For fifty years, AGNI has published international literature that transforms, combusts, and burns bright. Join us for a virtual reading that celebrates AGNI’s legacy and envisions its future with some of our dynamic contributors. These poets, writers, and translators from across the globe will come together to give a reading and discuss their experiences with the magazine’s intimate, rigorous editorial process.

50 Years of Fire: A Reading to Celebrate AGNI

Respected poets and scholars celebrate the contributions of Irena Klepfisz who will then read from her work. Klepfisz’s poetry is a fierce wave of truth graced with illuminating linguistic innovations, unafraid to engage with difficult themes: the brutal deaths in the Shoah, the unending Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the darkest moment of an immigrant’s journey. Klepfisz is a unique link between the Holocaust, the Yiddish revival, Jewish support for Palestinian human rights, and lesbian love.

A Tribute to Irena Klepfisz

How do you translate the immersive world of a literature work into a living, breathing piece of theatre? This conversation will explore the difference between the two mediums of storytelling, tips to consider, and how some dramatists have approached this with their own works. In addition to craft perspective, moderator Jessica Lit, Director of Business Affairs for the Dramatists Guild of America, will offer advice on the logistics of licensing and practical things to consider.

Adapting a Piece of Literature for the Stage

What does it mean to research the self? What’s it like to be a body in an archive? What happens when a living person comes into contact with physical and historical objects which they hope to turn into literature? In this panel, a diverse group of inter-genre writers will discuss their processes and experiences for research-based writing, with a specific focus on embodied research and the ethics of researching communities with whom one holds a visceral or personal connection.

Bodies in Archives: Researching Personhood, Researching as a Person

This panel will consist of African writers discussing the concerns, challenges, and rewards of writing about death and burial rites. What rituals show up on the page? How do effects colonization / postcolonization of African societies show up in death and burial rites. Particular focus will be given to the practice of repatriation of remains whether within countries or internationally. What is the importance of writing the desire to be buried at ‘home’?

Bury Me in the Motherland; Rituals of Death, Burial, and Repatriation in African Literature

For years, popular climate fiction has primarily been future dystopias that presuppose our failure in today’s battle against fossil fuels. Scientists agree that massive immediate change can still save the planet. Yet traditional publishing's lead time of two to three years is anything but immediate. These climate writers turned to various forms of arts activism, including a new, rapid publishing model for an urgent, contemporary climate literature that charts a path to victory and are seeking new novels.

Climate Novels Reimagined: Innovative Publishing to Confront the Climate Crisis

The panel will discuss the new scholarly volume Creative Writing Beyond the Academy in which creative writing scholars reflect upon the practice of writing. The editors and contributors to this work will explain how academic creative writing scholars examine creative practice in the book through reflection, exegesis, and research. The panelists will also discuss the myths and lore around writing practices and examine ways forward for the scholarship of creative practice.

Creative Writing beyond the Academy: The Scholarship of Creative Practice

How does crip literary writing convey intense personal emotion and experience while attending to social conditions for historical trauma, networks of care, access, and collective thriving in a way that a lyric "I" might shift toward a lyric "we"? In a reading and discussion, panelists center a poetics of queer-of-color disability and chronic illness by asking how cripping our attention to imagination, memory, dream, the senses, bodily rhythms, and environment disrupts the unified lyric subject.

Crip Lyric

Raymond Carver. Anna Sewell. Frank McCourt. Laura Ingalls Wilder. Each had their debut after the age of 50. In an industry obsessed with youth, no one ever talks about the mental overload of being an older writer whose first full-length publication occurs long after their twenty-ninth year. We'll give tips for writers till trying to get their big break after years of "hobby" writing or entering an MFA program next to writers young enough to be their children (or grandchildren).

Debuting as a "senior" writer: Why are there never "50 over 50" features?

Indian American poets celebrate the diversity of their belief systems, their different backgrounds, religions and cultures, and discuss the effects of right-wing nationalism in their country of origin, India, where moves to suppress minorities and free speech are on the rise. The poets, from Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities, will express their concerns about intolerance and the rise of nationalism both in India and the US—which is their home now—and how it affects their work.

Fearless: Indian Poets Celebrate Diversity in the Face of Hindu Nationalism

Writers of literary fiction often find the boundaries between the possible and impossible in their work disintegrating in strange, unexpected ways. What gives rise to this shift, and how do we navigate the surreal in our lives and work? How can models like Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, and George Saunders guide us? What techniques can help bring the speculative to life in a compelling and convincing manner? Acclaimed authors who’ve explored these questions will share insights and advice.

Ghosts, Portals, and Other Worlds: The Surreal in Contemporary Fiction

Often written about and not often enough written by, Native Americans are dispelling the mainstream cultural amnesia that surrounds the West’s first peoples through the genre of memoir. In this panel, three distinctive Californian Indian memoirists—a rising literary light, an award-winning poet-professor, and a celebrated storyteller and tribal leader—share their journeys navigating Indigenous identity in relation to the land, across continents, and through time.

Native Survivance, Defiance, and Culture-Keeping through Memoir

This multigenre panel focuses on strategies for writer / translators to negotiate their creative impulses in the context of translation. Focuses include how creative writers can ethically and responsibly utilize their creativity when translating, the potential merits and drawbacks of being a creative writer who translates, and how literary translators might be able to better understand the intentions of the writers they translate because of their background as writers themselves.

Poetic License: Negotiating Creative Impulses in the Context of Translation

In a poetic context where most work is not overtly metrical, metrical poems surprise. They can make room for new modes of being and saying, a potential realized by poets from Millay to Brooks to Patricia Smith. Each panelist will consider a metrical poem that has shaped their poetic practice—including work in noniambic meters—and will share a prompt inspired by the poem. We’ll explore meter, employed directly and as it informs free verse, as a radical, generative force in contemporary poetry.

Reclaiming Meter: Strategies for Contemporary Poem-Making

In “A Few Rules for Speculating the Future,” Octavia E. Butler wrote, "where we stand determines what we can see." Join the editors of the speculative anthology Infinite Constellations in a conversation with contributors exploring how culture informs their writing.

Speculating Us from Where We Stand: Writing Culture into Prose and Poetry

Although some poetry may be written for the page to be consumed privately, poetry as an art form is steeped in the history of oral storytelling. Spoken word, slam poetry, and poetry alike can serve as intimate and passionate dialogues between the writer and the audience. Join us for a conversation with playwrights who have translated their passion for these art forms into their works for the stage in powerful, new ways.

Spoken Word, Poetry, and Language as Theatre

Writing into chronic illness is an act of liberation. Through multiple genres—poetry, essays, and fiction—five award-winning writers with chronic illnesses explore their first-hand experiences of navigating disabilities, both visible and invisible, to reclaim their narratives, re-storying their lives against the multiple erasures enacted against them. The reading speaks back against ableist recovery and cripspiration stories.

The Chronic: Medicine and the Body in Writing

Many writers believe that revising one's work is the most challenging task writers face. What are the myriad ways we, as writers, approach revision? How do we get through the scariest, most daunting "swamps" of rough drafts? Are there maps, guideposts, and coping mechanisms we can use to get from point A to B and beyond? Five acclaimed writers discuss their revision processes and share tips, strategies, and approaches for revising stories and novels—and making our work as strong as it can be.

The Path through the Swamp: Revision Strategies and Processes

What makes or breaks a literary character who identifies as Muslim? How have Muslim characters evolved in different literary spaces? Does it matter when a faith-based character is written about by an author who identifies as a person of faith; or a person nonconforming to a defined spiritual path? Readers, writers, and publishers can now navigate through the stereotypes, tropes, and political undertones of Muslim identity issues within popular novels.

Unveiling the Juxtaposition of Muslim Characters in Modern Literature

Readings from We Are All Armenian: Voices from the Diaspora an anthology of creative nonfiction by diasporic Armenian writers to be published by University of Texas Press in March 2023.

We Are All Armenian Launch

A reading by poets from the anthology When Home Is Not Safe, Writings on Verbal, Emotional and Physical Abuse (McFarland, 2021). The reading will run approximately forty-five minutes. A Q&A session will follow for the remaining fifteen minutes. This topic is of the utmost importance, as approximately one in four women and one in nine men experience severe intimate partner physical violence, intimate partner contact sexual violence, and/or intimate partner stalking.

When Home Is Not Safe

Mother-poets read from their work that touches on contradictory affects, including the maternal anger and tenderness that Adrienne Rich described. One poet addresses unspoken challenges and fears of motherhood along with what it means to be a parent with mental health issues. Another poet shares visual quilt poems with a nod to the history of women’s work. One of our poets explores issues of exile, immigration, and trauma as a mother and daughter. One poet confronts climate change as a mother.

With Anger and Tenderness: A Reading by Mother Poets

With the public outcry surrounding #MeToo and other human rights crises, some writers have turned to the campus novel as compelling and productive terrain to examine the current zeitgeist. While riddled with complexities and creative challenges, the contemporary campus novel offers potential for transformation and renewal. Writers of campus novels will discuss their intentions behind writing their books, their experiences throughout the process, as well as the impact after publication.

Writing Academic Misbehavior: Why the Campus Story Is Compelling and Terrifying

The exhibit hall at the Seattle 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 Summit Lobby, Seattle Convention Center, Level 1.

AWP Bookfair Setup

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 Summit Lobby, Seattle Convention Center, Level 1. Please consult the bookfair map in the AWP 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 register at our senior rate. A $50 fee will be charged for all replacement badges.

Conference Registration, Sponsored by University of Washington (Mar 8)

Join AWP conference staff for a tour of the Seattle Convention Center. This tour will cover main event areas of the Seattle 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 conference@awpwriter.org to arrange for a different time.

Accessibility Tour

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.

CLMP Membership Meeting

Join AWP for an announcement of the winners of the George Garrett Award and the Small Press Publisher Award.

AWP Awards Celebration

Daily 12-Step Meeting. All in recovery from anything are welcome.

Sober AWP (Mar 9th, morning)

Conference Registration, Sponsored by University of Washington (Mar 9)

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

Dickinson Quiet Space (Mar 9)

A quiet, private space to gather your thoughts, reset, or take a break away from the crowds. Great to use for those needing low light space or to rest from overstimulation. Space includes seating and a sink. One attendee at a time.

Wellness Room 1 (Mar 9)

This nursing mother’s room is located in Room 439, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 4, and is available for any nursing mother to use. This room will be locked, and keys can be picked up at the AWP Help Desk in Registration, Summit Lobby, Seattle Convention Center, Level 1.

Nursing Mothers' Room (Mar 9)

Wellness Room 2 (Mar 9)

Join a certified yoga instructor for a gentle, one-hour yoga and meditation practice, appropriate for practitioners of all levels and abilities, focusing on stretching and mindfulness for writers. Please come wearing comfortable street clothes; mats and yoga apparel are not necessary.

Yoga for Writers (Mar 9)

Sarabande has a storied history of creative book campaigns. From collaborative art installations to lip sync battles and everything in between, these four Sarabande writers have changed the game of book publicity, finding new and exciting ways to engage with audiences within local and national communities, both virtually and in person. Listen to them discuss their campaign experiences and how they pushed their books to rise above the noise of a bustling literary landscape.

From Poetry Hotlines to Kate Bush: Sarabande Writers on Creative Book Promotion

Illness narratives and medical memoirs have the potential to heal our broken healthcare system in a meaningful way. As these genres expand, with literary works from both patient and healthcare worker perspectives, hear how five writers hope to improve healthcare by reducing stigma and elevating marginalized voices. We will discuss how literature, specifically the individual stories of patients and caregivers, could help make the healthcare system more just, effective, and compassionate.

Health and Illness Narratives: Harnessing Medical Memoir to Impact a Broken System

Many youth arts organizations rely on a hierarchical structure that reflects adults’ vision without engaging young creatives in the joyful work of self-determination. BreakBread Literacy Project upends this model: placing youth in organizational leadership at BreakBread magazine, fundraising, and daily operations. Join panelists as they discuss how organizations can create more inclusive communities led by the people they seek to serve.

Decolonizing Your Organization: BreakBread Literacy Project Model

How can we equitably teach students in the online / in-person creative writing classroom and de-center the heteronormative cisgender white male framework of academia? BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ panelists will address how they design equitable course curriculum and assignments to support students from varying backgrounds in their discovery as writers. They will discuss the challenges they have encountered and strategies they have implemented for promoting student engagement in the classroom.

Equity and Racial Justice in the Post-Pandemic Creative Writing Classroom

These innovative poets from various backgrounds and aesthetic schools will discuss the role that play takes in their creative work and pedagogy, focusing on approach and process and the various ways that linguistic, sonic, and visual play are part of their poetic and teaching lives. How can play make writing pleasurable? How can it provoke discovery for students? Some of the various roles of play that will be discussed are play as innovation, play as protest, and play as improvisation.

Poetic Experiments: Incorporating Play into Writing and Teaching

In an effort to build community solidarity, this poetry reading and community dialogue convenes Filipinx writers with varied experiences in performance, community organizing, education, and academia from San Diego, Anaheim, Vancouver, San Jose, and Chicago. Participants will share new works and collaborative manifestos as feminist, queer, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and/or anti-capitalist Filipinx writers in the diaspora.

The Digital Sala: Radical Diasporic Filipinx Poetics

Ever since Jonathan Franzen warned that the internet was such a murderer of creativity that he claimed he Krazy Glued the ethernet port on his laptop shut, debates have ranged from ascetics abstaining completely to publishers and agents claiming a modern writer's career is not viable without a "platform" of social media engagement. Three published writers and moderator discuss how the internet has helped make or break their careers.

The Internet and Creativity: Fatal Distraction or Turbo Charger?

This multigenre panel of writers, who have set their work across three continents, will discuss techniques for writing about culture and place, with an emphasis on bringing worlds to life on the page in imaginative and ethical ways. Among some of the questions that we will address: how can we authentically set our work in a culture, particularly if it isn’t our own? And what liberties can we take when representing real places and people, or creating entirely fictional cultures and landscapes?

Writing about Culture and Place: Techniques for Vibrant and Ethical Worldbuilding

The path from finishing a book draft to launching a debut novel into the world is thrilling and exciting, but it is also long and full of twists and turns. This panel of debut novelists—with publication dates in 2023 and 2024—will discuss all aspects of this journey, including finding an agent, selling the book, working with an editor, and navigating marketing and publicity. The aim of the panel is to be transparent and to provide helpful advice for all debut novelists to come.

Becoming a Debut Novelist: The Journey From Agent Queries to Book Launch

Although its forms have existed for centuries and gone by many names, the lyric essay is often described as an experimental “new” genre. Until recently, many of the most widely anthologized, read, and taught lyric essays have represented a narrow range of perspectives. Editors and contributors to The Lyric Essay as Resistance anthology discuss their commitment to evolving the lyric essay conversation and engaging a range of voices that more accurately represent the expansive nature of the genre.

Resisting the Narrative, Lyric Essaying the Future

How do situated bodily experiences shape the writing of belonging? Five writers and translators working in and between the Azerbaijani, English, Spanish, Urdu, and Zapotec languages, read poetry and creative nonfiction that attends to how immigrant and BIPOC writers create belonging through words shaped and transformed by their specific bodies, locations, and mobilities. These works emerge through the struggles of displaced people to connect body and place via storytelling—and so survive.

Migrations and Mutations: Writing and Translating From Our Bodies

The body yields many archives. We grasp for meaning through documentation. Yet as Saidiya Hartman argued, the deliberate absenting of certain voices creates “the violence of the archive." When women cede evidence of our collective histories, we sunder connections with our forebears and each other. Real artistic gains have been expunged from cultural memory. We’ll investigate the [archival body]—corporeal, the body politic, and our bodies of work—to refuse silence imposed by the patriarchy.

Archives of the Body

Writers conjure literary power by putting something real on the line. Yet risk operates differently across nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and translation, raising craft questions as well as the challenge of inspiring students to bring vulnerability to their writing. Panelists with experience in many teaching contexts—including universities, conferences, and community workshops—will share concrete ideas for empowering and equipping students to take personal and aesthetic chances.

Occupational Hazards: Teaching and Writing Risk across Genres

Diasporic essayists writing in multiple hybrid forms talk craft and content that subvert and resist the colonialist / imperialist gaze and genre boundaries of the Western canon. Panelists discuss inspiration for essays from multiple ancestors, from anti-patriarchal writers around the globe, Indigenous and First Nations storytelling traditions, and oral and visual sources. Topics include centering subjectivity, exploring historical trauma and memory, and exploring spirituality and activism.

Essays in Diaspora

After spending years in a pandemic, many have contemplated futures more hopeful than our present. Utopias continue to captivate readers through genres like hopepunk and solarpunk. Writers imagine through philosophies like Afrofuturism, queer futurity, utopian socialism, and beyond—and these futures we've imagined simultaneously impact our actions in the present. Through different critical lenses, panelists will discuss literary futures in order to envision possibilities outside of the present.

From Hopepunk to Afrofuturism: A Panel on Utopias and Literary Futures

For independent literary journals, establishing a journal in the larger writing community can be a major hurdle, but maintaining the journal once it’s established can prove to be even more of a challenge. From funding to retaining readers to building a brand, members of independent journals will come together in this panel to discuss the hurdles they experience and the strategies they’ve implemented to  survive in an ever-changing literary landscape.

Meant to Last: Maintaining Longevity as an Independent Lit Journal

Learning the craft of literary editing is challenging without apprenticeship or mentorship, and even seasoned editors may find themselves in search of new skills as technologies evolve and times change. How do editors develop, learn, and grow their practice? Drawing from exercises and case studies in the forthcoming editing textbook The Invisible Art of Literary Editing, this panel seeks to make the invisible visible, to demystify the process, and to discuss equity and transparency in editing.

The Invisible Art: Making Literary Editing Visible, Equitable, and Transparent

“For whom do you write?” is a common question asked of immigrant writers, especially in their early career, including in writing workshops. In this event four writers of South Asian roots—Indian, Pakistani, and Nepali—representing different linguistic backgrounds, share their experiences of writing in English and reflect on their audiences and on what it means to them to write from the intersection of languages and cultures.

For Whom Do You Write?: Four Immigrant Writers on Their Audiences

Originally a popular form of love ode in ancient Arabic, the ghazal was embraced by Persian poetics and later found its way into numerous Persianate cultures, most notably Urdu. For two millennia, the ghazal has remained intact in spirit, form, and sensibility, with a few important shifts in formal mechanics as it transitioned from Arabic to Persian. In this panel, five women poets with a background in Arabic, Urdu, and Persian, will discuss the ghazal's history and read some of their own ghazals.

The Ghazal and Its Homes through Time

When creative nonfiction writers revisit history through a deliberately subjective lens—with a distinct personal stake—we can amplify underrepresented voices, interrogate stock narratives, and emphasize crucial intersections. But we also face challenges including overwhelming scale, incomplete records, and the danger of appropriation. Panelists will discuss practical and innovative approaches to seeing the past anew including speculation, investigation, immersion, and the use of hybrid forms.

Re-visioning History in Creative Nonfiction

This panel shines a light on the difficult—and sometimes hidden—work of grieving. Can writing help us process grief? Is grief specific to families, to cultures, to languages? A distinguished panel of writers whose work includes award-winning novels, memoirs, poetry collections, short stories, essays, and books on craft discuss the process of grieving as adoptees, as the children of immigrants, as citizens of a troubled country, and as inhabitants of a planet in the midst of irreversible change.

Grieving in the Asian Diaspora

This meeting is for all AWP program directors. Please join us for a cup of coffee and an informal meet and greet with your regional directors. The chair of the AWP board will give a briefing followed by breakouts to discuss timely topics. We are interested in hearing what’s important to you and your program.

AWP Program Directors’ Plenary Assembly

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 AWP mobile app for location details.

AWP Bookfair, Sponsored by UBC School of Creative Writing (Mar 9)

Breakfast and lunch concessions are available inside the Exhibit Hall in the Seattle Convention Center. Debit, credit cards, and tap to pay are accepted at all food and beverage locations. Please consult the maps in the AWP mobile app for location details.

Bookfair Concessions, Bar, and Lounge (Mar 9)

Stop by the AWP Membership Booth to learn more about the many year-round benefits of AWP. Browse through issues of The Writer’s Chronicle, ask questions about the annual Award Series or the Writer to Writer Mentorship Program, purchase some AWP swag, or just pop in to say hello and take a selfie!

AWP Membership Booth (Mar 9)

Often poetry-music collaboration can falter due to speaking different artistic languages, perceived lack of applicability, and confusion over shared aims. However, poets and musicians benefit hugely from cross-disciplinary work when it involves an understanding of the specific relationship between both. We want to dismantle the obstacles, create effective shared spaces, and foster better cohesion between art forms, countering the "self-first" attitude that typically dominates both.

Creating Effective Collaboration between Poetry and Music

This panel of writers, with their varied backgrounds and connections to south, east, and southeast Asia, will explore and discuss the myriad ways their specific ethnicities have shaped their writing as current denizens of the United States whose specific locations range from the Bay Area to south Texas to upstate New York to the rural Midwest. The panel will focus on common themes, hardships, and obsessions linked to their various Asian backgrounds and multicultural experiences.

(Re)Imagining the "Asian American" Experience in 21st Century US

As poets and readers embrace the necessity of hearing a multiverse of human voices, it’s also necessary that we embrace the multiverse of the nonhuman. Though challenging, finding ways to "hear" the nonhuman can only enrich our writing. We will explore how that ethos, a new perspective on and attention to the nonhuman, has shaped the consciousness and work of contemporary poets, and what strategies we have found successful.

The More-Than-Human Multiverse: Celebrating the Poetry of Widening Circles

Queer art has always been at the forefront of cultural movements, pushing boundaries and expanding our ideas of what art and industry can look like. What does queer literature look like today across the publishing industry, and what are our hopes, dreams, and plans for its future? Join the publishing professionals who are revolutionizing queer literature for an in-depth discussion on the expansive possibilities of queer publishing.

The Future of Queer Publishing

Four creative writing instructors explore the challenges and rewards of being first-generation college graduates working in and navigating the academy. We’ll explore the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability among first-gen teachers and students; how to best reach and serve our fellow first-gen students while advocating for ourselves; invisible labor, especially among contingent faculty; institutional classism; imposter syndrome; and making space for our own creative work.

Forging Our Own Path: On Being First-Generation in Academia

While many craft guides and articles address fiction workshop pedagogy, few address the difference between successful semester-long workshops and successful week-long programs or conferences. In this panel discussion, accomplished instructors who work in both MFA classrooms and conferences will discuss how they successfully foster effective, inclusive workshops in the intense environment of short-term programs.

The Week-Long Fiction Course: Best Practices for Conference Workshops

This panel of authors who have published with small and large traditional publishers and one hybrid press discuss their own publicity efforts and costs transparently, including which investments paid off and which were a waste, what kind of support you can realistically expect from small and large press publicity departments, which gaps to prioritize if you can’t afford to do it all, and how to leverage book promotion into paid opportunities to earn back at least some of what you spend.

Book Promotion by the Numbers: A Transparent Discussion of Costs and Benefits

To celebrate thirty years of independent publishing, Four Way Books gathers five writers who represent not just its own legacy of broad-ranging aesthetics but the depth and diversity of contemporary American literature itself. Featuring panelists from all around the country, readings will traverse genres, forms, subjects, and styles, showcasing the unique voices and literary dialogue that define the collective strength, lasting impact, and longevity of a small press from Tribeca founded in 1993.

Turning 30! A Four Way Books Anniversary Reading

The Western US is one of the world’s most diverse regions, but the literary scene remains a “mainly white room.” In what ways is it the duty of West Coast indie journals and micro presses to find and publish writing that upends the norms of institutional gatekeeping? LA-based editors from sin cesar (formerly Dryland) and Indicia discuss their experiments with equity, intersectionality, and digital collaboration to publish crucial work that challenges hidden biases of audiences and the editors themselves.

Too Small to Fail: The Indie Press Prerogative in Advancing Diverse Voices

A tribute to Ed Roberson, whose career rose amid the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and '70s, which inspired him to challenge language and expectations of what a Black poet “should” be. A self-described nature and visual poet, he inspires us to be in conversation with and see our environment anew. A formally educated poet, Roberson is known for creating structures of layered voices that capture complex internal conversations. Four renowned scholars will speak, followed by Roberson reading.

Architecture of Things: A Tribute to Ed Roberson

While the influence of literature on film is ubiquitous and clear, film’s influence on literature is often under-discussed. Given that film and cinematic effects have had a significant effect on literary fiction, genre fiction, and even creative nonfiction, we will discuss the whys and hows of this trend. We'll break down several classic films from the 20th century and highlight how they have come to influence 20th- and 21st-century writing styles, citing examples of specific literary works.

Reading at 24 Frames Per Second: Exploring Cinematic Influence on Literature

Join other teaching writers and writer-in-the-school programs to discuss the rewards and challenges of the field at this moment. Goals for this meeting are to forge stronger connections within the network of WITSA organizations and practitioners and to set the coalition’s agenda for the year ahead. Time permitting, WITS community members will be invited to share their students’ writing.

Writers in the Schools Alliance Annual Meeting

During the pandemic, podcasts, online journals, virtual classrooms, and online arts organizations became vital community hubs. These virtual spaces provide access to the literary community across barriers like geography, income, disability, and parenthood, and are uniquely positioned to build inclusive communities. Representatives from Breaking Form Podcast, Think in Ink, Couplet Poetry, Wednesday Night Poetry, and Night School Bar consider the work, joy, and struggles of building virtual community.

Building Virtual Community

What is YA literature and how is the voice different from an adult novel? Or from a children's or middle-grade novel? In this session, four diverse YA novelists will discuss how they constructed the voice of their stories. We will discuss characterization, POV, language, and other craft considerations in constructing the voice of the YA novel. We'll talk about pitfalls to avoid. We will also address how a YA audience is different from other genres.

Crafting Voice in YA Fiction

Join these writers to explore different approaches to chronic illness across nonfiction, poetry, and fiction. Whether drawing from or challenging an extended metaphor, crafting a crucial detail that creates the larger reality, or mustering the clarity or energy the writing process demands, these writers talk honestly about the challenges and successes in finding form and language for the experience of chronic illness. In the process, the panel re-envisions expectations and literary conventions. Presenters on this event prefer all attendees wear a mask while in attendance at the event.

Writing through the Pain: Faces of Chronic Illness in Contemporary Literature

In a form characterized by compression, what does it mean to write at length? Can such works cleave to standards of precision and concision as they extend beyond the standard one-pager? What kinds of world-building, expansiveness of thought, or complexity of experience might be achieved in multipage or even book-length poems? Panelists will read briefly from their work, discuss both formal and free-verse approaches to writing long poems, and offer strategies for generating and sustaining them.

The Pocket Epic: Poets Writing at Length

In recent years, writers with rich and varied backgrounds, lived experiences, and perspectives have pushed back against narrow media portrayals of Appalachia, giving voice to the diversity of its literary landscape. This panel discussion will explore five Appalachian authors’ strategies and experience in boldly queering and disrupting these narratives in their books about the region.

Disrupting and Queering Appalachian Narratives

Roe v. Wade empowered generations to choose their reproductive futures. It also enabled choices important to creating literary selves, communities, and spaces. Now, on the cusp of 50 years, this landmark court decision may be overturned. Five poets and writers will read from their work and reflect on Roe’s impact on their imaginations and writing lives. How did Roe change the literary culture in which each panelist came of age? What are strategies for writing in a post-Roe world? Q&A to follow.

The Writing Lives of Roe v. Wade

The Smithsonian, in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, has embarked on a year-long project to examine the literary arts field, generate new ideas, encourage cross-sector communication, and offer approaches and solutions to nurture a more just and financially viable ecosystem. Panelists will provide an overview of this effort and its origins, and invite project advisors and participants into the conversation.

Mapping the Future of the Literary Arts Field, Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts

Naugatuck River Review, a journal of narrative poetry, is celebrating 15 years of publication in 2023. Wordpeace.co, a multigenre digital literary project dedicated to peace and social justice, is celebrating 8 years. Winners and finalists from Naugatuck River Review's 14th annual narrative poetry contest (judged by Lisa Kwong) and writers from Wordpeace will share the stage!

15 Years of Naugatuck River Review and 8 Years of Wordpeace!

In this panel, women writers, translators, educators discuss how non-Western literary practices inform their work. Their perspectives on literary traditions from around the world address how contemporary literature has long been informed by non-Anglophone traditions, which have largely been erased, ignored or relegated to the “periphery.” Their conversation of the present nearness of these traditions raises questions about prolonged global inequities both on and off the page.

Letting Go of a Periphery: The Rise of World Literature in the US

A lively and provocative literary present shapes our possible futures. For its 50th anniversary, Copper Canyon Press looks to its newest debut authors, who represent the many edges of poetry’s future. Ancient Chinese idioms transcend time in an immigrant’s poems of desire and grief. A librarian-artist perfects play in diverse self-expressions. A former medical editor explores the body in illness and pleasure. And a policy advisor aches with forbidden love while living in a surveillance state.

Future Forward:

This panel focuses on errors in translation to raise urgent questions about race, class, power, and literary values. It will engage the fraught situation of heritage speakers who often feel shame when making translation mistakes. It will confront and redress dominant ideas of accuracy, authority, and authenticity. Diverse panelists will discuss navigating their own translation errors and/or their experiences teaching, editing, or mentoring emerging translators.

On Errors: Reconsidering Accuracy and Authenticity in Translation, Sponsored by ALTA

As members of underserved populations, community college students are often overlooked as potential writers by the writing community and themselves. Students may underestimate the value of pursuing a creative writing class, program, or career. Panelists from institutions across the country who teach diverse, high-risk, low-income students will discuss the challenges of recruiting students into creative writing programs and how they overcome various obstacles while fostering literary citizenship.

It’s Possible: Advocating for Two-Year College Creative Writing Students

The intersection of creative writing and community engagement through the arts is a potent combination for social change with the capability to affect how we interact with one another and imagine the world around us. Through public art projects, community activism, and our own writing, how can the written word be used as a vehicle for empathy and social change? What is the power of bringing people’s words into public spaces as well as creating new worlds through our own fiction and poetry?

Radical Empathy: Writing and Community Engagement as a Form of Resistance

How do poets and essayists write and connect landscapes to the body, and what other metaphors do we find inspiring for describing the natural world? Our panel will discuss ways to deepen our understandings of landscape through language, writing against a backdrop of climate crisis, issues of land ownership, historical and racial controversies, and overcrowding. Are our metaphors personal, political, or preservationist? Can relating the body and self to landscape evoke a deeper care for the land?

Writing the Body as Landscape: How We See and Imagine Ourselves as Wilderness

Recent creative nonfiction storytellers speak out about being queer and/or trans in the military and how sharing their stories has helped shape public perspectives of LGBTQ+ people in the armed forces. Panelists discuss the challenges with sharing queer and trans stories, contributions of queer and trans voices to military literature, film, and storytelling, and strategies in creating social change through advocating for more diverse voices in the writing and documenting of military experiences.

Removing the Camouflage: Queer and Trans Military Voices Speak Out

In this panel, Vietnamese-American poets discuss the legacy of Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American poetics and how they see themselves honoring, disrupting, and expanding the landscape of Vietnamese-American literature. Panelists will cite work from notable Vietnamese-American poets, discuss the influence of the Vietnam War, and how certain poetic forms help with carrying on Vietnamese traditions.

The State of Vietnamese-American Poetics

The brevity, accessibility, and fluidity of flash creative nonfiction engages worldwide readers by defying conformity in language, form, and content, but how does lyric flash nonfiction reinvent storytelling and use poetry to break Western literary boundaries? This panel’s BIPOC, Queer, and multinational voices will interrogate the interplay between poetry and flash creative nonfiction with a focus on orality, mixed media, and how the lyric escapes the borders of Euro-patriarchal forms.

Defying Tradition in Lyric Flash Creative Nonfiction

In a world that celebrates writers who publish early and often, it can be easy for slower or older writers to feel the deck is stacked against them. Experience shows, though, that patience and persistence often pay off. Authors who spent ten years or more on their manuscripts will discuss their experiences with writing and revising their books, as well as the process of finding agents and being published, and will offer advice to those deep in their long-term, long-form writing projects.

Playing the Long Game: Novels and Memoirs Ten Years (or More) in the Making

Storytellers go back to the beginning of human history: wandering bards, a grandmother at the kitchen table, sailors watching the stars from the bow of a ship. Yet in contemporary times, agents and publishers seem to prefer the deep dive of a novel over the compact form of the story collection. In contemplating the merits of short fiction as a genre in its own right, this conversation among four dynamic short story writers will explore the ins and outs of writing and publishing the short form.

Ambition of the Short Story: Bringing the Short Form Front and Center

The authors on this multigenre panel, each of whom has published a creative writing textbook, will not actually be battling one another. They will, however, discuss why they decided to write / edit their textbook, the niche they hoped to fill, and the ways in which their textbook authorship has affected their own teaching and writing. For aspiring textbook authors, the panel will address practical matters of writing a proposal, compiling an anthology, and finding a publisher.

Battle of the Textbooks

Fairy and folk tales always belong to the next generation, while preserving the imprint of previous iterations. Told and retold across eras, these stories of kinship and metamorphosis—birth, death, marriage—make ideal sites for revisiting family legends, traumas that predate our arrival, the limitations of memory, false legacy, and the ever-evolving morals of snow child, bear father, sister and brother lost in the wood.

Family Trees in the Enchanted Forest: How Fairy and Folk Tales Help Us Rewrite In

Five writers from Ukraine, Russia, the Baltics, and other former Soviet republics stage a response to the war in Ukraine and the traumas of the totalitarian upbringing it has reawakened. In reading from our fiction, poetry, memoir, and journalism work, we present a deeper view of the region and offer textural solutions to making the political personal.

Totalitarian Traumas: A Reading by Writers from the Former USSR

Literary fame is not something most writers confess to seeking, but it often lurks in the background of our work. Is fame even worth pursuing? Does seeking fame warp us as writers, as human beings, or as members of a literary community? Or is the quest for recognition a motivator that keep us active and sharp? How much renown is enough? Four writers reflect on how they handle the desire for fame, and whether they find it most useful to cultivate it or to remain aloof from it.

Literary Fame: Should We Strive for It? Should We Care about It?

The tech tsunami transforming our world isn’t new—but change is accelerating.  Tech may feed into intersectional crises in race, environment, disinformation, and intolerance, amplifying inequity and colonialist tropes. Five Asian American voices tackle all of the above, drawing on roots in the tech space and in their race, gender, immigrant, and sexual identities.  We’ll explore the challenges of writing about tech with courage and authenticity, while exploring humanity’s love affair with tech.

Race to Machine: Asian-Americans Write Tech, Colonialism, and Dystopia

Kari Gunter-Seymour’s Women Speak anthologies and I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing, funded by the Academy of American poets, create spaces for marginalized writers within Appalachia and beyond.  As editor, Gunter-Seymour describes the process of intentionally creating books that support all writers within Appalachia and women, Affrilachian, and LGBTQ+ authors in particular. Authors from the collections discuss how activist anthologies support their individual works and personal activist goals.

Anthology Activism: Creating Space for Marginalized Voices

Acclaimed poets from the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, St. Lucia, and Grenada, will share their award-winning work, and discuss how their Caribbean roots inform their poetics, pedagogies, and practices.

Contemporary Chantuelles: A Reading by Caribbean Poets

Poetry is a great connector for creating community locally and globally. Join current and former poets laureate and other writers who create their own fields for poetry in public schools, in youth detention centers, buses, community centers, libraries, universities, publishing, editing and guest editing, and in their own front yards. Poetry walks in tandem with many purposes including social justice advocacy, education, bridging distances, and healing.

Connecting Community through Poetry

Persistent political, racial, and religious divisions have made Naomi Shihab Nye's long-beloved poem "Kindness" one that repeatedly resurfaces with its gentle yet urgent call for human connection. Like the poem, Nye's vast body of work as a poet, essayist, anthologist, novelist, and children's book author transcends genres and bridges worlds. Panelists will use the poem as a spark to discuss Nye's impact on their own work and lives. Nye will then close the event with brief remarks and a new poem.

AWP 2023 Onsite & Offsite Events

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