AWP Literary Awards & Poetry as Reciprocity: Indigenous Nations Poets Celebrate Language Back featuring Jake Skeets
Kansas City Public Library, 14 W 10th St, Kansas City, MO 64105
Wednesday, February 7, 2024
6:00 — 8:00 PM
Join AWP in celebrating the contributions of those honored through its various award programs: the Intro Journals Project, the National Program Directors’ Prize, the Small Press Publisher Award, and the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature. Following the presentation of awards, join Indigenous Nations Poets Heid E. Erdrich (Ojibwe), Jake Skeets (Diné), and Kimberly Blaeser (Anishinaabe), along with moderator Elise Paschen (Osage), for a conversation and reading in which participants share how their languages inform a poetics of reciprocity both on the page and in their roles as teachers, mentors, leaders, and activists. AWP is partnering with the Kansas City Public Library for this special event. RSVP to the event using this link.
It’s Alive… It’s Alive! Using Horror Film Aesthetics in Poetry featuring Sara Eliza Johnson
Room 2103C, Kansas City Convention Center, Street Level
Thursday, February 8, 2024
10:35 — 11:50 AM
Long viewed as an outside genre, horror only rarely skirts so-called mainstream “artistic legitimacy,” as seen recently in the award-winning films of Jordan Peele and Ari Aster. How can poets use horror films to push, even transgress, the boundaries of verse, and explore intersections of body, identity, and sociocultural history? Five poets will share how horror films have shaped their work, from processing the body to translating trauma. Who will survive and what will be left of them?
Communing with James Baldwin: A Centennial Celebration featuring Ed Pavlić
Room 2504AB, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 2
Thursday, February 8, 2024
10:35 — 11:50 AM
One hundred years after his birth, Baldwin’s legacy, influence, and relevance cannot be overstated. Panelists writing in several genres share work guided by the critic, activist, novelist, playwright, and poet, and discuss how we as writers and a society can make our way into communion with him.
The Unsung Masters Reading featuring Kevin Prufer and Kazim Ali
Room 2502B, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 2
Thursday, February 8, 2024
12:10 — 1:25 PM
Each year, the Unsung Masters Series publishes a book devoted to the life and work of a great but little known author. Volumes include large selections of the author’s work printed alongside interviews, articles, drafts, photographs, and ephemera. This reading brings together the editors of four recent volumes who will read from the work of poets Shreela Ray, Tom Postell, Bert Meyers, and Laura Hershey. This event should lead to great discoveries for those who attend.
In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy featuring torrin a. greathouse
Room 3501 EF, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 3
Thursday, February 8, 2024
12:10 — 1:25 PM
The forthcoming anthology In the Tempered Dark conveys the wide range of grief deemed urgent by contemporary poets from diverse backgrounds, at all career stages, exploring loss, trauma, addiction, marginalized bodies, the climate crisis, inter alia, through various styles and forms. As grief needs, from villanelle to epistle to golden shovel to erasure, these contributors’ poems show visceral links between unique bodies of/in grief and the shapes poems take on the page, transcending elegy.
Embodied Prosody, Embodied Sentences: Coping Mechanisms featuring torrin a. greathouse
Room 2103A, Kansas City Convention Center, Street Level
Thursday, February 8, 2024
1:45 — 3:00 PM
torrin a. greathouse asks, “What tools can prosody provide us with for cultivating an embodied poetics of disability?” Jenny Johnson suggests “Prosody can be a space for wrestling with and wrestling off old scripts, and also for generating the new ones that we need.” Oliver de la Paz argues that prose poems offer a specific vantage point for the “political” gesture of sentence making, while Brian Teare suggests that a collage-based prose practice can wire our sentences to our nervous systems.
Women Reclaim the Page: Generative Writing to Beat Burnout featuring Yalie Saweda Kamara
Room 2104A, Kansas City Convention Center, Street Level
Thursday, February 8, 2024
1:45 — 3:00 PM
In creative writing, the focus is product over process. Producing pages for publication is necessary, but when that goal takes over, what is lost? For women especially, writing solely to publish can lead to burnout. Generative writing might be an answer. These panelists, women who work in both academic and community spaces, champion writing for writing’s sake. Their interactive panel will reclaim writing as a process of discovery and invite attendees to try a few favorite generative prompts.
“To Confirm a Thing and Give Thanks”: Rereading May Swenson featuring Sara Eliza Johnson
Room 2208, Kansas City Convention Center, Street Level
Friday, February 9, 2024
9:00 — 10:15 AM
Though more widely acknowledged in her lifetime, May Swenson is now something of a “poet’s poet’s poet,” loved and admired by a select readership but generally overlooked by the wider public. This panel aims to elevate Swenson’s work, articulating the dynamics behind her richly varied oeuvre—lush, exploratory, imaginative, poised—and arguing for a twenty-first century return to this unduly neglected master and pioneering queer poet.
Draft, Draft, Goose: The Thinking Behind Revising featuring Kevin Prufer
Room 2105, Kansas City Convention Center, Street Level
Friday, February 9, 2024
10:35 — 11:50 AM
In this panel, five distinguished writers will each share a draft of a published piece along with its final version, and discuss the decisions made to get there. We’ll consider the cascading effects of the smallest changes, and how to maintain the equilibrium and disequilibrium one seeks in a finished piece—as well as how to remain committed to surprise, endeavoring not to polish a piece of writing into mediocrity. Our goal will be practical: to show the thinking behind revising.
Language Back: A Reading & Conversation with Indigenous Poets, Sponsored by Indigenous Nations Poets featuring Jake Skeets
Grand Ballroom A, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 2
Friday, February 9, 2024
10:35 — 11:50 AM
Simultaneous with the contemporary Land Back movement of Tribal Nations is an equally urgent call for Indigenous literary sovereignty. This focus on writing Indigenous includes a strong push for creators to employ tribal languages and their inherent structures—for Language Back. Poet contributors to The Diné Reader, Jake Skeets, Luci Tapahonso, and Esther Belin, will read recent work and discuss how their creative work maps itself at the intersections of tribal language, poetic form, and place.
Transforming the Imagination: Asian American Poets Redefine Hybrid Poetry featuring Victoria Chang
Room 2101, Kansas City Convention Center, Street Level
Friday, February 9, 2024
3:20 — 4:35 PM
Hybrid poetry embraces cross disciplinary work, combining poetry, prose, plays, visual art, collage, documents, to address and challenge dominant narratives. This panel focuses on the ways in which Asian American poets have invigorated hybrid forms to respond to uneven distributions of power, relay experiences of marginalization, oppression, and injustice as well as uphold joy, kinship, and devotion through the examination of cross-genre and interdisciplinary work as a practice of survival.
The Fine Art of Craft Talking featuring Wendy Call
Room 3501AB, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 3
Saturday, February 10, 2024
9:00 — 10:15 AM
At some point in our careers, we might be called upon to give a craft talk. The prospect of such a task can inspire both excitement and trepidation. In this lively discussion, panelists will speak to their experiences devising craft talks, and we’ll explore nuances of this genre, addressing questions such as: What is a craft talk? How do you write one? Are there certain conventions? Do you subvert those conventions? We’ll also discuss how to repurpose a craft talk for publication.
Holding Space: Creating a Safe & Supportive Virtual Writing Group featuring Shilpi Suneja
Room 2104A, Kansas City Convention Center, Street Level
Saturday, February 10, 2024
10:35 — 11:50 AM
Many writers struggle to find community, which can mean the difference between staying motivated through long projects or throwing in the laptop. In 2020, a group of writers who met at a residency for women of color came together virtually from around the world for accountability and encouragement. They’ve seen each other through publications, residencies, rejections, moves, even motherhood. Come find out how workshopping, sharing and support became a lasting sisterhood you might create, too.
Honoring Our Grandmothers—Indigenous Writers Reclaim History featuring Debra Magpie Earling
Room 3501AB, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 3
Saturday, February 10, 2024
10:35 — 11:50 AM
Authors read and discuss new works that reimagine significant experiences in American history—narratives previously dominated by non-Indigenous writers. Debra Magpie Earling paints a more authentic portrait of iconic figure Sacajewea in The Lost Journals of Sacajewea; Mona Susan Power explores the devastating Indian Boarding School experiences of her family in A Council of Dolls; LeAnne Howe recounts the tale of her grandmother’s survival of a pandemic in her poetry collection 1918.
Ten Years of APBF: African Women Poets in the US and Their Publication Journeys featuring Yalie Saweda Kamara
Room 2102A, Kansas City Convention Center, Street Level
Saturday, February 10, 2024
12:10 — 1:25 PM
This year, the African Poetry Book Fund celebrates ten years of promoting and advancing the development and publication of the poetic arts of Africa. Women poets from Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Uganda will discuss their individual paths to publication and the unique challenges, lessons, and best practices they encountered. They will also discuss the influence of the African Poetry Book Fund on their careers and the promotion African poetry throughout the world.
Sight Singing: Poetry and the Visual featuring Chris Santiago
Room 2103A, Kansas City Convention Center, Street Level
Saturday, February 10, 2024
1:45 — 3:00 PM
This panel explores the intersections between language and visual art through the lens of visual poetry. Our panelists will engage with questions about the role of design, typography, poetic images, so-called white- or negative space, and how visual elements can expand our understanding of poetic meaning. We will examine a range of visual poetry forms, including concrete poetry, collages, and multimedia works, to showcase the playfully diverse ways poets blend text and image to create meaning.
Giving Place a Voice: Persona as a Tool for Redefining a City featuring Jake Skeets
Room 2105, Kansas City Convention Center, Street Level
Saturday, February 10, 2024
1:45 — 3:00 PM
Place based writing has a long tradition in poetry; it also has considerable ethical concerns. What does it mean to claim a city as your own? When we write about location, what narratives are we creating or reinforcing? This discussion explores the archival nature of place-based writing while examining the impact of personifying place. What possibilities emerge when place becomes person? When land is given autonomy, what do we learn about it’s values, culture, and residents?
Lightning Readings by Writer to Writer Alumni featuring Claire Wahmanholm
Bookfair Stage, AWP Bookfair, Exhibit Halls D & E, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 3
Saturday, February 10, 2024
1:45 — 3:00 PM
Celebrating its fourth year at AWP, the event focuses on quick reads performed by published writers from the AWP Writer to Writer Mentorship Program. We invite you to enjoy a mix of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from these talented writers. Organized and emceed by alum P.D. Keenen.
