
Afrofuturism poetry. Panelists featured in a new poetry anthology on Afrofuturism, black comics, and
superhero culture discuss how their poetry contributes to second-wave Afrofuturism, along with insights to
Afrofuturism poetry as a sustainable genre and defining it for future generations.
Event Outline
What does it mean to teach CW as a minority instructor? In the age of "Asian Hate," how can we as
Asian Americans specifically incorporate ourselves into courses called simply "Workshop," as if to
imply an ossified canon? In these classrooms that have historically ignored us, how can we be sensitive
workshop guides to both minority and majority community students while still taking care of ourselves?
Students, how can you ask for CW instruction that leaves you feeling included and cared for?
Time and time again, undergraduates—even those with a self-professed interest in literature—will
come to creative writing classes claiming they don’t “get” or care for poetry. How do we
engage students in a genre they’re certain they don’t like or understand? On this panel,
professors will discuss strategies across a range of university courses detailing how they open
students’ minds to poetry and what lessons, prompts, and activities have helped foster a love for
poetry among their students.
Event Outline
How does LGBTQIA writing inform an understanding of life in rural spaces? Writers from a range of
racial/ethnic, national, generational, and occupational identities will read from work set in Mexico,
Alabama, Vermont, and beyond. Our work includes novels under contract, published memoirs, poems, and
biomythography.
Event Outline
This panel combines readings by four lively poets with a discussion centered around the following questions:
How do suppressed or redirected desires for motherhood (or nonmaternity) reside in our poems? How do our
identities as cisgender or nonbinary, Black or white, immigrant or native-born make their way into poems
that critique, reject, or resurrect the maternal? How do our forms give voice to the silenced or forbidden?
Our collaborative conversation invites audience participation.
Event Outline
This reading features writers affected by trauma, addiction, and/or mental illness. Panelists will present
their stories to empower themselves and others who have these stigmatized disabilities. Panelists will come
out as neurodiverse as they inspire their listeners with their literary memoirs; audience members, including
the neurotypical, will be able to identify with their struggles, triumphs, and resilience. The panel will
demonstrate that mentally ill does not mean mentally weak.
Event Outline
The Claw—a Philadelphia-based salon for genderqueer, trans, and cis women writers—invites you to
imagine diverse communal spaces beyond the writing workshop. Members of The Claw discuss how they create
safe spaces and promote mentorship and collaboration between writers. Participants will introduce
frameworks, guidelines, and rituals fostering connection rather than competition, boosting rather than
boasting. Audience members are given tools to return home and launch their own collectives.
Event Outline
How do learning spaces rally in service of their community members and bridge the access-gap between art
literacy and class? In this panel, four diverse LA area workshop founders open a dialogue on their community
outreach, operating practices, and pedagogies. Each panelist will outline achievements and challenges
they’ve encountered in their work to uplift, mentor, teach, and advocate new models that center
multiculturalism and deny systems of domination and white supremacy in the classroom.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1
The American Poetry Review has been in continuous publication since 1972. In honor of our
anniversary, we are proud to present four writers whose work is exemplary of the excellence and range we
publish. Contributing poets will read in honor of the occasion.
Event Outline
Exploring a pedagogy of showing up, not just for our students and colleagues, but for ourselves. How do we
find moments to rest while setting boundaries, finding and sharing resources of rest, and embracing the
power of moving back? We will look at ways to restore and repair in a time when faculty (especially those
with marginalized identities) are asked to do unrecognized and uncompensated work for social justice and
campus equity.
Event Outline
What kinds of feedback help our students thrive? We draw from professional experience as well as from
research in education and composition studies in sharing best practices in written and oral feedback. Our
recommendations take into account student difference such as race, gender, class, and neurodivergence and
apply to online, hybrid, and in-person creative writing classrooms for every level from high school to
continuing education.
Event Outline
A growing body of contemporary Jewish poetry imagines its way into the worlds of our recent ancestors,
whether literal, literary, or in spirit. What are the challenges of writing to investigate or recover these
lineages through layers of diaspora and receded languages? What are the possibilities? Each poet will read
their own poems and speak to their writing process and related craft considerations.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1
A lawyer well versed in fair use doctrine will moderate the panel: a publisher who has been on various sides
of copyright battles and two poet/professors. The moderator will introduce fair use engaging the panelists
in conversation about experience and case law. The conversation will highlight the difference between
creative risks with derivative material and plagiarism to the point the artist must decide between creating
or getting published. The panel will take questions from the audience.
Event Outline
Finding an agent is surely the end of the journey, right? You’ve got an agent, you’re on
submission—now what? Our panelists discuss feelings of both excitement and angst and answer these
vital questions. As an agented author on submission, what are the best ways to handle the uncertainty of
publishing? And what are best practices to combat imposter syndrome and stay focused on your individual
journey before, during, and after submission?
Event Outline
Five playwrights describe their varied pathways to production before and during the pandemic. From play
contests to networking to agent submissions to using directories, each will describe how their work came to
be staged and how play development differs from all other creative writing forms. They will finish the
session with an open discussion on how the virtual world may change how theater may be shared in the future.
Event Outline
Saturnalia Books makes its home in Philadelphia and is celebrating its twentieth Anniversary in 2022.
Timothy Liu, editor in chief, will moderate this celebratory reading to include a diverse lineup of
Saturnalia poets inclusive of African American, Asian American, and LGBTQ communities as well as the current
Mississippi state poet laureate.
Event Outline
In fiction, as in life, communal meals can be realms of possibility. Lavish holiday tables can be pivotal
sites of magic, mess, or tension. Feasts convene characters both close and estranged, friendly and inimical.
Dominant ideas of "family dinner: can be queered, bent, defamiliarized. And the food, vivid and
specific, can be a character, too. This will be a conversation between fiction writers to whom food and
meals are culturally significant in their lived lives, as well as in their stories.
Event Outline
This nonfiction panel will discuss writing to meet the key of our present moment. Have paradigm shifts
related to race, justice, consent, gender, identity, and the pandemic impacted our understandings of life
before now, and if so, how do we accept this charge to deepen and expand our work to meet the times? How do
we keep writing with imagination, complexity, and grace during periods of cultural transformation? What is
the creative nonfiction writer's role in histories still unfolding?
Event Outline
Join Lily Poetry Review Books for a reading by Shari Caplan, David P. Miller, Beth Mercurio, Martha
McCollough, Robbie Gamble, Laura Van Prooyen, Rikki Santer, and Max Heinegg.
Event Outline
Twelve-ten P.M. to One-ten P.M.
As we emerge into a new stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, conversations continue about how time felt different
this past year. A key part of those conversations has been the concept of “crip time,” a
disability community term that entered the mainstream this year. Crip time offers both liberation from rigid
time schedules and constriction within the limits of disabled bodies and minds. These five disabled authors
will speak to the reality of crip time in pandemic times.
Event Outline
This discussion features contributing writers to Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and
Literature. In a conversation moderated by the anthology’s coeditors, participating authors
speak about the significance of writing and teaching Black literature, the labor it requires, and the beauty
that comes from it. They will read excerpts from the anthology and discuss how their work reflects
pedagogies, experiences, and practices of teaching Black literature and centering Black life.
Event Outline
Myths are often viewed as stories from “the past.” But a number of recent works shows that they
can be used to engage with contemporary sociopolitical questions and imagine futuristic modes of being. This
panel explores how and why South Asian authors employ myths in their poetry, graphic novels, and more.
Authors discuss the refashioning of myths as a world-making force that may cultivate a sense of cultural
heritage, subvert orientalist stereotypes, and bring alternative futures into being.
Event Outline
In an interview, Melissa Febos writes, “The page has always been a place of reckoning for me.”
In this panel, five writers—all from different backgrounds—will discuss how research in
nonfiction has allowed them to reckon with the past. We will explore how different forms of
research—from interviews to old letters to library archives to photographs to literary
theory—led us to the centers of our own stories and took us deeper into larger conversations about
race, disability, and sexuality.
Event Outline
In a time when death and grief are heavily present in the global consciousness, this panel asks the
following question: How do poets approach writing about death, grief, and the afterlife, and how are such
approaches informed and complicated by a poet’s cultural background? Panelists will hold a craft-based
conversation about these themes as explored both within their own writing and the work of poets throughout
history. They will also give a brief reading and engage with audience questions.
Event Outline
From schools to boardrooms to military squadrons, Black and Afro-Latina natural hair continues to transfix,
confound, and enrage members of white society. Why is this still the case? The perception, policing, and
persecution of our hair is an incontrovertible form of structural oppression. Four contributors read essays
from the upcoming book of the same name (Chicago Review Press, 2022). Their work interrogates a systemic
bias that is cognizable, legible, and in need of course correction.
Event Outline
Queer/trans people of color editing/publishing build stronger activist, artistic, and scholarly communities.
Editors/publishers will discuss production and maintenance of Indigenous, people of color, womanist,
queer/trans, and multicultural journals and solo/coauthored books, anthologies, and presses. Collaboratively
producing diverse texts, panelists will discuss navigating economic, logistical, and institutional
challenges while centering issues of culture, politics, aesthetics, and diversity.
Event Outline
Twelve-ten P.M. to One-twenty-five P.M.
Milkweed authors discuss the intersections of literary culture and the natural world: Aimee Nezhukumatathil,
author of World of Wonders; Kazim Ali, author of Northern Light; and Kerri ní
Dochartaigh, author of Thin Places. Deep attentiveness to the environment—with its diverse
landscapes, wild creatures, and shifting climates—provides these writers with dynamic pathways to
explore regeneration, identity, and wonder in their work. Moderated by Animals Strike Curious Poses
author Elena Passarello. This event will be livestreamed. ASL interpretation and live captioning will be
provided.
Twenty-five years ago, Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady came together in friendship and solidarity with a
determination to create a home for Black poetry, and Cave Canem was born. Since that time, the organization
has grown into a fellowship of more than 500 Fellows, an eminent roll of Elders and a dedicated Faculty,
who—in community—have worked to build a foundation for poets now and in the future. Join
Derricotte, Eady, and surprise guests for this celebratory reading to honor the work of their minds and
hearts.
This event will be prerecorded and available on the virtual conference platform, in addition to being
screened onsite. ASL interpretation and live captioning will be provided.
What can branching narratives in video games teach us about narrative structure? This panel investigates how
branching narratives can break up linearity and show how choice and interactivity can expand traditional
notions of character, plot, setting, and story. This panel also explores ways of integrating branching
narratives into the creative writing classroom by considering craft implications and providing a discussion
of useful technical tools.
Event Outline
In 2019, the Presbyterian Historical Society opened 500 years of archival materials to creative writing
students from Community College of Philadelphia. As a result, the archive experienced an influx of energy,
and student work took surprising, subversive, and moving directions. Archivists, instructors, and students
share how classroom activities and a student exhibit helped demystify archival materials and connect a
170-year-old cultural institution to today’s movements for social justice.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2, Supplemental Document 3
The traditional book tour model of launch parties and bookstore signings became completely untenable the
last two years. Authors had to pivot to virtual events and come up with new and creative ways to get the
attention of potential readers. These strategies can be applied to future in-person events to mix things up,
grow a bigger audience, and sell more books. Arranged by the Authors Guild to help writers with the business
side of authorship, this panel will discuss event formats, promotions, and media strategies to revolutionize
your next book tour.
Trauma memoirs require careful emotional pacing, which means modulating the presentation of emotionally
charged material. Emotional pacing involves decisions about which events to include, how to withhold or
present details, and how to sequence events, often using narrative techniques to manipulate the distance
between the narrator and events. In this panel, four memoirist offer strategies for guiding the
reader’s experience in memoirs of near death, family secrets, and other difficult stories.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2
Four panelists discuss the process of birthing a regional anthology from its inception to curation,
assembly, publication, and marketing. Represented are editors from The Boom Project: Voices of a
Generation (Butler Books, 2019), The Women of Appalachia Project's Women Speak annual
anthology, and The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing, 2020).
Event Outline
The border. ICE. The wall. Asylum. Human cages. How can we truthfully represent the current immigration
crisis at the border in our writing? What are political and philosophical concerns, particularly when
authors inherit stories they are in effect still living and when readers might expect a happy ending?
Authors across categories—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young adult and children’s
books—talk frankly about the struggles and benefits of writing la frontera.
Event Outline
Toni Morrison implores us to write the books that we want to read. No more is this true than for Black queer
writers searching for ourselves in the Black literary canon. The works that we create talk back/signify
(Gates, Jr.) to the very books that shaped us as writers while ostracizing us as community members. In this
reading, five Black queer writers share excerpts of their work and the specific interventions or engagements
that they make in Black canonical texts.
Event Outline
How free can the creative writing workshop be in this time of great cultural division? Event facilitators
will generate a conversation that contemplates conflicts erupting with greater frequency in what should be a
nurturing and unified communal space. Presenters will share techniques for seizing on divisive incidents as
opportunities for growth, encouraging attendees to discuss their experiences and to pose questions related
to protecting both freedom and safety in the writing workshop.
Event
Outline
The permanent impacts of COVID and the Black Lives Matter movement on the publishing industry have yet to be
determined, but the early ripples prove a need for a top-down reassessment of editorial practices. Small
presses and literary magazines must reckon with patriarchal white supremacy if they plan to survive this
social justice moment. Writers/editors discuss how identity impacts editorial biases, while offering
strategies such as apprenticeships and training, to create lasting change.
Event Outline
Many writers have completed a manuscript of prose or poetry and are ready to publish their book. However,
the traditional agent-to-editor route may not be available. This panel discussion will provide advice on
finding a suitable book contest and giving your manuscript the best chance of success. Past winners of book
and chapbook contests will share their experience and knowledge. Also, a publisher of a small press that
holds annual poetry and fiction contests will tell the inside story.
Event Outline
If you pop the hood on craft, what would you see? Four women demystify writing and researching by showing
images of their works in progress and discussing the visual element of inspiration and organization. Across
genres (novels, biography, memoir, and YA), they show you photographs, letters, spreadsheets, and maps and
offer examples of visuals that changed their grasp of their material. Writing a book is solitary; join
panelists who invite you right to their desks and into their process.
Event Outline
How does a group of undergrads who have never met collaborate strategically with far-flung authors and
editors to create a publication drawing submissions from writers working in 47 countries (plus 48 US states)
in its first six months of existence? This panel—comprised of intergenerational "lit nerds"
building global dialogue and community via a digital venue recently recognized as an extraordinary debut
magazine by the CLMP—seeks to answer questions of reach, resources, and representation.
Event Outline
Everyone listens to music, but writers can listen with a special ear for the lessons of craft and artistic
structure, for sparking hidden pockets of forgotten or suppressed autobiography, or for guides to
one’s cultural identity. Music, like writing, is multivocal. Writers attempt to translate the music we
hear into metaphor, images, narratives, and revelations as we recount the often-unexpected journeys music
offers and describe the places we might then arrive at in our writing.
Event Outline
Writers from across genres, gender and sexual identities, and educational and cultural backgrounds come
together to share how they manage their talents, life, and career for success within the LGBTQ community. In
an attempt to both celebrate and give voice to queer experiences, they ask, "Is my writing queer
enough?"
Event Outline
Exile has inspired a diverse body of literature from around the world. Translating exile-themed writing
takes into consideration the cultural, historical, personal, and especially political differences unique to
each language and country. This panel of writers and scholars, translating from such languages as
Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Chinese, French, and Spanish, will briefly discuss, then read bilingual examples
of the many faces of exile, then address audience questions.
Event Outline
Writers who are adopted or otherwise estranged from their biological parents face particularly challenging
artistic questions about how familial reconciliation (or lack thereof) can be transformed from raw
experience into poems, stories, or essays. These five writers will discuss how they’ve crafted their
own experiences facing adoption, parentage, and identity into literary work—and, in doing so, explore
the relationship between experience and art and how each informs the other.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2, Supplemental Document 3
This meeting is an opportunity for members of Writers’ Conferences & Centers to meet one another
and for the staff of AWP to discuss issues pertinent to building a strong community of WC&C programs.
AWP’s WC&C Chair, Mimi Herman, will conduct this meeting.
Writing about the body experiencing sensual pleasure—especially female-identifying and queer
bodies—is often outweighed by writing featuring the body-shamed and sexually traumatized. This panel
is shaped by questions centered on the comparative absence of pleasure on the page. As practicing writers
whose work, in varied ways, celebrates the body, the panelists will discuss the importance of
representations of pleasure and offer craft practices they employ when writing the sensual and sexual.
Event Outline
This reading explores new work in the tradition of Jewish labor poetry: writing at the nexus of radicalism,
labor, and identity. In Jewish poetics, writing about labor spans our international, multilingual
literature; emerging poets are (re)interpreting this inheritance in terms of its politics and imaginative
possibilities. These poets—including writers from the Rust Belt—write about their work as taxi
drivers, electricians, motel staff, retail grocers, and parents.
Event Outline
This reading brings together poetry, essay, creative nonfiction, and fiction from recently released or
upcoming Madville titles. Madville Publishing offers a diverse range of styles, voices, and interests. The
reading presents noted writers and emerging voices to provide variety and interest for all potential
audience members.
Event Outline
One-forty-five P.M. to Two-forty-five P.M.
Contributors explore the themes of home and uprootedness and how they must sometimes coexist. For a
different joint reading that uses the full advantages of the Zoom platform, we will bring attendees into our
homes for a two-minute tour focusing on those spaces that allow us to write (and why), followed by a
three-minute reading. Then we will discuss and take questions from the audience.
Event Outline
Some shy away from writing memoir because writing a lengthy, personal, emotional narrative of hundreds of
pages seems too daunting. Yet, as these memoirists' readings will show, it's possible to craft memorable
journeys within a shortened format. These writers utilize first person narration as well as poetry,
photography, and social justice essays, reading from works that were made all the more powerful by being
published in chapbook form. These are not tomes but concise punches of reality.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2
How might a poet respond to serious illness or disability? Whether the poet is ill or witness to suffering,
the harsh, immutable facts of such conditions may generate fear, anger, despair. Sometimes the poet finds
strength in a hopeless situation. What in us persists in singing, regardless of how dire the facts? Five
published poets discuss work (their own and others’) that grapples with disease or disability and what
these poems reveal about hope, what Dickinson called "the thing with feathers."
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1
Editors of indie presses and magazines demystify the process of publishing works in translation, including
what they need to know to acquire works, managing international rights, how they handle the editing process,
and how translators can submit their work.
Writing a book can be a lonely endeavor. You learn your craft, draft a manuscript, and get feedback from
critique partners. What comes next? Hiring an independent editor can be the invaluable next step toward
unlocking a book's potential. But whom to hire, how to afford it, and how to get your money's worth? Two
former Big Five editors, writers who've worked with independent editors, and a literary agent discuss
vetting book doctors, maximizing the relationship, and locating sources of funding.
Event Outline
Our wounds are the openings to our deepest selves. The craving for connection in these soft and tender
places and the instinct to seek out witnesses to our scars are universal. But how can we ensure we are
writing toward healing, rather than retraumatization? And how do we write ethically about those who have
hurt us? Panelists working in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and graphic storytelling will discuss their
personal experiences and best practice principals for writing trauma ethically.
Event Outline
One-forty-five P.M. to Three o'clock P.M.
Renowned writers Patrick Rosal, K-Ming Chang, and T Kira Māhealani Madden will take the stage for a
crossgenre panel discussion. As acclaimed writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, this panel
will discuss the expansive possibilities within Asian American identity and storytelling through a
navigation across genres. A conversation on craft moderated by J. Mae Barizo will follow. This event will be
livestreamed. ASL interpretation and live captioning will be provided.
Join the Academy of American Poets for a reading by Academy Chancellor Emeritus Arthur Sze and award-winning
poets Meg Day and Kemi Alabi. Executive Director Jennifer Benka will introduce the event. ASL interpretation
will be provided. Founded in 1934, the Academy of American Poets is the nation’s leading champion of
poets and poetry, with supporters in all fifty states.
This event will be prerecorded and available on the virtual conference platform, in addition to being
screened onsite. ASL interpretation and live captioning will be provided.
How can we tell our stories on our own terms? Five anglophone writers from Myanmar, Malaysia, the
Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand talk about reclaiming perspectives and writing that does not pander to
orientalist expectations. What does it mean to use English, an imperial language, in this decolonial work,
particularly in such multicultural, multilingual countries, and what is the role of translation in
navigating this cultural and linguistic fluidity?
Event Outline
As the pandemic wanes, campuses and classrooms have reopened and our workshops can resume in person. What
have we, as educators, discovered in the virtual classroom that can enhance our face-to-face instruction and
build stronger creative communities? How can some of those resources and practices become part of our
pedagogy's new normal?
What is the right press for your work? Hear five nonfiction authors share all we wish we’d known about
the quest for agent, contract, and publication. We have written books published or soon-to-be-published by
an undergraduate student-run press, an independent press, university presses, a literary imprint of Amazon
Publishing, and one of the Big Five. We will discuss book proposals, book advances, focus vs. flexibility in
content and genre, and the editing and marketing processes.
Event Outline
In December 2020, during the global pandemic, Uganda-born, London-based poet Nick Makoha founded his vision
for an international poetry collective in the African diaspora called Obsidian Foundation. A panel of poets
who were selected to attend Obsidian's first virtual retreat discuss their experiences in poetry craft
during the event and the effects of uniting with the global African diaspora on their work. They also read
from their poetry and engage with attendees to discuss Makoha's process.
Event Outline
Our creative practices have transformed along with our identities as writers, creators, and teachers. Our
panel frankly discusses the literary expectations and practices we aspire to, are sometimes broken by, and
seek to transform. Learning and imagination are necessary to craft and survival, but sometimes literary
change comes at a steep cost. We celebrate and assess our nontraditional paths, encourage writers at all
levels, and critique the systems that hinder our dream of "The Writer's" lives.
Event Outline
Writer and activist Sol Plaatje was more than just the first Black African to write a novel in English. His
female-centric allegory, concerned with injustice and land dispossession, maintains relevancy in academic
discussion, essay, and course curricula. Reading from his life and work, highlighting his political as well
as his literary importance, panelists will examine how Plaatje explored issues of race, culture, gender, and
language to make a lasting impact and remain influential today.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2
Panelists will discuss the experience of writing and publishing a book as mothers of young children,
focusing particularly on the specific angst that comes with sharing a private part of oneself that might not
perfectly align with what society expects of mothers. The conversation will also include an examination of
what constitutes “acceptable motherhood” and how art can subvert and challenge those
expectations.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1
What happens when a project sets out to examine one life but winds up connecting to another—your own?
Panelists discuss the blurring of biography and memoir: What shape might a fused form take? What ethical
issues arise when your story creeps into someone else’s? What does research look like? Is there a
market? Sharing from their own projects across a range of media, including podcasts, magazines, and books,
panelists examine the problems and possibilities of the "biogoir" mashup.
Poetry can be intimidating for readers and writers who are unfamiliar with the genre and enter the classroom
with assumptions about what they’ll encounter. Discomfort can prevent exploration and learning,
holding students in a space where they are self-effacing or resistant. This panel gathers teachers with
academic and community experience to discuss strategies and successes in introducing poetry to new readers
and writers, with a focus on engaging and empowering students in their learning.
Event Outline
How do creative writing professors encourage students of color to dream on the page? How do they reconcile
the act of storytelling with its problematic history of being dominated and defined, in many of its genres,
by white males? In what ways is storytelling an act of resistance? Participants will answer these questions
and also discuss the ways in which anti-racist pedagogy can be deployed in creative writing workshops in
order to liberate the imaginations of students of color.
Event Outline
A bilingual reading by Krystyna Dąbrowska, one of Poland’s most acclaimed younger poets, and her three
award-winning translators, followed by a conversation on multiple techniques for translating the same poet,
as well as collaborative strategies for promoting her work throughout the English-speaking world. Known for
her inviting poems that investigate cultural exchange, family history, and language itself, Dąbrowska is the
winner of Poland’s distinguished Wisława Szymborska Prize.
Event Outline
What are the processes by which poets create and edit thematic anthologies and why? Five poet-editors
discuss their experiences with compiling and launching recent anthologies. They consider the challenges of
doing this during the pandemic, as well as methods of finding contributors by direct solicitation versus
open submissions, making acceptance decisions, organizing the anthology, answering rights questions, looking
for a publisher, creating effective publicity, and finding an audience.
Event Outline
Teaching online international creative writing courses offers unique opportunities for cross-cultural
exchanges, building global creative communities, and offering writers and writing instructors increased
access to and understanding of narrative, cognitive, and instructional possibilities. This panel of
experienced online instructors with the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa will
discuss the concerns and possibilities inherent in teaching for a global classroom.
Event Outline
In Exit West, Mohsin Hamid posits that "we are all migrants through time." In this panel,
novelists whose work traverses the border between the 20th and 21st-centuries consider what it means to live
and write on both sides of this temporal divide. By examining the legacy of the AIDS crisis, the
transformation of a metropolis, the impact of climate change, and the shifting landscapes of art and music,
we'll explore how the 20th century continues to haunt, shape, and reverberate in our own.
Event Outline
“If God is dead,” writes Richard Rodriguez, “I will cry into the void.” In an age of
distrust of institutions—church, state, and everything in between—what draws poets to questions
of the divine? In a time of dwindling participation in organized religion, what sustenance might a poetry of
faith and doubt offer readers and writers? In this panel, four poets discuss their approaches to traditions
of belief and critique and how these traditions may be reinvented to address our contemporary crises.
Transversal is a translation collective formed during the pandemic to give translators in the Philadelphia
area and across the world a virtual place to form connections, build accountability, and share work and
resources. A diverse assemblage of language pairs, backgrounds, and abilities, Transversal has quickly
become an important gathering space for many. Five translators from the collective will contextualize their
work, share insights into translator solidarity, and give a bilingual reading.
Event Outline
From social realism to speculative fiction, from American tales to immigrant lit, from heterosexual
narratives to LGBTQ stories—Caroline Kim (the 2020 Drue Heinz Literature Prize), Michael X. Wang (the
2021 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize), Rachel Swearingen (the 2018 New American Fiction Prize), and Kristina
Gorcheva-Newberry (the 2020 Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction) will read from their
award-winning collections on themes of love, loss, and cultural identity.
Event Outline
Writing is a solitary occupation, but once a book enters the world, it belongs to readers, critics, and
marketplace alike. Capitalism’s gaze (which of course is, by default, white, male, cis-het, abled,
etc.) fetishizes, tokenizes, sexualizes, and centralizes certain writers, while erasing/overlooking others.
At the same time, writers need/want to publish and also to market/sell their book. How can one be an artist
without pandering to or becoming complicit with the hegemonies of the gaze?
Event Outline
Wild spaces have historically been a male dominated arena. More than ever, women are exploring remote places
and finding voice in the evolving conversation of sustainability. From international trekking or exploring
the natural beauty of your own backyard through words and art to translating rural life in Maine from a
queer perspective or finding the power rooted in the physical landscape, these women record their
experiences to make sense of our human place in the earth’s past, present, and future.
Event
Outline
As queer lives take focus in life and in literature, fat queer/trans voices remain relegated to the shadows.
This discussion, led by established and emerging writers, explores the challenges and rewards of writing
while fat, crafting fat characters, and exploring fat queer/trans love, sex, anger, and joy. This session
offers ways to transform negative fat and queer/trans narratives into positive ones and celebrate
illuminating examples of fat and queer/trans literature and resources.
This virtual discussion room will take place live and will not be recorded for on-demand viewing.
Event Outline
Three-twenty P.M. to Four-twenty P.M.
How can a pile of stories become a cohesive book with a beginning, middle, and end? Many collections are
assembled after the pieces are written, which can make vital decisions about structure seem daunting. This
craft discussion with five debut authors of small press collections will provide a space for thinking both
big-picture about books of stories as well as getting into the weeds about all the small choices that help
collections cohere—from arrangement and structure to balance and flow.
Event Outline
Five debut novelists will discuss their work and the path to publishing strong Latinx characters that leap
off the page. What are the keys to crafting unforgettable characters that will haunt readers? How did they
approach creating complex characters that honor communities—Caribbean, Afro-Latinx, Southern, and
Midwestern—underrepresented in the US literary landscape? This panel aims to amplify different Latinx
voices while celebrating the novelist's pursuit of telling stories that persevere.
Event Outline
In this panel, writers and educators discuss the ways in which students, particularly first-generation
students, wear paper masks—personas in their writing to mask their own voices, which they may see as
inadequate in academic settings. Panelists explore this phenomenon across genres in the teaching of creative
nonfiction, poetry, and academic writing. We discuss theory, practice, and strategies to empower students to
appreciate and use their own voices.
Event Outline
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?/ The world would split open,”
wrote Muriel Rukeyser in the poem “Käthe Kollwitz.” How does truth-telling and the
construction of a voice differ in the genres of poetry and memoir? How do gender, class, and race figure
into what is told? What world—if any—is split open? These poet/memoirists discuss the urgency of
their turn to prose, also reading briefly from their memoirs.
Event Outline
Writers who write about other cultures and languages have to navigate many issues in how they present
themselves and their communities. Should we italicize non-English words? How much should we explain about
cultural nuances? And who is it that we’re writing for—a general audience that doesn’t
know us or an implied diaspora community? Hear from five diverse writers on the choices we’ve made and
how we balance authenticity with the demands of a predominantly white publishing industry.
Event Outline
Audre Lorde declared without hesitation that the erotic is power. When that force is an expression of Black
feminine sexuality, it can be an act of resistance and liberation. What gives us pleasure? How do we write
about that pleasure from a place of joy that welcomes vulnerability? To name a thing is to address but also
affirm it. When the erotic energy of Black womanhood is allowed to name itself, pleasure becomes unconfined
and writing that pleasure, limitless.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 2
This panel will examine the creative and healing effects provided by the virtual collaborative writing
processes implemented during the COVID shutdown. In answer to the Black Lives Matter movement during the
pandemic, playwright Deborah Ferguson virtually convened the geographically diverse Nubian Theatre Company
after a twenty-year hiatus to reenvision their seminal work, The People Could Fly, as a musical
theatre production entitled FLY! Weekly meetings provided interactive writing and editing.
Event Outline
Three-twenty P.M. to Four-thirty-five P.M.
A literary partner featured event focused on the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard award winners,
introduced by NBCC VP/Events Jane Ciabattari, moderated by NBCC President David Varno, featuring Leonard
award winners Raven Leilani, Carmen Maria Machado, and Kirstin Valdez Quade. They’ll focus on
launching a literary career, inspiration and research for their work, the influence of Leonard and other
awards, evolving forms, the unique challenges of writing in these times, and the imaginative process that
shapes their work. This event will be livestreamed. ASL interpretation and live captioning will be provided.
For millennia, patriarchal expectations have shaped literature’s socioeconomic context and making.
This intersectional panel brings together five award-winning writers who rewrite the patriarchy's impact on
our lives and art as Black, Latinx, South Asian, and white women—from persona poems as a Black
womanist or in the voice of Baba Yaga, to centering Latinxs in tales of settler colonialism, to poems that
confront workplace sexism, to a mother's essays about wringing the toxic from her son.
Event Outline
Considering how much the multimodal pedagogical framework lives within the realm of multicultural
literacies, there is a strong case to be made that the inclusion of podcasts into the creative writing
classroom could prove invaluable, especially given that many workshops fail to serve a significant portion
of students who either don’t feel welcome or don’t feel capable. This panel will discuss how
podcasts exist within an a priori cultural space, almost as if tailor-made to address these issues.
Event Outline
Nonfiction writers often grapple with how to write ethically about others. Memoirists, biographers,
essayists, journalists: all worry about hurting loved ones, misrepresenting those of differing cultures, or
disrespecting nonhuman nature in their work. This panel explores the various ways writers navigate these
tricky issues. Panelists and audience will share their experiences of developing moral standards in this
area with the aim of expanding our vision of the challenges and possibilities.
Event Outline
Writers trade in words, but sometimes words aren't enough. A panel of award-winning memoirists and essayists
will discuss how photos, documents, original artwork, and other visual elements can deepen, complicate, and
illuminate creative nonfiction. Discussion will cover craft concerns, like what can be described vs. what
must be depicted and how to go about weaving images into text, as well practical ones, like permissions and
convincing publishers that images are essential to your work.
Event Outline
The pandemic taught us how to Zoom and adapt, using digital solutions to keep writers connected in a virtual
capacity. But as we reenter society, how do we build upon and sustain those writing communities? In this
panel, authors, podcasters, program managers, and workshop facilitators discuss establishing strong literary
communities online and what approaches should continue to create productive and empowering virtual spaces
that foster better diversity and inclusivity among writers today.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1
Photographs, writing, and travel have been inextricably linked since the dawn of the postcard. A photo says,
“I was here,” and a poem asks “Where and who was I?” By bringing the two art forms
together, these book-length explorations—of Antarctica, of the parallels between dust-bowl migrants
and today’s California, of Japanese American incarceration, of the aftermath of a brother’s
suicide, and of post-1848 violences against Mexicans/Mexican Americans—show how poem and image
dynamically converse.
Event Outline
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 Mexico, Barbados,
Bulgaria, India, and Paraguay to write poetry, memoirs, nonfiction, and novels.
Event Outline
Panelists discuss the making of the landmark anthology When The Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs
Came Through. The poetry, songs, and chants in the anthology span four centuries and include 161
Native Nations' poets. There is nothing like it that can account for the lands and the poets and poetry that
came from these lands. Panelists will discuss the editorial structure of the book that begins in the East to
the North, continues to the West, and then heads to the South.
Four directors, from rookie to veteran, provide a sneak peek behind the scenes of their low-residency MFA
programs, from start (proposing the program to a dozen confused committees) to finish (running a fake
graduation ceremony). Topics include to MFA or not to MFA; why there are so many low-res programs now;
building a program that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive; the difference between traditional and
low-res; the "affordability factor"; and the "wow factor."
Event Outline
Young people need meaningful relationships with practicing writers. Writers (living, breathing,
coffee-drinking writers) show students that there are other ways to organize their lives. And working
writers need regular contact with young people to stay connected to the future. This panel will animate
these complementary ideas through the stories of four writer-educators, who will bring to the discussion
several decades of secondary school experience as well as robust, active writing lives.
Event Outline
Many literary institutions are reckoning with a history of exclusion and discrimination. However, after
accusations have flown and mea culpas been made, most have chosen to work behind closed doors as they try to
reinvent the systems of power among their staff and on their board. Come hear from leaders at organizations
who are undertaking this necessary DEI work out in the open, where transparency and accountability allow for
vulnerability, and where misstep can be an opportunity to grow.
Event Outline
Born in Philadelphia, Tim Seibles is a renowned performer, professor, mentor and poet, reckoning with race,
sensuality, belonging and the Divine. For more than thirty years, he taught at Old Dominion University, but
many poems and much of his National Book Award-nominated Fast Animal is set in the City of Brotherly
Love. He served as Virginia’s poet laureate from 2016–18. The panelists will celebrate his
contributions to the world of literature, and afterward, Tim Seibles will share his work.
Event Outline
MFA programs are not the only way to improve writing skills and craft a robust literary life: independent
creative writing organizations can be more inclusive alternatives that can allow a wider range of aspiring
writers to build community and careers. Join Redbud Writing Project cofounders and three successful authors
who have learned from, taught at, or been inspired by various non-MFA institutions, such as Clarion and
Grubstreet. Learn how you can grow, publish, and thrive without an MFA.
Event Outline
Current San Antonio Poet Laureate, Octavio Quintanilla, Jen Yáñez-Alaniz, Matt Sedillo, and Joyous Windrider
read from and discuss Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century, published jointly by the Black Earth
Institute and Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts. The multigenre anthology features the work of such
important Chicanx writers as Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Octavio Solis, and more.
Event Outline
These readings showcase the lives of poor and working-class protagonists and were conceived by writers from
distinct, poor, and working-class backgrounds eerily similar to those of their respective characters.
Exploring various unique and underprivileged rural settings, authors tackle moral dilemmas through richly
developed yet poorly compensated characters, exposing them in all of their flaw, vice, merit, and humanity.
Event Outline
Why publish a chapbook? Is a chapbook just a short book? What makes a community of poems a successful
chapbook? Ephemera, folk tale, town gossip, political tract: the little book pressed into the hands of
everyday people has historically connected tale and song with community. This panel focuses on why poets
write chapbooks today. Panelists will share our own chapbook stories to reveal how your poems can sing in
this morsel of a form, reach readers, and gleam in the gamut of subjects and themes.
Event Outline
FUSE's annual caucus for undergraduate student writers and editors and their advisors, who meet to network
and discuss issues related to the world of undergraduate literary publishing, editing, and writing.
Organizational updates are followed by open discussion, Q&A, and planning for the upcoming year,
including conference events. This meeting will be accessible to in-person and virtual attendees.
Event Outline
Fiction, nonfiction, and poetry reading by Unsolicited Press authors. The reading will include recently
published creative works that span many geographies, time frames, cultural identities, and boundaries. Each
author will introduce themselves and read a short excerpt of their work.
Event Outline
The event will be moderated by Tonya Jones, founder of PDX Women of Color (WOC) Zine Collective. The panel
will feature WOC zinesters who will discuss how participating in do-it-yourself (DIY) culture can be an act
of resistance and liberation. Zine culture provides an opportunity for WOC to tell their stories/truths
their own way, including (and not limited to): writing, art/comics, rants, collage, etc.
This virtual discussion room will take place live and will not be recorded for on-demand viewing.
Event Outline
Five o'clock P.M. to Six-fifteen P.M.
The caucus creates a space where teachers in K–12 schools, as well as those who work part-time with
young writers, can share their classroom experiences with the hopes of helping one another understand the
complex and diverse needs of young writers in the twenty-first century. The meeting will feature
presentations by caucus members to help generate discussion around issues of pedagogy, and how to build a
creative writing curriculum that is accessible to students no matter their identity or background. This
meeting will be accessible to in-person and virtual attendees.
Daily 12-step meeting. All in recovery from anything are welcome.
Indigenous writers and scholars participate fluidly in AWP, teaching, directing affiliated programs, working
as independent writers or scholars, and/or within community language revitalization efforts. Annually
imparting field-related craft, pedagogy, celebrations, and concerns as programming understood by
Indigenous-Native writers from the Americas and surrounding island nations is necessary. AWP conferences
began our caucus discussions in 2010. Essential program development continues in 2022.
Event Outline
Six o'clock P.M. to Seven-thirty P.M.
A celebration of poetry collections by Elvis Alves, Sheila Black, Todd Hearon, Eamonn Lynskey, Sandra
McPherson, and Lex Runciman.
An intimate gathering for those connected with our magazine and friends to celebrate our new Editor-in-Chief
and amazing editors and our almost fifteen years of promoting diversity in lit! Come meet some of our top
folks!
The Pinch invites masthead, contributors, and readers to a reception in celebration of recent issues.
Come meet the editors who selected your work! Meet the writers whose words captured you on the page!
Sponsored by the Hohenberg Foundation and the Department of English at the University of Memphis.
This event is a celebration for Madville Publishing authors, past and present. Friends of Madville or
Madville authors are welcome.
A gathering to celebrate the incredible work being done at writers' conferences, centers, festivals,
retreats, and residencies across the US and internationally. Come have a drink, learn more about these
programs, and connect with their directors.
We welcome all Sewanee Writers' Conference alumni and guests to catch up with friends at an open bar.
Philadelphia Stories celebrates the Philadelphia literary community at this reception, which will also
showcase the special AWP issue of this free literary magazine.
Special guests will include panelists from "Indigenous Ecopoetry: Environmental Perspectives from Those
Who Came First," as well as poets from the reading "Poetry and Place: Connecting Who We Are to
Where We Are." There will be a brief program, conversation, and refreshments.
Join us for a wine and cheese reception to celebrate Philadelphia-area poetry press Saturnalia Books'
twentieth year.
Six-thirty P.M. to Seven-forty-five P.M.
Uniting attendees from across disciplines, the African Diaspora Caucus will provide a forum for discussions
of careers, best practices for teaching creative writing, and obtaining the MFA or PhD. We will work with
AWP’s affinity caucuses to develop national diversity benchmarks for creative writing programs and
will collaborate with board and staff to ensure that AWP programs meet the needs of diaspora writers. This
caucus will be an inclusive space that reflects the pluralities in our community. This meeting will be
accessible to in-person and virtual attendees.
Eight o'clock P.M. to Nine-fifteen P.M.
The LGBTQ Writers Caucus provides a space for writers who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender,
or queer to network and discuss common issues and challenges, such as representation and visibility on and
off the literary page, and how to incorporate one’s personal identity into their professional and
academic lives. The caucus also strives to discuss, develop, and increase queer representation for future
AWP conferences and serve as a supportive community and resource for its members. This meeting will be
accessible to in-person and virtual attendees.
Event Outline
Ten o'clock P.M. to Midnight
AWP welcomes students to return to the roots of Slam! Open Mic, where 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, March 24, 2022, and Friday, March 25, 2022, 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.
Seven-thirty A.M. to Eight-forty-five A.M.
Daily 12-step meeting. All in recovery from anything are welcome.
Eight o'clock A.M. to Five o'clock P.M.
The first stop at #AWP22 is the vaccination verification check-in, located at the 155 N Broad Street
entrance to the Pennsylvania Convention Center. All attendees must verify proof of valid COVID-19
vaccination through CrowdPass. Once you are verified, you will receive your #AWP22 lanyard, which will serve
as indication your vaccination status has been verified. Proceed to the Registration area in Halls D&E
on the 200 level to complete the registration process.
Attendees who have registered in advance or who have yet to purchase a registration may secure their
registration materials in AWP’s registration area located in Exhibit Hall E, Pennsylvania Convention
Center, 200 Level. Please consult the bookfair map in the conference planner for location details. Students
must present a valid student ID to check in or register at our student rate. Seniors must present a valid ID
to register at our senior rate. A $50 fee will be charged for all replacement badges.
Coat check is available outside of Halls D & E on the 200 level of the Pennsylvania Convention Center. It is
$3.00 per item checked, or $5.00 for two items. ATMs can be found in the Broad Street Atrium on the 100
Level, by the Business Center on the 200 Level, and near the Concierge on 200 level.
A Mamava lactation suite is located outside of room 126B of the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
The Lactation Room is located in room 110A of the Pennsylvania Convention Center. To access the Lactation
Room, please see the AWP Help Desk to obtain the key. For reasons of privacy and security, access to the
lactation room is granted with permission from AWP only.
A dedicated quiet space for you to collect your thoughts, unwind, and escape the literary commotion.
"There is a solitude of space, / A solitude of sea, / A solitude of death, but these / Society shall
be, / Compared with that profounder site, / That polar privacy, / A Soul admitted to Itself: / Finite
Infinity."—Emily Dickinson
A second dedicated quiet space for you to collect your thoughts, unwind, and escape the literary commotion.
“There is a solitude of space, / A solitude of sea, / A solitude of death, but these / Society shall be, /
Compared with that profounder site, / That polar privacy, / A Soul admitted to Itself: / Finite
Infinity.”—Emily Dickinson
A quiet space free of fluorescent lighting located in room 110B of the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
Nine o'clock A.M. to Ten o'clock A.M.
Three award-winning writers of recently published books of short fiction give brief readings, followed by
moderated conversation about the short story collection in today's publishing landscape. What are the things
that a collection can say in 2021 that can't be said in other ways, and how do these authors' books strive
toward that aspiration? When do you know that you have a collection that works as a whole? When do you know
that you have a collection ready to submit for publication?
What is the role of the book reviewer? Are current critics engaging with new poetry in ways that are
illuminating and rewarding for readers and writers of different genders, races, and ethnicities? As readers
demand that institutions support poets who write into the many traditions outside the historical center,
what’s the responsibility of the critic? This diverse group of poet/critics considers these questions
and others within the context of the changing landscape of writing and publishing.
Event Outline
While books like MFA vs. NYC echo AWP reports on the rise of creative writing (CW) educations in the
US, and their popularity in Australia reveals this rise is not limited to North America, non-English
countries have been slower to enter “the program era.” Two new anthologies from Routledge and
Bloomsbury chart the rise of CW educations around the world and the next major chapter in tertiary CW
education—the multilingual student. Anthology editors and contributors discuss global tertiary CW ed.
Event Outline
Join us for a poetry reading in celebration of bodies deemed unconventional by everyday society. This
reading will feature five award-winning published authors living with varying physical and mental
intersections and ranging identities as Black, Salvadoran, Mexican, Iranian American, and Indian American
writers. Come witness how the body works as a poetic tool to liberate, reinstate power, and, most
importantly, return to self-love.
Event Outline
Since 2013, Mutha Magazine has given voice to motherhood from diverse perspectives, particularly to
the stories too often silenced or ignored. Mutha contributors, whose experience is as diverse as their
writing, will read works that recognize mothering in its complex realities, including the grit, beauty,
brokenness, and getting by.
Event Outline
Recent years have shown the continued popularity of ghost stories across literature, from the terrifying and
literal to the comedic and metaphorical—yet how do we make sense of the ghost story as contemporary
fiction? In this panel, acclaimed genre-bending authors will talk about the ways ghosts manifest in their
own work, the varied roles ghosts play in literature and across cultures, strategies for writing ghost
stories, and why they (and all of us) continue to be drawn to haunted fiction.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1
Trauma is universal, but since 2020 it has become vital that we explore our relationship to trauma and our
translation of that trauma into words, between languages, from ourselves to others and from others to
ourselves. This panel will explore personal and political traumas and their translations in and out of
language and meaning across a variety of poetry, examining the wider implications of translation beyond just
its literary usage.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2
Nine o'clock A.M. to Ten-fifteen A.M.
Many writers and academics are deeply influenced by our faith of origin yet are often dismissed by society
as secularists. Women writers who explore Catholicism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism in poetry,
prose, and hybrid forms will discuss writing about faith in this era of rising faith-based fanaticism. How
do we approach topics like spiritual abuse? How do we keep from self-censoring? Why is it important to share
our stories despite the social cost?
Event Outline
Adrienne Rich writes: “I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled /
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here.” This panel is about English
language poets from Eastern Europe writing about the parallels between their homes and the US: nationalism,
nativism, homophobia, and human rights abuses. We discuss new strategies of resistance for more than one
culture and explore how poets co-opt the language of oppressors for their own power.
Event Outline
A reading and discussion with contributors to the first major anthology of literature on abortion. Panelists
will read from works on abortion written over five centuries and six continents, discussing their own
writing process about abortion, the suppressed lineage of abortion literature, and the themes that mark the
book, including the struggle against silence and shame, the importance of support during abortion, and the
impact of class, politics, ethnicity, and religion on reproductive justice.
Teaching presses and apprenticeships in the art and craft of publishing prepare student writers to submit
and publish their work. They also provide the foundation for a more inclusive, innovative, and accessible
publishing industry. Join panelists from Kaya Press, LARB Books, Lookout Books, and Ooligan Press as they
discuss their respective publishing models and demonstrate how their work as publishers, editors, and
teachers empowers future generations to lead meaningful change.
Event Outline
Celebrating our fiftieth year of fostering original literary voices, BGSU presents five writers from various
eras of our program’s history. Writers from BGSU have published more than 400 books and been
recognized with the Yale Younger Poets Award, the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Los Angeles
Times Book Award for Poetry, the Drue Heinz Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, among other
honors. This reading will showcase the quality and diversity of BGSU’s writers over the decades.
Event Outline
Community college literary journals offer new and emerging writers, many of minority and underrepresented
backgrounds, unparalleled access to publishing their first works, learning about journal design and
production, and the literary world at large. Panelists from around the country (CA, FL, MD, MI, NY) will
share strategies to engage community college students and other writers from local communities in practices
of the literary marketplace and the nuts and bolts of running different journals.
Event Outline
The addict's crisis transcends the page and is often brought there by the writer-addicts themselves. The
trauma of addiction is a central conflict in any addict's story; however, it is not the only plot point.
This panel of writers in recovery seeks to discuss where the sobriety narrative stands today, how recovery
stories can combat harmful fetishization tropes that further stigmatize addicts, and how real-life recovery
tools can help the writer become a better writer of witness.
Event Outline
In memoir, how do we balance telling the story we need to tell with the discomfort of exposing secrets that
can cause harm—especially to those we love? How do we write despite the possible fallout? Five
acclaimed memoirists tackle this question through their own candid explorations of family, romantic
partners, and careers, exploring what it means to make the personal public. Attendees will come away with
tools to dig deep into the truths they must tell.
Event Outline
As the number of big commercial publishers contracts, university presses offer an essential alternative.
Almost ninety universities are actively acquiring creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and translations,
but information on their interests and procedures is not always easy to find. This diverse panel features
one university press director and four acclaimed writers of multiple genres, published by a range of
university presses. They guide you through the publishing process, from submission to distribution.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2
The short story is a form uniquely suited to experimentation and play. Five fiction writers discuss
innovative approaches to the short story in their own work and the work of writers whom they admire,
reflecting on what premises and constraints have proved fruitful for them and for others, thinking through
the purpose of experimentation—what it makes possible, both for the writer and the reader—and
offering exercises to prompt writers who hope to experiment in their own work.
Event Outline
Five ecopoetry anthology editors will discuss editing and publicizing anthologies (international, national,
or local) encouraging action on our environmental crisis and environmental injustice that can help readers
feel a sense of both urgency and hope. Some of us have collaborated with scientific or environmental
organizations, donating royalties and developing action guides. We will discuss organizing the book, finding
a publisher, and working with the publisher to develop a unique point of view.
Event Outline
Benjamin Garcia writes, "the language in question is corrupt // it's poison and salve // savage and
sage // it's honeysuckle and bitter oleander." The poets in this reading, with recent books published
by Milkweed Editions, all illustrate in varying ways the press's ongoing commitment to art that uses
language to trouble and interrogate the status quo. Our poetries are radical, queer, disabled,
genre-bending. We seek to celebrate our power as creators—come join us!
Event Outline
From Tiananmen Square to the London Bombings to Duterte’s dictatorship in the Philippines to the power
of Fake News, four women writers’ work reshapes the narrative of contemporary event as it gels into
history. Through their novels that deal with the big issues—representation, surveillance, legacy,
colonialism, resistance—the work of these award-winning Asian women is working to transfigure the
discourse through the political novel as it expands to include diverse, articulate voices.
Four innovative novelists, all seasoned fiction workshop leaders, discuss how Robinson achieves her
remarkable effects, engaging women's and men's lives, race, Christianity, and American cultural history in
novels simultaneously unadorned and complicated, regional and universal, and reminding us that novelists can
be our public intellectuals. Panelists will tease out how Robinson does what she does and what we can learn
from this work, with insights for both pedagogy and our own writing.
Event Outline
That first book is out in the world, the launch is long past, and you're back at your desk plugging away at
the next one. You've already written and published one book—shouldn't the next one be easier? If
you're still plagued by uncertainty and struggling with your second book, you are not alone. This panel of
authors working on their sophomore books will grapple with surviving your debut and how to get the work done
afterward while encountering the struggles and slumps of second books.
Event Outline
Nine o'clock A.M. to Eleven-fifty A.M.
LitNet is a coalition of literary organizations from across the United States that works to promote the
importance of the literary arts in American culture, build the capacity of the literary field, and broaden
funding for the literary arts. Join us for a meeting from 9:00 a.m. to 10:15 a.m. to learn more about what
we do, followed by a breakfast mingle with literary leaders and other advocates from the field.
Nine o'clock A.M. to Five o'clock P.M.
With more than 600 literary exhibitors, the AWP Bookfair is the largest of its kind. A great way to meet
authors, critics, and peers, the bookfair also provides excellent opportunities to find information about
many literary magazines, presses, and organizations. Please consult the bookfair map in the printed
conference planner or AWP mobile app for location details.
Breakfast and lunch concessions are available inside the Exhibit Hall in the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
Cash, debit, and credit cards are accepted at all food and beverage locations. Please consult the maps in
the conference program or mobile app for location details. Due to COVID-19 precautions, eating and drinking
is limited to designated areas.
The Wick Poetry Center’s Traveling Stanzas Makerspace offers conference attendees an opportunity to
creatively engage with themes of health and healing, social and racial justice, nature and environment, and
peace and conflict. This interactive exhibit invites participants to share their voice using a suite of
digital expressive writing tools, such as Emerge (an erasure poetry app), Thread (community-generated
poems), and the Listening Wall (thematically-driven touch-screen poetry displays). Visitors will be able to
choose a theme, follow a prompt, then print and share their responses. More information can be found at
http://travelingstanzas.com.
Ten-thirty-five A.M. to Eleven-thirty-five A.M.
Pluralizing and problematizing simplistic notions of land/sky/water, womanist and queer/trans Palestinian
and mixed-race Arab/Indigenous poets, non/fiction writers, performers, and editors examine the ways space
and place shape and guide our work. Surfacing stories grounded in geohistory, this panel will discuss the
connections between Nations and narration, bodies (of work) and the lands and waters from which they emerge,
and decolonizing dialogues of ecopoetic and environmental literatures.
Event Outline
This panel expands and troubles the practice of poetry through an exploration of two writers’ pathways
to nonpage forms including film, dance, and visual art. The panelists will share work and discuss how poetry
informs their work, including questions such as: How do we engage multiple practices and poetics? How does
our work circulate in the economy of each medium? The panelists wish to acknowledge various barriers to
participation for the original panel of five.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2, Supplemental Document 3
Is climate fiction a misnomer? The climate crisis teaches us that human experiences (and those of other
species) are myriad, multifaceted, and irreducible to a narrowly prescribed set of expectations that genres
often impose. There can be no one Thing with a capital T that constitutes fiction about climate change, as
this anthology's seventeen stories illustrate. Showing itself in different and often inequitable ways around
the world, the climate crisis and the stories about it are diverse.
Event Outline
This panel focuses on the challenges, methodologies, and drives involved in the creation of a decolonial
archive of Puerto Rican literature. It addresses how interviewing writers, translating, working with
institutions, and digitizing materials can create a lasting open-access source during a period in which the
archipelago’s educational resources are being privatized and the gap between institutional access and
intercommunity literary production is widening in both archipiélago and diáspora.
Event Outline
Philippa Gregory's controversial historical fiction is igniting passionate conversation about the fine line
between erasing facts and taking artistic liberties. This panel will discuss how to craft historical
narratives that captivate readers without sacrificing accuracy, especially about groups of people who are
often misunderstood. With wisdom from academia, publishing, and play- and novel-writing, we will discuss how
to combine vivid characters and intriguing plots with reality and solid research.
Event Outline
While personal essay often serves as vessel for the exploration of memory and the construction of identity,
the disturbed essay stirs up the sediment, allows for memory’s paradoxes, and helps us reevaluate what
we reach towards when we write. It allows us to refute dominant narratives about LGBTQIA+, PoC, and disabled
lives. Those elements of the past that wake us, interfere with the coherent story of a self, and invade our
privacy become the radical heart of a truer story.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1
Adapted from Patty Berne’s "Disability Justice - A Working Draft," a disability justice
framework understands that: all bodies are unique and essential; all bodies have strengths and needs that
must be met; we are powerful, not despite the complexities of our bodies, but because of them; and all
bodies are confined by ability, race, gender, sexuality, class, nation state, religion, and more, and we
cannot separate them. Disability justice holds a vision born out of collective struggle, drawing upon
legacies of cultural and spiritual resistance.” Cave Canem and Zoeglossia invite you to join Raymond
Antrobus, Khadijah Queen, and L. Lamar Wilson in a discussion on how poets of color work within and without
that framework, including readings from the poets.
Ten-thirty-five A.M. to Eleven-fifty A.M.
Diné writers, often expected to speak of their work for its content and aesthetic alone, carry a
compounded burden since settler-colonial patterns of subjection promote primitivism; genocidal legislative
history; and Hollywood-glossed, southwest aesthetics, including violence and savagism. This panel presents
Diné craft methods and Dinétics (Diné aesthetics/poetics), which are erased or obscured
(at best) and violated or made meaningless (at worst), to interrogate false narratives as an act of
restoration.
In a society that favors the unambiguous over the complex, how do mixed authors of color write the truth of
ourselves? Do we depict the ambiguity of our backgrounds or default to the recognizable and marketable? Do
we reframe the issue by writing nonhuman characters? How do we embrace our in-betweenness and how do we
influence structural change to reflect the nuances of the mixed experience? Five writers discuss how their
work fits in the literary landscape now and in a more inclusive future.
Event Outline
The Central Brooklyn Oral History and Atlas project is a college-wide research project at Medgar Evers
College in New York City that engages students, faculty, and local community residents on the collecting,
archiving, and exhibition of oral histories from the area. College faculty on this panel will share and
discuss how innovative creative writing pedagogy and curriculum and social and community-based art practices
based on oral histories can be used to make the classroom more inclusive.
Hear from prose writers on Philly activism, Philly café life, Philly poverty, and how Philadelphians
struggle with Philly's creative economy as written in their latest works. How do five authors approach the
layers, neighborhoods, tensions, despairs, and sheer pretty brickness of a city the New York Times
once hypothesized as “the sixth borough”? The “New York novel” is its own beast, but
these authors demonstrate that prose set in Philly is a capture all its own.
Event
Outline
Many writers of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry offer freelance editorial services as a sideline,
but few are able to generate a steady income as independent editors. If you’ve ever dreamed of
self-employment as an editor, part-time or full-time, this panel is for you. You’ll meet four
experienced author-editors who will share their personal stories, discuss best practices, and offer advice
on everything from finding new clients to setting your rates.
Event Outline
“Illness,” writes Lauren Slater, “medicine itself, is the ultimate narrative: there is no
truth there.” While there is much more awareness and less romanticising of mental illness in literary
culture than there once was, writing about diagnosis and recovery still brings with it plenty of stigma and
shame. With work that ranges from graphic forms to narrative nonfiction, our panelists discuss their
approaches to writing about mental illness, family history, and psychiatric care.
Event Outline
The blank page looms. What if self-imposed rules and practices could help you generate your most inspired
work? This panel explores ways in which writers across genres pair daily ordinary activities (morning walks,
art-making) with self-imposed writing constraints (mandated vocabulary, word limits) to unlock creative
potential and create full-length books. Panelists will discuss their practices and constraints and offer
tips and exercises to help audience members begin their own projects.
Alice James Books publishes poets whose writing possesses the range, depth, and ability to cultivate greater
empathy in our world and to dynamically push against silence. This work is instrumental in driving
conversations that help us overcome the barriers we face. Four poets with new or forthcoming collections
from Alice James will read from their work and discuss their writing process.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1
How can poems make vivid the work of activism and protest and attract more people to social movements? Can
poems make us more compassionate, effective activists? Called by Vincent Toro’s poem “Vox Populi
for the Marooned,” poet-activists will read poems on nuts and bolts of social change: demonstrating;
making flyers, zines, and new media; fundraising; direct action; group messaging; door-knocking. Panelists
will discuss craft elements that make visible the hard work of building another world.
Event Outline
In memoir courses, painful experiences can spark powerful stories, yet the classic writing workshop asks
college and adult-education students to sit in judgment of one another. They may feel exposed or dump too
much information. Depression, self-harm, homophobia, racism—such topics impact storytelling. On this
panel, we'll move past workshopping to empathic support, discussing how to create sanctuaries in person or
online that foster self-awareness. Bring your questions and passion for teaching.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2, Supplemental Document 3
We are innovative writers who unearth hidden stories through erasure poetry, peeling away language to reveal
invisible worlds beneath given texts. We examine letters, visual artifacts, pharmaceutical data, and
Ancestry.com reports to excavate buried narratives through erasures, a dynamic form that potentially
reenacts and heals silences related to family, race, illness, and trauma. We discuss techniques for writing
erasures and unearthing hidden texts to reveal vital voices and revelations.
Event Outline
Like the musician’s “sophomore album,” the poet’s “second act” navigates
complex terrain. How much should a poet show aesthetic range? Does introducing a new project threaten the
development of poetic voice? When should a poet look for a new publisher? This reading features five poets
whose second books have been released in the past year—a trying year for any release, but especially
so for early-career poets. These poets will also discuss the diverse paths that brought them to those books.
Event Outline
Iraq and Afghanistan military and veteran writers have enthusiastically embraced the internet to amplify
their voices and build audiences through blogging, online publishing, remote workshopping, and social media
promotion and as a bridge to traditional print publication. The members of the panel, all accomplished
authors or online journal editors in the veteran-writing field, offer a range of perspectives regarding best
online publishing practices, lessons learned, and future possibilities.
Event Outline
Despite the forms that have arisen since the mid-20th century, conversations about poetic form are often
limited to binary notions of traditional forms and free verse. But there need not be firm delineation
between them: new forms often arise from free verse. We will explore how free verse spawns different
approaches to structures and their subjects and how changes in form demand performative engagement with the
texts, in which writers and readers conspire to form order within a chaotic milieu.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 2
If it’s true that no one wants to hear about another person’s kids, how then do we write about
parenthood? How do we differentiate our writing from the deluge of poems on parenting? How do we craft
fresh, compelling work for a wide range of audiences, including nonparents? Five poets discuss how
parenthood changed their relationship to their work, sharing practical writing advice for the poet-parent
and techniques they developed to avoid cliché and self-indulgence.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2
Twelve-ten P.M. to One-ten P.M.
One of the most difficult challenges first-time novelists face is figuring out the structure of their
stories, yet is structure imposed on story, or does it arise organically from it? The novels we admire most
have not just married form to plot but found ways to make the form itself iterate what matters most. In this
panel, award-winning fiction writers engaged in first-novel work will discuss their processes, struggles,
strategies, and overall journeys through structuring their first novels.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1
Taiwan is the twentieth-largest economy in the world and a modern democracy, but it is blocked from
membership in the United Nations and World Health Organization and can’t even compete in the Olympics
under its own name. China thwarts Taiwan’s sovereignty not just through diplomacy but through
language, by censoring perceived dissent and controlling the narrative. Taiwanese American writers can tell
their stories from a safe distance; their words are urgent and necessary to counteract this erasure.
Event Outline
In 2020, Deep Vellum, a press with its origins in publishing works in translation, made the decision to
publish stateside authors. By happenstance, many of the debut authors were children of immigrants. Panelists
discuss their work and what it means to be American authors publishing alongside works in translation.
Event Outline
Indie presses and magazines discuss the most successful digital and social media strategies they've used to
expand their reach, engage their audience, and build community.
Event Outline
This panel examines modes of feedback as a genre that necessitates critique in light of implicit pedagogical
traditions and biases that dehumanize the writing workshop. We will discuss how to collaboratively unpack
power dynamics and cultural assumptions to build equitable, inclusive workshops. We will discuss different
forms and levels of workshops, drawing upon a range of techniques and perspectives from small colleges to
HBCUs to large state universities and points in between.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2, Supplemental Document 3
Joy Harjo has been a major voice in poetry, in Native Literature, in American Literature, for over four
decades. Her influence is immeasurable and her qualities many. Come celebrate with us the beauty, the truth,
the strength and musicality of Joy Harjo’s work and the wonderfulness of her as a person.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2
This event will be a panel discussion between four women of diverse ages, races, and backgrounds who work as
literary groundbreakers and who share one common distinction: they come from Kentucky. When the world
shifted to life at a distance, we were all searching for ways to draw together. We found renewed community
in our successes as women from the same region who branched out. In this event, we explore how reconnecting
with the people you’ve met in hometowns past may change your literary future.
Event Outline
Twelve-ten P.M. to One-twenty-five P.M.
The concept of chosen families is important in queer communities. A chosen family is a group of people who
deliberately choose to be in each other's lives—people you aren't related to, but your lives are
intertwined. This conversation explores the way Americans are moving toward chosen families rather than
blood families. Sometimes we are unlucky in our birth families, but that shouldn't stop us from finding big
love, a home, a joyous group around us who becomes our family. This event will be prerecorded and available
on the virtual conference platform, in addition to being screened onsite. ASL interpretation and live
captioning will be provided.
W.J.T. Mitchell describes ekphrasis as “something done to something, with something, by someone, for
someone.” Teaching and writing ekphrastic poetry elicits questions about power, positionality,
knowledge, appropriation—and the anxiety and pleasure of influence. How is the genre evolving and
creating innovative ways for poetry to respond to the visual arts? Four writer-teachers who teach and write
ekphrasis discuss their progressive pedagogy that imagines this genre in radical, inclusive ways.
Event Outline
Is parenting all-consuming—or is it a complex and nuanced insight into life that adds depth and
meaning to our creative practices? Contributors to the new anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing
Motherhood share original writing in a conversation that navigates a range of transformative
experiences including living with children both young and grown, being a single parent, experiencing
infertility, having a transracial adoption, and being the birth parent in an open adoption.
Event Outline
The first impression a writer makes on an editor happens in the pitch. But what exactly does a successful
pitch look like? How long should one even be? What elements should a pitch contain in order to get that
coveted assignment? Four writers with experience publishing reportage, essays, profiles, and other
nonfiction discuss how to grab an editor's attention with a pitch that tells a compelling story and how to
pivot if a pitch gets turned down.
Event Outline
“Science fiction is a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are
attacking the recent past and the present.” As Ray Bradbury suggests in this quote, many readers and
writers turn to speculative fiction not to wonder about what might happen so much as to think about
what’s already happening. Five writers and editors will share their experiences working with sci-fi
that, rather than being an escape, serves as an engagement or confrontation with the present.
Event Outline
Established indie publishers White Pine Press, Ugly Duckling Press, MadHat Press, and BOA Editions discuss
the ins and outs of the current sphere of independent poetry publishing. Topics willl include the manuscript
selection process (including contests and open submissions), layout and design, PR, marketing, distribution,
reviews, the real economics of running a successful poetry press, current trends and waves, technology, and
the future.
Event Outline
Poetry Centered, a new podcast from the University of Arizona Poetry Center, invites poets to curate
selections from Voca, the center’s online audiovisual archive of 1,000+ recorded readings from 1963 to
today. In each episode, new constellations of meaning emerge, coalescing as intergenerational conversations
across time and space. The producers and three poets who have hosted episodes will reflect on voices they
encountered in the archive and how this experience shaped their present thinking.
Event Outline
What community and cultural languages define your work as a writer? Five Perugia poets guide a discussion
investigating the challenges of language acquisition and loss, the use of terms as weapons of exclusion in
military and civilian spaces, the reclamation and affirmation of mother tongues, and ways of speaking from
and for the environment. Explore how linguistic experience intersects with craft in this conversation
featuring women poets from one press who represent myriad places and voices.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1
The American sonnet is having a moment. This panel features scholars and poets discussing the contemporary
sonnet and the ways in which today’s writers subvert, revise, and creatively destroy the sonnet as an
inherited form. How, the panel asks, do poets reimagine this prescribed form to engage questions of race,
class, gender, sexuality, and power in America? How do today’s sonnets negotiate constraint and
agency, tradition and innovation?
Event Outline
Since 2016, when these panelists convened to talk about their experience as POC writers who led
creative-writing workshops, profound changes in conversations on race and writing have taken place. Let's
consider the ways that faculty of color center and negotiate intersectional identities in these spaces.
Their dual perspective as marginalized leaders position them to reimagine the writing workshop after
centering equity. What has been disrupted? What has stayed the same?
Event Outline
Working with young people on their developing writing is both exciting and powerful. This panel, made up of
teachers, visiting writers, and community organizers, all of diverse backgrounds, share their insights on
how to have maximum impact when visiting a K–12 classroom or community center. This panel will discuss
all facets of a classroom visit, and how to best set students up for success, igniting a passion for
language's potential.
Event
Outline
“I do not intend to speak about, just nearby,” Trinh T. Minh-ha says in her film
Reassemblage, critiquing the documentary genre. What does it mean to speak nearby, as women writers
who practice archival research and make work in conversation with difficult histories? How do we reclaim and
remake the act of research itself? How do we speak with, without speaking for? Join us for a conversation on
the joys, challenges, ethics, and possibilities of research as creative practice and reparative act.
Event Outline
Asian Americans are rarely depicted as Southerners. Ours is an invisible history and a conspicuous
existence. So to whom do we write? Whom do we preserve by writing? Heritage has long concealed a threat in
Southern lexicon. And yet at the root, heritage is an act of transmission from one generation to the next.
Join panelists in a discussion to push Southern poetics towards wholeness by asserting that the Asian
American experience in the South is vaster than one generation.
Event Outline
The medium of comics is well-established as presenting works of literary value, but critical writing can be
mired in a defensive position (not just for kids, not just illustration, not just a fad). Critics and
culture writers discuss the challenges and opportunities in embracing comics as both literature and pop
culture; the essential role of diverse communities in comics; drawing on art, literary, and film criticism
as reference; the pitfalls of boosterism; and how criticism pushes the field.
Event Outline
Tillie Olsen (1912–2007), writer, activist, mentor and supporter of women writers, is central to
working class literature, feminist literature, and writing about the imagination and the artistic process.
Publications include Tell Me a Riddle (1961) and Silences (1978). “Tillie Olsen helps
those of us condemned to silence—the poor, the racial minorities, the women—find our
voices” (Maxine Hong Kingston). Presenters share about Olsen's mentoring. Short reading, film
excerpts, and slide show.
Event Outline
The past several years have seen an explosion of trans stories and a vibrant, seemingly limitless array of
new strategies used to tell them. Four trans and nonbinary writers consider how their work explores
“trans” themes through multiple lenses, rooted in craft and technique: temporal recursiveness
and cyclicality; shifts in voice and genre; and narratives that criss-cross normative understandings of
geographic, cultural, and linguistic borders.
Event Outline
Aside from workshops, what can undergraduate creative writing programs offer students to create a vibrant
and engaging community? The panel will discuss undergrad literary journals, navigating budget issues
associated with reading series, and enticing cash-strapped students to participate in outside activities.
We’ll consider how a program can create an international sense of community as well as offering local
service opportunities for writers—all while bearing in mind postgraduate nerves.
Event Outline
You’ve embarked on a work of fiction. You have a tentative starting point and an idea of the
characters, the plot, and the tension. You even have a vision of how the work will end. All things
considered, you’re off to a great start. But you also find yourself in a familiar predicament, and you
ask yourself: is this flash fiction, a short story, or something longer? This panel of fiction writers
working in a variety of forms will discuss how they decide what shape their work will take.
Event Outline
One-forty-five P.M. to Two-forty-five P.M.
FC2 has been a leading publisher of experimental writing for over forty years, hosting a continually dynamic
and diverse conversation about what constitutes the innovative. FC2 authors include, among many others,
Samuel Delany, Leslie Scalapino, Lidia Yuknavitch, Stephen Graham Jones, Diane Williams, Amelia Gray, and
Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi. This event features readings by authors of their latest releases, followed by a
Q&A.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 2
Barrow Street Press began publishing books in 2002 as an offshoot of its poetry magazine, Barrow
Street. A significant presence in the small press poetry world, Barrow Street Press continues to
publish four books a year through an annual book prize as well as through submissions to the press. Readings
by these five representative poets showcase and celebrate the continuing breadth and power of the Barrow
Street Press roster of poets.
Event Outline
Between COVID and the shuttering of theaters, low-paying playwriting commissions, and the proliferation of
writers needed for online television and performance, many playwrights are venturing into other areas of
writing beyond the proscenium. Hear from some of the top writers in our field about how they made the shift
into other forms, how their playwriting skills helped/hurt their writing in these forms, and what to do if
you are interested in working in areas outside the theater.
Event Outline
What can a poet do in the face of dehumanization and brutality towards groups of people? How can we avoid
sentimentality or reducing victims to statistics? How do we communicate the victimization of a people while
still conveying their agency and humanity? Do the details of craft matter in the face of mass murder, and
how can poetry honor the dead and urge society towards justice and humanity? And what do poets do when we
see the attitudes that led to genocide resurfacing today?
Event Outline
San Jose State University’s MFA has been a dual-genre program since its inception in 2000. SJSU
requires MFA students to complete three workshops in a primary genre and two workshops in a declared
secondary genre. SJSU offers tracks in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenwriting/playwriting. We also
offer occasional hybrid-genre workshops. MFA core faculty and MFA students will discuss the advantage of
working in two genres and reflect on their experiences in the program.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2, Supplemental Document 3
Setting and place are at the center of our stories and identities—yet globalization and territorial
violences create a complicated spatial “belonging." How do we place ourselves in our writing?
Braving political strife, war, and displacement coupled with traumas of misrepresentation by dominant
narratives, five women grounded in (global) Lebanese, Azerbaijani, Palestinian, and Pakistani cultures write
and/or translate poetry, fiction, and memoir to recast histories and cultures in our own voices.
Event Outline
Forget objectivity. Journalists increasingly use a first-person point of view in feature articles,
commentary, and essays. Personal stories engage readers, especially on digital sites. But in the
Disinformation Age, a first-person perspective also promises more honesty about who's doing the observing or
deciding which stories to tell, helping to address implicit bias. A diverse panel of journalists and
essayists discuss how to build trust with readers by crafting a believable first-person voice.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2, Supplemental Document 3
One-forty-five P.M. to Three o'clock P.M.
Three powerhouse poets debut their new collections from Copper Canyon Press and discuss craft as it meets
content. Resisting police brutality, lamenting the loss of the natural world, and grieving across distances
of time and geography, these poems carry tremendous weight. How can poetry give shape and voice to complex
emotional truths and urgent political convictions? These radically inventive authors explore transformative
possibilities as they defy collapse and expand out of the status quo.
This event will be prerecorded and available on the virtual conference platform, in addition to being
screened onsite. ASL interpretation and live captioning will be provided.
Akin to how printing technologies revolutionized verse to create a print culture, new media advancements
have led to another tectonic shift in how audiences experience language and how poets explore identity and
embodiment. Now poets are transforming language and performance for a digital culture by exploring social
media, visualization, code, VR, and mobile applications. This reading will showcase work from diverse poets
that have incorporated new media into their craft and performances.
Event Outline
This panel of five long-term Typehouse Literary Magazine editors will discuss the challenges of and
techniques for dealing with and adapting with the changing publishing world, including structure for dealing
with submissions, printing formats, soliciting and publishing ownvoices, establishing consistency in a
rapidly changing publishing market, budgeting, and engaging in activism within the magazine industry.
Event Outline
The statistics are daunting. Each year, far more writers complete their degrees than academic jobs open, and
after so much hard work, the final hurdle to landing a university teaching position can feel insurmountable.
Our panel assembles veteran search committee members from universities across the country to illuminate the
other side of the search. We will offer advice and answer audience questions, giving writers their best shot
at landing a position.
Event Outline
Four poets and a prose writer, two who are Indigenous and three who are Latinx, discuss the poetics of
solidarity taking on the history of femicide at the US/Mexico border and equally devastating record of
murdered and disappeared Indigenous women across US and Canada. Together they move beyond arguments
involving poetry of witness and documentary poetics to discuss, as compromised individuals, the politics of
representation and writing as a place to build alliances and community.
Event Outline
Young writers programs allow literary organizations to expand their reach and inspire a new generation of
readers and writers, but such programs require months of thoughtful planning and attention to detail.
Panelists representing a diversity of offerings for young writers (mentorship programs, in-person and
virtual classes, yearlong and summer programs) will offer tips for structuring, marketing, and facilitating
a young writers program while also considering issues of access and equity.
Event Outline
This panel will discuss how imaginative techniques can supplement historically researched writing to offer a
visceral experience of marginalized voices within an Indigenous framework and how to apply similar
strategies to shape a respectful and responsible approach to research and writing outside of that tradition.
Panelists will discuss the intersection of documentary and visual poetics, literary cartography, creative
ethnography, and enactment of Indigenous sovereignties through creative work.
Event Outline, Supplemental Document 1, Supplemental Document 2, Supplemental Document 3
From Eliot to Okot p'Bitek, poets have stolen theater's ticks and tricks in hybrid forms. Moving on from
stylized poetry slams, language poets' performative poetics, and voice-driven poets testing audience
credulity, today's poets test new lineations and typography to “theatrify” the page and
performance. Five poets display their hybridity to unsettle narratives about race and childhood that control
human relations.
Event Outline
This panel will explore the counterintuitive subject of privacy in a form that demands divulgence. How can
we tell the "whole" truth without including everything? How do we negotiate dueling loyalties to
an important story and to loved ones? What devices can a nonfiction writer use to withhold or conceal
things? And how do some craft choices reflect the burden placed on certain populations to perform
vulnerability? Finally, how can memoirists retain privacy in the social media stratosphere?
Event Outline
If writing is an act of solitude, requiring either “money and a room of [one’s] own” or
the fluidity of movement and travel that Paule Marshall describes in Triangular Road, then how do
writers create amid an act that often requests a subsuming of time, body, and often identity, especially as
historically marginalized people, especially now? Panelists examine means of creation that navigate the
minefields of parenting from the space of Other.
Event
Outline
A thesis often represents a student’s cumulative work in a creative writing program. But what happens
next? Panelists who have recently published their first books, will discuss their creative processes, what
changes they made from thesis to book publication, how publication affected them, and the challenges they
faced, such as revision, submitting to journals and prizes, seeking an agent, and applying to residencies.
These authors will offer practical advice to attendees and hold a brief Q&A.
Event Outline
Imprisonment affects individuals, families, and communities in layered and lasting ways. Writers working in
poetry, prose, and hybrid forms who have been impacted by imprisonment will share excerpts of their work and
discuss imprisonment. How does imprisonment affect individuals, their families, and the collective? Why is
it imperative to share stories of incarceration? How can writing about imprisonment empower ordinary people
to make change?
Event Outline
Join us for a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts! With
picturesque locations in Amherst, Virginia and Auvillar, France, VCCA has been providing established and
emerging artists with the gift of time and space to create for half a century. Five VCCA Fellows will share
their residency experiences, and read from new work.
Event Outline
From the many phrases and words that can’t be literally translated to all of those cultural
differences, these five Latin American/Hispanic writers will share how they navigate and balance both
languages in their work. The writers on this panel explore the advantages and the importance of bilingual
writing across genres and how mixing language (code-switching), culture, and literary traditions helps them
to find their unique voice while reflecting on the struggles found along their journeys.
Event Outline
What are best practices for deep creative research, and how does who researches and writes about science and
tech shape our future? Four creative writers exploring underrepresented perspectives in STEM share research
practices and experiences, including shadowing med students and visiting North Korea, exploring virtual
reality and infiltrating Reddit to access the language and hierarchy of game design companies, visiting
deforested areas in Cambodia, and investigating robobees and robot priests.
Event Outline
Love it or hate it, hybrid programming is the future of literary events, offering unbeatable accessibility
and dynamic opportunities for programming not possible with limited budgets or in-person events. Panelists
from a library and suburban and urban book festivals, who have all capitalized on the power of technology,
will talk strategies for leveraging online spaces in tandem with in-person events to build your buzz and
brand in a way that will inspire even the most Zoom-fatigued of us.
Event Outline
Despite recent attention to Black Lives Matter, Black literary cultures and the voices of Black women and
LGBTQ+ people rarely take center stage. As writers, teachers, organizers and cultural workers, we reflect on
Philadelphia's rich Black feminist literary life. How do we center Black women, girls, and trans and
nonbinary people in our writing and community work? We discuss nurturing Philly's Black feminist literary
imaginaries and gather insights for cultural workers in other cities and beyond.
This virtual discussion room will take place live and will not be recorded for on-demand viewing.
Event Outline
Three-twenty P.M. to Four-twenty P.M.
With over two million podcasts and half of US households listening, many writers are turning to podcasts to
make a living—but audio is increasingly difficult to break into. The learning curve is steep, many
internships require extensive experience, and mentorship that leads to employment is rare. Five women
writers from NPR, Headspace, the ACLU, and the Center for an Urban Future share how they found lifelong
mentors, a collaborative community, and the experience they needed to break in.
Event Outline
Panelists will explain how they adapted to the new virtual world of poetry during the pandemic. The
panelists will share insights into how they found ways to forge an inclusive online poetry community that
encompasses virtual readings, podcasts, reviews, and newsletters to provide a poetic voice and connection
throughout the country. Then the panelists will host a Q&A to provide tips on how to authentically
market your own work and support other poets through the internet.
Event Outline
Every writer needs a good editor—even writers who spend their days working as editors themselves. But
writers who are also editors still edit their own work, with the possibility of a unique double vision, even
across mediums and genres. Five editor-writers will share the insights, tricks, and challenges they
encounter when turning their editing eyes on their own writing, offering complications and alternative to
the advice we all give and receive.
Event Outline
This panel will offer the perspectives of four women writers of color using digital humanities and digital
archives to recover, document, and promote the voices and histories of underrepresented artists, writers,
and activists. We will also discuss how we can use digital tools to tell stories in new and compelling ways.
In addition, we will describe the challenges we face as women of color in the predominately white field of
digital humanities and how we navigate through these obstacles.
Event Outline
A workshop developed at a rural two-year campus in northern Wisconsin introduced students to oral
storytelling traditions, structure, and style. Along with performing their own stories, students partnered
with community groups to present the stories of marginalized voices. These service-learning projects led the
presenters to feature the survival stories of local Somali immigrants, separated from family for years by
restrictive policies, in a documentary film to be be discussed in this panel.
Event Outline
In a culture where women of color are ever-expected to perform rage/anger as a primary mode of social
protest, five poets flip the script and read poems with joy as their primary focus. These poets find
strength in Toi Derricotte’s writing and notion that “joy is an act of resistance.” They
explore the powers of gratitude, eros, humor, devotion, and love—those forces necessary to
defy/oppose/disarm regimes of hate and division.
Three-twenty P.M. to Four-thirty-five P.M.
Rivka Galchen’s second novel Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch was a finalist for the 2021 Atwood
Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her debut novel Atmospheric Disturbances won the William Saroyan
International Prize for Writing and was named to best of the year lists by The New York Times,
Salon.com, Slate, and more. Ruth Ozeki’s fourth novel The Book of Form and Emptiness
was released in September 2021 and named a best book of the year by outlets including Time and The
Guardian. Her 2013 novel A Tale for the Time Being won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and
the Dos Passos Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and National Books Critics Circle Award.
Moderated by Zachary Steele.
This event will be prerecorded and available on the virtual conference platform, in addition to being
screened onsite. ASL interpretation and captioning will be provided.
Structuring a book-length work presents unique opportunities and challenges. How does form meet content at
over 50,000 words? There are a myriad of different ways to answer this question. This panel brings together
a diverse group of nonfiction writers from across the country to discuss their approaches to form in a
manuscript, the many craft decisions made during the writing process, and the different storytelling
lineages called upon in crafting the final version of the work.
Event
Outline
Temple University has been Philadelphia’s only full-time residential graduate creative writing program
since 1985. This panel celebrates that history by presenting readings from five poetry alumni whose recently
published works explore poetry as historiographic practice, covering topics such as surveillance capitalism,
the settlement of North America, the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692, anti-Asian violence since 9/11, and
Black voices hidden in the archives.
Event Outline
Professionals from the literary field discuss alternative career paths to academia, including magazine
publishing, writers-in-the-schools programs, literary conferences and festivals, and arts administration.
This panel features craft talks by essayists whose work appears in the University of Nebraska Press
anthology A Harp in the Stars, which Aimee Nezhukumatathil calls “a fascinating look into the
bright heart of what the lyric essay can be.” Contributors will read brief excerpts of a segmented
essay, a braided essay, a hermit crab essay in the form of a word search puzzle, and a hybrid lyric craft
essay, then discuss practical strategies as well as theoretical concerns when writing in these forms.
Event Outline
One joy of being an avid reader is discovering a fresh voice, new to and in love with literary
self-expression, but so, too, is there joy in following the growth of a voice over the course of an
author’s lifetime. Each book is a time capsule of sorts: the representation of an
individual’s understanding of the world, forever preserved on page. This event will feature writers in
various stages of life, reflecting on all the people they’ve been over the years, charting out the
many maps of the self.
Event Outline
Realist, character-driven ecofiction and cli-fi play a special role in the urgent dialogue on
humanity’s culpability for and response to the desecration of the natural world. We discuss how and to
what effect we ground such stories in history and science, center nonhuman characters and natural settings,
negotiate despair and hope, harness environmental messaging to character and plot, and approach the global-
and generational-scale changes that drive speculative ecofiction.
Event Outline
Surviving as a Black woman in the world is an act of protest. Thriving as a Black mother and artist can be
revolutionary. How does this revolution appear on the page, on the stage, and in the difficult act of
getting published—and paid well? In a genre dominated by white women, can the breadth of our stories
be acknowledged and lauded? Writers of fiction, memoir, reportage, and plays will discuss the wide artistic
terrain of Black motherhood, including health, disability, sex, adoption, and more.
In publishing and academic contexts, short stories almost always come with a caveat: they're not marketable
or they're just what fits most easily in the workshop format. What if we stopped comparing books of short
stories to novels? This panel looks at the story collection as its own art form, rather than a prelude to a
debut novel. From contest to indie press to the Big Five, the panelists are writers who have come together
to discuss how to write, arrange, edit, and sell a collection.
Event Outline
Many lit mag editors participate on both sides of the submission process: reading unsolicited stories and
sending out their own for consideration. What do editors learn about writing from reading and editing
submissions? How does evaluating, accepting, and declining stories change the work of drafting new short
fiction? This panel dives into the editorial selection process on a craft level, with editors from
American Short Fiction, Apogee, The Common, The Offing, and One Story.
Event Outline
Oulipo writer Georges Perec says, “I set myself rules in order to be totally free.” From word
limits to time limits, writing with constraints can be a powerful tool when teaching writers to expand their
first-draft strategies as well as further hone their craft through imposed limitations. In this panel, five
instructors discuss what specific rule-based exercises they employ in the writing classroom and how those
constraining prompts allow students to find greater freedoms in their own work.
Event Outline
To celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Undocupoets Fellowship, a grant awarded to poets who are currently
or who were formerly undocumented in the US, this reading features the debut collections of four recipients
of the fellowship. This dynamic reading presents a complex and nuanced narrative of the undocumented
experience and highlights each poet’s differences in approach and vision. Each poet will also share a
poem written by another Undocupoets Fellow to preview the books yet to come.
Event Outline
Literary contests can be a great way to connect with editors, build an audience, and find a good home in the
world for your work. Submitting to contests is also an art in itself, one that requires savvy, strategy, and
perseverance. In this panel, four writers who have found success in literary contests offer advice on
choosing opportunities to pursue, selecting what to submit, and weathering the ups and downs of contest
news—all while staying grounded in what matters most: the writing itself.
Event Outline
This reading will feature five writers who have been invited to perform their written work
"dimensionally" using sound, image, objects, and other performance strategies. The goal of the
dimensional essay is to provide the space and equipment for writers to engage audiences by using elements
that compliment and extend the work of language. This event invites readers to question the formal
conventions of a literary reading and offers writers the opportunity to stretch out, collaborate, and play.
Mental Illness has young people going to extreme lengths to stay afloat. The isolation post-COVID has
presented new challenges for this audience (and their families) struggling for acceptance amid increased
alcoholism, divorce, family rejection, voices in their heads, and larger judgmental voices in the world. Our
group of diverse gendered panelists of different ages, ethnicities, and orientations, will explore these
challenges and how the act of writing has enabled us to exorcise our demons.
Event Outline
Debut collections chosen for the National Poetry Series represent a unique opportunity for poets to reach a
wide audience from the start, more immediately and effectively connecting them to the writing community to
contribute to the shaping of contemporary literary culture. But is it possible to prepare for the challenges
and opportunities in order to make the most of them? A panel of 2019 and 2020 winners will discuss their
paths to the prize and how it has affected them and their work.
Event Outline
This multigenre panel focuses on strategies for international authors or their translators seeking to
publish a translation of the work in English, as well as for international authors living in the US seeking
to publish the work in their native country. From Greek memoir to Armenian fiction to Mexican poetry, the
panelists will address the challenges faced by authors or by literary translators in spanning cultural
differences and in bringing the manuscript to US readers.
Event Outline
Our discussion room will explore literary activism, art and community-building, and literary and academic
change-making through five different vantages. In particular, we will share Asian American approaches
to crossracial organizing, improvisational pedagogies, neurodiversity, and literary activism in and beyond
the academy. We will include examples, generative writing, and somatic and embodied activities for
participants to engage, interact, and create so we move toward liberation collectively.
This virtual discussion room will take place live and will not be recorded for on-demand viewing.
Event Outline
Five o'clock P.M. to Six o'clock P.M.
YA authors who are also poets will discuss the many ways the craft of poetry has informed their fiction.
Attendees will learn the relationship between poetry and prose, how poetry can benefit prose, and how these
authors see the specific relationship between poetry and YA, as well as how authors navigate each
genre’s community.
Event Outline
The literary arts are experiencing more relevance than they have in decades, being more widely regarded as a
conduit for healing, a therapeutic modality that benefits mental and physical wellbeing and augments the
social and emotional learning of individuals and communities. This panel will feature the work of three
nonprofits that employ poetry in therapeutic ways across diverse demographics—from youth in both
public schools and nontraditional spaces, to the medically and socially vulnerable.
Event Outline
A wide variety of events—from the social to the political—spark our writerly imaginations.
Closest at hand, often, are the latest injustices and/or cultural outrages. We feel we must write about the
"thing itself." This panel will offer a series of disruptions suggesting alternatives to the
writer's sometimes essayistic, editorial impulses. Perhaps there is more opportunity in the unexpected.
Perhaps we can find more ways to reach the reader when they have their guard down.
Event Outline
Fiction that engages climate change often focuses on historical decisions or future possibilities, which can
strip responsibility and agency from those of us living on Earth today. This panel of climate fiction
writers will discuss why contemporary environmental justice, representation, and intersectionality in
environmental narratives matter as they share strategies for crafting stories that invite readers into the
conversation about the climate crisis.
Event Outline
Join the Chicago Quarterly Review for a second celebration of its Anthology of Black American
Literature, guest-edited by National Book Award winner and MacArthur Fellow Charles Johnson. This
reading showcases the breadth of voices that have been brought together in this remarkable issue as well as
the Chicago Quarterly Review's commitment to special editions, the fifth in its history. Interspersed
with questions and commentary, five contributors of prose and poetry read from their work.
Event Outline
Forms do more than contain: they exclude. They break down. They free. When forms disrupt expectations, they
can shatter paradigms. This panel joins five essayists in conversation about how structures we reconstruct
expand access, inquiry, and dialogue. They will discuss how new nonfiction forms can be used to increase
intimacy, forge inroads into others’ experiences, address global crises that defy traditional
structures, and reframe a more comprehensive social context.
Event Outline
Five o'clock P.M. to Six-fifteen P.M.
Daily 12-step meeting. All in recovery from anything are welcome.
What does it mean to steward Asian American literature organizationally, collectively, and individually? The
sixth annual Asian American Caucus is a town hall-style hang out and community space. Come meet other Asian
American writers and discuss opportunities and resources available to support you. Organized by Kundiman,
Asian American Writers' Workshop, Kaya Press, Hyphen Magazine, the Asian American Literary Review,
and Smithsonian’s APAC. This meeting will be accessible to in-person and virtual attendees.
Event Outline
Six o'clock P.M. to Seven-thirty P.M.
Please join us in celebrating Creative Writing at Bowling Green. For over fifty years, graduates from BGSU
have made outstanding contributions to our contemporary literary culture. We welcome faculty, students,
alumni, and new and old friends of the program to share food and drink and stories.
Six-thirty P.M. to Seven-forty-five P.M.
This will be a town-hall-style meeting, creating a much needed space for SWANA writers to build and connect
within AWP. We invite established and emerging writers, editors, students, scholars, and organizers and aim
for the caucus to facilitate networking and exchange on Arab American literary endeavors, craft, publishing,
poetics, and praxis. Our caucus seeks to empower and center the voices of underrepresented Americans with
roots in the Arab world.
Event Outline