#AWP17

[upperrubberboot]

[nationalbook]

See you at #AWP17!

The National Book Foundation is headed to Washington, D.C. for #AWP17 . Here are some of the National Book Award Winners, Finalists, Longlist and 5 Under 35 honorees who you can catch during the conference. We’ll see you there! 

Thursday, February 9, 2017

Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award Winner and Finalist

Mystery in the Writing Process: Discovery, Revelation, and Witholding for Writers and Their Readers

9:00AM-10:15AM

Featuring National Book Award Winner William Alexander and National Book Award Longlist author Kekla Magoon

A Lecture by Jacqueline Woodson, sponsored by The Poetry Foundation

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM

Featuring National Book Award Winner & four time National Book Award Finalist Jacqueline Woodson

VIDA Voices & Views: Exclusive Interview with Joan Naviyuk Kane, Ada Limón, & Alicia Ostriker

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Ada Limón

The Art of the Novella: Publishers and Writers On Crafting the Beautifully In-Between

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM

Featuring 5 under 35 Honoree Josh Weill

Asian-American Generations at Coffee House Press

1:30pm - 2:45pm

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Karen Yamashita

Some of My Best Friends Are Octavia Butler and Ursula K. LeGuin: Genre Bias in the Creative Writing

1:30pm - 2:45pm 

Featuring 5 under 35 Honoree Asali Solomon

But Do You Have a Novel? How and Why Short Story Writers Transition into Novelists

3:00 pm - 4:15 pm 

Featuring 5 Under 35 Honoree Kirstin Valdez Quade 

Copyright Basics for the Digital Age

3:00 pm - 4:15 pm

Featuring two-time National Book Award Finalist James Gleick

Going for Gold: Five Novelists Rewrite the Sports Narrative

4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

Featuring 5 Under 35 Honoree Tracy O'Neill

An Invitation to Poetic Discovery, Sponsored by Poets House

4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

Featuring National Book Award Finalist & Longlist author Monica Youn

Friday, February 10, 2017

Viet Thanh Nguyen, National Book Award Finalist

Celebrating The Golden Shovel Anthology in honor of Gwendolyn Brooks

9:00AM-10:15AM

Featuring three time National Book Award Finalist Marilyn Nelson 

Strange Bedfellows: The Unholy Mingling of Politics and Art

9:00AM-10:15AM

Featuring National Book Award Longlist author Anthony Marra

Workshopping War: The Challenges of War Writing in the Classroom

10:30am - 11:45am 

 Featuring National Book Award Finalist Jayne Anne Phillips

Crafty: Four City University of New York MFA Graduates Read from Their Work

10:30am - 11:45am 

 Featuring National Book Award Winner and 5 Under 35 Honoree Phil Klay

Beyond Sex: The Poetics of Desire

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Tim Seibles

Coming of Age: The Blurry Lines between Adult & YA literature

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM 

 Featuring National Book Award Finalist Jason Reynolds

Raising Hell: Writing from the Extremes

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM 

 Featuring 5 Under 35 Honoree Tea Obreht

American Smooth: A Tribute to Rita Dove

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM

Featuring National Book Award Winner Robin Coste Lewis and National Book Award Finalist Rita Dove 

The Interconnectedness of Poetry & Memoir

1:30pm - 2:45pm 

 Featuring National Book Award Finalist Tracy K. Smith

A Reading and Conversation with Alexander Chee and Valeria Luiselli, Sponsored by Coffee House Press and Kundiman

1:30pm - 2:45pm 

Featuring 5 Under 35 Honoree Valeria Luiselli and National Book Foundation Executive Director, Lisa Lucas

Going There: Writing the Complicated Truth in the World's Hot Spots

1:30pm - 2:45pm 

Featuring 5 Under 35 Honoree Brit Bennett 

A Tribute to Marie Ponsot

1:30pm - 2:45pm

Featuring National Book Award Finalist and Longlist author Kevin Young

Daddy's Little Girl, and Other Misfortunes in YA

3:00 pm - 4:15 pm 

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Laura Ruby

To Sing the Idea of All: Walt Whitman in DC

3:00 pm - 4:15 pm 

Featuring Literarian Award Winner and Cave Canem co-founder Cornelius Eady

A Conversation between Chimamanda Ngozi and Ta-Nehisi Coates

4:30pm - 5:45pm

Featuring National Book Award Winner Ta-Nehisi Coates

Distant Lands, Intimate Voices

4:30pm - 5:45pm

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Viet Thanh Nguyen

Saturday, February 11, 2017

Rita Dove, National Book Award Finalist

Poetry As Invocation

10:30am - 11:45am

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Ada Limón

Get in Formation: Form in YA Literature

10:30am - 11:45am

Featuring three time National Book Award Finalist Marilyn Nelson

Being the Change You Want to See: The New Literary Leadership

10:30am - 11:45am

Featuring National Book Foundation Executive Director Lisa Lucas

Immigrants / Children of Immigrants

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM

Featuring National Book Award Finalist and Longlist author Monica Youn

21st Century Troubadours

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Rita Dove

Women Writers Get Gritty

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Jayne Anne Phillips

No Easy Readers: The Challenges of Writing for Children

1:30pm - 2:45pm

Featuring National Book Award Winner William Alexander and National Book Award Longlist author Anne Ursu

The Ghosts of History

1:30pm - 2:45pm

Featuring National Book Award Finalist and 5 Under 35 Honoree Angela Flournoy

A Reading and Conversation with Aracelis Girmay, Tim Seibles, and Danez Smith.

1:30pm - 2:45pm

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Tim Seibles

Socially Conscious Fiction

3:00pm - 4:15pm

Featuring National Book Award Longlist author Garth Greenwell

Going for Broke: Working Class Writers on Choosing a Career In The Arts

3:00pm - 4:15pm

Featuring 5 Under 35 Honoree Tiphanie Yanique 

Writing Across Cultures

3:00pm - 4:15pm

Featuring 5 under 35 Honoree Valeria Luiselli 

Conversation with Ross Gay & Tina Chang

3:00pm - 4:15pm

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Ross Gay

Poetry in the Age of the Drone

4:30pm - 5:45pm

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Solmaz Sharif

Reading with Rita Dove, Terrance Hayes & Ocean Vuong

8:30pm - 10:00pm

Featuring National Book Award Winner Rita Dove, and National Book Award Winner & Finalist Terrance Hayes

Reading with Colum McCann & Margot Livesly

8:30pm - 10:00pm 

 Featuring National Book Award Winner Colum McCann

[poetsorg]

Poets, writers, and friends at #AWP17: be sure to stop by booth #406 to say hello to the Academy of American Poets and Poets.org! We'll be raffling off our enamel Whitman pin and our Rita Dove flask both today and tomorrow.

For more information about our events at AWP, visit http://bit.ly/2kekiok.

[werewolfdefenseattorney]

Click the link, click the thumb. First prize wins 5 paid-for trips to AWP conferences!!!

This is a cool and easy way to help support my writing for free, and it takes 10 seconds!!

[unnamedpress]

Unnamed at AWP

Unnamed at AWP: the wonderful Fabienne Josaphat, Rebecca Entel, Jessie Chaffee, and Esmé Weijun Wang!

[chenchenwrites]

Thanks to Craig Morgan Teicher for this lovely mini-review of my book on NPR! Check out the whole article, “Poetry To Pay Attention To: A Preview of 2017′s Best Verse,” which highlights new/forthcoming books by Morgan Parker, Adrian Matejka, Javier Zamora, Danez Smith, Craig Santos Perez, & others. 

[jwhittz]

Quick check-in after day one of AWP: impostor syndrome is still strong, but I've attended some excellent panels and seen all two people I know here. I've already missed a bunch of things I wish I could have gone to, so next time I come they better have a cloning option for registration. Major takeaway from basically every panel: I NEED TO WRITE MORE.

[literaryhousepress]

Come see us at our beautiful booth! The Rose O’Neill Literary House, the Literary House Press, and Cherry Tree are at booth 626 in the AWP Bookfair!

[frontporchlit]

Conversations at AWP 2017 by blog editor Leticia A. Urieta

The Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference is a microcosm of the national and international writing and publishing community, where hundreds of writers, publishers, educators and administrators convene in one city for four days and engage in a communal celebration of and conversation about the nature of writing. This year, the AWP conference was held in Washington D.C. and this made all the difference.

I should explain that this was my first time attending AWP, and I went into the experience primed by the charged environment of where we were and what I might experience. I was staying with friends and colleagues who had attended other AWP’s, and so I was given much conflicting advice: enjoy the panels, don’t go to the panels they are a waste of time, attend off site events, the readings are the best, etc. I also had to be cognizant of my scheduled time at the bookfair representing Front Porch Journal. When I downloaded the app the AWP provides to plan your schedule, I was a bit overzealous, like a young Hermione Granger attempting to attend too many classes; since I didn’t have a Time Turner, I would have to split my time as best I could between the bookfair, panels, readings and time with friends who I had the privilege of seeing because we were meeting in this city for these few days.

If I could summarize the conference into one word (besides more colorful words that my friends were using after a few nights of drinking), it would be resistance.

As I said, we were in the capital of our nation, where our president was signing contentious and discriminatory executive orders whose effects were taking place around us. While at the conference, part of me wanted to avoid social media, lock myself in this bubble of literary dreams to hear writers and poets like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speak about her novel or hear the quiet, hypersensitive voice of Ocean Vuong as he read his poetry like I’ve never heard anyone read before. It was invigorating to be around and amongst these talents, some I knew and some I was meeting for the first time, and gave me energy to want to return to my own thesis work, now at the end of my final semester in the Texas State MFA. Then I would get on Facebook and see the ICE raids occurring back home, threatening friends and youth in the community that I served. I couldn’t help but feel a certain amount of guilt and need to perform some form of resistance while I was here, to take some action that would mean something before I left the birthplace of so much fear and division in our country.

As I wandered the Bookfair and attended panels centered around race, language and identity as these facets of ourselves shape our relationship to our writing and to other writers, I saw people wearing black buttons with ‘Resist” written in bold white ink. I saw women wearing “Black Lives Matter” t-shirts and rainbow flags sewn to their coats. All around me, resistance was occurring in a multitude of forms, from the reading of political, angry, passionate poetry from Terrance Hayes, to the conversations taking place. At several points during the conference, there were overt acts of resistance to the current political regime, from several writers creating a “wall” during the bookfair (which I participated in) to inconvenience those trying to pass, as well as readings and candlelight vigils around the capital that made statements-this may be normal, but this is not OK. What was especially interesting, however, was that it seemed that the word “resistance,” meant very different things to different people. During our brief “human wall” demonstration, several people scoffed and complained that we were blocking their way to certain booths at the bookfair, to which we responded that that was exactly the point. It seemed that people who espouse the ideals of resistance, and continuously call for us to avoid normalizing the Trump administration, were in fact resistant to being criticized or made to feel uncomfortable for even a few minutes of their day. The dream bubble of AWP isolation was bursting before their eyes, and they didn’t like it.

Another resistance I discovered, and enjoyed, was people’s resistance to labelling themselves with binaries of genre, language, identity and even style. During my time at the bookfair, I had so many wonderful conversations with people who responded to our questions about what they wrote when they said “everything.” Having had the experience of people trying to label me and my work in binary terms, as fiction, or poetry, as real, or fantasy, as white, or latina, I loved finding kindred spirits who, despite the publishing industry's insistence that branding oneself means reducing yourself to one thing, were embracing hybridity, versatility and even the political act of affirming their very existence through their art. I attended a panel led by mixed writers, and took away so many quotes to live my life by as a mixed woman, including one reminder that stood out: “Insist upon the integrity of your work.”

During my last night in D.C. I went to eat with friends. At the dinner table, I asked a question I had considered before, but never voiced: What is the difference between a writer and an author? The responses varied-some said that writers worked, while authors were already published. Some said that the terms were interchangeable. I argued that there was a level of ethos associated with the term “author,” and that this ethos opened doors for authors to do more work and have a defined platform in the writing community. A poet acquaintance pointed out that you don’t have to be published to be active in the community. Even here, there was a resistance of definitions and delineations because, as traditionally marginalized writers, we all knew that the work for us would never be done. After hearing responses from friends and new writers I met, it was obvious to me that the act of writing is a conversation with the literary communities that form us. With so many of embarking into new and unknown territory, because we are graduating from MFA programs, or because we are beginning new community and artistic projects, we are looking for our places in a social landscape that is often in disagreement.

Sitting here at the airport waiting for my flight home, I am OK with the fact that I didn’t go to any museums or visit any landmarks while I was here. That will be another trip. I am OK that I didn’t go to all the panels and readings that I wanted. The body and spirit are both invigorated and exhausted after a conference that requires so much travel and creative energy. In the end, I am simply grateful to have been a part of a conversation.

[brooklynartists]

AWP 2017 Shelter Drop-Off

Wendy & I traveled down to our nation’s capital to sell some books through BAP, attend a vigil before the White House, & collect toiletry donations for the CCNV shelter here in DC, one of the largest of its kind in the country. Below are some photos we took of those who donated, & of us dropping off the donations.

We received 83 bars of soap, 38 bottles of body wash, 90 bottles of shampoo, 81 bottles of conditioner, 65 bottles of lotion, 9 bottles of mouthwash, 3 bottles of sanitizer, 5 rolls of toiler paper, 4 chapsticks, etc.

Just wonderful. Thank you writers of AWP!

[salt-lock]

{old habits, old friends} we're tired & we hurt but we survived #awp17 🏆 This was our seventh time going together (three in a row rooming together & tabling for draft), & I honestly hope there are many more years of the same to come. #documentingyrscene

[kitchentablelit]

If you don't buy books by Black women poets and writers, I don't know if you know what love really is. #AWP17 #community #showlove #givelove #belove #KitchenTableLit #blackwriters #blackpoets #blackwriters #blackbrilliance

[beblk]

http://www.capitalbop.com/nicole-mitchells-black-earth-ensemble-presents-mandorla-awakening-a-major-afrofuturist-statement/

[jordancastro]

New York Tyrant presents: AWP17 Escalator Reading at the Wheaton metro stop in Silver Spring, Maryland on February 11, 2017. This is the largest escalator in the Western hemisphere. Filmed by Chelsea Hodson.

Readers:

1:22 — Precious Okoyomon 5:00 — Zachary German 8:15 — Nicolette Polek 12:05 — David Fishkind 15:30 — Jordan Castro 19:20 — Emma Heldman 23:00 — Chelsea Hodson 26:30 — Juliet Escoria

[lgbtq-writers-caucus-blog]

Fractured Selves: Fabulism as a Platform for Minorities, Women, and the LGBT Community.

(Sequoia Nagamatsu, Aubrey Hirsh, Brenda Peynado, Zach Doss, Ramona Ausubel)

Fabulist writers and editors define Fabulism (often used with other terms like magical realism and slipstream), illuminate individual approaches to the genre alongside brief readings, and discuss how fabulism can be a rich territory for expression, exploration, and power for minorities, women, and the LGBT community. what does it mean to write about the other from other worlds or hybrid spaces?

[chenchenwrites]

thanks to Split This Rock for making this beautiful card with some lines from my poem "Set the Garden on Fire." picked this up in DC at #AWP17