2011 Annual Conference Accepted Events

Below is the tentative list of accepted panels for the AWP 2011 Conference & Bookfair in Washington, D.C.  The list is sorted by the module the panel was proposed under, and then is in alphabetical order by title within those modules. We are currently working to confirm all panelists. We are also working to make sure all participants sit on no more than two panels, and only one of those may be a reading. The finalized schedule will be posted to the AWP website in October. For a complete explanation of the scoring and selection process for panel proposals please visit: Proposal Guidelines: Selection & Scoring Process.

AWP has worked very hard to expand the conference so that more of our members may participate as presenters. Whereas the conference once offered 16 events and 50 presenters, the conference now offers hundreds of events and more than a thousand presenters. AWP has tentatively accepted 380 panels for inclusion in the 2011 Conference & Bookfair in Washington D.C. These panels represent 1,614 panelists comprised of 912 (56.5%) women and 702 (43.5%) men. By comparison, for the 2010 Conference & Bookfair in Denver we accepted a total of 400 panels that represented 1,550 panelists comprised of 834 (53.8%) women and 716 (46.2%) men.

Please feel free to contact the AWP Conference Department at conference@awpwriter.org with any questions you may have about this schedule. 

Please click on a module below to see the accepted events within that module:
Agents, Contracts, and Contents AWP Pro-Forma Events Career Advancement Craft of Fiction Craft of Nonfiction Craft of Poetry Cross Genre Issues Cross Genre Readings Fiction Readings Nonfiction Readings	Pedagogy Playwriting and Screenwriting Poetry Readings Program Development Publishing and Editing Regional Focus Translation Tributes Writers’ Conferences and Centers

Agents, Contracts, and Contents

Copyright Fair and Use: a legal review and clinic for poets
Katharine Coles, Peter Jaszi, Jennifer Urban
The Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute/The Poetry Foundation offers a copyright/fair use panel followed by a 3-hour clinic for poets, who may sign up for brief consultations.  Moderator Katharine Coles and panelists Peter Jaszi, Jennifer Urban, and law students from UC Berkeley and the American University will clarify copyright and fair use issues of concern to poets and help the audience distinguish between rights and limits arising from copyright law and those connected with business practices.

Copyright Law Basics for Authors
John McKay, Michael Klipper, Chris Mohr
Understanding the basics of copyright law allows writers to protect what is theirs, and respect what is not.  It allows writers to make more knowledgeable decisions about proposed contracts, and whether or how to use things that don’t originate with them – from facts or ideas to text, photos, and lyrics.  Be informed about concepts like fair use, public domain, work for hire, notice, registration, derivative works — it’s more than just a good idea … it’s the law.

Double Duty: Writers Who Work in the Publishing Industry
Parneshia Jones, Randall Horton, Toni Margarita Plummer, Dan Bernitt
Join four accomplished writers who happen to be successful publishing professionals from the commercial, independent, and university press backgrounds. They will discuss the pros and cons of being on both sides of the literary coin, as well as how being in both worlds have taught them to make wiser decisions about their own writing careers while being responsible for publishing award-winning writers from all over the world. Get the inside writer’s view of the publishing industry.

Love at First Query: Agents and Authors Share Strategies for Falling in Literary Love
Catherine Cortese, Bret Anthony Johnston, Adam Chromy, Matthew Gavin Frank, Jamie Brenner
Searching for the right agent or author is complicated. Some forge tight bonds from their first collaboration, while others break up only to reconnect with new, more appropriate counterparts. Is there a formula for a perfect relationship between an artist and his or her representation, or is it all luck of the draw? These agents and authors will share their stories of successful connections, and present strategies and techniques for others to find their own mutually beneficial partnerships.

What They Didn't Tell Us, We Will Tell You: Four First-Time Authors Discuss the Nitty Gritty of Publishing
Michael David Lukas, Siobhan Fallon, Nomi Stone, Kevin Haworth, Rebecca Rasmussen, Alan Heathcock
This panel will feature four first-time authors discussing the publishing process, from submission to publication and beyond. Drawing from a wide range of personal experience—working with large houses and university presses on poetry collections, novels, and collections of short stories—the panelists will address and attempt to demystify the publishing process, from phoners to author questionnaires, book jackets to blurbs, and the elusive book tour.

Why Don't They List Agents on Match.com? Demystifying the Author/Agent Relationship
Britta Coleman, Matt Bondurant, Alex Glass, Marcy Posner, Jenny Bent, John McNally
Finding the perfect agent takes more than a pithy profile or even a well-written query. Join literary agents Marcy Posner, Alex Glass and Jenny Bent, with authors Britta Coleman, Matt Bondurant and John McNally, for a lively discussion about finding the right agent, snagging the right agent, and living happily ever after. Topics will include when to approach an agent, how to pitch your work, common pitfalls to avoid, the contract process, and where you can find agents in their natural habitat.

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AWP Pro-Forma Events

2010/2011 Writers’ Conferences & Centers Meeting
An opportunity for members of Writers’ Conferences & Centers to meet one another, and the staff of AWP to discuss issues pertinent to building a strong community of WC&C programs.

A Reading by the 2009 AWP Award Series Winners
A reading featuring AWP's 2009 Award Series winners Kevin Fenton, Bradyley Paul, Christine Sneed, and David Vann.  

AWP 2012 Chicago Conference & Bookfair Forum
Join the AWP 2012 conference chair, and AWP staff, for an open forum to discuss topics of interest and relevance to AWP’s upcoming conference in Washington, D.C. 

AWP Program Directors Plenary Assembly
All AWP program directors should attend and represent their programs. The Executive Director of AWP will report on AWP’s new projects and on important statistics and academic trends that pertain to creative writing programs and to writers who teach. A discussion with the AWP board’s Regional Representative will follow. The plenary assembly will be followed by regional breakout sessions. 

Best Practices for Submitting an AWP Panel Proposal
Come join AWP conference committee members and staff for a best practices discussion about submitting a panel proposal for the 2012 Conference & Bookfair in Chicago. Discussion will include an overview of the proposal system and tips for submitting a more effective proposal.

Keynote Address by Jhumpa Lahiri, Sponsored by George Mason University
Jhumpa  Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection that explores issues of love and identity among immigrants and cultural transplants. Published to great acclaim in 2003, Lahiri’s novel The Namesake expands on the perplexities of the immigrant experience and the search for identity. Lahiri’s most recent book of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, received the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Vallombrosa Von Rezzori Prize, and the Asian American Literary Award. Lahiri is also the recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award, an O. Henry Prize, and the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has received grants from the Guggenheim Fellowship and The National Endowment for the Arts.

Midwest Region: AWP Program Directors Breakout
If you are a program director of an AWP member creative writing program in the following states you should attend this session: Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin. This regional breakout session will begin immediately upon the conclusion of the Program Directors Plenary Meeting, so we recommend that you attend the Plenary Meeting first. Your regional representative on the AWP Board of Directors, Richard Robbins, will conduct this meeting.

Northeast Region: AWP Program Directors Breakout
If you are a program director of an AWP member creative writing program in the following states you should attend this session: Connecticut, District of Columbia, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont. This regional breakout session will begin immediately upon the conclusion of the Program Directors Plenary Meeting, so we recommend that you attend the Plenary Meeting first. Your regional representative on the AWP Board of Directors, Judith Baumel, will conduct this meeting.

Pacific West Region: AWP Program Directors breakout Session
If you are a program director of an AWP member creative writing program in the following states you should attend this session: Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington. This regional breakout session will begin immediately upon the conclusion of the Program Directors Plenary Meeting, so we recommend that you attend the Plenary Meeting first. Your regional representative on the AWP Board of Directors, Steve Heller, will conduct this meeting.

Pedagogy Forum Session: Fiction & Drama
This session is designed to give contributors to the 2011 Pedagogy Forum an opportunity to discuss their work, though all are welcome.  The papers themselves will provide a framework to begin in depth discussion in creative writing, pedagogy and theory.  A pedagogy speaker will contextualize the discussion with some brief remarks before attendees break out into small discussion groups.  These groups will be facilitated by trained pedagogy paper contributors.

Pedagogy Forum Session: Muti-Genre
This session is designed to give contributors to the 2011 Pedagogy Forum an opportunity to discuss their work, though all are welcome.  The papers themselves will provide a framework to begin in depth discussion in creative writing, pedagogy and theory.  A pedagogy speaker will contextualize the discussion with some brief remarks before attendees break out into small discussion groups.  These groups will be facilitated by trained pedagogy paper contributors.

Pedagogy Forum Session: Nonfiction
This session is designed to give contributors to the 2011 Pedagogy Forum an opportunity to discuss their work, though all are welcome.  The papers themselves will provide a framework to begin in depth discussion in creative writing, pedagogy and theory.  A pedagogy speaker will contextualize the discussion with some brief remarks before attendees break out into small discussion groups.  These groups will be facilitated by trained pedagogy paper contributors.

Pedagogy Forum Session: Poetry
This session is designed to give contributors to the 2011 Pedagogy Forum an opportunity to discuss their work, though all are welcome.  The papers themselves will provide a framework to begin in depth discussion in creative writing, pedagogy and theory.  A pedagogy speaker will contextualize the discussion with some brief remarks before attendees break out into small discussion groups.  These groups will be facilitated by trained pedagogy paper contributors.

Southeast Region: AWP Program Directors Breakout Session
If you are a program director of an AWP member creative writing program in the following states you should attend this session: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. This regional breakout session will begin immediately upon the conclusion of the Program Directors Plenary Meeting, so we recommend that you attend the Plenary Meeting first. Your regional representative on the AWP Board of Directors, Martin Lammon, will conduct this meeting.

West Region: AWP Program Directors Breakout Session
If you are a program director of an AWP member creative writing program in the following states you should attend this session: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Nevada, New Mexico, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. This regional breakout session will begin immediately upon the conclusion of the Program Directors Plenary Meeting, so we recommend that you attend the Plenary Meeting first. Your regional representative on the AWP Board of Directors, Luci Tapahonso, will conduct this meeting.

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Career Advancement

AAUP and Writers and Teachers and AWP
William Nevins, Robert Kreiser
This forum will provide information for AWP members and others about the AAUP and provide suggestions on how the AAUP and AWP may increase cooperation and mutual support, to the benefit of all our members, especially those who are teachers. The American Association of University Professors AAUP is a long established Washington DC headquartered national organization defending creative expression, academic freedoms and advocating improved working conditions for faculty and improved college governance.

Balancing Professional Writing With Your Creative Side
Matt Tullis, Michael Downs, Valerie Due, Jason Tucker, Jolie Lewis
There are precious few opportunities for writers to make money doing what they do best — writing. The money-making writing opportunities out there — public relations, marketing, advertising, even newspaper reporting — can at times be a creative drain on the creative writer. This panel focuses on how writers with these backgrounds have avoided some of the pitfalls that come with writing professionally and found ways to transfer skills from one writing realm to the other.

Doing It All --?
Ann Fisher-Wirth, Aliki Barnstone, Nicole Cooley, Annie Finch, Cynthia Hogue
Five women who write and publish both poetry and academic prose, and who also hold significant adminstrative responsibilities, read briefly and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of this triple commitment. How do you do it all? More importantly, Why do you do it all? Is this a gendered issue? Does it signify an inability to extricate oneself from others' demands and expectations? Does it stem from feminist or other ethical convictions? Is it fructive for health, happiness, poetry?

Finding and Creating Online Teaching Opportunities—and Sustaining and Succeeding in Them
Erika Dreifus, Sage Cohen, Andrew Gray, Matthew Lippman, Chloe' Yelena Miller, Scott Warnock
More than one in four college/university students now take at least one course online. While some writers teach in college and graduate writing programs, others have established their own, independent course offerings or teach through private organizations. Our panelists represent a range of professional experiences in online teaching, in prose and poetry, for-credit and not-for-credit. They will share strategies for finding (and creating) work and succeeding as online writing instructors.

Hired!: Landing the Elusive Tenure Track Job
Caitlin Horrocks, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Darrin Doyle, Nick Kowalczyk, Forrest Anderson, Kelcey Parker
Six recent tenure-track hires in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction discuss their diverse experiences and offer advice and guidance on the search for a teaching position. They’ll discuss every stage of the job search, from researching positions to writing cover letters, to the interview and the campus visit, providing insight into what you can control, what you can’t, and what you should do to prepare. Ample time will be provided for questions.

More Than a Foot in the Door: Benefits of the Creative Writing Internship
Barrett Bowlin, Christine Gelineau, Philip Brady, Stephanie G'Schwind, Jon Tribble, Sarah C. Harwell
As jobs in publishing and editing dwindle, having prior experience in these fields becomes invaluable. In this panel, editors and internship coordinators will speak about the benefits of offering creative writing internships to undergraduate and graduate students for course credit.  Representatives from BOA Editions, Etruscan Press, Crab Orchard Review, Colorado Review, and Harpur Palate will be available to offer insight and answer questions regarding their internship programs.

Riders on the Storm: Strategies for Getting (and Surviving) the Tenure-Track Job
Hadara Bar-Nadav, Miles Harvey, John Struloeff, Irina Reyn, Simone Muench
In these difficult economic times, many colleges and universities across the United States are in financial crisis, which has led to hiring freezes, furloughs, and even firings. As recent tenure-track hires, we will present strategies for securing tenure-track jobs. We also will discuss ways junior faculty can survive and succeed in these precarious economic times, while balancing academic responsibilities with our creative lives.

Separated by a Common Language: Teaching on the Opposite Side of the Pond
Patricia Ann McNair, Carrie Etter, Mimi Thebo, Kathy Flann, Philip Hartigan, Steve May
As the number of creative writing programs increases here and in the UK, teachers are crisscrossing the Atlantic for posts. British and Americans speak an almost common language, but educational systems, learning outcomes, publishing, student issues, daily life, etc. are different enough to complicate things. Inhabitants of these parallel universes will share stories of things lost and found in translation, and will help others considering a cross-cultural career path prepare for what’s ahead.

The Art and Authenticity of Social Media: Using Online Tools to Grow a Community
Jane Friedman, Tanya Egan Gibson, Guy Gonzalez, Bethanne Patrick, Christina Katz
Social media is easy to disparage as meaningless socializing, undignified shilling, or time better spent writing. Yet sharing information online and having conversations with readers is critical to spreading the word about what you (or your organization) does. Online community building can help develop a long-term readership, plus open up new opportunities. This panel discusses meaningful online social interaction, and how the panelists have seen it advance their careers or their organizations.

The Future of the Book Review: How to Break In
Salvatore Pane, Roxane Gay, Irina Reyn, Emily Testa, Lena Valencia
The Future of the Book Review: How to Break In.  The rise of the book blogger has forever altered the traditional book review. But what is the state of the book review moving forward in a digital culture, and how do interested parties actually go about becoming reviewers? Panelists including the editor of PANK, the book review editors of BOMB and Hot Metal Bridge, and published writers currently working in the field will answer these questions and more.

The Road Less Traveled: How to be a Writer Without a Full-time Academic Gig
Cheryl Strayed, Steve Almond, Amy Holman, Ru Freeman, Christian TeBordo, Marisa de los Santos
The path to solvency and security for most writers is to pair writing with full-time jobs in academia. On this panel, six authors will talk about their lives as writers without the de facto college teaching gig. Panelists will discuss the range of ways they’ve supported themselves, the reasons they’ve chosen the paths they have, and also the liberations and constraints they’ve experienced as writers outside the writer-faculty track that's so deeply embedded in what it means to be a writer today.

To Go Or Not To Go Abroad:  Writers In A Global Market
Peter Murphy, Ann Neelon, Gaylord Brewer, Clifford Garstang, Christine Cutler
Is it a mistake to ignore the global nature of today’s academic marketplace?  This panel investigates the growing importance of international experience as an asset for creative writers who hope to succeed in the current highly-competitive job market.  Five writers with significant experience abroad describe opportunities available to U.S. writers outside the U.S. as well as discuss strategies for capitalizing on international experience in order to start or jumpstart academic careers.

What Are You Wearing?: Exploring the Emerging Genre of Fashion Writing
Molly Prosser, Amanda Wolpink, Julia DiNardo, Sadie Stein, Jonathan Hesser
For years, fashion writing has been perceived as a pretentious, insiders-only realm. Now, with reality TV and the blogosphere taking on fashion, everyone has something to say. Writers and editors from ModCloth, Jezebel, Fashion Pulse Daily, and Zappos Development sit down to discuss the craft and teaching of fashion writing, establishing a voice in the contentious style world, how best to apply an MFA to a career in fashion writing, and the challenges the woman-dominated field faces.

What Do Writers Do All Day?: Articulating Our Work in the Profession
James Engelhardt, Stephanie Vanderslice, Kathryn Miles, Christine Stewart-Nunez, J.D. Schraffenberger
As creative writing becomes more professionalized—witness the growth of MFA and PhD programs as well as AWP itself—it becomes crucial to demystify our process and to describe for our colleagues the work we do. These descriptions are central to grant proposals, career advancement, and tenure review. The descriptions this panel develops will allow writers to name similarities to and differences from the other work of English departments as we lay the groundwork for a successful career.

(WITS ALLIANCE) Paths of Passion: WITS Links to University Teaching and Writing Careers
Laura Longsong, Tiphanie Yanique, Cody Walker, Keya Mitra, Robert Fanning, Robin Davidson
A legacy is emerging as WITS teachers develop college-level teaching and writing careers.  How does WITS experience help writers get jobs as professors, and then shape that teaching? How does it nurture one's own writing?  How does the WITS' commitment to underserved students change the teacher, so art profoundly connects to pleasure, gift exchange, and political activism? The panelists are professors who have taught in diverse settings and write poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and translation.

Written Across Waters
Patrick Rosal, Beth Ann Fennelly, Aracelis Girmay, David Wright, Curtis Bauer
Four award-winning American writers, who have spent extensive time abroad in Africa, South America, Asia, and Europe, will address funding opportunities and challenges, as well as the particular urgency and personal responsibility of being an American writer in an international context. Writers will discuss how various places overseas first called to them, how they made their travels possible, and how looking home across natural and political borders has affected their writing.

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Craft of Fiction

A Convenient Truth: Writing and Teaching Ecofiction
Benette Whitmore, Susan Hubbard, Valerie Miner, Liza Wieland, Paul Griner
Ecofiction--literary practice connected to nature and environment--has implications for all fiction writers and teachers. Three award-winning teachers/writers of fiction discuss those implications and present techniques for incorporating eco-fiction in literary work. Environmental ethics can inform fiction without making it didactic or dull. Considering writing as a social process driven by relationships of identity and place helps us create complex characters and reach diverse audiences.

A Conversation With Richard Bausch
Jennifer Haigh, Richard Bausch
A candid conversation between friends: acclaimed teacher and award-winning novelist and short story writer Richard Bausch and his former student, novelist Jennifer Haigh.

Beyond Bagels and Lox: Jewish-American Fiction in the 21st Century
Erika Dreifus, Andrew Furman, Kevin Haworth, Margot Singer, Anna Solomon
Jewish-American fiction has long been seen as a literature of emigration from the shtetl, assimilationist angst, and overprotective parents. But what's nu? How do Americans born decades after the Holocaust and the birth of the State of Israel deal with those complex subjects in fiction? Who are the new Jewish immigrant characters? How does American Jewry's more than 350-year history inspire plot/setting? And how are writers today influenced by Judaism's rich multilingual and spiritual legacy?

Creative Online
Yvette Christiansë, Li Yun Alvarado, Amanda M. Calderón, Melissa Castillo-Garsow, Bronwen Durocher
What possibilities lie in the malleability of the Internet and its multi-directional readability? As the future of fiction becomes increasingly influenced by blogs, social networking, and multimedia, writers seek ways to merge questions of craft with the technological demands of web-based platforms and their potential for instant feedback and editing. Four writers will present cutting edge web-based fiction writing projects and discuss their work and process in the context of these questions.

Fiction's Future
Tom Williams, Lance Olsen, M. Evelina Galang, Roy Kesey, Debra DiBlasi, Steve Tomasula
This panel invites five aesthetically diverse authors brave of foolish enough to respond to think aloud about fiction's future.  What might in fiction look like, read like, and why?  What forms are we apt to see in the next five or fifteen years?  What changes in publishing, distribution, media, and the sociohistorical landscape might impact what we mean when we say ‘fiction,’ ‘journal,’ ‘book,’ ‘conventional,’ ‘innovative?’  Should writers even concern themselves with such questions?

Hint Fiction: Stories that Prove Less is More
Robert Swartwood, Randall Brown, Ann Harleman, Michael Martone, Daniel Olivas
The editor of the recent Norton anthology and its contributors examine stories of extreme brevity. They will discuss whether these stories are considered actual stories and whether they hold substance, focusing on the questions: Do works of this length help or hinder writers? Can these tiny stories have just as much impact as stories of traditional length? The panelists will share their own hint fiction and discuss its role in the ongoing evolution of literature.

How Stories Within Stories Can Make Great Stories
Elizabeth Poliner, Cathryn Hankla, Pablo Medina, Jean McGarry
Think: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Chekhov’s Gooseberries.  These are classic examples of a story within a story making a great story.  But how are contemporary writers approaching this technique?  What innovations have they introduced?  This panel will explore the story-within-a-story device through the works of modern and contemporary fiction writers, including Alice Munro and Peter Taylor, and suggest ways in which this form might find new expressions.

Jets vs. Sharks?
Michael Croley, Richard Bausch, C. Michael Curtis, Elizabeth Cox, Jill McCorkle
In a recent article, essayist and author Elif Batuman stated one of her reasons for not attending a writing program was her aversion to the idea of craft.  I realized that I would greatly prefer to think of literature as a profession, an art, a science, or pretty much anything else, rather than a craft. The panelists discuss the value of craft, what it means, and how we pass this knowledge onto our students while also addressing the concerns Batuman raises and their legitimacy.

Leaping Prose: Alternative Shapes for Approaching the Novel
Peter Grandbois, Forrest Gander, Kazim Ali, Carol Moldaw
In Leaping Poetry, Bly discusses how Latin American poetry moves between the conscious and unconscious. This panel seeks to reshape the novel through associative leaps at the level of the word, the image, the sentence, the paragraph--as opposed to the traditional, linear, cause-and-effect movement in fiction. In our interrogation of the novel form, we will examine how these leaps can be made and what can be gained by stepping outside the linear, the rational, the binary in shaping the novel.

Linking It Up: Working with Story Cycles, Linked Collections, and Novels-in-Stories
Anne Sanow, Cathy Day, Clifford Garstang, Dylan Landis
You have characters who appear in more than one story, or several stories set in one place—and you don’t want to write a traditional novel. What are the possibilities? This panel examines the different ways that stories can be linked together to create groups of stories or an entire book. We will focus on strategic craft decisions related to character, setting, point of view, and narrative arc, and discuss how best to determine the completed structure and form of your project.

Meta-Fiction Latino: Beyond Magical Realism
Daniel Olivas, Kathleen Alcalá, Xánath Caraza, Susana Chávez-Silverman, Salvador Plascencia
Meta-Fiction Latino: Beyond Magical Realism.  The novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, is the seminal work of magical realism that has cast a long -- and sometimes constraining -- shadow over Latino writers. Yet meta-fiction, (which acknowledges the reader’s role in literature and often breaks the wall between fiction and memoir) has emerged from this shadow to stand on its own. The panelists will share their own works of meta-fiction and discuss its role in contemporary Latino literature.

Narrative Structure: The Episodic and the Epiphanic
Jack Harrell, Erin McGraw, Josh Allen, Nicole Mazzarella
In Best American Short Stories 2000, E.L. Doctorow noted a shift more disposed to the episodic than the epiphanic, moving the modern story toward the earlier form of the tale. Does this trend in fiction continue? Should it? Since anti-story musings of the 60s, the epiphany has been cast as a naïve insistence on meaning. Will globalism and cultural ecumenism further the shift to the episodic, bringing about the climax and the denouement of the literary epiphany itself?

Politics in the Novel
Andrew Scott, Chuck Wachtel, Debra Monroe, Margaret Lazarus Dean, Steve Yarbrough
Serious novelists who allow politics to enter their novels must make difficult decisions about how the two meet. Readers bring their own politics to the experience, as well, so how do authors negotiate these concerns to craft meaningful work that endures? How does an author reckon with the politics of an issue of central concern to her audience without slipping into didacticism or propaganda?

Pushing the Boundaries in Young Adult Fiction
Swati Avasthi, H.M Bouwman, Alexandra Diaz, Jeri Ready-Smith, Michele Corriel
The Young Adult genre has grown up and the boundary between YA and Adult fiction has become murkier, with some suggesting that the distinction is only marketing. We will address the perennial question about the difference between YA and Adult and will discuss what boundaries do or don’t exist for YA and Middle Grade fiction and how those boundaries are being pushed.  We will discuss how recent innovations in structure and form have opened YA and MG up to new, dynamic storytelling opportunities.

Putting the Story in History
Ron Hansen, Speer Morgan, Philip Gerard, Debra Brenegan
Literary historical fiction is on the rise, especially when the subjects involve uncomfortable social issues like racism, sexism and crime. But, what is the relationship between story and history? How can writers make ‘facts’ and ‘truth’ work in fiction?  Can we use the past to better understand the present?  Four novelists will discuss their historical novels and the constraints, joys and challenges they faced regarding maligned perceptions, research methods and ethical dilemmas.

Raymond Carver in the Workshops
Carol Sklenicka, Bret Lott, Maura Stanton, C. J. Hribal, Douglas Unger
Panelists who knew Raymond Carver examine Carver’s profound influence on late 20th-century short fiction and his legacy to the genre, considering how creative writing workshops shaped Carver, the enduring qualities of his subjects and style, the editorial versions of his stories, and the impact of his fiction on current students.

Representing the Erotic in Literary Fiction
Varley O'Connor, Phillip Lopate, Michelle Latiolais, Carol Moldaw, Paul Lisicky
How do writers approach and render sex believably and inventively in a society of sexual saturation? Our panel of fiction writers will analyze sexuality in their work across cultures, generations, and in relation to disability. They will discuss the impact of sexual orientation on characterization and point of view; examine how desire may drive narrative and influence image and voice; and consider sex as a lens to evoke fresh perspectives on gender.

Ripping More Than a Bodice: Historical Fiction as Inquiry
Debra Dean, Jane Alison, A. Manette Ansay, Jennifer Cody Epstein, Luis Alberto Urrea
Life is messy, history no less so. The panel will discuss the constraints and liberations of writing in this genre. How do writers use history to serve the story and what obligation do we owe to historical fact? Are there effective strategies to avoid being entombed in one’s own research? How does one achieve authenticity of character, voice, and setting in a way that is alive and compelling to the contemporary reader?

Short Story to Novel
Al Heathcock, Heidi Durrow, Alexi Zentner, Téa Obreht, Marie Mockett
Debut novelists often publish an excerpt of their finished work as a short story before tackling a full manuscript. Yet the way from short story to published novel is not always smooth. Four debut novelists, who did publish parts of their books as short stories, will discuss the journey from short story to novel, with an eye toward helping other emerging writers.

Small Ships, Deep Ocean: Independent Presses Keep Short Story Collections Afloat
Clifford Garstang, Mary Akers, Laura van den Berg, Jason Ockert, Jim Ruland, Tiphanie Yanique
Charting a course for your short story collection has never been trickier. From shrinking shelf space to nonexistent advances, disinterested trade publishers to increased competition for readers, more and more authors of story collections are turning to independent presses. Six salty veterans discuss the small press experience: platforms for approaching publishers, the challenges of promoting collections, and the advantages and disadvantages of small publishers in an uncertain economy.

Spotlight on Operation Homecoming
Jon Parrish Peede
Event Description and Participants TBA

The 1960 National Book Award Revisited: What Makes Fiction Last?
Peter Grimes, Steve Almond, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Brock Clarke, Michael Griffith
What values in fiction endure? In 2010 we formed a committee of fiction writers and looked back 50 years to rejudge the 1960 National Book Award. We read, haggled, named a winner, and each of us wrote an essay--to take up arms for a favorite, reassess the year's anointed books, reflect on the ebb and flow of reputation, explore the politics of awards. This panel will ask, What do we value most highly in fiction, and what gets cast aside by the way we define 'ambition'?

The Craft of Historical Fiction
Robin Oliveira, Anna Keesey, John Pipkin, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Kelly O'Conner McNees
An exploration of the craft of historical fiction by the debut authors Robin Oliveira, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Kelly O’Connor McNees, John Pipkin, and Anna Keesey. They are the authors of, respectively, My Name is Mary Sutter, Wench, The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, Woodsburner, and Little Century, We will delve into the role of imagination, the use of fictional versus real characters, the incorporation of research, and the commitment of the author to real events.

The Intimate Detail
Carole Burns, Alice McDermott, Margot Livesey, Mary Kay Zuravleff
The Intimate Detail – The importance of the telling detail in depicting a character, place, or situation is a given, and yet, how does it work?  How does a small, insigificant detail encapsulate the so much larger, more ephemeral whole that writers are trying to bring to life?  We will look at several types of details – details used to depict appearance or place, to create scenes, and to evoke a character’s memories – and try to pull apart how the intimate detail reveals so much.

The Myth of Relevance
Pauls Toutonghi, Brigid Hughes, Tom Bissell, Danielle Evans, Vu Tran
The use of topical themes in fiction can be both a blessing and a curse. While, on the one hand, a strong writer should be able to make almost any scene interesting and vivid -- writing about current events bears a certain weight of responsibility. Fiction depends on the artful surprise; if the substance of a story is cut from the headlines it risks straying into the territory of the familiar. Where should a writer draw the line? What is dangerous and what is inspiration?

The Virtues of Obsession
C.J. Hribal, A. Manette Ansay, Lan Samantha Chang, Peter Turchi
Writers often worry about saying or writing something new, about not repeating themselves--but a lot of wonderful writers return to the same essential material, and find new angles, new aspects to explore.  Four writers will talk about the virtues of obsession--whether in process, content, or themes--and the value in recognizing and working (and reworking) the material one finds most compelling.

Things That Go Bump When You Write: Monsters, Myths and the Supernatural in Literary Fiction
B.J. Hollars, Lauren Groff, Hannah Tinti, Laura van den Berg, Scott Francis
What do Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and ghosts all have in common? For one, over the past year, they've all managed to stomp, swim and haunt their way onto the literary scene. Join writers as they discuss their experiences implementing supernatural elements into their fiction. Panelists will offer tips on how to add credibility to the incredible and humanity to the inhuman. They will also explore the evolving definitions of gothic and grotesque in the 21st century.

Trends in Contemporary Flash Fiction: What Editors Are Looking For
Tom Hazuka, Todd James Pierce, Leah Rogin-Roper, Robert Shapard, Ryan G. Van Cleave
Flash fiction may be elusive to define (stories of 500 words? 750? 1000?), but there is no denying its widespread appeal to both writers and readers.  What do editors want in the flash fiction stories they publish?  Five editors of both recent and classic short short story anthologies (Flash Fiction, Flash Fiction Forward, You Have Time for This, etc.), who are also widely published writers, discuss trends in contemporary flash fiction and what they look for in stories for their anthologies.

Writing the Young Adult Novel
Tami Lewis Brown, Zu Vincent, Carrie Jones, Stephanie Greene, Helen Hemphill, Sarah Aronson
The young adult novel has exploded in recent years and many adult writers are crossing over. What does it take to write for this burgeoning field? Six novelists publishing literary, historical, mainstream and fantasy fiction for the young, discuss the similarities and differences in adult and young adult fiction that can help writers transition to this fresh—and often edgy—new genre.

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Craft of Nonfiction

A Sense of Where We Were: Nonfiction Writers on Setting
William Bradley, Robert Root, Bob Cowser, Steven Church, Kristen Iversen
Setting is vital across nonfiction, in essays, memoirs, and literary reportage, and often the main character in travel and nature writing. Giving a reader a sense of where the writer was is key to the reader’s immersion in nonfiction writing. Writers whose works span the range of nonfiction will discuss how they create settings from communities they live in and landscapes they encountered—how to enter place in prose, how to recognize and overcome obstacles, what they’ve learned in the process.

Flinging the Ink Pot:  Resisting Messages About Off-Limits Subjects in Memoir
Jill Christman, Kate Hopper, Paul Lisicky, Joe Mackall, Sue William Silverman
This panel of memoirists will consider what happens when we write about subjects that are commonly lumped together and dismissed by the publishing industry. It seems we shouldn’t talk about abuse, addiction, or parenting of any stripe. Why are certain subjects seen as played out, clichéd, and sensational? We will consider whether we can avoid categorizing giant facets of human experience as literary no-no’s and find our way back to the serious writing of the stories we need to tell.

Imagining Ourselves:  The Narrative Stance in Memoir
Judith Barrington, Dustin Beall Smith, Nancy Lord, Allison Hedge Coke, Valerie Miner, Sherry Simpson
A diverse group of memoirists, who also write and teach in other genres, will discuss how they create personas for themselves and how these identities are freshly created and shaped to the work in hand.  Exploring what Vivian Gornick calls the glory of an achieved persona, they will share examples of versions of themselves they have used in memoir, consider how persona functions in other genres, and assess how each identity is central to the authenticity and depth of the writing.

Interviewing In My Underwear:  Adventures as a Female Memoirist
Wendy Sumner-Winter, Barrie Jean Borich, Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, Kerry Cohen, Brenda Miller, Cheryl Strayed
We've all heard that confession is good for the soul, but how about for a woman living in the real world? Six memoirists discuss the familial, professional, social costs and benefits-and everything in between-of being a woman who writes candidly about her body, her physical life, her sex life, her carnal appetites. We will talk about what it is like to navigate our various social and political worlds having told, literally, the naked truth.

Literary Science Writing: Don’t Be Scared
David Everett, Nancy Shute, James Shreeve, Christopher Joyce
Many nonfiction writers either don’t understand or are afraid of the challenges of writing about science, medicine, technology, or other complicated subjects. But this panel of experienced writers argues that the best science writing can be as ambitious as the best literary writing on any subject. Good science writing, in fact, may be more challenging, because it requires a journalist’s regard for accuracy plus the ability to explain complex subjects with grace, passion, and literary skill.

Memoir and Latinidad
Joy Castro, Esmeralda Santiago, Luis Rodriguez, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Rigoberto González
U.S. Latina/o memoir has developed a rich contemporary tradition that spans the political and stylistic spectrum from Richard Rodriguez to Gloria Anzaldúa. But what makes a memoir Latina/o? Does latinidad influence aesthetics and craft as well as content? Do Latina/o memoirists see themselves as inheriting the life-writing techniques and traditions of the U.S., Latin America, or both? How do writers navigate mainstream expectations that their memoirs will represent whole cultures and nations?

Memoir, Spirituality and the Self in the Narcissistic Culture of Our Time
Elizabeth Kadetsky, Rodger Kamenetz, Kazim Ali, Julia Spciher Kasdorf, Elizabeth Kadetsky, Farideh Goldin
If one believes the detractors, memoir bears responsibility second only to reality TV for fomenting this ‘narcissistic’ age, in Christopher Lasch’s term—an era of  therapeutic jargon that celebrates not so much individualism as solipsism, justifying self-absorption as ‘authenticity’ and ‘awareness’. Here, we consider quests for self-knowledge as linked, rather, to a spiritual project. How can memoir point to places beyond the self—to transcendence, insight or affiliation with human community?

Moving Pictures, Moving Words: Essays in the Digital Age
Ned Stuckey-French, Marcia Aldrich, Rebecca Faery, Doug Hesse, Philip Metres, Wendy Sumner-Winter
This panel will examine the impact of the digital revolution on the essay. We will address the following questions: How are the new media changing the ways we write, read and teach essays? What can essayists learn from poets, novelists, filmmakers, bloggers, web designers and hackers about what the digital future may hold? What problems and possibilities do these new essays present to magazine editors, anthologists and book publishers?

Playing for Keeps:  Intensity and Creativity in the Lyric Essay
Steven Harvey, Brenda Miller, Robert Root, Rebecca McClanahan, Kathryn Winograd
The lyric essay gives writers the license to experiment—to play with language in fresh and surprising ways—but if this playfulness lacks intensity the lyric essay can become a game, or worse, an idle exercise.  What do writers do to animate the form so that it not only enjoys the freedom to explore but achieves the level of passion and intelligence we expect from all great writing?  A panel of writers will consider the question and offer concrete suggestions.

Recovery as Discovery: Rethinking Nature Writing
Tom Montgomery-Fate, David Gessner, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Gretchen Legler, John Price, Tom Montgomery-Fate
Since Thoreau’s invention of the nature memoir 160 years ago, much of the natural environment itself has been damaged or destroyed. Thus, today’s nature writer must attend to both the natural world and her/his own role in its slow destruction.  Their task now is less to discover and record the rare, than to recover and nurture the ravaged.  This panel of nature writers will explore how they’ve addressed this paradox in their work.

Shaping a Life: Voice, Structure and Craft in Memoir
Janice Gary, E. Ethelbert Miller, Ben Yagoda, Dustin Beall Smith, Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, Michael Downs
While fiction writers create entire worlds from scratch, those working in the nonfiction genre of memoir must struggle with the bulky material of an existing life. Like a sculptor working with a block of stone, the memoirist’s task is to shape and reveal, fashioning a well-formed text out of a lifetime of experiences. In this session, writers of memoir will discuss the challenges of the form including where to begin, structure and voice, material selection and other craft considerations.

Status Update: The Personal Essay in the Age of Facebook
Jen McClanaghan, Phillip Lopate, Bob Shacochis, Debra Monroe, Jocelyn Bartkevicius, Josh McCall
Between the ever-popular tell-all memoir and ubiquitous status updates on websites such as Facebook and Twitter, the confession has never been so popular or so utterly mundane. We know more about each other than ever before and yet little that's truly intimate or insightful. This panel will discuss the tradition of the personal essay and what it might offer the contemporary reader and writer, namely the opportunity for real insight and reflection.

Tearing Your Heart Off Your Sleeve: The Problem of Pathos in Creative Nonfiction
B.J. Hollars, Re'Lynn Hansen, Marcia Aldrich, Marion Wrenn, Katie Jean Shinkle
How can nonfiction writers avoid the pitfalls of sentimentality and nostalgia while directly addressing them in the work?  Join editors from Black Warrior Review, Fourth Genre, South Loop, Painted Bridge Quarterly, and Versal as they discuss the problem of pathos in nonfiction while offering concrete strategies for how best to approach emotionally driven topics.  Panelists will also explore how traditional and experimental forms lend themselves to packing an emotive punch within the genre.

The Unfolding Story:  Narrative Possibilities in Creative Nonfiction
Steven Harvey, Joe Mackall, Jocelyn Bartkevicius, Bob Cowser, Michael Steinberg
Stories emerge in works of creative nonfiction in a variety of ways.  Sometimes they are told in a straight-forward manner, but often they are truncated, muted, or implied—and each choice has consequences.  What are the possibilities for storytelling available to the writer of nonfiction?  What effects do these choices create?  Does the genre place any limits on narrative possibilities?  A panel of writers and editors will examine these questions about the tales we tell in creative nonfiction.

To Tell You the Truth: Strategies in the New Nonfiction
Jeffrey Shotts, Nick Flynn, Eula Biss, Ander Monson, Stephen Elliott
Creative nonfiction has never been more exciting, as writers from multiple genres explore and define new modes of writing essay, memoir, journalism, and cultural criticism. Four writers at the forefront of the new nonfiction discuss strategies for writing and reading these new forms of ‘truth-telling.’

What the Narrator Doesn't Know: The Importance of Speculation in Narrative
Jill McCabe Johnson, David Huddle, Dinah Lenney, Lee Martin, Lia Purpura
Should narrators admit what they don’t know? Does ignorance discredit the non-fiction author? Listen to four writers discuss how they use speculation to openly investigate questions, uncover the narrator’s vulnerabilities, delve more deeply into narrative, and intensify plot. Learn how not knowing can build credibility, open possibilities for the author, while inviting the reader to embark with you on a journey of exploration.

What's Normal in Nonfiction?
Steven Church, Debra Marquart, Ander Monson, Bonnie J. Rough, Bob Shacochis, David Shields
Moderated by Editors of The Normal School, the panel will feature a discussion of the polarizing questions concerning the ethics and aesthetics of nonfiction writing today. Is the nonfiction writer’s obligation to the art or to the subject? The audience? Can you conflate time, use composite or fictionalized characters, or borrow material from other sources without citing it? Panelists will consider what the role of the nonfiction writer is today and how that role is defined by ethical concerns for subject and audience, and/or aesthetic concerns for art, genre, form, and technique.

Where Science and Justice Meet: The Necessity of Environmental Writing
Nancy Lord, David Gessner, Gretchen Legler, Kathleen Dean Moore, Catherine Reid, John Calderazzo
Beset by global warming, habitat loss, and industrial waste and pollution, today’s ‘natural world’ demands more than observation and reverence from writers. This panel of established nature and environmental writers will explore the need for scientific accuracy, political acumen, the pursuit of social justice, and at least occasional humor in shaping literary responses to environmental threats and change.

Women on Wanderlust: Travel Writing
Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Elisabeth Eaves, Alison Stein Wellner, Valerie Conners
Contributors of Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010 will debate the role gender plays in their trade. What safety precautions do they take on their solo expeditions? Have they ever used their perceived vulnerability to their advantage? After exploring the ways gender can impact a journey, they will reflect on how it influences prose. Is there a feminine style of travel writing? What is the market like post-Eat, Pray, Love, and how can new writers break into the field?

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Craft of Poetry

A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line
Emily Rosko, Raza Ali Hasan, Evie Shockley, John Gallaher, Emmy Perez, Cynthia Hogue
So much in poetry depends upon the line--one of the most contested and central topics in 20th-century poetics.  This panel extends the discussion of this poetic fixture into the 21st-century.  The concept of the line so often emerges as a kind of poetic and critical blank check--an aesthetic, socio-political, and metaphysical variable.  Embracing this variability, the panelists will discuss how the line remains a crucial and generative force in their poetic work and thought.

A Writer’s Relationship to Their Literary Influences in the Process of Making or Hindering a Poet
Philip Terman, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Anne Marie Macari, Tyehimba Jess, Patricia Clark
Every poem is a new metaphor, says Robert Frost, and yet each poem is rooted in a tradition larger than the poet or the poems we create. But Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence claims that poetic influence hinders creativity and produces weakness. Have our literary relatives or ancestors harmed us or have they strengthened the poetry we create? This panel of poets from diverse backgrounds will explore our connection to unique literary ancestries, and how that connection makes us the poets that we are.

Beyond Blackout and Whiteache: Poets Rewriting Race
Ailish Hopper, Martha Collins, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Jake Adam York, Douglas Kearney
We’ll investigate the ways that poetry about race, from ‘both’ white and black poets, can use the same language that's been our ‘jail’ to now invent a ‘key.’  Where’s the line between us using cultural tropes, and them using us? What role the body, or a body’s absence; of effacement or (in)fidelity to narrative?  Looking at constraints we encounter---and possibly enact--- we’ll explore how formal choices embody and offer the possibility of Audre Lord’s naming the nameless…so it can be thought.

Beyond Ekphrasis: The Endless Possibilities in Collaboration
Mary Hutchins Harris, Lola Haskins, Patricia Smith, Marjory Wentworth, Kwame Dawes
Poets, artists and musicians have thankfully influenced one another for ages.  But what happens when poets move beyond reacting to a piece of artwork from another century to where a painter, composer, or choreographer reacts to poetry?  What if poets become part of the creative process that brings a multi-sensory experience to life?  We will discuss how collaborations enhance personal artistic growth and offer invaluable opportunities to influence and enrich those outside our literary realm.

Broadening the Poet's Vision Through the Peace Corps Experience
Virginia Gilbert, Sandra Meek, John Isles, Ann Neelon, Derick Burleson
How does a stint in the Peace Corps influence a writing life? This panel investigates the question of how living in a developing country as a volunteer contributes to the growth of a poetic voice.  Five award winning poets who served in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe discuss and illustrate through their writing how representing America abroad contributed to their understanding of what it means to be a poet in the world.

CantoMundo: Building a Community of Latina/o Poets
Pablo Miguel Martinez, Carmen Tafolla, Deborah Paredez, Emmy Perez, Cynthia Cruz, Eduardo C. Corral
CantoMundo, a master workshop and retreat, strives to cultivate a community of Latina/o poets by providing a culturally-grounded space for the creation, documentation, and critical analysis of Latina/o poetry. In this session, founders and fellows will reflect on launching the retreat-workshop and will discuss the significance of CantoMundo's efforts to connect training in craft with a focus on Latina/o aesthetic and social concerns. The session will also feature a reading by panelists-fellows.

Changing Chords: The African American Poet as Critic
Herman Beavers, Honoree Jeffers, Timothy Seibles, Anthony Walton, Carolyn Beard Whitlow
This panel features four African American poets discussing the role aesthetics, music, and political struggle have played in the history of African American poetic criticism.  This panel imagines a central role for the poet/critic in the 21st Century, as editors and as the authors of critical perspectives which clarify how attention to craft and emotional content yields unique insights into how poetry means as it also explores the complexity of lived experience in the African Diaspora.

Channeling Voices: The Persona Poem
Julie Sheehan, Linda Bierds, Cornelius Eady, Joan Houlihan, Melissa Stein, Robert Thomas
Six poets discuss the curious case of the persona poem, its powers, its problems: choosing which voice to channel, handling the ethics of impersonation (a Class 6 felony), negotiating between how a historical or invented I would actually speak and how the poem’s language survives the printed page. Why write in persona? Can personas, like actors, be miscast? What does the First Person Historical do that the Third Person Historical can’t? What are the pitfalls of giving voice to someone else?

Faith vs. the Avant-Garde:  Spirituality and Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry
G.C. Waldrep, Kazim Ali, Bhanu Kapil, Catherine Imbriglio
To what extent is spiritual commitment compatible or incompatible with a poetics variously described as innovative, experimental, or avant-garde?  To frame it the opposite way, mustn't any poetry of spirituality be, on some level, ‘experimental’?  Four poets and cross-genre writers from across four distinct spiritual traditions discuss the relationship between faith, practice, and poetic innovation in their and others' works.

From the Home Front: Civilian Poets Writing on War
Juan J. Morales, Raza Ali Hasan, Laren McClung, Khaled Mattawa, Maria Melendez, Faisal Siddiqui
Six poets from different walks of life will read and discuss how warfare enters their daily lives and how they navigate their roles as writers, witnesses, the relatives of veterans, and as civilians.  They will discuss the complications of taking a stance, the daily life of combat zones, the plight of the refugee, PTSD, the longing for peace all while reflecting on how poems depicting recent and past wars help them better scrutinize present representations of warfare composed on the home front.

History in Verse: Poets at the Intersection of Documentary and Art
Andrea Carter Brown, Marilyn Nelson, Cynthia Hogue, Frank X Walker, Scott Hightower, Robin Coste Lewis
Six poets committed to writing history in verse discuss how they came to their material; other collections that have influenced them; the role of research and the difficult task of balancing information, concision and lyricism; strategies for approaching their subjects; and the many challenges involved in writing poetry that is true to history as well as good poetry.

How a Poem Happens: Six Poets Explore How Their Poems Were Made
Adrian Blevins, Linda Gregerson, Bob Hicok, Dorianne Laux, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Eric Pankey
The six poets on this panel will explore the making of one of their poems from genesis to publication. Each poet, who has been featured on the popular weblog How a Poem Happens, will discuss their own process of poetic composition, addressing the following questions: How was this poem initiated? How did it arrive at its final form? Were any principles of technique consciously employed? What is American about this poem? Was it finished or abandoned?

Lyric Poetry and the Archive
Tung-Hui Hu, Brenda Hillman, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Brent Armendinger, Cody Walker, Megan Pugh
If, as Pound famously wrote, a epic poem is a poem containing history, what does it mean to write lyric poetry inspired by the archive? How do poets use archival or historical documents in their craft? On this panel, six poets examine their relationship to a diverse array of archives containing cartographic maps, voicemail messages, oral histories, and other ephemera, suggesting that lyric poetry can itself function as a sort of archive.

Mongrels, Monsters, and Mutants: New Identities in Contemporary Poetry
Joshua Kryah, Cathy Park Hong, Bhanu Kapil, Myung Mi Kim, Prageeta Sharma
This panel will consider poetry that crosses genetic and identity borders in order to create new mixed forms. Through an exploration of each poet’s work, we will examine a variety of ideological assumptions, subject positions, and social concepts concerning ethnicity, gender, and nationality in contemporary poetry. Our conversation will revolve around poetry open to acquiring and dispensing identity in relation to its ever-changing internal, social, and linguistic contexts.

Poetry as Multimedia Documentary
Ted Genoways, Kwame Daves, Erika Meitner, Susan B.A. Somers-Willett, Natasha Tretheway
Over the past two years, Virginia Quarterly Review has sent poets, photographers, and radio producers to collaboratively report from communities in crisis (Dawes in Jamaica and Haiti, Meitner in Detroit, Somers-Willett in Troy, Trethewey in Gulfport). The resulting poems and media blur the lines between art and journalism to present a new model of storytelling. Poet-reporters gather to read from their work, discuss multimedia collaboration, and debate the possibilities of poetry as documentary.

Poetry: The Common Ground
Stanley Moss, Aliki Barnstone, Diana Der-Hovanessian, Levent Yilmaz, Stephanos Papadopoulos, Iman Mersal
Since its founding, Sheep Meadow Press has published translations of numerous languages, often from a mixture of cultures with traditionally tense relationships. This event is a chance for a diverse roster of poets and translators to read their work and discuss the ways in which poetry serves to bridge cultural divides.  This panel includes translations and discussions of Greek, Turkish,  Armenian, Arabic and Israeli poetry.

Poets Wrestling with Research
Andrea Scarpino, Douglas Kearney, Erica Dawson, Carrie Shipers, Millicent Borges Accardi
Although we are told to write what we know, many poets consider research an integral part of their writing and revision process. Whether that research is historical, literary, or familial, poets who use research in their writing draw on a wealth of techniques in the writing processes.  Five poets who wrestle with research in their work will discuss how doing so informs, strengthens, and challenges their writing, as well as some of the unique problems inherent in writing research-laden poetry.

Post-Katrina Poetry: Five Years Later
Robin Kemp, Kalamu ya Salaam, Peter Cooley, Julie Kane
Hurricane Katrina unleashed a storm of questions: who gets to speak for whom, who is ‘disaster-surfing,’ and who is a New Orleanian. Noted New Orleans-based poets reflect on poetry as a weapon against cultural homogenization. Topics include a critical overview of post-Katrina poetry by natives and non-natives; the landmark ‘Still Standing’ reading; the difficulties of post-Katrina publishing; and the damage that Washington's inadequate response is wreaking on New Orleans' poetry community.

Relocating Poetry within the Brain: Consciousness, Emotion, and Poetic Rhetoric
Bruce Covey, Amy Gerstler, Danielle Pafunda, Jenny Sadre-Orafai, Megan Kaminski
In light of cognitive science’s research into the biological basis of emotion, the public perception of poetry as ‘engaging the realms of feelings and dreams’ has caused poetry to appear more than ever disengaged from scientific fact.  The truth is, however, that many current poets have already begun revamping poetry’s emotional rhetoric with an understanding of current science.  This panel will examine elegies, odes, and other emotionally driven forms within the context of cognition.

Story, Telling: Innovative Poetic Narratives
Kathleen Ossip, Jennifer Moxley, Kate Greenstreet, Dawn Lundy Martin, Peter Covino, Susan Briante
Narrative, particularly autobiographical narrative, is one of the enduring pleasures/sources of poetry. These days, more and more poets are using non-traditional and documentary strategies to enact the lived life in long poems and book-length sequences. Six poets who have explored the new poetic narrative in recent books will talk about their methods and the techniques they've developed -- oblique and blunt, factual and lyrical -- to allow their stories to emerge.

Strategic Thievery
Katy Didden, Victoria Anderson, Joanne Diaz, Leslie Harrison, Shara Lessley, Katie Peterson
True to Eliot’s adage that great writers steal, poets read the work of other writers to acquire new rhythms, forms, and subject matter; occasionally, they stumble across less expected techniques. The poets on this panel will talk about the quirky writing tricks they’ve lifted from writers they love. Come hear writers discuss erasing Montaigne and de-composing and re-composing Petrarch, and learn about Marianne Moore’s interscoper, Annie Dillard’s sticky fingers, and the Larry Levis swerve.

The Audacity of Scope: Crafting the Book-Length Poem
Stacey Lynn Brown, Sherwin Bitsui, Molly Gaudry, Philip Memmer, Thorpe Moeckel
In a contemporary poetic landscape that favors collections of individual poems, what inspires a poet to (re)turn to epic poetry? What are the thematic, aesthetic, and technical concerns specific to poems with a larger scope? How does the poet approach issues of format, structure, and organization? What are the distinctions between book-length poems and novels in verse? Five award-winning poets discuss their experiences working with the limitations and freedoms inherent in this traditional form.

The Long and Short of It: Writing, Teaching, and Publishing the Long Poem
David Hawkins, Kimiko Hahn, David Bonanno, Julie Agoos, Jonathan Farmer
Many university workshops neglect them, all but a few anthologies avoid them, and nearly every literary magazine refuses to print them. Nevertheless, the critical importance of the long poem seems secured by their canonical significance, the poets who continue to write them, and the handful of editors who print them. Two editors and three poets who have a range of experience with the form discuss the long poem, its history, and the 21st century forces which complicate its future.

The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project
Anna Evans, Kim Bridgford, Erica Dawson, Jehanne Dubrow, Dana Gioia, Kathrine Varnes
In March 2010 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Kim Bridgford launched The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project, an online database of essays about women poets and their work. The Timeline Project aspires to become a comprehensive resource of women poets, spanning all periods, countries and schools of poetry. This panel will discuss the need for, and importance of, the timeline, along with its ongoing development, such as handling copyright issues and contributing an essay.

The Poetry of Truth: the Role of Reasearch in Contemporary Poetics
Cole Swensen, Susan Howe, Thalia Field, Cecil Giscombe, Jonathan Skinner
Poetic language is often thought opposed to, or at least incompatible with, the language of information, but there is an emergent poetic trend that fuses the two. These poets put research at the center of their practice, thus examining both the construction of truth, which controls our relationship to information, and that of poeticity, which allows language to be perceived as art. Panelists will address these issues by presenting their recent work in light of the research that informed it.

The PSA Presents: A Reading and Interview with Eavan Boland
Alice Quinn, Eavan Boland
Acclaimed Irish poet Eavan Boland will read her poetry, followed by an interview with Poetry Society of America Executive Director Alice Quinn.

Undivided: Poet as Public Citizen, Sponsored by Split This Rock Poetry Festival 
Melissa  Tuckey, Toi  Derricotte, Martín Espada , Carolyn  Forché, Mark Nowak
Split This Rock celebrates poetry of provocation and witness and the role of poet as public citizen.  In a time of multiple wars, economic, social and environmental crisis, this panel will discuss the role of poets and poetry in public life. Shelley described the poet as ‘unacknowledged legislator.’ What does this mean in the age of Fox News and corporate lobbyists?  What are some of the ways that poets are engaging with the larger public in the United States and abroad?  Who are the models for this work? How might we begin to think of ourselves as undivided: both citizen and poet?

Unite!: Acts of Radical Poetic Collaboration
Arielle Greenberg, Rachel Zucker, Dana Teen Lomax, Rodrigo Toscano, Matthew Cooperman, Jason Snyder
How does collaborative poetic work, which destabilizes the single-author voice and resists total control, lend itself to radical themes and aesthetics?  In these projects, process, style and content interrogate notions of authorship and authority, resulting in subversive perspectives on politics and culture.  Collage, children participating, live performance, and interdisciplinary media are just some of the techniques used to create work that is as community-minded as it is provocative.

Unseen Mentorship: The Best Poets You (May) Never Have Heard Of
Jeffrey McDaniel, Paisley Rekdal, Terrance Hayes, A.E. Stallings, Dennis Nurkse, Khaled Mattawa
A panel in which six poets introduce a poet he or she thinks has slipped under the contemporary critical radar, but who the panelists believe deserve a wider audience. These ‘unseen mentors’ span a wide variety of nations and cultures, historical periods and aesthetic movements. Each panelist will present a brief introduction to the poet's work, read a short selection of the poet's work, then discuss the poet's influence on their own work and the work of the poet's own contemporaries.

Whitman for Writers: Walt Whitman in Washington
David Baker, Linda Gregerson, Stanley Plumly, Ann Townsend
In 1862 Walt Whitman traveled to the hospital camps of Washington DC to find his brother George, wounded in the Civil War.  The poet stayed for the next decade in the nation’s capital, volunteering as nurse, writing hundreds of letters for soldiers, clerking in government offices, writing poems.  This panel considers Whitman as witness, healer, and worker, tracing how the Civil War’s grim actuality and the assassination of Lincoln transform the great poet’s life and work.

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Cross Genre Issues

Beyond Psychobabble: Finding Effective Language for Workshop Critiques
Susan Hubbard, John Hales, Liza Wieland, Anna Leahy
What constitutes effective feedback in a creative writing workshop? Why do students often speak like psychological counselors? Four teachers/writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry discuss strategies for shaping discussions that are provocative, not overly emotive or unduly self-reflexive. Borrowing criteria and terminology from other art forms, and avoiding psychobabble, can be useful first steps in fostering students' fluency in making critical statements in and out of the classroom.

BODIES POLITIC
Barrie Jean Borich, Judith Barrington, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ann Pancake, Ira Sukrungruang, Brian Teare
The literary body is beloved, is bared, is captive, is container, is hidden, is habitat, is dissenting, is taboo, is pleasure, is change. We make literature out of the body's clashes and communions, and our bodies together create a social mesh we write to maintain and sustain, remake or escape. This panel—a diverse body politic of poets, novelists and essayists, gathering in the political belly of America—will grapple with corporeality, community and claiming the body for the page.

Building LGBT Literary Traditions
Julie R. Enszer, Eloise Klein Healy, Jason Schneiderman, Tony Valenzuela, David Trinidad, Reginald Harris
What are LGBT literary traditions? What institutions, publications, practices, and ideas nurture and develop new writing from emerging and established LGBT writers? What strengths exist in the landscape of LGBT literature and what opportunities are there for more growth and development?  From the sexy and sensuous to the mundane and sublime, this panel explores these questions and more with perspectives on LGBT literature from publishers, writers, critics, arts administrators and activists.

Environmental Writing in the Age of Global Climate Change
Janine DeBaise, Paul Bogard, Sheryl St. Germain, Kathryn Miles, BK Loren, Simmons Buntin
Environmental writing has moved beyond nature writing to include concerns of urban ecology and the built environment. Six writers and editors from the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) will discuss ways in which writers have responded, in both traditional and new media, to climate change and other environmental crises. They will discuss the ways that writers are linking environmental issues to sexism, racism, and other injustices within our communities.

Face-to-Face Communities in the Age of Facebook
Curtis Bauer, Elaine Sexton, Oliver de la Paz, Camille T. Dungy, Ross Gay
At the beginning of the 21st century can we thumb our noses at technology-based communities in the hope to save traditional methods of community building? Without rejecting technology, this panel will inform attendees how to benefit from both technological resources and different non-technological approaches to starting, establishing and growing communities in diverse literary contexts, including reading series, anthologies, writing collectives, small presses, and race-based organizations.

Fact and Fiction: Four Women Write About The Disease All Women Dread
Rita Ciresi, Mary Cappello, Elizabeth Nunez, Suzanne Strempek Shea
Two memoirists and two novelists will discuss the difference between writing ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ about breast cancer, and explore how race, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality affect their work.  Panelists also will explore why (with the exception of celebrity biographies) mainstream American publishers shy away from manuscripts involving breast cancer and how independent presses--such as Alyson, Beacon, and Akashic--have stepped in to fill that gap.

Hands On: A Conversation about DIY and Craft Culture in a Digital World
Liz Ahl, Jennifer Flescher, Timothy Schaffert, Kathryn Bursick, Betsy Wheeler, Mathias Svalina
Given the efficiency-driven digital world, why does handcraft survive? Why are there still books? What does lead type offer us in 2010 that differs from what it offered Whitman when he set Leaves of Grass? What does the cut and paste 'zine have to say to the hand-set broadside? How are the digital and the handmade cooperative or symbiotic? What can handcraft offer us about learning, reading and writing?  Session participants’ experiences as writers, publishers, and teachers inform their answers.

Honoring American Writers and their Works
Malcolm O'Hagan, Helen Sullivan
Panel members with discuss various aspects of the new American Writers Museum. Members of the audience will be invited to engage in a discussion of what should be in the museum - genres, authors, artifacts, events, etc.

I Am Not a Terrorist: The Political Writer
Terry Hong, Lorraine Adams, Ru Freeman, Nathalie Handal, Porochista Khakpour, Luis Alberto Urrea
As national borders disintegrate through war and technology, fictional ones do not necessarily follow suite, often staying true to place; but must writers whose lives are political, and who function as spokespersons for worlds that American readers may never visit, write politics into their art? Writers with ties to current debates about Iran, Palestine, Algeria, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, discuss the burden of truth and the choices they make as cultural translators.

Is it a book?
Joe Miller, Ayesha Pande, Julia Kasdorf, Jeff Gundy
At least once or twice a year a writer shares a particularly complex essay, story, or set of poems with a workshop or a friend, and hears ‘I think you have a book here.’ Others labor for years over what they hope will become books, only to hear ‘This doesn’t quite make a book.’ How do writers discover what will and won’t make a book?  Three writers and an agent/former editor share the stories of their successful book projects as well as those that couldn't quite make it to the next level.

Kin: Mixed-Genre of Color
Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, Linda Hogan, Deborah A. Miranda, Ching-In Chen, Nancy Agabian, vaimoana litia makakaufaki niumeitolu
Artistic traditions of color precede, intersect with, and inform European forms, but too often are ignored in discussions of the avant-garde. This is especially unfortunate when we see the long traditions and volume of work being produced that buck against, exist outside of, and hybridize Eurocentric conventions of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and theatre. Europeans are not the only innovators, and what mixed-genre writers of color produce is both highly crafted and highly traditional.

Native Writing: A New Generation, New Conversation
Jocelyn Bartkevicius, Santee Frazier, Sy Hoahwah, Tacey Atsitty, Toni Jensen
This panel brings together new Native writers whose work is featured in a recent special issue of the Florida Review. Their work is diverse in its tribal, geographic, and aesthetic makeup and marks a shift toward a new generation of Native writing. This panel examines this shift: how these new writers see their work in relation to existing Native writing, how this new Native writing fits with other ethnic writing, and how it fits within the broader community of American literature.

New Political Writing
Susan Briante, Nick Flynn, Alan Michael Parker, Tony Trigilio, Crystal Williams
The label ‘political writing’ often brings to mind classic protest literature from the Vietnam Era or the more recent Poets Against the War website. But what does that label mean today? The poets, novelists and creative non-fiction writers featured on the ‘New Political’ panel will discuss their approaches to the issues of the day, their relation to political writing of the past, and how they avoid replicating the polarizing Red State/Blue State rhetoric of so much popular discourse.

Page Turners: Asian American Literature in the 21st Century
V.V. Ganeshananthan, Tina Chang, Ravi Shankar, Amitava Kumar, Manijeh Nasrabadi
From Hmong to Iran to Turkmenistan, Asian American literature is broadening its terrain.  The Asian American Writers' Workshop is at the fore of this conversation on ‘radical inclusivity.’ But what unifies these cultures and aesthetics? Join an eclectic group of Asian American Writers in conversation as they come together to discuss the future of the Asian American arts movement in a post multi-cultural world.

Race in the Creative Writing Workshop
Cynthia Cruz, Michelle Valladares, J. Michael Martinez, Suzanne Gardinier, Thomas Sayers Ellis
Teaching in writing workshops, what allowances ought to be made for the artists, individually, and where do we draw the line? At what point do stereotypes  of race get addressed? How does it feel to be the lone writer of color in a college writing workshop?   What balance and/or added perspective can a teacher bring to the workshop experience?  When does ‘teaching teaching ones race’ begin to interfere with one’s own opportunity to discuss craft?

Red & Black: Cross-Genre Issues
Chezia Thompson-Cager-Strand, Ishmael Reed, Margaret Noori, C.Leigh McInnis
The theoretical overlap of the categories of genre in Native American and African-African Literatures is a distinctive feature of its’ use of the poetic to illuminate narration in storytelling and fiction. Encouraging writers to bridge genre differences or providing students with models that by-pass genre restrictions contributes to creating reading and cultural literacy. The panel will present examples of this strategy as it sculpts a view of ethnicity in the past and in the present.

Stranger Than Fiction: The Choice Between Fiction and Nonfiction
Robin Romm, Kerry Cohen, Pam Houston, Cheryl Strayed, Richard McCann
Most every writer has a personal story to tell. But with memoir comes potential harm – for friends, family, and themselves. Often, writers wonder if they could simply change their stories to fiction. How do authors choose between fiction and nonfiction when telling their stories? Can the same story be both fiction and memoir? Five authors who have made such choices will discuss the reasons behind their decisions, and the ramifications of having done so.

Strangers on a Train: What Poets Can Learn from Hitchcock
Michelle Mitchell-Foust, Ralph Angel, Stephanie Brown, David St. John, Arthur Vogelsang, Suzanne Lummis
Over the course of eleven days, Alfred Hitchcock used eighty camera angles and nine actors to create one minute and forty-eight seconds of film--his shower scene for Psycho. This attention to detail is also the poet’s work. Hitchcock reveals a psychological density in his films that many contemporary poems aspire to. The panelists examine his narrative structures, scenes, interview material, and Hitchcock-inspired poems, in a discussion of what Hitchcock’s vision provides to today’s poets.

The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World
Lauret Savoy, Elmaz Abinader, Faith Adiele, Fred Arroyo, Debra Kang Dean, Nikky Finney
A segregation of ideas continues in this country such that both the environmental movement and nature writing do not yet recognize the many voices of people not of Anglo-American descent. Join contributors to the unique new anthology The Colors of Nature--African-, Asian-, and Arab-American, Latino/a, Native, and multi-racial writers--who redefine nature and nature writing, enlarge our understanding of the human place on Earth, and offer fresh ways of considering multicultural literature.

The Essayist in the 21st Century
Randon Noble, Robert Atwan, Eula Biss, EJ Levy, Kyoko Mori
What is the future of the essay?  How can essayists make this 16th-century form relevant to a new millennium? This panel of writers and editors will discuss how the personal essay is being challenged by more experimental forms, how this traditional genre might transform itself to meet the demands of a new publishing environment, and how new technologies pose logistical, aesthetic and ethical problems for the essay.

The Good Review: Criticism in the Age of Book Blogs and Amazon.com
Jeremiah Chamberlin, Charles Baxter, Stacey D'Erasmo, Gemma Sieff, Keith Taylor
This panel examines how criticism is changing in a literary landscape increasingly dominated by new media. In this era, who is a critic? What is a good review? Whom does it serve? And what is the impact of criticism on literature and culture? Editors of both online and print publications join writers of fiction, poetry, and criticism to address these questions, as well as to discuss how books get reviewed and by whom, why vigorous reviewing is necessary, and ways to write reviews that matter.

The Great Indoors: Gender, Writing, and Re-envisioning Literary Merit
Randall Mann, Cate Marvin, Barrie Jean Borich, Susan Steinberg, Patti Horvath, Sarah Gambito
By circumstance and design, the work of many women writers is concerned with issues of interiority (physical, emotional).  This micro way of viewing the human experience is frequently overshadowed by a literary aesthetic that privileges a more macro, and stereotypically masculine, approach.  This panel examines how this inadequate model for evaluating literature has perpetuated a gendered division between writers and writings.

The Poetry-Prose Dynamic, Internationally
Carrie Etter, Toi Derricotte, Molly Peacock, Tim Liardet, Jill Bialosky
In this panel, five authors, residing in the UK, Canada, and the US, investigate the interrelationships between their poetry and their prose, addressing such issues as the place(s) of memoir, shared elements such as simile and fact, the writer’s identity, and questions of form. What can we learn by examining the interfaces among the various genres we write? How do the different ways cross-genre authorship is perceived in the UK, Canada, and the US affect identities and careers?

The Rosary Effect: The Challenges of Writing from a Catholic Perspective
Haley Lasche, Luisa Igloria, Linda Norton, Ruben Quesada, John Reimringer
Five writers of poetry and prose discuss how practicing Catholicism has influenced their writing. Coming from diverse geographies, sexualities, racial perspectives and spiritual awakenings, these writers delve into the ways their works are influenced by the current Catholic paradigm. The panelists discuss how they negotiate what parts of the Catholic religion and ritual they consciously and subconsciously include in their writings regardless of their approval of papal comments and doctrines.

To Wave or Not to Wave: Writing the Female Body Across Generations
Kathleen Rooney, Janice Eidus, Patricia Foster, Karen McElmurray, Kate Zambreno
First, second, or third wave?  Post or no wave? The six feminist writers in this roundtable don’t get hung up on labels, but they do suggest there’s insight to be gained by looking at how the work of women writing about sex and the body has evolved over the past 40 years. Join them for a multi-genre, multi-generational conversation on how feminism has influenced literary explorations of gender, useful for anyone interested in how writing the body can situate individuals of any age in the world.

Transformative Dialogues Between Writers of Color
Alexs Pate, Quincy Troupe, David Mura, Marilyn Chin
This panel will examine the dialogues taking place now between writers and communities of color.  How do writers foster interventions and exchanges between people of color?  How are we influenced by each other’s works and traditions?  What are the necessary critiques and interventions that need to be made in this area?  In what ways do such exchanges alter our view of history and the present?  The panelists will use their own work and experience in such dialogues to explore these questions.

Two Jews, a Catholic, a Buddhist, a Mennonite Sufi Shaman, and a ________ walk into an AWP Panel: Geography’s Influence on Writers Writing Religion and Culture.
Eric Wasserman, Ira Sukrungruang, Heather Derr-Smith, Bich Minh Nguyen, Erika Meitner, Mary Biddinger
Geography has emerged as a vital component for writers exploring the culture of religion in the post 9/11 literary landscape. The place the writer hails from is now just as important to depicting the culture of religion as the faith the writer is steeped in. A cross-genre cross-country panel of not-so-nice Jewish boys, Catholic schoolgirl transgressors, superhero emulating Buddhists, and more, take a special look at how place fuels how writers approach the culture of religion in their work.

What To Expect When You're Expecting Your First Book
Alexi Zentner, Jill Bialosky, Téa Obreht, Noah Eaker, Peter Mountford, Adrienne Brodeur
Three debut novelists and their respective editors from Dial, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and W. W. Norton, will discuss what an author can expect, and more importantly, what an author should do, between the period of selling his or her book and the publication date. Topics will include mistakes to avoid, the editing process, what pre-publication marketing and publicity can be done by the author and what is handled by the house, and what the author should be working on in his or her own writing.

What Women DON’T Write About When We Write About Sex
Xi Xu, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Honor Moore, Victoria Redel, Ellen Bass, Sue William Silverman
In a post-feminist age, the memoir has blown the lid off sexual secrets, and in all genres, women have written increasingly frankly about sexuality over the last fifty years.  It almost seems that nothing is off limits. But what’s the art and craft of this sexual ‘anything goes’? Six women discuss the treatment of sex in their writing and ask:  Do we write Passion?  Do we write Lust?  Do we write Love?  And what don’t we write about when we write about sex?

When Should We Write For Free?
Jess Row, Robin Hemley, Chris Offutt, Stona Fitch, Nicole Walker
In a world of proliferating outlets for our writing, how do we distinguish between publishing for the love of art, and publishing for which we ought to be paid? Do literary journals, anthologies, and magazines (print and web) have an obligation to pay their contributors, even a minimal amount? Are informal kinds of writing (tweets, Facebook posts, blog entries) ‘content’ we should be compensated for? Join this panel of writers, editors, and bloggers for a vigorous debate—all voices welcome.

Writing Faith: A Conversation about the Creative Impulse
Dinah Lenney, E. Ethelbert Miller, Brenda Miller, Dani Shapiro, Askold Melnyczuk
Panelists will discuss the link between faith and creativity in both secular and non-secular work. No question writers and readers are looking for larger meanings and resonances: But can art be accomplished without mysterious influences? Are we hard-wired to seek divine inspiration or is writing a spiritual practice in and of itself? And what about doubt: a necessary component to the art? To faith? To faith in art? - or must we be absolute believers to carry on?

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Cross Genre Readings

A 45th Anniversary Reading by the Alumni of the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Dan Albergotti, Kelly Cherry, Camille Dungy, George Singleton, Jillian Weise, Drew Perry
One of the oldest such programs in the country, the MFA Writing Program at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro celebrates its 45th anniversary with a reading by our award-winning alumni.

A Reading by Faculty of Goucher College
Kathy Flann, Elizabeth Spires, Laura Wexler, Madison Smartt Bell, Susan Shreve, Jessica Anya Blau
Goucher College in Baltimore recently celebrated its 125th year. The undergraduate creative writing program, home to the Kratz Center for Creative Writing, has been part of the college’s distinguished history for the past three decades. Many of the program’s graduates have earned MFA’s and illustrious publishing careers. In 1997, Goucher launched the first low-residency MFA program devoted solely to creative nonfiction, the first of its kind in the country.

A Reading by Five Points Writers
Megan Sexton, David Bottoms, Kim Addonizio, Madison Smartt Bell, Celia Dovell Bell, Edward Hirsch
Five Points has continued to foster and support the work of established and emerging writers for nearly 15 years. Come hear award-winning writers who have been featured in Five Points over the years read from their work.

African American Writers on Obama
Lita Hooper, Renee Simms, Tara Betts, Antoinette Brim, Demetrice Worley
44 on 44: Forty-Four African American Writers on the 44th President of the United States is an anthology of poetry, essay, and creative non-fiction based on the election of the first African American president of the U.S.  The anthology includes contributors’ reflections of the historic election of Barak Obama.  Several contributors will read from the anthology and engage in a discussion with one another and the audience.

Behind the Brown Wall: Chicana and Chicano Voices Rise Up
Richard Yañez, Kathleen Alcalá, Eduardo C. Corral, Carolina Monsiváis, Paul Pedroza
A reading by authors who declare the U.S.-México Border a part of their creative identity. The poetry, stories, novels, and essays of these respected Chicana and Chicano voices are rooted on both sides of the international boundary. In their publications, the borderlands symbolize a more complex portrait of America’s boundaries than sensationalized headlines of drug smuggling and illegal immigration. Come witness these talented writers and poets who celebrate people more than mere politics.

Camino del Sol: 15 Years of Latina and Latino Writing
Rigoberto Gonzalez, Marjorie Agosin, Kathleen Alcala, David Dominguez, Gina Franco, Sergio Troncoso
This reading panel is a celebration of the recently-released anthology that gathers the best selections from fifteen years of the University of Arizona Press' Latino literary series, Camino del Sol. During its tenure, the press published 100 titles, shaping the Latino literary landscape and becoming the most important Latino literary series in the country.

Caribbean Diaspora and Diegesis: Cristina Garcia and Irene Vilar
Fred Arroyo, Cristina Garcia, Irene Vilar
Cristina Garcia, prize-winning Cuban American novelist and editor of two Vintage Latino literature anthologies, and Irene Vilar, controversial non-fiction writer from Puerto Rico and editor of The Americas book series, combine brief readings from their works and discuss the Latino Caribbean Diaspora as it continues to find expression in new literary narratives.  Moderated by Douglas Unger, co-founder of the UNLV Creative Writing International program.

Courting Risk: A Multicultural/Multi-Genre Reading
Khadijah Queen, Natalie Diaz, Naomi Benaron, L. Lamar Wilson, Susan Southard, Ariel Robello
Courting Risk is an annual reading series which promotes the work of emerging writers, particularly those who are women, LGBT and/or of color. Focus is given also to writers who address difficult political or social issues in multiple genres and art forms. A brief introduction of the series will be followed by a reading from six powerful emerging writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and cross-genre work, with time allotted at the end for Q&A.

Creative Writing Fulbright Fellowship Reading
Katherine Arnoldi, Jillian Weise, Katrina Vandenberg, Erika M. Martinez, Gail M. Dottin, M. Thomas Gammarino
The Fulbright Program funds undergraduate and graduate students to study, conduct research or pursue creative activities abroad for a year. The Creative Writing Fulbright Fellowship Reading is composed of past Creative Writing Fulbright Fellows who will not only tell of the application process, the experience and the professional, creative and personal benefits of having received this prestigious award but also read some of the work that they created while in such places such as Japan, Panama, the Netherlands, Paraguay, the Dominican Republic and Argentina.

Crossing Genres, Boundaries, and Cultures: A Reading of Iranian-American Writers
Roger Sedarat, Porochista Khakpour, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Ezzat Goushegir, Manijeh Nasrabadi
The literary tradition of the United States thrives upon the convergence of disparate cultures.  The rising popularity of Iranian American writing especially exemplifies both the successful strategies and the difficulties of turning one’s experience of two very different backgrounds into literature.  Four authors, each representing one genre, read from their award winning writing.

Don't Call Me Mother
Ellen Placey Wadey, Lisa Alvarado, Jan Beatty, Miki Howald, Geeta Kothari
You can find books by clock-ticking virgins, infertile women, adoptive parents, single-mothers-by-choice, blissful mothers or even mothers pulling out their hair. Yet stats show more women are choosing not to become mothers. So where are our voices? These essays and poems will consider the world of non-mothers: issues of legacy, the awkwardness of labels, questions about aging, and more. We're happy. We're not bitter or selfish. Don't call us mother. We're fine with it. Come hear for yourself.

Finding Identity in Cultural Margins: A Reading and Discussion on Transracial Adoption
Dana Collins, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Catherine McKinley, Lee Herrick, Precious Williams
For transracial adoptees, separation from biological lineage leads to searching for what defines family and home.  As adults, they straddle cultural margins between places of origin and places of migration.  Nowhere is this more evident than in their vivid personal testimonies.  From the Korean diaspora, from within America’s borders, and from the British foster system, come to a gathering of transracially adopted poets and memoirists reading from their work and discussing these potent themes.

George Mason University MFA program faculty prose reading
William Miller, Courtney Brkic, Alan Cheuse, Stephen Goodwin, Kyoko Mori, Susan Shreve
Come hear George Mason University’s top prose writers. Four faculty members from the Mason MFA program will share excerpts from their fiction and non-fiction work.  Readers include Courtney Brkic, Alan Cheuse, Steve Goodwin, Kyoko Mori, and Susan Shreve.

Graywolf Press Reading
Fiona McCrae, Nick Flynn, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Benjamin Percy, Stephen Elliott, Jessica Francis Kane
Five writers of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction read from their recent books published by one of the best literary publishers in the country, Graywolf Press. Introduced by Graywolf Publisher Fiona McCrae.

Hollins Graduate Program 50th Anniversary Reading
Jeanne Larsen, Madison Smartt Bell, Jenny Boully, David Huddle, Jill McCorkle, Natasha Tretheway
Is it something in the (mineral spring) water?  Some noted graduates of Hollins’ one-of-a-kind program in creative writing read their work, and sample more by a variety of other alums. Join us as we look back at our first 50 years, charge on into the next half-century, and celebrate the inauguration of the Jackson Center for Creative Writing, established through the generosity of John and Susan Jackson. Come figure out what makes the Hollins program what it is. Or just come and enjoy.

Jewish Guilt
Janice Eidus, Carol V. Davis, Marjorie Agosin, Ruth Knafo Setton, Elaine Terranova
Have Jewish writers cornered the market on guilt?  Do they express guilt differently from Catholic or Muslim writers? Does guilt change across generations, genders and genres? Five Jewish writers covering a broad spectrum, from Ashkenazi to Sephardic to Latino, writing fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, hailing from the Bronx, Los Angeles, Morocco, and Chile, from secular to religious, will explore the evolution and present-day reality of Jewish Guilt in their own writing and beyond.

Moby Dick’s Descendants: A Cross-Genre Reading of Works Inspired by the Great American Novel
Marci Johnson, Alan Michael Parker, Dan Beachy-Quick, Sena Jeter Naslund
Melville's Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, considered by many to be the Great American Novel, has inspired numerous writers over the last 160 years. The three distinguished writers on this panel have each written works in conversation with Melville's: Dan Beachy-Quick's A Whaler's Dictionary, Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife: Or, The Star-gazer: A Novel, and Alan Michael Parker's A Tale of a Whale. These novelists and poets will read, and then discuss her/his relationship to the 19th century classic.

Ploughshares 40th Anniversary Celebration
Ladette Randolph, Eleanor Wilner, Kathryn Harrison, Colm Toibin, Elizabeth Strout, Terrance Hayes
This round table features six recent guest editors of Ploughshares magazine and celebrates 40 years of the journal’s founding commitment to showcasing diverse literary voices with each issue. Former guest editors read and discuss how they made choices for their issues.

The Asian American Writers' Workshop 20th Anniversary Reading
Ken Chen, Kimiko Hahn, Patrick Rosal, Jennifer Tseng, Marie Lee, Ed Lin
Over the past 20 years, The Asian American Writers’ Workshop has grown from a Greek diner meeting into a preeminent intellectual sanctuary for Asian American literature. Join us for a cross-genre, cross-generational reading celebrating the Workshop’s 20th year.  Writers will read from their work and talk about the Workshop’s influence and history.

The Southampton Review’s 5th Anniversary Reading
Robert Reeves, Ursula Hegi, Matthew Klam, Roger Rosenblatt, Julie Sheehan, Helen Simonson
Five years ago, a range of talented emerging and established voices began appearing alongside visual artists in the handsome pages of a new magazine, The Southampton Review. Published by the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton, TSR has already earned a reputation for outstanding creative nonfiction. Join a representative group of TSR contributors, with a nod to those in the DC area, for a sampling of personal essay, fiction, poetry and memoir.

University of Maryland MFA Faculty Reading
Michael Collier, Maud Casey, Merrill Feitell, Howard Norman, Stanley Plumly, Joshua Weiner
Readings by the University of Maryland MFA Faculty: Maud Casey, Michael Collier, Merrill Feitell, Howard Norman, Stanley Plumly, and Joshua Weiner

Vermont College of Fine Arts 30th Anniversary Reading
Robin Oliveira, Mark Doty, Bret Lott, Sydney Lea, Nin Andrews, Wally Lamb
A centerpiece celebration of the 30-year history as one of the first low-residency MFA in Writing Programs in the U.S.  An innovator in the field, VCFA celebrates this milestone with readings by three former VCFA faculty members – Mark Doty, Sydney Lea and Bret Lott - and four alumni – Nin Andrews, Earl Braggs, Wally Lamb, Robin Oliveira.

WAMfest:  The Words and Music Festival Presents
David Daniel , Rosanne Cash, Kristin Hersh, Josh Ritter, John Wesley Harding
Featuring readings and performances by Rosanne Cash, Kristin Hersh, Josh Ritter, and John Wesley Harding.  Event to include readings, acoustic songs, and a discussion. 

Writing Human Rights: A Reading by Writers of the Iranian Diaspora
Jasmin Darznik, Persis Karim, Anita Amirrezvani, Sharon May
These readings will explore the connections between Iranian women's lives, cultural and political systems, and international human rights struggles in the literature of the Iranian diaspora. Award-winning poets, novelists, and memoirists share work on the themes of freedom of expression, political persecution, torture, and exile, reflecting on how their writing has been shaped by both recent events in Iran and the politics of Middle Eastern identity in post-9/11 America.

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Fiction Readings

A 46th Anniversary Fiction Reading by the Faculty of the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Jim Clark, Michael Parker, Fred Chappell, Craig Nova, Holly Goddard Jones, Lee Zacharias
One of the oldest such programs in the country, the MFA Writing Program at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro celebrates its 46th anniversary with a fiction reading by our award-winning faculty.

A Reading and Conversation with Carole Maso, presented by VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. 
A Reading and Conversation with Carole Maso, presented by VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. 

A Reading and Conversation with Sandra Cisneros and Helena Maria Viramontes, Sponsored by the Macondo Writers’ Workshop
Lorraine  Lopez, Sandra  Cisneros, Helena Maria  Viramontes
A Reading by Sandra Cisneros and Helena Maria Viramontes, moderated by Lorraine Lopez.

A Reading and Discussion with the American University Prose-Writing Faculty
David Keplinger, Richard McCann, Danielle Evans, Stephanie Grant, Rachel Louise Snyder
This panel, celebrating the twentieth anniversary of American University's MFA program, features the prose faculty of American University reading their recent work and discussing how the District of Columbia has affected the way in which each panelist thinks about the aims of their writing.

A Reading by Junot Diaz
Junot Diaz
Junot Díaz was born in 1968 in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the John Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize; the National Book Critics Circle Award; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. Díaz has been awarded the Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Reader's Digest Award, the 2002 PEN/Malamud Award, the 2003 U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and the Rudge (1948), and Nancy Allen Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A Reading by Mary Gaitskill and Sapphire, in association with Blue Flower Arts
Mary Gaitskill, Sapphire 
Mary Gaitskill is the award-winning author of Veronica, which was nominated for the 2005 National Book Award, National Critic’s Circle Award, and L.A. Times Book Award; Because They Wanted To, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award; and her recent collection of stories, Don't Cry. Sapphire is the author of the bestselling novel, Push, which won the Book-of-the-Month Club Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, and was made into the Academy Award-winning film, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. Her collections of poems are American Dreams and Black Wings & Blind Angels.

A Reading of Algonquin Writers
Lizzie Skurnick, Tayari Jones, Caroline Leavitt, Lauren Grodstein, Rahul Mehta, Michael Knight
Over forty years ago, Algonquin Books was founded in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Algonquin has grown- widening it's scope to be more than a regional press, while still honoring and deepening its southern roots. Come hear five diverse Algonquin writers read from their work.

A Voice of Her Own: A Reading
Reese Okyong Kwon, Alexander Chee, Porochista Khakpour, Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Hasanthika Sirisena, Tiphanie Yanique
This reading presents writers who have given fictional voice to women from patriarchal societies. What are the joys and responsibilities of creating characters from women who traditionally have had fewer opportunities to speak for themselves? Drawing from their experiences with and research into Japanese, Iranian, Caribbean, Korean, Sri Lankan, and historical French communities both native and expatriate, six writers will read and discuss passages featuring the women they have made.

America Reimagined: Four Contemporary Voices
Alison Granucci, Jennifer Egan, Joshua Ferris, Rick Moody, Benjamin Percy
America finds itself recast, stretched, and redefined though the astute minds of Egan, Ferris, Moody, and Percy. Each explores an eerie version of America through the eyes of their characters: a reanimated crawling hand, an ill man who cannot stop walking, a former punk rock star, and a father and son trip down a devilish canyon. These refreshing and surprising writers go straight to the jugular of modern life and bring us stories in which one cannot always tell the hero from the villain.

Bangladeshi Fiction: A New Direction in South Asian Literature
Ameena Meer, Gemini Wahhaj, Sharbari Ahmed, Jalal Alamgir, Javed Jahangir
Bangladeshi authors Monica Ali and Tahmima Anam have shaken the literary world by pointing to new directions in South Asian story telling. This panel presents Bangladeshi writers and considers the exciting new possibilities in South Asian narrative. How is Bangladeshi fiction different? What are the defining elements of this new voice? The writers will read from their work and discuss the ways in which they redefine the South Asian landscape in their concept of audience, imagination, and politics.

Best of the West: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri
Seth Horton, Kent Meyers, Aurelie Sheehan, Kent Nelson, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Mitch Wieland
Best of the West: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri is an annual anthology of exceptional short fiction rooted in the western United States. Five award-winning contributors gather to read from their anthologized work. They are to be introduced by D. Seth Horton, the series co-editor.

Capital Voices: Fiction from Washington Writers' Publishing House
David Taylor, Andrew Wingfield, Elisavietta Ritchie, Elizabeth Bruce, Denis Collins
Washington Writers' Publishing House is a non-profit literary collective. Through its annual Fiction Competition, WWPH seeks out and publishes excellent literary fiction from writers within metropolitan Washington, D.C.  WWPH authors will read from their prizewinning work, showcasing the rich variety of voices sending out stories from the nation’s capital.

Fiction and The American Scholar
Sudip Bose, David Vann, Bret Anthony Johnston, Alix Ohlin
For more than 70 years, The American Scholar has published essays and poetry by some of the most luminous names in world literature: Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, Philip Larkin, Ralph Ellison, Randall Jarrell, and John Updike, to name just a few. In 2006, the magazine published its first short story, and it is now committed to printing the finest fiction, both in print and online. Come hear readings by three acclaimed, award-winning writers, whose stories have appeared in The American Scholar.

Fiction and the Literary Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Benjamin Barnhart, Matthew Eck, Kira Henehan, J.C. Hallman, John Reimringer
Over thirty years of publishing, Milkweed Editions has gained a reputation amongst independent presses for publishing award-winning fiction--from Larry Watson’s Montana 1948, to Seth Kantner’s Ordinary Wolves and David Rhodes’ Driftless--that is both aesthetically ambitious and successful in the marketplace. This event features four debut fiction writers new to Milkweed Editions reading from their work, and discussing the publication process with the Publisher.

George Mason University MFA Alumni Fiction Reading
Nicole Louise Reid, Andrew Wingfield, Liam Callanan, Dallas Hudgens, Ramola D, Steve Amick
George Mason University’s MFA Program celebrates its 30th year with an alumni fiction reading featuring winners of the AWP Award Series in Short Fiction, Washington Writers' Publishing House fiction prize, and authors of books published by top trade and literary publishers.  Enjoy a microcosm of the variety of exceptional authors whose voices developed in the vibrant and uniquely exciting Washington, D.C. area.

Get Shorty: Readings from The Kenyon Review’s Short Fiction Contest.
Cara Blue Adams, Megan Anderegg Malone, Christopher Feliciano Arnold, Mika Taylor, Nick Ripatrazone, Megan Mayhew Bergman
The KR Short Fiction Contest for Writers Under Thirty is entering its fourth year. This reading is an opportunity to hear work from younger writers recognized as winners or runners-up by judges Alice Hoffman, Richard Ford, and Louise Erdrich from the first three years of the contest.  Submission to this contest must be 1200 words or less.

Makes New Friends and Keeps the Old
Jack Shoemaker, Skip Horack, Andrew Altschul, Jane Vandenburgh, Richard Wirick, Janice Shapiro
Makes New Friends and Keeps the Old: Counterpoint / Soft Skull Press is an author-driven house with a clear presence on both the West and East coasts and two rosters of award-winning authors working in every genre. Please join us in celebrating our combined successes with readings by current outstanding authors—Skip Horack, Andrew Altschul, Jane Vandenburgh, Richard Wirick, and Janice Shapiro—marking the beginnings of a new indie era.

National Book Critics Circle Celebrates East Coast Fiction
Jane Ciabattari, Edward P. Jones, Jayne Anne Phillips, Elizabeth Strout, Colson Whitehead, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award Winners and Finalists Edward P. Jones, Jayne Anne Phillips, Elizabeth Strout and Colson Whitehead read from their award-winning fiction; the geographic range covered in their work evokes various regions of the East Coast, from Maine to Brooklyn to Virginia to West Virginia.

Richard Ford and Writers in the Schools, Sponsored by PEN/Faulkner Foundation
Richard Ford
Event Description TBA

Starcherone Books 10th Anniversary Celebration Reading
Donald Breckenridge, Sara Greenslit, Joshua Harmon, Janet Mitchell, Aimee Parkison, Nina Shope
Featuring Donald Breckenridge, Sara Greenslit, Joshua Harmon, Janet Mitchell, Aimee Parkison, and Nina Shope.

UVA MFA Faculty Reading
Jeb Livingood, Deborah Eisenberg, Christopher Tilghman, Gregory Orr
Members of the University of Virginia MFA faculty read from their recent work. Readers include Deborah Eisenberg, Chris Tilghman, and Gregory Orr.

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Nonfiction Readings

A Reading by John Philip Santos & Lorraine Lopez, Sponsored by the Macondo Writers’ Workshop
John Philip  Santos, Lorraine  Lopez
Description TBA

Are We Feeling Better Yet? Women Speak About Health Care in America
Colleen McKee, Amanda Crowell Stiebel, Paula Kamen, Catherine Rankovic, Anita Darcel Taylor, Christine Simokaitis
In Are We Feeling Better Yet? Women Speak About Health Care in America, a collection of personal essays, women recount their often Sisyphean efforts to access and receive quality health care. They write with dark humor and brave candor about treatments for mental and physical illnesses that work, don’t work, and kind of work—that is, when they can afford them at all. In this panel, the co-editors join four contributors in reading from the acclaimed anthology.

Autism and Siblings: Stories Spanning Generations and Cultures
Debra Cumberland, Bruce Mills, Anne Barnhill
Our panel will feature readings from our anthology of essays and will also discuss the process of publishing an international and multi-generational perspective on growing up/aging with a sibling who has autism. While capturing the diversity and the unique vision of the authors, our readings from the book will also represent shared experiences: the emotional terrain of accomodating resentment, love, and helplessness, and the yearning to connect across neurological differences. Through deepening an understanding of the autism story, these essays are fundamentally about family and the compelling ways people sustain the ties that bind.

Celebrating 10 years of SABLE LitMag
Kadija George, Kevin Etienne-Cummings, Carla Murphy, Koye Oyedeji, Wangui wa Goro
Celebrate 10 years of SABLE, The LitMag for new writing for writers of colour with past readings from contributors, some of whom are now editors. The panel of writers focuses on the non-fiction contributions, including essays, travel writing, memoir and translation work.

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse: The Writings of Leonard Peltier
Ana Davis, Harvey Arden, Peter Matthiessen, Student from North Hennepin Community College, Student from North Hennepin Community College
In observance of Native American writer and activist Leonard Peltier's 35th year of incarceration, writers, friends, and supporters of Leonard's, along with English students and members of the Native American Nations Association student group from North Hennepin Community College, will read extracts from his book Prison Writings: My Life is My Sundance.

One Word Please: Writers on the Words They Love or Loathe
Molly McQuade, April Bernard, Jane DeLury, Maureen N. McLane, Nathaniel Taylor, Willett Thomas
Five writers examine the passionate relationship they have with one word in particular—the one that makes them cringe or swoon. Their choices are a wild gallimaufry from sweet to dämmerung, midnight to kankedort to pants. The essays are lyric, zinging one-liners, extended quips, jeremiads, etymological adventures, and fantastic romps. And they are all beautifully collected in Molly McQuade’s anthology One Word: Writers on the Words They Love or Loathe, published in late 2010 by Sarabande Books.

Reverent Irreverence: Women Writing Spirituality
Lorraine Lopez, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Heather Sellers, Kathryn Locey, Meredith Gray
Academics often shrink from matters of faith, a sensitive topic even without considering gender politics, particularly male hierarchies and representations of the divine in organized religion. So where does this leave the female writer eager to explore incongruities that erupt between the impulse to create and faith systems that contradict her agency? What if she explores faith fault-lines through humor? This panel of writers explores faith and spirituality—irreverently—through personal essay.

We Wanted to be Writers: Lessons from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop
Eric Olsen, Glenn Schaeffer, Sandra Cisneros
A reading from We Wanted to be Writers, edited by Olsen and Schaeffer. This is a collection of interviews with 27 of the editors’ classmates and teachers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the mid-70s. The interviews are arranged into conversations on topics including the creative process, our years in the Workshop, and survival strategies after. Those interviewed include TC Boyle, Jane Smiley, Jayne Anne Phillips, Sandra Cisneros, Allan Gurganus, John Irving, Marvin Bell, and Jack Leggett.

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Pedagogy

American Creative Writing in the Balkans
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer, Vladimir Levchev, Filitsa Sofianou-Mullen, Michael Cohen
This panel explores how creative writing is taught in another language or to people for whom English is a second language. Panelists will share their experiences teaching students who take creative writing classes in English in the Balkans and discuss similarities and differences between creative writing programs in America and in other countries including Bulgaria and Greece. Additionally, attendees will hear perspectives on conducting classes and workshops in more than one language.

Being in Uncertainties, Mysteries and Doubts: Negative Capability and the Place of the Imagination in the Academy Today
Alison MacLeod, Maggie Butt, Nigel McLoughlin, Derek Neale, Paul Munden
This UK panel asks whether Keats’ beloved Mysteries are protected or put at risk by writing programmes today.  Its writer-contributors explore poetry, fiction and non-fiction creation in relation to issues of authorial intention and abandon, the alogical forces of memory, artistic acts of becoming, and authors’ experiences of the autonomy of a work-in-progress. They offer, too, models of creativity that might yet help to establish an uncompromised space for the imagination within the Academy.

Beyond the Workshop: Revising, Revamping, Rejecting the workshop model
Margaret Lazarus Dean, Charles Baxter, Liam Callanan, Valerie Laken, Patrick O'Keeffe
For many teachers, the workshop is the default mode of creative writing pedagogy. Many of us have had to defend the method from criticisms (e.g. that a workshop constitutes the blind leading the blind), yet even those of us most dedicated to the workshop have experienced problems or doubts. This panel will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the workshop as traditionally imagined, its underlying assumptions and possible limitations, and alternative approaches to the writing classroom.

By Heart: The Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Contest
Stephen Young, Ron Smith, Mimi Herman, Sarah Bainter Cunningham
Conceived at AWP in 2004 by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, the Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Contest has grown from a two-city pilot to a program that last year involved 325,000 students from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the US Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. Representatives from the co-sponsors, along with a student, teacher and organizer discuss the contest, its impact on high school poetry instruction in the US, and how to participate.

Creative Writing and the University: A Conversation with Mark McGurl
Mary Stewart Atwell, Mark McGurl, Eileen Pollack, Tracy Daugherty, Dean Bakopoulos, Nathaniel Minton
This panel will analyze the effects of the institutionalization of creative writing on American literature through a conversation with Mark McGurl, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing.  Other participants, well-published fiction writers and teachers of writing, will join McGurl in assessing the particular ways in which MFA programs have influenced the content, structure, and style of postwar American novels and short stories.

Delinquents, Desperados and Drama Queens: Managing Unusual Personalities and Unexpected Situations in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom
Amy Friedman, Hope Edelman, Michele Morano, Richard McCann, Deborah A. Lott
Writing workshops can be delicate--things of beauty when students work as a community and challenging if someone demands too much, dismisses others, provokes, or acts out. Subject matter also can challenge ethically and psychologically--abuse, mental illness, sexuality. How can instructors manage these situations and serve all students. Panelists discuss ways to address and diffuse potentially explosive dynamics while maintaining focus on the work.

DOES SCHOOL KILL POETRY?  CAN IT BE POETRY'S BFF?
James Armstrong, Kevin Prufer, Michael McLaughlin, Susan Somers-Willett, Brandon Cesmat, Laura Armstrong
Is the marginalization of poetry in American culture the result of the way it is taught?  This panel considers how poetry pedagogy both at the K-12 and the beginning college level affects the public perception of poetry.  What do high school teachers actually say about poetry?  Do programs that bring poets into schools help?  Does the slam poetry scene have an effect?  Does college English win students back, or does it increase the indifference? How should educators at all levels teach poetry?

Does the Writing Workshop Still Work?
Dianne Donnelly, Graeme Harper, Stephanie Vanderslice, Anna Leahy, Patrick Bizzaro, Mary Ann Cain
This panel re-examines the effectiveness of the workshop, reaching beyond the question of whether it works, to consider altered pedagogical models. In visualizing what else is possible in the workshop space, the participants cover a wide range of theoretical and pedagogical topics and explore the inner workings and conflicts of the workshop model. The needs of a growing and diverse student population are central to the panelists’ consideration of non-normative pedagogies.

Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell the Workshop
Lori Horvitz, Lee Ann Roripaugh, Carol Guess, Kristin Naca, Catherine Reid
This panel questions the common workshop practice of critiquing through a formalist lens, in which the larger ideological/historical contexts of a piece remain unspoken. What are the implicit tensions between this approach and teachers or students who perceive the workshop as an inherently political space? As queer women writers and teachers, we will discuss strategies and possibilities for raising social awareness in classroom discussions and dynamics.

Examining the PhD in Creative Writing
Jeri Kroll, Maggie Butt, Jenn Webb, Donna Lee Brien
The PhD is the exit award for Creative Writing in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, and increasingly in the US. This international panel debates key issues around its examination, such as standards, rigour, ethics and research methodology. It also considers the challenge of interdisciplinary and hybrid theses, mediocre creative work accompanied by excellent critical work, and the lack of standard examination policies and procedures.

Goatfoot, Duende, Fractals: Teaching Prose by Poets
Laura Lee Washburn, Jeanne E. Clark, Oliver de la Paz, Beth Spencer
This panel will focus on craft writing by poets. How does the reading of craft essays influence writers and editors in their own work and in the appreciation and critique of writing by others? Three creative writing teachers and a poetry editor will discuss the importance of essays by poets on poetry. We will recommend essays, books and anthologies, and discuss the pedagogy of teaching craft, revision, and editing through these essays in both undergraduate and graduate classes.

How Everybody is Doing Everything: Writing and Teaching in Art Schools
Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Eric E Olson, Amy Lemmon, Lesley Jenike, Beth Concepción, Matt Donovan
Once thought of as places that only produced artists and designers, art schools increasingly have become places that teach writing and produce writers. Not just ateliers where poets and painters rub elbows, these institutions are laboratories of culture with their own pedagogies for teaching creativity, developing technical skills and building critical communities. In this panel, we’ll explore how art and design, their programs, practices and students, shape how we write and teach writing.

Literary Locavores: Offering Students a Banquet of Local Works
Jerry Wemple, Claire Lawrence, Yvonne Murphy, Kathryn Paterson
The culinary locavore movement recognizes the bounty of a local region, and shows appreciation for what is sometimes overlooked. The literary counterpart to this movement allows us to examine works by local authors. Students of creative writing often feel both connected to and motivated by a writer who speaks of their place, their lifestyle. We believe these poets and prose writers, who range from well-known to little known, offer an ample harvest to sustain (and inspire) our students.

Making Peace with the Pen: How Teenage Boys Assert the Writer Within
Stacy Leigh, Dave Johnson, Gregory Pardlo, Roger Sedarat
Many teen writing workshops include boys—quiet, eyeing the door, plotting escape. Why do many young men struggle to declare themselves as writers?  What weighs down teenage boys from marginalized communities seeking creative community? Male writers who made the decision to write as teenagers share insights, gained as students, teachers and mentors, on messages and methods to help teenage boys embrace creative community.

Realities of the Classroom – Personalities and Boundaries [WITS Alliance]
Michele Kotler, Giuseppe Taurino, Eli Hastings, Sherina Sharpe
The classroom in the movies is not the classroom we walk into. How do we shape who we are as teaching artists? How do create constructive boundaries with our students?  How do we navigate gender, race, class and age with the students we teach? How do we prepare ourselves for this work? How can we respect classroom legalities and our students’ rights? This panel will address the above in an active discussion about the sensitivity and toughness needed to be a successful writer in the school.

Research in the Creative Writing Classroom: Methods, Pedagogies, Dilemmas
Laura Valeri, Sonya Huber, Jay Snodgrass, Jessie Thieman, Katie Brookins
Teachers and students discuss pedagogies that lead to meaningful research for prose and poetry: What methods and exercises effectively motivate students to  research reliably? How do we facilitate turning facts into lively narratives and poems? How do we research and write respectfully about different cultures, sub-cultures and times? Who owns the story, and when does ownership become a problem? How do we handle significant research in sixteen weeks?

Responding to Disturbing Undergraduate Student Creative Writing
Joseph Bathanti, Susan Weinberg, Peter Blair, Kim Carter, Derek Davidson, Lynn Doyle
When students submit work that raises fears for their wellbeing,teachers may wish to focus on craft, yet feel compelled to intercede. Being thrust into roles for which teachers are untrained is daunting, so what approach is best in conferences and workshops? How do we offer help, and what happens when it is rejected? What barriers might we encounter from our college, and what innovations might we propose? Experiences and ideas will be shared,with input from a Counseling professional.

Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll: Exploring the Risqué in the Poetry Workshop
Wendy Barker, David Kirby, Kevin Prufer, Jacqueline Kolosov, Kevin Clark
Poetry workshops can be charged with tension when a student’s writing passes barriers of convention or decorum. Depending on their ethnic, religious, political, or gender identification, workshop members can react emotionally to edgy language or imagery. And yet, as teachers, we encourage students to push past the usual borders. This panel will explore ways to maintain our pedagogical tenets when student writing challenges prevailing standards.

Signs of Writers: American Sign Language and English Bilingualism as a Resource for Authors
Paige Franklin, Christopher Heuer, Jane Nickerson, Sharon Pajka, Tonya Stremlau
Deaf gain, a term coined by D. Bauman and J. Murray, provides a frame to discuss the positive contributions of the Deaf community to human diversity (as opposed to the negative frame of the term hearing loss).  For writers, this means seeing the Deaf community’s dual use of American Sign Language and English as a resource.  This event considers pedagogical approaches for encouraging writers to exploit this advantage for poetry, fiction, multimedia blogging, and script writing.

Small Press Publishing as Pedagogy
Elizabeth Robinson, Laura Moriarty, Charles Alexander, Kyle Schlesinger, Jane Sprague
Participants in this roundtable include writers and teachers with extensive experience doing small press publishing. Each will offer a perspective on the ways that small press publications function ideally as pedagogical tools.  Discussion will center around the ways small press books enhance the aesthetic and cultural diversity of contemporary literature, offer alternatives to mainstream texts, and model for students how to start their own publishing ventures.

Taking It to the Streets: Service Learning through Collaborative Outreach
Alexis Pride, Meade Palidofsky, Margaret-Ann Ritchie, Stephen Tartaglione
A panel of tenured faculty, community arts administrators, teaching artists and student teachers discusses an outreach collaboration that promotes service learning and civic engagement for college students. The panel presents demonstrated strategies that blend pedagogical approaches for teaching writing and theatrical performance for underserved youth populations.

Teaching At-Risk Teen Writers
Susanna Horng, Maya Nussbaum, Maria Theresa Romano, Nancy Larson Shapiro, Mary Roma, Tara Betts
This panel, composed of veteran mentors & leaders of Girls Write Now, an organization of professional women writers mentoring NYC high school girls since 1998, examines the challenges & joys of nurturing at-risk teen writers. Through their unique, intergenerational community model-- mutually exciting for students and teachers--panelists share GWN’s pedagogical approach, multi-genre curriculum, developmental portfolios & writing exercises applicable to a range of populations and skill levels.

Teaching in the New Landscape: Integrating Multimedia Expression into the Writing Classroom
Sarah Pollock, Faith Adiele, Jessica Langlois, Lisen Stromberg
Even as books and print media struggle for survival, we are also witnessing the birth of new narrative possibilities. Can new dynamic, democratic e-forms (video narratives, podcasts, book trailers, review tweets, graphic-digital-interactive creations) deliver new audiences and engender complex interactions between writers and readers? We’ll discuss how and why we embrace multimedia approaches in our writing courses and will describe strategies for offering support with limited tech expertise.

Teaching Queer Writing: Workshops to Watch Out For
Andrea Lawlor, Samuel R. Delany, Eileen Myles, Ian Sherman, Morgan Lynn, Sara Jaffe
What does it mean to teach queer writing? Are we teaching craft, creating community, or both? What’s the best way to teach queer writing (whatever it is)?  In what ways might queer writing pedagogy inform all our teaching practices? This panel of writers who teach will share strategies and ideas based on their experiences teaching undergraduates, graduate students, and in the LGBTI community.

Teaching the non-traditional writer: practical techniques for teaching students outside the mainstream
Andrew Zornoza, Robert Lopez, Margaret Fiore, Elise Juska
Narrative, character, metaphor, dramatic tension: many of the traditional points of ‘craft’ can be easily shown to the student-writer already steeped in the literature of the western canon.  But how do we teach writing to students who've taken a different path into our classrooms? This panel offers practical tips and strategies in teaching artists, ESL students, and other nontraditional writers who may lack the confidence and/or knowledge to feel empowered.

The Youth Voice Amplified: Poetry and Social Justice in the Classroom and Community
Quraysh Ali Lansana, Georgia A. Popoff, Jackie Warren-Moore, Avery R. Young, Nandi Comer
Are today’s youth too focused on pop culture? empowered to make change? Are adults listening? This panel of skilled teaching artists will lead a roundtable discussion on political/social expression through poetry/spoken word, sharing approaches to teaching in schools, detention centers, & community. Panelists offer unique experiences, ranging from 3rd grade persona poetry workshops to teaching a high school class while having to duck & cover from urban gunfire.. Open to all writers & educators.

[WITS Alliance] - We Were All Poets in the 3rd Grade: What Happened?
Jack McBride, Janine Joseph, Sheryl Noethe, Mary Rechner, Giuseppe Taurino, Jeanine Walker
WITS Writers will discuss their paths as writers and teachers, from when they fell in love with writing, how they were discouraged or made to feel anxious about the process, and how they subsequently came back to it. Investigating why K-12 students go from a willingness to engage creative writing (and all it entails: vulnerability, creativity, risk) to being afraid or indifferent, panelists will explore best teaching practices for re-engaging students and collaborating with classroom teachers.

[WITS Alliance] A Classroom as Big as the World
Rebecca Hoogs, Georgia Popoff, David Hassler, Paul Shaffer, Loyal Miles, Jim Walker
The New York City sidewalks of Frank O’Hara. The Idaho wilderness. A soul food restaurant in Indianapolis. Forget four walls; the most exciting writing in K-12 education is happening beyond the chalkboard. Writers and administrators from programs that teach writing to young people will talk about their experiences getting kids out of the box of the classroom to get out of the box with their writing.

Writing: What To Teach, How To Teach It, and Why
Meg McGuire, Marie Ponsot, Rosemary Deen, Jackson Taylor, Catherine Yeager, Ruth Nathan
In the almost 30 years since it’s publication Beat Not The Poor Desk by Rosemary Deen and Marie Ponsot has never been out of print and its pedagogical principles have influenced the creative writing classrooms of hundreds of teachers. In its opening line the book asserts: Writing is one of the great human pleasures and is done in the energy of that pleasure.  There is great professional pleasure in teaching it. Deen and Ponsot lead us to recognize that the use of writing is thinking and that while each piece of writing is unique--all writers use the same five elements in composing. Here we re-visit and celebrate this classic text with its authors Rosemary Deen and Marie Ponsot, and with teachers who’ve practiced its pedagogy: Catherine Yeager, and Jackson Taylor.  Moderated by Meg McGuire.

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Playwriting and Screenwriting

A Screening and Discussion for The Times Were Never So Bad: The Life of Andre Dubus
Edward Delaney
A screening of The Times Were Never So Bad: The Life of Andre Dubus with the filmmaker Edward Delaney, and others who participated in the film.  The documentary features interviews with Andre Dubus III, Tobias Wolff, Richard Russo, Christopher Tilghman and others, and has been an official selection the Rhode Island International Film Festival, the New England Film & Video Festival, among others, and has toured the country at many colleges and universities.  The screening will be followed by a discussion and Q&A with the filmmaker and others who participated in the film. 

Adaptation: The Thrown Gauntlet
Brighde Mullins, Erin Cressida Wilson, Karen Zacarias, Prince Gomolvilas, Blake Robison, Anne Garcia-Romero
An adaptation is more than the sum of its parts. The greatest merit of working on an adaptation is also its greatest challenge. When adapting for the stage or screen, you already have structure and form. That's a great place to start. The challenge is to find a way to honor the emotional core of the source material while making it dramatic, suitable for the stage or screen, and very much your own.

Collaboration — Love it or Leave it
marc nieson, Ed Radtke, Lisa Schlesinger, sands hall, nelson chipman
Any play/film begins with the word, the writer. Yet whether or not you craft scripts alone, in our field collaboration is a given. Produced plays and films are inherently the synergy of varied people’s visions, talents, and two cents. Yet how do you best collaborate with a fellow writer? Consider and weigh potential partners? Release your creation into another’s hands? Utilize outside input to enhance the scope and practice of your individual craft without compromise or detriment?

Devised Playwriting: Experiments in New Play Collaboration
Austin Bunn, Steve Feffer, Aya Ogawa, Lania Knight
Devised Playwriting: Experiments in New Play Collaboration: This panel examines the advantages and challenges of the devised play process, in which a single dramatic work is conceived and developed by a group of people. Some devised plays use interviews for their scripts, while others employ community members as writers. What are the best practices for collaboration? What are strategies for working with transcripts? What does excellence look like?

Playwriting and Screenwriting:  Their Business in the Academy
Bonnie Culver, Ken Vose, Ross Klavan, Jean Klein, Juanita Rockwell
This presentation discusses the difficulties and successes of including playwriting and screenwriting in writing programs.  Both genres demand a different approach in writing and business acumen than poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.  What are those challenges?  How has one program decided to embrace the potential conflicts and make a place for these ‘less academic’ writers. Wilkes faculty discuss how screenwriting, playwriting techniques are integral  parts of the program curriculum, from poetry to nonfiction.

Writing Plays with Poetry:  The Place of Verse Drama in Contemporary Literature and Theatre
Sarah Kain Gutowski, John Barr, John Surowiecki, David Yezzi, Stephen Young
After a brief discussion of verse drama written in the 20th century, we will reflect on the work of writers who create in the genre today, and efforts like those of the Poetry Foundation to encourage and support plays written in verse. At the heart of the conversation we’ll discuss why a writer might compose a play with poetry, and the advantages and disadvantages of the genre. Also, we’ll consider verse drama not just on the page but on the stage, and whether it has a place in theatre today.

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Poetry Readings

30th Anniversary of the Washington Prize--a Retrospective Reading
Fred Marchant, Nathalie Anderson, Frannie Lindsay, Jay Rogoff, Enid Shomer, John Surowiecki
Winners of The Word Works Washington Prize for poetry will demonstrate the artistic diversity of one of America's oldest book publication contests. From Enid Shomer, whose Stalking the Florida Panther became the first full-length book to win the prize, to Frannie Lindsay, whose third book Mayweed won in 2009, six fine poets will read from Washington Prize books launched from DC. Brief discussion of how the prize process shaped their careers will follow.

A Celebration of Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry
John Hoppenthaler, Cornelius Eady, James Harms, Dzvinia Orlowsky, Jerry Williams, Michael Waters
Founded in 1972, Carnegie Mellon UP has produced well over 200 collections, including books by Pulitzer Prize winners Rita Dove and Stephen Dunn. It is difficult to overstate CMUP’s dedication to supporting and advancing the literature of our time; the press has produced as many books as money will allow each year, striving to keep CMUP open to new voices.  This reading will feature six poets who have found in CMUP a home for his or her poetry, and the purpose of this panel is to sing of it.

A Different Kind of Hybrid: Race, Lyric, and Innovation
Ruth Ellen Kocher, Sarah Gambito, Dawn Lundy Martin, Wendy S. Walters, Thomas Sayers Ellis
Norton’s Hybrid Anthology reveals the intersection of Lyric and Innovative poetry, but only slimly represents many writers of color. Are writers of color less often ‘claimed’ as innovative writers, or traditionally lyric writers, regardless of form because they often utilize a privileged ‘I’ or an emerging ‘freedom narrative’ in the midst of experiment? This reading by innovative writers of color means to begin a dialogue about different approaches to Lyric, Hybridity, and Innovation.

A Reading and Conversation with Kay Ryan, Sponsored by the Library of Congress
Kay Ryan, Dana  Gioia
A Reading and Conversation with Kay Ryan, Sponsored by the Library of Congress

A Reading and Conversation with Rae Armantrout, Sponsored by Wesleyan University Press
Rae Armantrout, Craig Morgan Teicher
Event Description TBA

A Zephyr Press Poetry Reading with Bakhyt Kenjeev and Ouyang Jianghe
Leora Zeitlin, Bakhyt Kenjeev, Jianghe Ouyang, J. Kates, Austin Woerner
To commemorate our 30th anniversary, Zephyr Press presents one of Russia’s foremost poets, and one of China’s, in a tri-lingual reading that will allow the audience to hear a broad sampling of their work. Kazakh-born Kenjeev has published 12 books; Ouyang is the author of numerous books and belongs to the group called Five Masters from Sichuan. Their literary translators will read the English versions, and briefly discuss the challenges of rendering the poems from Russian and Chinese.

Academy of American Poets Presents Claudia Rankine and Charles Wright
Tree Swenson, Claudia Rankine, Charles Wright
A reading featuring readings by two-award winning poets, Claudia Rankine and Charles Wright. Presented by the Academy of American Poets.

AMERICAN POETS RESPOND TO MAJOR GLOBAL TRAUMA
Pamela Uschuk, Cornelius Eady, LeAnne Howe, William Pitt Root, Joseph Ross, Carmen Calatayud
How do American poets respond to traumatic events of significant suffering (i.e. the Haiti earthquake, torture, repression of women in Afghanistan, Arizona's controversial Immigration law, SB 1070, genocide of Indigenous peoples, the BP oil spill devastating the Gulf of Mexico)?  Award-winning writers, Cornelius Eady, LeAnne Howe, William Pitt Root, Pamela Uschuk and D.C. poets, Joseph Ross, Carmen Calatayud will read their work as well as selections from the work of diverse American poets.

Arktoi Books Celebrates Five Years of Lesbian Publishing!
Eloise Klein Healy, Elizabeth Bradfield, Catherine Kirkwood, Rita Mae Reese, Ching-In Chen
Established in 2006 by Eloise Klein Healy, Arktoi Books is an imprint of Red Hen Press dedicated to publishing literary works of high quality by lesbian writers.  Please celebrate our first five years with a poetry and fiction reading from our diverse group of writers.  A discussion of the impact, responsibilities, and conversations these first books have had in the queer community, and how these efforts have played out in the literary world, will follow.

Blackened Alphabet: 20 Years of Affrilachian Poetry
Parneshia Jones, Ricardo Nazario-Colon, Mitchell Douglas, Kelly Ellis, Paul Taylor, Frank Walker
When the Affrilachian Poets formed at the University of Kentucky in 1991, publications in seminal poetry anthologies and first books followed. Twenty years later, the cycle is repeating and a new wave of Affrilachian books is making an impact in the national literary landscape. This reading will assemble five founders of the Affrilachian Poets to share their work and ponder the group’s future.

Carpetbagging for Poetry
Stuart Dischell, Mark Cox, Dorianne Laux, Thomas Lux, Joseph Millar, Alan Shapiro
A Reading by Six Northern poets--Mark Cox, Stuart Dischell, Dorianne Laux, Thomas Lux, Joseph Millar, and Alan Shapiro--living, writing, and teaching in the South.

Celebrating 75 Years of New Directions Poetry Now
Jeffrey Yang, Forrest Gander, Thalia Field, Susan Howe, Rosmarie Waldrop
Since 1936, New Directions has published some of the most groundbreaking poetry of the 20th century. ND continues to introduce pivotal writers from here and abroad. To celebrate the 75th anniversary, poets Thalia Field, Forrest Gander, Susan Howe, Rosmarie Waldrop, and ND Poetry Editor Jeffrey Yang  will talk about the New Directions legacy, how past New Directions poets including Duncan, Levertov, Oppen, Pound, and W.C. Williams influenced their work, and will read from their new books.

DC WritersCorps 16th Anniversary Poetry Reading
Kenneth Carroll, John Murillo, Reuben Jackson, Brian Gilmore, Jeanie Tietjen, Imani Tolliver
A reading featuring writers who taught in DC WritersCorps, a groundbreaking poets-in-the-community founded in 1994 by the NEA and AWP. This outreach program reached over 10,000 DC resident and engaged over 150 poets and writers. These writers worked in homeless shelters, soup kitchens, libraries, prisons and public schools. DC WritersCorps created the nation’s first Youth Poetry Slam League, winning President Clinton’s Arts and Humanities Award for innovative use of literature to serve at-risk youth.  While DC WritersCorps was very much a regional endeavor, many of the writers have gone on to national prominence as both writers and academics, including A. Van Jordan; Gary Lilley; Jeffrey McDaniel; Brian Gilmore.

Doubled Voice:  Poems and Translations
Kristin Dykstra, Lila Zemborain, Mariela Méndez, Daniel Coudriet, Daniel Borzutzky, Eduardo Espina
This reading features short bilingual presentations by two teams: poets speaking alongside the translators who have recently created new versions of their writing.  Poetry translation plays a special role in the history of literary translation: it is regularly described as the most difficult, even explicitly ‘impossible’ form of translation.  Our presenters have been engaged in recent projects in spite of this characterization (or because of it) and will share the results and challenges of their collaborations.

Fifteen Years of Louisiana State University's Southern Messenger Poets
Claudia Emerson, Mike Carson, Kate Daniels, Dave Smith, Sidney Wade, Steve Scafidi
2011 is the fifteenth year of Louisiana State University Press’s signature series Southern Messenger Poets, edited by Dave Smith.  This panel includes poets who have one or more books with the series, as well as its founder and editor. The panelists will speak about the Southern Messenger series, read from their volumes as well as from the volumes of fellow poets the series.

George Mason Poetry Faculty Reading
William Miller, Jennifer Atkinson, Ben Doller, Sally Keith, Eric Pankey, Susan Tichy
Come hear the vibrant poetry created at George Mason University. Five faculty members from the Mason MFA program will present their newest work. Readers include Jennifer Atkinson, Sally Keith, Eric Pankey, Susan Tichy, and the most recent addition to the group, Ben Doller.

Home front: women poets and war
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, Lorraine Healy, Alicia Ostriker, Maria Melendez, Anne Waldman
Despite increasing numbers of female soldiers, women often ‘stay at home’ during times of war.  How do women poets respond to issues of war, especially when those wars take place far from the home front? How does one engage with aspects of politics and violence when one’s personal experience may be far from the front line? Armed with poems, women writers from different regions, generations, origins, and aesthetics attack the issue, sharing their approaches to the poetry of war.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Poetry Reading
Andrew Hudgins, Linda Gregerson, Rodney Jones, Maurice Manning, Alan Shapiro, Natasha Tretheway
To celebrate Michael Collier’s first ten years editing the poetry series at HMH, five of his authors will read: Linda Gregerson, Rodney Jones, Maurice Manning, Alan Shapiro, and Natasha Tretheway.  Michael, a professor at the University of Maryland, also directs the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.  Under his editorship, the press has produced a National Book Award Finalist, and won three Kingsley Tufts Awards, the Poets’ Prize, and a Pulitzer Prize a finalist for the National Book Award.

If I Can’t Dance You Can Keep Your Revolution: A Reading by Six Writers of Political Engagement
Sean Thomas Dougherty, Crystal Williams, Silvana Straw, Brian Gilmore, Dora McQuaid, Roger Bonair-Agard
These six artists create work steeped in the political and social realities of life in America and lean toward issues of cultural exploration and collaboration.  At a time of political turmoil and disenchantment by too many, these writers use poetry to point out inequities of justice and the solidarity of people who struggle with less than.   But to do this they use language that is musical in its construction.  Because as Emma Goldman said, ‘If I can’t dance you can keep your revolution.’

In Capital Letters: A reading and Discussion with Past and Present Poetry Writing Faculty of American University
Richard McCann, Kyle Dargan, David Keplinger, Myra Sklarew, Barbara Goldberg
A panel featuring past and present poetry writing faculty of American University's MFA program reading their work and discussing what it has meant to write and foster a studio program in poetry in Washington, D.C. over the past thirty years.

Indigenous Re-Matriation through Reading & Speaking Poetry
Susan Deer Cloud, Monty Campbell, Jr., Linda Hogan, Black Bear LaBoueff, Paul Hapenny, Stephanie Elliot
This panel, comprised of Indian people published in the Native anthology I Was Indian (Before Being Indian Was Cool), will read poems from the anthology as well as talk about firing poetry and pottery with their hearts and hands.  Is it possible for such firing to re-matriate living indigenous people and re-create a non-colonized land, interior and exterior?  How is such creating of ceremony?  How do our words, written and spoken, fulfill our responsibility to the next seven generations to come?

Innovations, Migrations, and Translations: Contemporary Poetry in Tokyo
Judy Halebsky, Kyong Mi Park, Yuka Tsukagoshi, Sawako Nakayasu
Hear voices of innovation from the Tokyo poetry scene. This reading presents poetry, collaborations, and translations, from Tokyo based poets: Sawako Nakayasu, Kyong Mi Park, Yuka Tsukagoshi, and Judy Halebsky. In different ways, these poets connect poetry in Japan with writers and readers transnationally.  The reading is intended for an English speaking audience and includes two-voice bilingual poems and short readings in Japanese followed by English language translations.

LaChiPo and the New Latino Poetics/Politics
John-Michael Rivera, Rodrigo Toscano, Valerie Martinez, Roberto Tejada, Danielle Cadena Deulen, Carmen Giménez Smith
LaChiPo, an online forum for the Latino Diaspora, is the Latino’s 21st century answer to ‘new’ movements like Flarf and Conceptual poetics.  Devoted to developing Latino letters, LaChiPo invites AWP attendees to resituate how they read, to relearn how identity is spoken, expanding their articulation of history, art and modernity.  LaChiPo presents writers discussing Latino conceptions of internet community, identity and the avant-garde, reading individual and their collective poetry works.

Mark Doty, Sandra Alcosser, Alison Hawthorne Deming, & Pattiann Rogers, Sponsored by Poets House
Mark Doty, Sandra Alcosser, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Pattiann Rogers
Program Description TBA

New American Writing 40th Anniversary Reading
Maxine Chernoff, Bin Ramke, Gillian Conoley, Rusty Morrison, Paul Hoover, Julie Carr
The distinguished literary magazine New American Writing will celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2011.  Established in 1971 as a saddle-stitched quarterly called OINK!, it has become one of the premier literary periodicals of our time.  Some of the magazine's leading contributors will read from their work.

Outsiders Writing the Outside: A Reading of Wilderness Poetry by Women, Queer, and Minority Writers
Keetje Kuipers, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, G.E. Patterson, Paisley Rekdal, Camille Dungy, Ross Gay
While poets from Walt Whitman to Mary Oliver have shown that the pastoral is not an experience limited to the poetic adventurings of straight, white men, wilderness writing is still a frontier dominated by our colonial forefathers. But many women, queer, and minority writers are beginning to wield the chainsaw that cuts that line on the page. As more of us leave the garden and go off-road, new poetic exploration occurs. Come hear these award-winning ‘outsiders’ read their wilderness poetry.

Peepal Tree Press 25th Anniversary – Poetry Reading
Dorothea Smartt, Tony Kellman, Opal Palmer Adisa, Aza Weir Soley, Kamau Brathwaite
Any serious collection of contemporary Caribbean poets will be incomplete without titles from Peepal Tree Press: home of the best in Caribbean and Black British fiction, poetry, literary criticism, memoirs and historical studies. Celebrate 25 years of award-winning publication and commitment to poetry, with a cross-section of its poets, from the Caribbean and its diaspora, reading from their own works, as well as personal favourites from Peepal Tree’s extensive back catalogue.

Poetry of Resistance: Poets Take on Reasonable Suspicion (Arizona SB 1070)
Francisco X. Alarcón, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Odilia Galván-Rodríguez, Scott Maurer, Abel Salas, Meg Withers
On April 2010, in response to a controversial law in Arizona, a Facebook page, Poets Responding to SB 1070, was created.  It is now literally a public forum for lively mixing of poetics & politics.  Its poet moderators will discuss the political imagination of multicultural poetic expressions in support of a resurgent Civil Right Movement for comprehensive Immigration Reform.  Come & see accomplished poets read some cutting edge poems posted on the FB page as well as from their acclaimed works.

Prize Winners Choose Prize Winners: A Reading with Cave Canem Poetry Prize Winners and Judges, 1999 and 2009
Alison Meyers, Rita Dove, Gary Jackson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Natasha Tretheway
This reading celebrates the significance of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, for over a decade a catalyst for the careers of deserving African American poets. Natasha Trethewey, inaugural winner in 1999, is book-ended with Gary Jackson, the most recently published winner. They are joined by Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa, the distinguished judges who chose their manuscripts.

Seriously Funny
David Kirby, Barbara Hamby, Albert Goldbarth, Mark Halliday, Jennifer Knox, Jason Bredle
Reading from a new anthology, Seriously Funny: Poems a out Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else, published by the University of Georgia Press. Participants will read their own poems and those by other poets in the anthology and speak about the role of humor in serious poetry.

Smashing the Box: Fresh Faces and First Books by Asian American Poets
Esther Lee, Cynthia Arrieu-King, Melody S. Gee, Joseph O. Legaspi, Neil Aitken, Purvi Shah
Representing an array of diverse voices and aesthetics, poets Neil Aitken, Cynthia Arrieu-King, Melody S. Gee, Esther Lee, Joseph O. Legaspi, and Purvi Shah will share work from their recently-published first books, as well as how organizations like Kundiman, a retreat for Asian American poets, and its community has affected their artistic lives. Along with sharing the joys and challenges of publishing their first poetry collections, they will also discuss how their work pushes against the boxed-in stereotypes that exist about writers of color and their experiences in America.

The All Collegiate Afterhours Slam
Jim Warner, Phil Brady
The All Collegiate Afterhours Slam is open to all undergrad and grad students attending the conference. Participation is capped at ten slammers a night. Slam pieces must be no longer than three minutes in length. Prizes, judges, and organization of event will be handled by Wilkes University Creative Writing Program and Etruscan Press. Limited open mic to follow the slam (time permitting).  Come visit the Wilkes University /Etruscan Press booth to register.

The Poem as Ghost/ Haunted Americas
Camille Norton, Marilyn Nelson, Kevin Prufer, Ramon Garcia, Matthew Zapruder
What speaks through us when we speak of America? To what extent are certain poems ghosted or possessed by the past? This panel offers a poetic inquiry into a nation haunted by the wounds, silences, and the psychic return of history. We consider the ghosts of, among others, Emmett Till, Edgar Allan Poe, the war dead, the bodies of those displaced through migration, and the ghostly landscape of an America repressed by the strip-malls and freeways of our postmodern experience.

The PSA Presents: A Reading and Interview with Juan Felipe Herrera
Robert N. Casper, Juan Felipe Herrera
National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Juan Felipe Herrera will read his poetry, followed by an interview with Poetry Society of America Programs Director Robert N. Casper.

The PSA Presents: A Reading and Interview with Stephen Dunn
Robert N. Casper, Stephen Dunn
Pulitzer Prize-winner Stephen Dunn will read his poetry, followed by an interview with Poetry Society of America Programs Director Robert N. Casper.

The T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize: A 15th Anniversary Reading
William Baer, Mona Lisa Saloy, David Keplinger, Carol V. Davis, Dean Rader, Victoria Brockmeier
The T. S. Eliot Prize has emerged as one of the most distinguished poetry book awards in the U.S. Known for its high profile judges such as Dana Gioia, Naomi Shihab Nye, X. J. Kennedy, Alberto Rios, and Mary Oliver, the Prize continually recognizes a diversity of voices, themes, and aesthetics in both beginning and established poets. Administered by Truman State University Press in Eliot’s home state of Missouri and endorsed by Eliot’s widow, this is a celebration of prize-winning collections.

The Vietnamese Children’s Art Exhibit Reading
David Hassler, Ellen Bass, Dorianne Laux, Long Chu, Bruce Weigl, Alberto Ríos
The Vietnamese Children’s Art Exhibit reading features original poems written by American children, veterans, and established poets in response to Vietnamese children’s paintings of peace and war collected by the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam. This traveling exhibit and reading offers a timely testament to the emotional truth of war and peace. Readers will range from award-winning poets to elementary school children, presenting a readers’ theatre-style performance.

This Human Longing
Alison Granucci, Bob Hicok, Marie Howe, Gregory Orr, Kevin Young
The poetic lines of these acclaimed poets reside in the space between the spiritual and the earthly. Their poems speak to our soul's longing for union, while recording how we stumble through our unwieldy, ordinary, everyday life—full of human folly and injustice. Poetry, they seem to say, is the mixing of dirt and air, of pork chops and heartache, of the body's losses and the way we praise the Beloved. The colorful and poignant poems of Hicok, Howe, Orr, and Young nourish us on all levels.

Unembarrassed Poetry
James Cihlar, Kristin Naca, Brenda Shaughnessy, Richard Siken, Alex Lemon
The Truth must dazzle gradually, Emily Dickinson warned. Poetics have historically embraced a variety of dictums. But many contemporary writers blow past the boundaries of aesthetic camps, unselfconsciously pulling methods from experimental, lyrical, and narrative traditions in service to the individual poem. As abstractions and language productively crash, pure utterances emerge. This reading celebrates poets whose work lays out the truth raw, even in the midst of beautiful wreckage.

Virginia Tech MFA Faculty Reading
Edward Falco, Bob Hicok, Jeff Mann, Erika Meitner, Fred D'Aguiar
Five members of the Virginia Tech MFA Program faculty will read selections of their writing. From the gay and Appalachian writings of Jeff Mann, to the culturally and politically diverse interests explored in the poetry of Erika Meitner and Bob Hicok, to the multi-genre work of Fred D’Aguiar and Ed Falco, the five readers on this panel represent a variety of cultural, political, and aesthetic approaches to fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Walt Whitman Award: Readings and discussion by past and present recipients
Eric Pankey, J. Michael Martinez, Nicole Cooley, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ben Doller
The Academy of American Poets presents the Walt Whitman Award each year to a poet’s first collection of poems. Five poets at varying stages of their writing lives will read  from their work and discuss the impact of the award, which publishes the book, distributes it nationally, and provides a prize of $5,000 cash and a month-long residency. The poets will examine the significance each element has had on their subsequent trajectory as writers and will address concerns of unpublished poets.

Washington Writers’ Publishing House Poetry Reading
Jehanne Dubrow, Holly Karapetkova, Brandel France de Bravo, Carly Sachs, Bruce MacKinnon, Piotr Gwiazda
Celebrating a nearly forty year history, the Washington Writers’ Publishing House is a collective press run entirely by volunteers.  Since 1973, WWPH has published over 50 volumes of poetry.  Come hear six poets read from their prize-winning collections and discover the diversity of the DC-area literary scene.

We(a)ve: Inter-Indigenous Sovereign Poetics
Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, James Thomas Stevens, Lisa Suhair Majaj, Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano, Elaine Chukan Brown, ku'ualoha ho'omanawanui
Sovereignty is both inherent, internally asserted by Native Nations, and inter-nationally recognized and affirmed by other Indigenous peoples. It is not only a political process, but also a continual act of Indigenous re-creation. A collective of womanist and queer Indigenous poets have been writing to each other, sharing writing prompts and assignments, engaging in experiments. The collective will share the poems that emerged, and discuss the collaborative process that wove them together.

Wesleyan University Press Poetry
Suzanna Tamminen, Kamau Brathwaite, Joseph Harrington, Ed Roberson, Evie Shockley, Elizabeth Willis
Wesleyan University Press authors read from their new books. Joseph Harrington’s Things Come On is a mixed media work centered on the Watergate years.  Evie Shockley’s the new black  investigates Black America’s evolution through and beyond history. Kamau Brathwaites’ Elegguas rewrites the relationship between Africa and the ‘new world’ in a wave of remembrance. Elizabeth Willis’s Address exposes the fragility of our founding, republican aspirations. Through Ed Roberson’s To See the Earth Before the End of the World we celebrate and mourn a landscape on the verge of disintegration.

Wrestling with the Civil War: A Sesquicentennial Reading and Discussion
Sally Dawidoff, Frank Bidart, Vijay Seshadri, Kevin Young
The Civil War is the single most consequential event in the history of our country and the single most resonant. Innumerable poets have responded to the war, several making unmistakable allusions to earlier works. Witness, for example, Allen Tate’s Ode to the Confederate Dead (1928), Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead (1964), and Kevin Young’s For the Confederate Dead (2007). The panelists will read from their work and then discuss the fraught lineage into which they have placed themselves.

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Program Development

Advice to Grantseekers from the National Endowment for the Arts
Jon Parrish Peede, Amy Stolls
Staff members from the Literature Division of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) will address your questions and provide a status update on agency policies, programs, and initiatives that can have an impact on individuals and arts organizations.  Topics covered will include: grant opportunities and their deadlines, eligibility, applying on line, the review process, and tips for more effective proposals.

Art School Faculty Caucus
Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Monica Drake, Aimee Phan, Casey Smith, Maw Shein Win, Dawn Paul
Annual meeting of Art School Faculty Members to discuss pedagogy, programming, administration and best practices particular to Art School writing classes and programs.

As Long As People Write: Training and Supporting New Writing Teachers
Sarah Harris, Crystal Fodrey, Ben Ristow
Richard Hugo said that as long as people write there will be writing teachers. Today many programs listed in the AWP Guide name the opportunity to teach as a selling point—yet few offer training in the teaching of creative writing. Most graduate students are instead trained through composition theory. We will present the results of research on this training process, and recommend ways programs can support those who desire more connection between their writing lives and the courses they teach.

Closing the Distance: Innovations in Low-Residency MFAs
Lori A. May, Kathleen Driskell, Tod Goldberg, Meg Kearney, Michael Kobre
Low-residency program directors will discuss innovative approaches to providing value-added opportunities for students at a distance—regardless of varied geographic locales. Topics include adaptability in pedagogical training, funded editorships and real-world publishing experiences, online approaches to the traditional workshop model, the inclusion of commercial projects in film and television, and how students may become involved in a reading series or literary journal.

Getting to the Core: Creative Writing as a Core Requirement in College Curricula
Chad Davidson, Gregory Fraser, Randy Hendricks, Thomas Hynes, Stephanie Vanderslice
The inclusion of creative-writing classes in the core requirements of college curricula promises major benefits to writing programs. The road to the core, however, may be fraught with dangers. What will your department think? What about other departments that may feel threatened by the popularity of creative writing? What challenges will upper administrators face? How can you both serve the institution and further your program goals? This panel seeks to address these key questions and concerns.

How to Create a Moveable Feast: Studying Writing Abroad
Jennifer Stewart, Sonja Livingston, Shelley Puhak, Jesse Loren, BIll Lavender, Peter Thompson
This panel will explore the nature of the graduate creative writing program abroad and its benefits for both the low-residency and traditional MFA models.  It will include perspectives from faculty, organizers, students and alumni and will also focus on how to create such a program, and the possibilities of partnerships across programs, and, indeed, borders.  We will also address the possibilities for  Post-MFA writing abroad opportunities.

Indigenous-Aboriginal American Writers Caucus
LeAnne Howe, Gordon Henry
With the flourishing proportion of Indigenous writers and academics participating in AWP and teaching in affiliated programs (including endowed chairs & program directors), the present time is highly conducive to impart field related celebrations and concerns as understood by Native writers from the Americas and surrounding island nations. We propose a second formal meeting be held at the 2011 AWP Conference continuing movement in an Indigenous Caucus.

Into the Breach: Nurturing and Training Adjunct Faculty for the Future
Randall Albers, Lad Tobin, Simone Zelitch, Lott Hill
As full-time faculty positions have failed to keep pace with the exponential growth in creative writing courses, adjunct faculty have increasingly filled the breach. Programs must respond by emphasizing the care and development of adjuncts in order to ensure teacher-writers able to offer students an engaging, challenging, high-quality education. Panelists with university and community college experience will describe different models for training, supervising, and nurturing adjunct faculty

Low-Residency MFA Program Directors’ Caucus
Stan Rubin, Bonnie Culver, Jennifer Stewart
This is a regular annual meeting of the directors of low-residency MFA Programs, providing a forum for discussions on program development and pedagogy particular to the low-residency model. All low-residency directors are welcome to attend and vote.

Promise of Spring or Cruelest Day? April 15 Deadline for MFA Application Decisions
Wendell Mayo, Jim Clark, Judith Claire Mitchell, Brad Felver, Alison Balaskovits
This will be a frank discussion of advantages and disadvantages of the Council of Graduate Schools’ (CGS) April 15 resolution found here: http://www.cgsnet.org/Default.aspx?tabid=201. Despite the so-called spirit of the resolution, abuses occur in MFA / PhD recruiting. The goal is to draft a request that AWP look at the issue and make policy relevant to creative writing and not simply one supposed to fit any graduate applicant in any academic program.

SCRIPTING CURRICULUM: INTEGRATING PLAYWRITING AND SCREENWRITING INTO THE MFA IN WRITING PROGRAM
Barry Brodsky, Steven Cramer, Tod Goldberg, Charlie Schulman
MFA programs—particularly those that are low-residency—have begun teaching playwriting and screenwriting next to the more commonly taught genres of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Directors and faculty members from Lesley, Spalding, and UC Riverside will discuss the challenges of teaching writing that has been traditionally housed in film schools or theatre departments and the enrichment gained from adding scriptwriting to their programs.

The Future of Creative Writing in the Academy
Terry Ann Thaxton, Joe Amato, Philip Gerard, Nigel McLoughlin, Lisa Roney, Kass Fleisher
The Future of Creative Writing in the Academy. Creative writing as an academic discipline is relatively new, with the strongest push forward in the 1940s with Paul Engle’s Iowa Writing Workshop. And now, with budget restraints and the consumerist culture in the academy, creative writing courses, in the US and abroad, are receiving directives from administration to increase enrollments in smaller classes, which cuts at the very core of creative writing pedagogy. How can we afford to remain stagnant in our pedagogy if our studio workshop courses have thirty, forty, fifty students in them? Should we reform our pedagogy? What strategies can we adopt to protect good practice where necessary? Are there pedagogic methodologies which can be applied which will allow us to successfully integrate the workshop model into a more mixed methods approach? This international panel will explore proactive, theoretical, as well as pragmatic ways in which creative writing can survive in academe amidst budget issues and other pressures.

The Role of Alumni in Graduate Writing Programs
Fred Leebron, Robert Polito, Brighde Mullins, Andrew Levy, Jeffery Hess, Jessica Handler
What role do alumni have in graduate writing programs, both in terms of what they can do for their programs and what their programs can do for them?  How can programs better serve their alumni, and how can alumni help better their programs?  This panel will examine formal and informal alumni programming, and offer an assessment of the obligations programs have to their alumni and that alumni have to their programs.

The Urban MFA:  Why it Makes a Difference
Michelle Y. Valladares, Linsey Abrams, Kimiko Hahn, Joseph Lease, Jan Heller Levi
There are a few MFA programs in the US located in the heart of cities and urban neighborhoods, where students and faculty commute, attend part time and at night.    How do these programs represent a difference to the ‘more traditionally collegiate’ programs on suburban or rural campuses?  What are the benefits to attending an urban MFA program?  Why would students choose such programs?  How can urban environments benefit new writers and American writing.

Traveling Stanzas: Promoting Poetry and Design in the Community
David Hassler, Nicole Robinson, Essence Cain, Scott Parsons, Valora Renicker, Natasha Rodriguez
From multiple perspectives, a university design instructor, high school teacher, middle school student, and Wick Poetry Center outreach poets discuss Kent State’s Traveling Stanzas project, which places visually appealing poetry from the community in transit systems, businesses, libraries, and schools. Panelists examine its impact on the community, as well as on the web, through the development of Traveling Stanzas animated e-greetings, and offer strategies for replicating the project elsewhere.

Two-Year College Caucus
Kris Bigalk, Sharon Coleman, Pamela Achenbach Novak, Vickie Hunt
With almost half of all students beginning college careers at two-year colleges, and increasing numbers of MFAs landing two-year college teaching jobs, interest in creative writing at the two-year college is increasing every year. Come to this annual networking meeting to find out more about innovations in two-year college creative writing programs, courses, and more. We will discuss creative writing at the two-year college, hold a business meeting, and provide tangible resources for faculty.

Understanding Comics as Creative Writing
John Woods, Matt Madden, Gary Sullivan, Luca DiPierro, Joseph Young
While the critical study of comics has been fully embraced by English Literature departments, Creative Writing programs have been slower to create a place for the practice of comics in their own curricula. Similarly, independent literary presses rarely publish comics, leaving that work to comics-specific houses. This panel features teachers and practitioners of the medium who will discuss ways to open up the Creative Writing field to the practice of comics (and other image-text literature).

Using Old and New Technologies to Create a Literary Community at the Two-Year Campus and Beyond
Mary Lannon, Brain Baumgart, Matt Mauch, Sharon Coleman, Christina Rau, John Dermot Woods
Panelists who have taken up new technologies and tried out their effectiveness in bringing together students, faculty, staff and community members both on campus and virtually to share all things literary will explain their challenges, successes and work-in-progress. Wikis, blogs, weekly e-mail blasts, reading series, and Facebook sites are some of the strategies faculty will describe as they explain their efforts to build a literary culture on their two-year campuses.

Virtual Mentoring Made Real: The Evolving Tech of a Low-Residency Program
Jim Warner, Matt Koch, Jean Klein, Nancy McKinley, Joseph Nalbone, Starr Troup
Over the last five years Wilkes University's Low-Residency M.A./M.F.A. program has developed an online mentoring experience marrying the best practices of teaching with cutting edge Learning Module Systems.  From simple email attachments, to working with social networking websites, to experimenting with real-time video chat, our panel of students and faculty discuss the challenges and successes facing creative writing programs in an ever-changing technology age.

Warring Worlds: Developing  Creative Writing Vourses for Veterans
Charlotte Gullick, Brian Turner, Chris Leche
This panel will discuss the power and importance of broadening access to creative writing courses for veterans and their families and communities. Discussion will include cross-curriculum approaches to engaging veterans, as well as address issues of creating opportunities for honoring veterans through the arts such as reading of their own works. These types of courses will lay the foundation for student success throughout their degree programs.

Who Makes the Best Student?: Growing Your Program with Nontraditional Majors
Patricia Clark, Simmons B. Buntin, Joe Wilkins, Sean Prentiss
Are the best MFA students always English or Creative Writing majors? Four writers with undergraduate degrees in business, economics, engineering, and political science discuss the rich and various skills, stories, and outlooks
they brought to graduate writing programs. They will also discuss ways undergraduate programs can better develop writers through encouraging more diverse academic experience and also widen the pool of students.

Why Creative Writing Research Matters: Creative Writing and Today's Academy
Graeme Harper, Helena Blakemore, Nigel McLoughlin
What is Creative Writing research, and why is it important? This international panel, involving Program Directors who have developed Creative Writing research programs in the USA, UK and Australia, will discuss Creative Writing research today. They’ll outline ways in which this research is developing, and discuss how this relates to current MFA and PhD programs. They’ll explore key possibilities for creative writers who want to engage in research, as well as avenues for employment and funding.

[WITS Alliance] Poetry and Partnerships: The Critical Elements for Writers-in-the-Schools Programs
Melanie Moore, Alise Alousi, Loyal Miles, Robin Reagler
The partnership between working writers and classroom teachers is at the heart of writers-in-the-schools programs, but it’s only one of the critical partnerships required to make a program happen. Panelists from three organizations that have WITS programs will offer insights into the other critical partnerships that enable effective writing initiatives to thrive in schools, including relationships with board members, with funders, and with key decision-makers for school districts.

Women's Caucus
Lois Roma-Deeley, Patricia Smith, Cheryl Dumesnil, Anna George Meek, Amy King, Katherine Arnoldi
Where is the place for the women writer within AWP and within the greater literary community? The women's caucus discusses this as well as continuing inequities in creative writing publication and literature. In addition, issues centering on cultural obstacles in the form of active oppression, stereotypes, lack of access to literary power structures, historical marginalization of women's writing, issues and perspectives and the diverse voices of women will explored. Networking opportunities.

Write Your Way: Teaching Writing in Non-School Settings
Victoria Sammartion, Celeste Rivera, Kamilah Moon, Morgan Willis, Sheila Maldonado
This presentation will be geared towards writers who are currently teaching or are interested in teaching writing in non-school settings, including correctional facilities, juvenile detention centers, therapeutic communities and group homes. Everyone who attends this presentation will walk away with tangible tools for introducing people in alternative and transitional settings to the craft of writing and there will be ample time made to answer specific questions from people currently teaching.

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Publishing and Editing

Agents & Editors: Best Practices for Securing Your Publishing Partners
Mary Gannon, Julie Baer, Robert Lasner, Corina Barsan, Greg Michalson
Agents and editors will give an overview of the literary market and their place within it, as well as providing a behind-the-scenes perspective on how they acquire clients or books and offering specific guidance to authors on the best practices for each step involved in partnering with publishing professionals.

Ask Not What the Internet Can do for You: shifting our perspective on Internet publishing as an alternative to major market publishing.
Ralph Pennel, Justin Maxwell, Ravi Shankar, Anmarie Trimble, Lizzie Stark, Max Magee
This panel will discuss electronic publications as central to the needs of 21st Century writers and readers and not as entities serving as secondary iterations of preexisting publications. We will focus on how the electronic medium is advantageous to editors, and to the editorial and publication processes. We will also cover how the medium allows for a new nexus between writer and user by permitting a more diverse discourse with current and emerging literary modalities.

Beyond Print: Digital Directions in Literary Publishing
H. Emerson Blake, Michael Archer, Jeffrey Thomson, Ram Devineni, Steven Lagerfeld
Digital media is often presented as a challenge for literary magazines and journals—an obstacle to be overcome. But digital media also presents dynamic opportunities for the world of good writing. This panel features the editors of five print, digital, or online-only publications—Guernica, Orion, From the Fishouse, Wilson Quarterly, and Rattapallax—that are using digital media to find new methods of expressing their missions and new ways of connecting with their audiences.

Beyond Times New Roman: The Literary Journal as Object
Travis Kurowski, Jodee Stanley, Sandra Doller, Matvei Yankelevich, Jen Woods, Shayna Schapp
From curatorial art teams to the hand-bound letterpress, to pages upon which art and words are nearly indistinguishable, the literary journal is so much more than paper and font choice. Attention to design will turn a journal into an art object that sets it apart from the masses. Editors from five innovative journals share concrete strategies for incorporating art and design: getting submissions, working with an art editor, and how to redesign the literary journal from scratch.

Building the Literary Robot: The lit journal as new media
James Engelhardt, Scott Lindenbaum, Jurgen Fauth, Zach Dodson, Zachary Schomburg, Travis Kurowski
Lit has gone viral, adapted to fit Twitter feeds, iPhone apps, and social networks, and fashioned into flash animation for posting on YouTube. How do literary journals step into these new, far-reaching modes of publishing? What role will e-literature have in contemporary publishing and the teaching of creative writing? What will this mean to the traditional short story, poem, and essay? Writers and editors of online and print literary journals tell how they’ve explored new e-lit territory.

Change or Die: How Established Print Journals are Adapting to Life on the Internet
Amber Withycombe, David Lynn, Speer Morgan, R.T. Smith, Christina Thompson
As models for publishing an economically viable literary journal evolve, the magazines that shaped small press publishing during the last century are learning to adapt by printing slimmer issues, moving original work online and emphasizing social networking. Such practices are common for newer magazines but few established journals have made the change. Editors from Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Shenandoah and Witness discuss how they are re-imagining their magazines online.

CLMP & SPD Publisher Meeting
Jamie Schwartz, Tasha Sorenson
The staffs of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and Small Press Distribution discuss issues facing CLMP and SPD publishers, goals for the organizations and upcoming programs.

CLMP Keynote—Size Matters: Big Houses, Small Presses and the Literary Ecology of American Publishing
Gerald Howard
The board co-chair of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, and the Maxwell E. Perkins Award-winning Doubleday executive editor and vice-president, talks about the coexistence and cross-pollination of independent and commercial publishing in the US.

CLMP Panel—Editor as Mentor: Literary Magazines and Emerging Writers
Rob Spillman, Hannah Tinti, C. Dale Young
Editors savvy in the ways of molding minds (in addition to manuscripts) from Tin House, One Story and New England Review share stories about some of the relationships they’ve fostered and the writers they’ve nurtured, and what these mentorships have meant for their respective publications.

CLMP Panel—Nice Help When You Can Get It: Making Effective Use of Interns and Volunteers
Jamie Schwartz, Rose Carlson, Andrew Ciotola, Stephanie G’Schwind
Staff members from Tupelo Press, West Branch and Colorado Review share strategies for creating mutually beneficial working relationships with volunteer labor.

CLMP Panel—So You’ve Made an eBook...Now What?
Ira Silverberg, Gloria Jacobs, Julie Schaper, Andy Hunter
A marketing-focused symposium for publishers about how small presses and literary magazines can make the most out of paperless publishing.

CLMP Panel—The Art of Nonprofit Publishing
Jeffrey Lependorf, Allan Kornblum, Fiona McCrae, Martha Rhodes, Erika Goldman, Brigid Hughes
Executives from Bellevue Literary Press (BLP), A Public Space, Coffee House Press, Graywolf Press and Four Way Books discuss how mission-driven literary publishers acquire grants and donors in addition to manuscripts.

$$ CLMP Workshop for Lit Mags—Let's Get Digital
Andy Hunter
Discover how to translate literary magazines into formats befitting electronic platforms from Electric Literature’s trailblazing co-founder and editor-in-chief. (Note: CLMP Workshops cost $30 for CLMP members and $60 for nonmembers. To register, please stop by the CLMP booth at the Bookfair.)

$$ CLMP Workshop for Presses—The Virtual Book Tour
Kate Travers
Readings can get expensive, for both book publishers and bookstores—not to mention authors—as budgets are cut across the board. The virtual book tour provides a way for indie presses on a shoestring to schedule author readings not limited by cost or coast. (Note: CLMP Workshops cost $30 for CLMP members and $60 for nonmembers. To register, please stop by the CLMP booth at the Bookfair.)

Curating Literature: Five Editors of Literary Anthologies Discuss their Process
Ravi Shankar, Cole Swenson, Pireeni Sundaralingam, Jeffrey Thomson, Jen Hofer
Anthologizing, derived from the Greek word for flower-gathering, has become a verb of great import in literary communities. Whether in an attempt to create a canon, to shape a pedagogical tool or to form a compendium that preserves something essential while opening new space for critical inquiry, the reasons behind anthologizing are manifold. Join five editors of important anthologies, from the international in scope to ones that include audio and translation, as they discuss their processes.

Founding Women:  Publishers and Editors from across the Literary Journal Landscape.
Jennifer S. Flescher, Brigid Hughes, Rebecca Wolff, Jennifer Barber, Beth Harrison, Rebecca Morgan Frank
Katharine Graham, former publisher of the Washington Post said, to love what you do and feel that it matters – how could anything be more fun? In this panel, six women publishers, from a range of medium and generations, will discuss their own literary matters: the process of creating and sustaining their successful literary ventures. Panelists will discuss the gender politics of publishing and explore the strides the literary landscape has made and the struggles we still grapple with.

From the Page to the Small Screen: What the Information Age Means for Us
Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum, Terry Hummer, Maggie Dietz, Mary Flinn, Brian Brodeur, Keith Montesano
As digital technologies such as blogs, online periodicals, hypertext and phone Apps gain legitimacy, more writing than ever before finds its home online and big questions loom.  What’s lost/gained when we translate our work from the page to the screen?  Are these technologies promotional tools or new creative forms?  Are we witnessing the death of the page or its evolution?  Panelists from Slate, Blackbird, The Favorite Poem Project, AmeriCamera, and the blogosphere will answer these questions.

Listening to Literature
Rachel Louise Snyder, Maureen Corrigan, Christopher Turpin, Sarah Koenig, Karen Munson
Public radio needs writers. Writers need public radio. Yet too often writing programs see radio as solely a journalistic effort. Our panel aims to dispel that notion. The MFA or MA can be a springboard for writing for radio, just as learning to craft a radio story can teach us about the writing craft. This panel will discuss the many avenues in public radio available to writers with imagination and drive.

Poet/Editors on Inclusivity and Race
Rich Villar, Dan Chiasson, Don Share, Carmen Giménez Smith, Craig Santos Perez, Barbara Jane Reyes
Poet/editors present discuss inclusiveness (and lack thereof) of minority voices in literary publications.  Representing both mainstream and more community-based projects, the panelists consider the challenges of inclusiveness, and how successful (and unsuccessful) they have been. Throughout, they consider how, in an atmosphere of perceived mistrust, constructive dialogue can be forged towards the goal of better presenting the broad spectrum of American poetry.

Presses With a Mission
Hanna Andrews, Becca Klaver, Johannes Goransson, Lisa C. Moore, Anna Moschovakis
This panel gathers editors of literary presses varied in aesthetic, geography, and genre that share one thing in common: presses created to fulfill a mission. Through manifestos, statements of philosophy, or politically-charged jacket copy, these editors have defined an editorial goal and built a catalog to match. Editors discuss the implications of missions rooted in identity or aesthetics, how missions both clarify and complicate, and how publishing itself alters their original aspirations.

Reconsidering the Experiment
Steven Coughlin, Traci O Connor, Richard Sonnenmoser, Kim Dana Kupperman, Kathryn Nuernberger
We have lost track of what it means to be experimental. The prose poem is over one hundred years old, flash fiction and the lyric essay are comfortably familiar, and even language poetry is a well-established genre. These modes dominate our conversations about experiments in literature, but with so many writers partaking in these forms it has become increasingly difficult to see them as anything but conventional. Quarter After Eight, a journal of innovative writing, proposes a panel of editors and writers that examines the current and future directions of experimental writing and considers ways to put the experiment back into experimental writing.

The Art of Rejection: Giving and Receiving
Diana Raab, Wendy Call, David Huddle, Geeta Kothari, Molly Peacock, Kevin Morgan Watson
Rejection is part of the literary life. Rejection of your manuscript is not a rejection of you as a person or a writer, but of one piece of writing. It says nothing about your potential. It’s equally difficult being an editor turning down work, as being a writer receiving the rejection. These panelists of writers, editors, and publishers will discuss how to establish boundaries between yourself and your work, what we learn from rejections, and how feedback makes us better writers and editors.

Thinking Beyond the Book: The Future of Authorship and Publishing in a Transmedia World
Jane Friedman, Seth Harwood, Guy Gonzalez, Kevin Smokler
According to publishing futurists, we are now experiencing the late age of print. Publishers are beginning to see the print book as the last stage of author development, rather than the first step. A new model is emerging for stories and content distribution, with publishers and authors experimenting with mobile apps, podcasts, and multimedia approaches. This panel discusses the changes underway, what innovations are coming, and how writers can adapt no matter what the future of reading holds.

What We Love; What Editors Are After
Rob Spillman, Fiona McCrae, H. Emerson Blake, Denise Oswald, Andrew Leland, Daniel Slager
Six distinguished magazine and book editors speak candidly about what they love and what makes it to the top of the mountain of manuscripts? Editors from The Believer, Graywolf Press, Milkweed Editions, Orion, Soft Skull Press, and Tin House offer concrete examples and anecdotes of writing that works for them, and offer advice on how to build a long-term mutually fulfilling writer-editor relationship.

Women Writers and Rejection: How to get published and avoid the slush pile
Kate Gale, Nancy Boutin, Hilda Raz, Ladette Randolph, Allison Joseph
Women writers don't submit enough; we're too cautious and we take rejection too hard.  This is a panel on how to toughen up and choose wisely. There is no match.com, no eharmony; it's all up to you, baby. You can be as published as the boys, and we're here to show you how.

Writing the Beltway: Four Washington, DC Publishers Navigate the Capital
Matthew Kirkpatrick, Reb Livingston, Richard Peabody, Caitlin Hill, Dave Housley
Editors from Barrelhouse magazine, No Tell Books, Gargoyle magazine, and Poet Lore magazine read from their journals and discuss their experiences working to produce and promote literary art within the politics-obsessed sphere of Washington, D.C.

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Regional Focus

35th Anniversary of the Jenny McKean Moore Fellowship at George Washington University
Faye Moskowitz, Maxine Clair, Tayari Jones, Jane Shore, Ed Skoog, Honor Moore
The Jenny McKean Moore Trust at George Washington University marks its 35th year of funding poets and writers for a year in residence at the university, typically during crucial early stages in their creative development. Recent and former fellows share reflections on their fellowship year, discuss the impact of the fellowship on their work and the literary community beyond GWU, and celebrate the legacy and generosity of the fellowship’s benefactor.

At The Doorstep of the Capitol 42 seasons of Folger Poetry
Teri Cross Davis, Gigi Bradford, Libbie Rifkin, Jean Nordhaus
For 42 seasons the Folger Shakespeare Library has provided a stage for contemporary poetry’s most eloquent voices. Past Folger Poetry coordinators Gigi Bradford, Jean Nordhaus, and Libbie Rifkin talk about their role in keeping the series current, balancing the administrative and the creative, how the Folger Poetry Board was created and their role in sustaining the series, and what it takes for a poetry series to maintain and thrive in the hustle and bustle of the nation’s capitol.

Barely South: Writers from the MFA Program at Old Dominion University
Luisa Igloria, Janet Peery, Sheri Reynolds, John McManus, Michael Pearson
Core faculty in fiction, nonfiction and poetry in the MFA Creative Writing at Old Dominion University, read from their recent work and share perspectives on how place and region influence or intersect with their work and with their pedagogical practices.

Beyond Deliverance—Writing Place and People of Appalachia
Janet Bland, Bev Hogue, Nathan Anderson, Tim Catalano
Beyond Deliverance—Writing Place and People of Appalachia: Once an early gateway for western expansion and symbolic of American progress and adventure, Appalachia’s portrayal today, in both literature and imagination, is often that of dead end roads, dangerous coal mines, and backwards people.  Re-considering a renewed geographical narrative, these transplanted writers explore the profound impact of Appalachian history and culture on meaning, identity, and the creative process.

Bright Lights of Brookland: Reading the Legacy of DC’s Northeast Neighborhood
Christy Zink, Tricia Elam, Marcia Davis, Dan Vera, Michael Gushue
Washington, DC’s Brookland neighborhood holds a storied history of artistry. Actress Pearl Bailey lived here, and writing luminaries such as poet Sterling Brown, playwright Jean Kerr, and novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings all called the neighborhood home. This panel illuminates that legacy, as contemporary poets, novelists, nonfiction writers, and editors who live and work in these city blocks read writing by their predecessors and discuss the import of this literary community past and present.

Diversity in a Diverse Writing Community:  One MFA Program’s Experience
Michelle Y. Valladares, Michele Wallace, Lyn Di Iorio, Camille Wanliss Ortiz
How do the faculty and students at The City Collge of New York, CUNY’s  MFA program address issues of race in and out of the classroom, in their writing, and as part of their teaching pedagogy?   Does it make a difference to teach and study writing in Harlem?  Does the history,  culture and influence of Harlem and New York City impact the MFA experience.

Four by Four: Beltway Poetry Quarterly Celebrates the Poetic Lineage of the Capitol City
Holly Bass, Regie Cabico, Brian Gilmore, Kim Roberts, Dan Vera
We honor four African American poets, active from the 1920s to the 1990s, who helped build and sustain the literary community in Washington, DC, and whose influence continues to inspire: Sterling Brown, Essex Hemphill, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and May Miller.  Each historic writer is paired with a contemporary DC writer.  Sponsored by Beltway Poetry Quarterly, publishing and documenting DC writers online for over ten years.

Local Poets With National Reputations
Susan Shreve, Jane Shore, Linda Pastan, E. Ethelbert Miller
A poetry reading of local writers with national reputations.

Nation and Neighborhoods: The District of Columbia as a Venue for Local and National Poetic Voices
Shyree Mezick, E. Ethelbert Miller, Patricia Gray, Dolores Kendrick, Kenneth Carroll, Myra Sklarew
A panel exploring the historical challenges of reconciling Washington, D.C.’s many neighborhoods, local poets and literary history with the city’s position as the nation’s capital and the various writers from around the country who have and continue to filter through the city. This panel is composed to illuminate the effect local and visiting writers have had on shaping the image of D.C.’s poetry community, as well as how the relationship between those two groups has evolved over time.

Potomac Review Celebrates Best of 50
Julie Wakeman-LInn, Kirk Nesset, Sandra Beasley, Jacob Appel, Ethelbert Miller, Jennine Capó Crucet
To celebrate its 50th issue, Potomac Review offers a sampling of its history with readings by Kirk Nesset, Sandra Beasley, Jacob Appel, Ethelbert Miller, Jennine Capos Crucet, and others. Based in the Potomac region, PR has always had concern for the environment at its heart, but over the past two decades, its focus has evolved nationally and internationally and culturally; the reading represents the diverse voices and styles who have appeared in the pages and taps our Best of the 50 issue.

The New South, the New Regionalism: Editing an Aesthetic
Haines Eason, Gregory Donovan, Nathaniel Perry, R. T. Smith
From the Fugitives onward, Southern literature has attempted to reconcile with and reject the national literary scene. But today, ‘New South’ has come to mean progressive or adaptive, and arguably the Upper South leads the charge to change. Virginia Editors Gregory Donovan of Blackbird, Nathaniel Perry of Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and R. T. Smith of Shenandoah discuss progressivism in Southern letters, and how they balance the regional and national in selecting work for their pages.

The Way We See D.C.: African American Writers' Riffs on Living in the Nation's Capital
Kermit Frazier, Breena Clarke, Eric May, E. Ethelbert Miller
African American writers, native Washingtonians or those strongly connected in other ways to Washington, D.C., read from their fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, capturing aspects of the spirit of black people’s lives in the Nation’s Capital in ways that remind us why many folks have often called it their Chocolate City.

UVa Young Writers Workshop: A 30th Anniversary Celebration
Liz Ahl, Cornelius Eady, Gregory Orr, Mary Szybist, Donald Platt, Deborah Stein
For 30 summers, YWW has taught high schoolers the art and craft of poetry, fiction, songwriting, non-fiction, and playwrighting.  Our teachers and alums have published widely, have taught in high schools, universities, prisons, and elsewhere.  We’ve performed Greek dramas to military communities across the US, have established writing workshops in our local used bookstore, and have auto-tuned the news on the Rachel Maddow Show.  Come hear what happened to us at YWW and what we’re up to next.

Washington Journalists Turned Fictionalists
Tim Wendel, Jim Lehrer, Joanne Leedom-Ackerman, Sarah Pekkanen
What happens when Washington-based newswriters and reporters turn to fiction? Will the result tend to be more popular than literary, more commercial than artistic? How do they find the time, often while balancing deadline work? Several prominent journalists-turned-fictionalists answer these and other questions, while reflecting upon how their newsgathering experiences influence their fiction.

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Translation

In the Clefts of the Rock: Translating Erotic-Religious Poetry
Sheri Allen, Betty De Shong Meador, Willis Barnstone, Sholeh Wolpé, Hélène Cardona
Sexuality and religion are generally regarded as separate and antagonistic realms in the Anglo-American cultural landscape. But they can be intimately engaged in poetry that emerges from other cultures around the world. What strategies do contemporary translators use to bring about the balance between the spiritual and the sexual in religious-erotic poetry? We will hear and discuss recent English-language translations from an eclectic range of poetries, from ancient Sumer to modern Iran.

In the Interest of Language: The Poet as Translator
Olivia Sears, Wayne Miller, Valzhyna Mort, Idra Novey, Sidney Wade
To translate, one must engage with the original language, but also fully inhabit and interpret the mood, culture, and the voice of the writer. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that translation is the closest of close readings, and that such attention to the nuances of each word gives a poet new insight into the intricacies of language. The Center for the Art of Translation invites four premier poet/translators to explore how translation has informed their relationship with their own words.

Paul Celan in Translation
Stanley Moss, John Felstiner, Norman Manea, Ian Fairley, Susan H. Gillespie
Paul Celan, whom George Steiner has called almost certainly the major European poet of the period after 1945, created a significant body of work that has long resisted easy translation. This panel of preeminent Celan translators, writers and scholars will read from and discuss the poetry and translation of the greatest German language poet after Rilke.

Rebuilding Babel: Writers Teaching Translation
Carrie Messenger Messenger, James Shea, Monica Mody, Johannes  Göransson
This panel will examine how writers teach translation: both the art of translation and texts in translation. What is the translator’s responsibility to the original text? To what extent should the study of a translated text focus on the fact of its translation? What might such engagements with foreign languages and literature teach us? This panel will explore these questions and the mechanics of teaching translation and texts in translation, including the use of trots for poetry and prose, working with multiple languages in the classroom, and the evaluation of student work.

Spanish American Poetry in Translation: from Post-Avant-garde to Postmodernism
Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, Forrest Gander, Katherine Hedeen, Gary Racz, Michelle Gil-Montero
In Spanish America, the terms Avant-garde and Modernism connote approaches to poetry remarkably distinct from what those terms generally mean to North Americans. And yet these approaches define the major literary works of a continent. This panel highlights the shift from Post-Avant-garde to Postmodernism, celebrating the last 60 years of Spanish American poetry and introducing some of the region’s best poets, read and commented on by their translators.

The experimental and the international
Hilary Plum, Karen Emmerich, Scott Esposito, Steve Dolph, Anna Moschovakis, Jill Schoolman
This panel considers why literature in translation is often described as experimental: What issues arise as foreign literary traditions enter the US milieu? How does the phenomenon of literature in translation shed light on American conceptions of experimental vs. mainstream? What can happen when highly language-focused (thus experimental?) work moves between languages? A discussion among translators, writers, and book & magazine editors and publishers in the field of international literature.

Trading Stories with the Enemy: Navigating the Cuban/American Literary Landscape
Patricia Ann McNair, Ruth Behar, Kristin Dykstra, Achy Obejas
The relationship between the US and Cuba is complex and ever-evolving, and this evolution is reflected in the stories and publications of Cubans and Cuban-Americans. While the two governments grapple with politics and policies, writers and editors continue to cross borders and boundaries in order to collect and share these stories. Our panelists have been actively engaged in this process for years, and will speak about the challenges and rewards of this work.

Translating Poets Alive
Mariela Dreyfus, Yusef Komunyakaa, Raúl Zurita, Valerie Mejer, Anna Deeny
This session aims to discuss the advantages and particulars of translating a poet alive. It includes a translation from English into Spanish (Valerie Mejer translating Yusef Koumanyakaa) and another one from Spanish into English (Anna Deeny translating Raúl Zurita). Topics covered include author’s input in translating his own work; literal and literary choices when translating; bridging North and South through translation. A bilingual poetry reading will follow.

Translation/Trans-Latino: Writing Across the Borders
Daniel Borzutzky, Mónica de la Torre, Kristin Dykstra, Valerie Martinez, Urayoán Noel, Lila Zemborain
For many reasons, it has become common to place Spanish-language writing from Latin America in a separate category from English-language US Latino Writing.  While we recognize the context and importance of this split, this panel seeks to start a new dialogue about writers who skillfully navigate both categories.  In the process, we will discuss how a multi-lingual, multi-national ‘Trans-Latino’ vision has shaped our writing, translating, editing and teaching in productive and challenging ways.

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Tributes

A discussion and celebration of the work of the poet Ai, 1947-2010
Lisa Lewis, Jill Bialosky, Marilyn Chin, Major Jackson, Jeff Simpson
National Book Awardwinning poet Ai died unexpectedly in March 2010 at the age of 62, leaving behind an astonishingly original body of work, most of it dramatic monologue.  This panel, which includes her longtime editor and colleague and two former students, will discuss her contributions to American letters as a poet and a teacher, focusing on both her artistic innovations and the political significance of her work.

A Tribute to John Barth
John Irwin, Dave Smith, Alice McDermott, Tristan Davies, John Barth
John Barth, one of America’s best known and most important postmodernists, continues to build a literary legacy from 16 books of fiction and two essay collections. This 80th Birthday Tribute organized by Johns Hopkins University, where he earned two degrees and later taught for more than two decades, will reflect on his contributions to American letters, writing pedagogy, and hundreds of writers and writing students.

A Tribute to John Haines
Bruce Guernsey, Dana Gioia, Steven Rogers, John Haines, Sheryl St. Germain, Baron Wormser
A tribute to the noted writer, John Haines of Alaska, the author of nine books of poetry such as Winter News and The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer: Collected Poems, plus six collections of nonfiction including the memoir, The Stars , the Snow, the Fire.  His awards include two Guggenheims, an NEA Fellowship, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Library of Congress.  Each participant will speak about a specific aspect of his work and life, and following, Mr. Haines himself will read.

A Tribute to Marilyn Hacker
David Groff, Alfred Corn, Suzanne Gardinier, Marilyn Hacker, Khaled Mattawa, Alicia Ostriker
As poet, translator, activist, editor, teacher, and mentor, Marilyn Hacker has proved herself a profound and enduring presence in contemporary poetry, letters, and public life in America and internationally. In this celebration of her poems, her translations, her activism, her advocacy for global literature, and her efforts to foster the verse and values of several generations of writers, her colleagues explore the power and influence of her work—after which the poet herself will read.

A Tribute to Morton Marcus
Peter Johnson, Nin Andrews, Ray Gonzalez, Dennis Maloney, Gary Young, Gian Lombardo
This event will be a tribute to the prose poet Morton Marcus, who died last year. Besides me, there will be three nationally known prose poets and Marcus' most recent publisher presenting papers on Marcus and celebrating his legacy.

A Tribute to Ontario Review: Raymond Smith and Joyce Carol Oates
Douglas Unger, Jana Harris, Richard Burgin, Sheila Kohler, Albert Goldbarth
Founded in 1974, edited by Raymond Smith and Joyce Carol Oates, Ontario Review and its press bridged literary/artistic cultures and is known for introducing new and emerging writers and maintaining established writers in print for three and a half decades.  Forced to suspend publication in 2007 due to the death of Raymond Smith, Ontario Review and Ray Smith's contributions to letters, and the continuing generous energies of Joyce Carol Oates, are honored by Jana Harris, Richard Burgin, Sheila Kohler, Albert Goldbarth, Doug Unger and voices from the audience.

Celebrating 50 Years of Fredom to Write Advocacy
Larry Siems, Honor Moore, Major Jackson, Joanne Leedom Ackerman, Azar Nafisi
Freedom to Write, PEN American Center’s flagship program, is celebrating 50 years of working to defend free expression globally.  Several PEN members—Honor Moore, Major Jackson, and Joanne Leedom Ackerman—and PEN’s director of Freedom to Write, Larry Siems, will offer an hour of readings and discussion related to PEN’s advocacy work.  They will touch upon PEN’s recent activities in China, Russia, and Iran as well as PEN’s work against book-banning and for reader privacy in the US. 

Elizabeth Bishop Birthday Celebration
Joelle Biele, Jonathan Galassi, Jeffrey Harrison, Lloyd Schwartz, Jane Shore, Sarah Vap
At the centenary of her birth, we remember Elizabeth Bishop and celebrate her work with the release of three new books, expanded editions of her collected poetry and prose and her 40-year correspondence with The New Yorker.  This intensely private woman wrote some of the best-loved poems of the twentieth-century and is a major figure in American letters.  This panel will offer personal stories, readings, and critical assessments of Bishop’s literary achievements and wide-ranging influence.

Honoring Robert Coover
Maya Sonenberg, Robert Coover, Kate Bernheimer, Mary Caponegro, Brian Evenson, Ben Marcus
Through fiction and nonfiction, panelists will celebrate their continuing fascination with the ever changing and always challenging work of Robert Coover, meta-fictional master, myth-breaker and myth-maker, and one of the founders of hypertext.  Coover, author of over 20 books, including The Origin of the Brunists, The Public Burning, Pricksongs and Descants, Ghost Town, and Noir, will close the panel with a reading.

Lucille's Gifts: A Tribute to Lucille Clifton, Poet and Teacher
KC Culver, Michael S. Glaser, Theresa Sotto, Jayme McLellan, Lauri Watkins
This panel will pay tribute to Lucille Clifton not only as an author of international importance, but also as mentor and colleague. Lucille enjoyed a long career sharing her light with faculty, undergraduates, and graduates.  Participants will discuss her compelling presence, her teaching and writing methods, and her influence on us as students, teachers, and human beings.  We will also explore how her aesthetic influenced us as writers.

One Poem Festival Celebrating Rane Arroyo
Francisco X. Alarcón
A diverse selection of friends, fellow writers, and former students each perform a poem by poet, playwright and professor, Rane Arroyo, to celebrate his life and work. The session will open with an invocation by Chicano poet and educator Francisco X. Alarcón.

Remembering Jack Myers
Mark Cox, Ralph Angel, Gillian Conoley, Bret Lott, Tim Seibles, Richard Jackson
Friends, colleagues, and students honor the late Jack Myers. Seamus Heaney, who selected Myers’ work for the 1985 National Poetry Series, describes his poetry as wise in the pretense of just fooling around. Myers’ contributions range from widely used anthologies and textbooks to a dictionary of poetic terms, 18 books in all. A final volume, The Memory of Water, is expected early 2011.

The Dream the Dreamers Dreamed: A Tribute to Langston Hughes, Sponsored by Split This Rock Poetry Festival 
Sarah Browning, Derrick Weston Brown, Jericho Brown, Sonia Sanchez
Langston Hughes was working as a busboy here at the Wardman Park Hotel when he slipped poems to Vachel Lindsay, launching his literary career, one of the most influential of the 20th century. Two DC institutions, Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness and Busboys and Poets Restaurant, are named in his honor and claim Hughes as a literary mentor and guiding light. Celebrate Langston Hughes’ February 1 birthday as we pay tribute to the man, his poetry, and his enduring legacy of social and political engagement.

Tribute to Orchises Press
Terri Witek, David Kirby, Lia Purpura, John Poch, Barbara Hamby, Terri Witek
5 poets who are beneficiaries of Roger Lathbury’s care and attention will pay tribute to Orchises Press then read an Orchises poem each.  Together we represent a range of the press’s generosities, from its long championing of David Kirby’s work to the recovery of an out-of-print Barbara Hamby classic to multi-book support of emerging poets John Poch and Terri Witek to the launch of the skyrocket that is Lia Purpura, we all have something to say in appreciative description of the press and its publisher.

What Goes On: A Tribute to the Mind and Poetry of Stephen Dunn
Laura McCullough, Kurt Brown, Andrea Hollander Budy, Kathleen Graber, BJ Ward, Peter Murphy
Stephen Dunn is a poet’s poet, a philosopher, who, to quote Robert Bringhurst in defining poetry, think[s] intensely and beautifully.  Reflecting on Dunn’s WHAT GOES ON: Selected and New Poems and his newest book, HERE AND NOW, this tribute will examine Dunn’s influence and the affect of his oeuvre as a poet who explores, as Eluard said, the world within this one and will be followed by a reading by Dunn.

Writers on Mentors and Literary Friendships
Jayne Anne Phillips, Tom Grimes, Elizabeth Benedict, Alexander Chee, John McIntyre, Michael Dirda
Jayne Anne Phillips and writers Tom Grimes, author of Mentor, a Memoir, on writing and his Iowa mentor, Frank Conroy, Elizabeth Benedict, editor of Mentors, Muses, Monsters, 30 Writers on People Who Changed Their Lives, Alexander Chee, author of Annie Dillard and The Writing Life, John McIntyre, RN MFA Capote Fellow, editor of Memorable Days, Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps, and Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize-winning book columnist, discuss the lasting influence of literary mentors.

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Writers’ Conferences and Centers

All Booked Up—How to Create a Festival
William Miller, Ruth Kogen Goodwin, Kwame Alexander, Sarah Browning, Nancy Coble Damon, Charles Jensen
The DC area is rich in literary culture, and this has led to the creation of a variety of high-quality regional book festivals. The experts behind five such events will give you a behind-the-scenes look at how each festival works; from how they secure funding and choose their authors, to how they market to the public and how the festivals complement each other and collaborate. There will be ample time for Q&A so you can learn how to create the same quality literary events in your community.

America's Next Top (Literary Center) Model
Charles Jensen, Gail Browne, David Biespiel, Jordan Hartt, Andrea Dupree
Whether for-profit, non-profit, or in the academy, literary centers can take many forms, approaches, and business models. While writers have a good sense of developing strong content, business approaches can somtimes be confounding to us. These panelists, who represent various center business models, will discuss the strengths and limitations of each design based on their own perspectives and experiences.

Filling the Void: Growing & Sustaining Literary Communities
Jill Pollack, Christopher Castellani, Alix Wilber, Kyle Semmel
What is the beating heart of a city’s literary community? Writing centers across the country are doing more than filling a void: they are building vital links and opportunities to serve writers at all stages of their careers. Panelists from some of the largest centers in the country will share the successes and challenges of helping writers to study the craft, creating training grounds for MFA graduates to teach, developing reading audiences, and participating fully in a city’s cultural life.

How to start a literary center and thrive through the decades
Jocelyn Hale, Andromeda Romano-Lax, Gregg Wilhelm, Eve Bridburg, Sue Joerger
Have you realized that your region needs a literary center and wondered how you might get one going? What are your first steps and what will follow as your vision takes hold and your organization grows. Learn about the lifecycle of nonprofits from leaders of literary centers at all stages of development from Idea and Start-up (49 Alaska Writing Center), Growth (CityLit in Baltimore and Grubb Street in Boston) and Maturity (Richard Hugo House in Seattle and The Loft Literary Center in Mpls.).

Kundiman from Community to Communities: Reaching out from the Writers' Retreat
Oliver de la Paz, Sarah Gambito, Margaret Rhee, Andre Yang, Neil Aitken, Tamiko Beyer
While Kundiman is known for its annual retreat and its dedication to the promotion and cultivation of Asian American poetry, what often goes unmentioned is the civic, social, and community work that extends beyond the space of the retreat. Faculty members, fellows, and Kundiman founders will discuss the tenets of community building as it relates to Kundiman, but will also discuss how they channeled and even extended the premise of community building beyond the Kundiman retreat space.

Marketing Your Literary Community: How to Make Sure Your Organization is Heard
Kyle Semmel, Art Taylor, Jill Pollack, Chip Cheek, Gregg Wilhelm
So you've started a literary center or festival in your community. Now what do you do? How do you market it? In this panel, marketing directors from six diverse literary communities—ranging from recently founded to long-established centers—discuss how they spread the word in their communities. Which strategies work? Which don't? How do you get the best return on investment on a limited advertising budget? From this panel you'll walk away with tips on how to ensure that your community thrives.

Tearing Down the Town/Gown Divide: Taking Writing Off Campus and into the Community
Tim W. Brown, M.L. Liebler, April Naoko Heck, Gary Glazner, John Domini
This panel presents a diverse lineup of writers who have in varying ways traversed the town/gown divide by taking their literary and organizational expertise into the community. Each speaker will share insights into the process and offer realistic, achievable strategies for faculty and students alike to gain exposure for their writing, grow their audiences and obtain real-world experience, while expanding appreciation for writing in ways that are both entertaining and enlightening.

Town and Gown: MFA Programs in Partnership with Local Communities
Joyce Peseroff, Steven Cramer, Sonya Larson, Jonathan Papas, Janet Pocorobba
MFA programs can act as a resource for communities by creating affiliations with libraries, community centers, and other local organizations. The panel will discuss projects developed between one MFA program and the Boston Public Library and the Denney Community Center; a low-residency program’s support of internships through their interdisciplinary requirement; and the writer’s organization Grub Street’s use of student interns and volunteers to bring creative writing to underserved communities.

Views from the Loft
Jocelyn Hale, Daniel Slager, Sandra Benitez, Mark Doty, Marilyn Chin, Heid Erdrich
Contributors to the anthology Views from the Loft: A Portable Writer's Workshop will be featured in conversation with the editor and publisher of Milkweed Editions. Contributing writers Sandra Benitez, Marilyn Chin, Mark Doty and Heid Erdrich will join editor Daniel Slager in a discussion moderated by the Loft's Executive Director.

[WITS Alliance] Camps: Artful Paths for Summer Income
Paul Shaffer, Long Chu, Cecily Sailer, Megan McNamer, Janet Hurley
Writing outside the classroom takes us several easy steps toward helping students experience writing as fun, while anchoring good writing habits during time off from school and making parents very happy. This heady cocktail can allow these tuition-based camps to more than pay their own way, introducing a writing project and its creative programming in your area that can provide work for writers, and perhaps help launch a writers in the schools program.