Hell-Bent Hope: Poets Holding Fast During This Time of Ecological Crisis featuring Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Thursday, March 27, 9:00 AM- 10:15 AM
Location: Concourse Hall 152, Level One, Los Angeles Convention Center

Now is a time of ecological crisis and mass extinction, so even if you don’t consider yourself a “nature” poet, all of us need to ask ourselves what the writer’s task is in this climate-changed world. Equally important is how to cope with despair, which can be incapacitating, threatening to silence us under its weight. Together, we’ll discuss how to bear witness to these coming storms and how to define hope in a way that might allow one to move forward with courage, awareness, and yes, even joy.
 

Divergent Writers: A New Bloomsbury Anthology on Neurodivergence & Ableism featuring K. Iver

Thursday, Mar 27, 2025 9:00 AM — 10:15 AM
Location: Room 404AB, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

Creative writing spaces are largely engineered for abled bodies. Attitudes surrounding disability, illness, and neurodivergence range from reluctance to complete disregard. These writers are often romanticized, erased, or both, as the writing world has little interest in accommodating those who do not fit neatly into ableist paradigms. Our panel of exceptional authors will discuss our forthcoming anthology. In doing so, we will share our relevant experiences and suggest interventions.

Electric Conduit: Poetics, Translation & the Digital Age featuring Shook

Thursday, Mar 27, 2025 9:00 AM — 10:15 AM
Location: Room 513, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

In an era of digital glut, translation offers an engaging experience across cultures by literally making us think in another’s language and syntax. This panel explores translation as an art, focusing on the translator’s choices as a pathway through cultural difference and an opportunity to create new connections. Panelists will discuss balancing form and content, the cultural and political implications of translation, and how to ensure translation remains viable in the digital age.

When Words Are Not Enough: Graphic Literature & Diasporic Histories featuring Victoria Chang

Thursday, Mar 27, 2025 12:10 PM — 1:25 PM
Location: Room 411, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

The blank spaces surrounding migration, diaspora, and intergenerational trauma can’t always be filled with words alone. Join four Asian American writers and artists who dove into their families’ lost histories and found stories that could only be told through a combination of text and image. From poetry to memoir to history, discover how the graphics medium brings richness and nuance to diasporic works, helping creators find their way into and out of their families’ complicated pasts.

The Sky Above the Roof: Community & Creativity in Carceral Environments featuring Sally Keith

Thursday, Mar 27, 2025 1:45 PM — 3:00 PM
Location: Room 511AB, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

Facilitating creative writing in carceral settings is vital work that demands flexibility and careful planning. This discussion will explore roadblocks one might encounter while setting up workshops, as well as ways to foster community so that incarcerated writers can explore their own stories, invent and give shape to the kind of writing they would like to develop, and share their work in a supportive setting. Panelists bring a range of experience working with juveniles and adults.

Theories of Vastness: On Capaciousness in Poetry featuring Kazim Ali

Thursday, Mar 27, 2025 3:20 PM — 4:35 PM
Location: Concourse Hall 151, Level One, Los Angeles Convention Center

What does it mean for a poetic work to be “capacious”? This term implies an expansiveness of scope and experience—the possibility for the primordial and the vatic to converge, the promise of poem as sprawling event. This panel explores the mysteries of the capacious poem, while demystifying capaciousness from a craft perspective. It asks what craft tools can be brought to bear to enact cultural, linguistic, and spiritual vastness in poetic space.

Eyes Wide: Exploring the Extended Ekphrastic featuring Victoria Chang and Tess Taylor

Friday, Mar 28, 2025 9:00 AM — 10:15 AM
Location: Room 503, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

Ekphrasis—“adding commentary”—traditionally lets a poet meditate on a single work of art. But increasingly poets are upending and enlarging ekphrastic forms, extending the ekphrastic to include art practices, artist’s lives, and historic, familial, and personal archives. Extended ekphrastic touches other forms—autobiography, memoir, criticism, documentary poetry. In this panel, five poets with diverse working methods will examine the challenges and rewards of extending the frame.

Making Meaning out of Work: The New American Labor Poetry featuring Ama Codjoe

Friday, Mar 28, 2025 10:35 AM — 11:50 AM
Location: Room 501ABC, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

Labor—retail work, entrepreneurism—is entwined with the American Dream, shaping our values and informing our relationships with others. We equate our worth and identities to our jobs and may even reduce others to theirs. This panel features five poets who will discuss how poetry’s antagonism to capitalist structures can be a means to limit and expand personhood, as well as explore the impact of mechanization in daily life. How does writing about labor negotiate a poem’s aesthetics?

The Translator’s Note: Bridging Linguistic & Cultural Chasms, Sponsored by ALTA featuring Wayne Miller

Friday, Mar 28, 2025 10:35 AM — 11:50 AM
Location: Room 514, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

The Translator’s Note is an indispensable companion to poetry in translation, acquainting readers with new poets, helping editors to evaluate poems, positioning a poet’s significance within a literary landscape, defining challenges in a particular piece, and more. Translating from Albanian, French, Persian, Portuguese, and Spanish, our panelists will address how the Translator’s Note bridges linguistic and cultural chasms while fostering an understanding and appreciation for diverse voices.

Excuse My Beauty: Queer Indigenous Poetics, Story & Time featuring Jake Skeets and No’u Revilla

Friday, Mar 28, 2025 3:20 PM — 4:35 PM
Location: Room 518, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

“Excuse My Beauty” is a phrase borrowed from the late Stephanie Yellowhair. “Excuse My Beauty” will be a celebration of the diverse and vibrant work of queer Indigenous poets who span landscape, waters, and histories. The poets will read from their own work and the work of others, while engaging in a vital discussion on how time and story are entangled in poetry and how they each invigorate Indigenous sovereignty both here in the United States and abroad.

Emergence & Becoming—Framing Native Poetics Beyond the “Renaissance”: A Lecture By Jake Skeets 

Saturday, Mar 29, 2025 9:00 AM — 10:15 AM
Location: Petree Hall C, Level One, Los Angeles Convention Center

The term “Native American Renaissance” has long been used to describe the surge of Native literary production in the 1960s and ’70s. However, this label risks implying that Native literature lacked sophistication or vitality prior to this moment. Drawing from Diné poetics and cultural frameworks, this lecture—part of the #AWP25 Tribal Colleges & Universities Fellowship Program—will examine how these ideas illuminate the continuity and innovation of Native storytelling traditions, offering a more expansive understanding of Native literature’s past, present, and future.

The Black Ekphrastic Mode featuring Jason Allen-Paisant

Saturday, Mar 29, 2025 10:35 AM — 11:50 AM
Location: Room 503, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

Four UK award-winning Black poets/academics talk about the unique approach to ekphrasis in their latest poetry collections. From four different vantages of the Black gaze, they fuse a relationship between poetry and the visual arts. They share both their poems and praxis. Malika Booker — An Alternative History of Stones (TBC, 2025); Jason Allen-Paisant — Self-Portrait as Othello (Pavilion, 2023); Denise Saul — The Room Between Us (Pavilion, 2022); Nick Makoha — The New Carthaginians (Penguin, 2025).

No Excerpts: On the Long Poem featuring Ama Codjoe and Rick Barot

Saturday, Mar 29, 2025 12:10 PM — 1:25 PM
Location: Room 408A, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

Long poems pose many problems for the writer, reader, and teacher. How do poets, past and present, retain the attention of readers? How much does the market shape poem length? How can one teach poems concerned with endlessness in short class periods? The hope is that one may free oneself from these anxieties to make art that endures not just across pages, but across centuries. Dedicated to that long view, this panel features five poets who have written and/or taught long poems themselves.