Join Milkweed Editions in booths 1424 & 1426 for
author signings, books and tote bags on sale, giveaways, and more!
SIGNINGS
Dan Beachy-Quick Thursday, 3:00–3:45
Chris Dombrowski Thursday, 3:00–3:45
Alex Lemon Friday, 10:00–10:45
Ada Limón Friday, 11:00–11:45
Analicia Sotelo* Friday, 12:00–12:30
*winner of the Jake Adam York Prize
Martha Collins Friday, 12:30–1:00
Mike Bazzett** Friday, 1:00–1:30
**winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry
William Brewer*** Friday, 1:30–2:15
***winner of the National Poetry Series
Joni Tevis Friday, 3:00–3:30
Fady Joudah Friday, 4:30–5:00
Karen Anderson Saturday, 11:00–11:30
Analicia Sotelo* Saturday, 2:00–2:45
NAVIGATING UNCERTAIN TERRAIN: ESSAYISTS OF MILKWEED EDITIONS
(R227) Thursday, 1:30–2:45 • Room 20 & 21, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Featuring Dan Beachy-Quick, Alex Lemon, Joni Tevis, Chris Dombrowski, Elizabeth Rush.) How do writers use the genres of memoir, personal or lyric essay, and literary nonfiction during times of political, social, ecological, and personal uncertainty? How do they use a form’s facility to include, connect, veer, and go astray to encompass curiosity and apprehension, chaos and clarity, disaster and hope? Five vastly different writers demonstrate how uncertain terrain can lead to unexpected beauty, electric possibility, and some of the most exciting writing within the field today.
A MILKWEED EDITIONS POETRY READING
(F263) Friday, 3:00–4:15 • Room 18 & 19, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Featuring Fady Joudah, Analicia Sotelo, Martha Collins, David Keplinger, Michael Bazzett.) Five award-winning debut and established poets read from new work and translations published by Milkweed Editions. These are poets working from a range of experiences, geographies, and styles, but what unites them is that they are all poets set on speaking out: about the body, inside and out; against “virgin” and “naïve” as insult; about mapping cities known and unknown and the slow burn of time passing, about ecological disaster and other horrors, personal and shared.
WHY INDIE PRESSES ARE OPENING BOOKSTORES
(S263) Saturday, 4:30–5:45 • Grand Salon A, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
(Featuring Sally Bradshaw, Betsy Teter, Daniel Slager, Victor Giron.) An increasing number of independent presses are going into the retail book business, morphing into full-service community hubs for book browsing and expanded literary programming. Some see retail floor space as an opportunity to bring more customers and supporters to their front doors. Others see it as an important source of income. This panel, with representatives of three thriving presses, will examine how they did it, whether it’s working, what they hope to achieve, and what they've learned.
POETRY & THE BODY
READING & PARTY
Friday, March 9
Demmi’s Market on 7th
1816 E 7th Ave, Tampa 33605
Four poets—Ada Limón, Analicia Sotelo, Ashley M. Jones, and Molly McCully Brown—turn the political personal in poetry that channels anger, protest, and perseverance. Presented by Milkweed Editions, Hub City Press, Orion Magazine, Oxford American, and Guernica Magazine.
7:30 p.m. doors
8:00 p.m. reading
8:30 p.m. party!
Visit Milkweed’s booth (1424–1426) to get discounted books, signed books, and special deals:
Buy 4 books, get a tote bag free!*
Buy 2 books, get our first-ever Poetry Sampler free!*
The Poetry Sampler features excerpts from our 2018 poetry list, including new work from Ada Limón, Max Ritvo, and Jos Charles; the first English verse translation of The Popul Vuh, the Mayan creation epic, translated by Michael Bazzett; and more! Only available at AWP.
*While supplies last.
Everyday Magic, Community as Protagonist, and Other Narrative Strategies from the Rest of the World
(R125) Thursday, 9:00 am – 10:15 am • Room 12, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Tracey Baptiste, Susan Power, Tony Eprile.) The Western world’s approach to fiction is predominantly a Hamlet-like exploration of the individual psyche as if that psyche is isolated from the surrounding culture, an approach so frequently seen as to have become the default assumption that this is what literature has to be. This panel explores how alternative conceptions and storytelling modes—such as how community makes us who we are, or "magical events" as an everyday reality—informs the work of writers from other cultures.
Writing/Motherhood: Difficulty, Ambivalence, and Joy
(R132) Thursday, 9:00 am – 10:15 am • Room 20 & 21, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Nancy Reddy, Chanda Feldman, Carolina Ebeid, Emily Perez, Chelsea Rathburn.) The fear of a “bad poem with a baby in it,” as Joy Katz puts it, is just one of the challenges of writing about mothering. There’s also the practical difficulties of writing while raising children. The poets on this panel speak back to cultural narratives about motherhood and writing, which often position motherhood as an all-consuming, joyous state at odds with art-making. Panelists will read poems and share ideas and experiences about navigating the intense work of writing and mothering.
From the Stanza to the Paragraph: Poets Who Write Prose
(R173) Thursday, 12:00 pm – 1:15 pm • Florida Salon 4, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
(Jill Bialosky, Gregory Anthony Pardlo, Harriet Millan, Marilyn Chin, Joy Harjo.) Why do poets turn to writing prose? What can a poem say that prose cannot and vice versa? Is the reason one chooses to write in one genre over the other about audience? About subject matter? What steps or process does a writer take to move from poetry to prose? How does being a poet impact one’s prose style? This panel will explore these questions and others. Five panelists will offer words of caution, success, and despair learned from their journeys in writing in more than one form.
Memoir as an Agent of Social Change
(R197) Thursday, 12:00 pm – 1:15 pm • Room 24, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Connie May Fowler, Alice Anderson, Joy Castro, Sue William Silverman, Parneshia Jones.) In both root and blossom, memoir has always served as an agent of social change. James Baldwin’s nonfiction, for example, resonates with calls for societal transmutation. Our panelists work in the same tradition, exploring addiction, child abuse, climate change, disability, domestic violence, gender, the industrial prison complex, misogyny, racism, and more. We’ll examine the necessity and transformative power of writing our truths through a personal lens.
Persona of the Personal: A Reading and Roundtable
(R179) Thursday, 12:00 pm – 1:15 pm • Ballroom A, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(David Welch, Ada Limón, Jaswinder Bolina, Hannah Pittard, Barrie Jean Borich.) How do memoirists maneuver masks to represent the real world? When do novelists invoke their own lives through their characters? How do poets vary the voices of their speakers for personal ends? Join a memoirist, a novelist, and two poets as they read and discuss the use of persona in their work. As each panelist also mentors other writers, the resulting conversation will explore the experiences of approaching persona as a teacher, reader, and writer inside as well as outside of the workshop.
Poets of Color Read Poetry on Parenting
(R206) Thursday, 1:30 pm – 2:45 pm • Florida Salon 5, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
(Hayes Davis, Teri Davis, Juliet Howard, Jon Pineda, Victoria Chang.) Hear poetry that navigates the ins and outs of race, gender, ethnicity, and religion all from poets who are also parents, juggling identities, professional careers, and raising children of color in an increasingly complicated world.
Superconductors: Poets & Essayists Channeling Science
(R261) Thursday, 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm • Room 24, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(William Stobb, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Michael Branch, Kimiko Hahn, Anna Leahy.) A generation of science writers emerged before fake news and overcame false divisions between scientific and creative inquiry. For these writers, the Voyager images, climatology, the human genome project, string theory, and other scientific ideas are part of the artistic palette, fully integrated with the stretch of literary imagination. Five leading essayists and poets forge connections between science and the literary arts.
Living, Reading, and Writing the Multilingual Poem
(R239) Thursday, 3:00 pm – 4:15 pm • Florida Salon 6, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
(Amanda Galvan Huynh, Mai Der Vang, Luisa Igloria, Hari Alluri, Chris Santiago.) As multilingual poets proliferate, so does the need for a new form of expression. In turn, such poems create new reading and writing communities, and require us to reexamine practices of incorporating non-English words into English text. This panel brings together poets who work with Hmong, Vietnamese, Spanish, Tagalog, and Hindi to discuss challenges: incorporating a second language, reading, audience, and the future of such poems in the literary and publishing community.
Into English: The Case for Multiple Translations
(R288) Thursday, 4:30 pm – 5:45 pm • Room 18 & 19, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Kevin Prufer, Cole Swensen, Ellen Doré Watson, Danielle Georges.) To mark the publication of Into English (Graywolf Press), an anthology of multiple translations and accompanying essays on the art of translation, three panelists and a moderator will discuss the intricacies of literary translation and the value of considering multiple translations—that is, parallel translations of the same poems by different translators. This panel brings together experienced translators of French, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, and German.
The Literary Twitterati, Sponsored by WITS
(R286) Thursday, 4:30 pm – 5:45 pm • Room 16, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Analicia Sotelo, Dorothea Lasky, Ruben Quesada, Kaveh Akbar, Eve Ewing.) Meet some of the most important minds in the Twitterverse as they share experiences as literary citizens in 140 characters or less. Whether advocating for increased visibility or enjamb-ing your horoscope, these panelists will talk about their approach to digital communication and how you can create a platform of your own.
Side-Hustle Publishing: Sustaining a Small Press in Austere Times
(F135) Friday, 9:00 am – 10:15 am • Room 24, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Steve Halle, Laura Cesarco Eglin, Adam Clay, Sarah Gzemski, Ellen Kombiyil.) How do small presses confront issues of sustainability in an era when available resources like funding, time, energy, and people power for literary publishing are spread thinner than ever? Representatives from The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, co•im•press, Noemi Press, Shelterbelt Press, and Veliz Books focus on practical lessons they’ve learned along the way, including critical decisions and essential techniques for building a thriving, community-driven organization with limited means.
(F204) Friday, 1:30 pm – 2:45 pm • Grand Salon D, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
(Allen Gee, Adrienne Su, Laurie Clements Lambeth, Sean Hill, Edward Skoog.) In 2016, the writing world lost Claire Kageyma-Ramakrishnan and Derick Burleson. They had each earned their doctorates at the University of Houston, and they were each poets and professors in the prime of their careers, Claire only 47, Derick just 53. Their absence is not easy to bear; our diverse panel will pay tribute to them for their friendship, their teaching, and their writing, and we hope everyone who knew them will gather with us to contribute as many remembrances as time allows.
"The Dividing Line": Blending Research In Personal Narratives
(F224) Friday, 1:30 pm – 2:45 pm • Room 13, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Jon Pineda, Joni Tevis, Greg Bottoms, Colin Rafferty.) This panel will gather together creative nonfiction writers who mix various types of research into their personal narratives. Inherent in their creative process is a burgeoning integration of both the shared and the personal. The panel’s discussion will focus on the way each writer approaches this “dividing line,” the space between the material that comes forward through extensive research and the material pulled from the writer’s unaided memory.
Four Way Books 25th Anniversary Reading
(F227) Friday, 1:30 pm – 2:45 pm • Room 16, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Kevin (Mc) McIlvoy, Aaron Coleman, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Kevin Prufer, Valerie Wallace.) Celebrating our 25th anniversary in 2018, Four Way Books presents five writers from around the country reading from recent work. Since its founding, Four Way Books has been revered for its commitment to showcasing a wide range of poetry and short fiction by debut and established writers. From the elegant lyric to the disruptive narrative, in gritty portrayals of the interior to near-apocalyptic visions, this celebratory reading offers new writing across genres and aesthetic divides.
Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! The Unconventional Writing Career, Sponsored by WITS
(F225) Friday, 1:30 pm – 2:45 pm • Room 14, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Michele Kotler, Martin Rock, Abby Travis, Thomas Calder, Giuseppe Taurino.) While the tenure-track teaching job is often the dream of creative writers, the academic market has become increasingly competitive, calling for much more than an MFA or a PhD. Here are exciting careers you can build outside of the ivory tower, where your mastery of language and critical thinking skills can make a real difference in communities. From the creative to the nonprofit sectors, listen in as our panelists share how you can craft a meaningful living.
Poets Teaching Poets: Literary Mentorship and the Creative Life
(F246) Friday, 3:00 pm – 4:15 pm • Ballroom A, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Melissa Hammerle, Kathleen Graber, Malena Mörling, Danielle Legros Georges, Matthew Dickman.) Our greatest teachers are those who attend, with exquisite care, to our deepest creative impulses. They show us a path into our writing with an understanding that shapes us profoundly, as writers and as teachers. In this panel, we will reflect on our own mentors, including Stephen Dunn, Lorna Goodison, Galway Kinnell, Dorianne Laux, Philip Levine, and Jean Valentine, while considering what constitutes meaningful literary mentorship in the academy and in our broader writing communities.
Pitching, Publishing, and Promoting Reviews: A How-To Conversation
(F295) Friday, 4:30 pm – 5:45 pm • Room 20 & 21, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Alyse Bensel, Kristina Marie Darling, Dan Beachy-Quick, Jennifer Schomburg Kanke.) Although writers are inundated with advice on how to submit their creative work, they often struggle with how to pitch, write, and publish book reviews. This panel of successful reviewers and editors will demystify the reviewing process, offering advice and strategies for pitching reviews, writing reviews in a range of formats (essay, single, PW-style), and working with journals to connect with publications, presses, and writers to expand potential contact networks.
Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence in the U.S.
(F292) Friday, 4:30 pm – 5:45 pm • Room 16, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Alexandra Teague, Matthew Olzmann, Dana Levin, Wayne Miller, Brian Clements.) In this reading from the new anthology Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence in the U.S. (Beacon, December 2017)—the first to gather contemporary poets writing about gun violence, along with responses from gun-violence-prevention advocates and victims—five poets will share work from the anthology. The panelists will also show brief video clips of their poems’ accompanying responses, and answer questions about the role of poetry in this pressing social conversation.
Donald Justice: An Appreciation
(F289) Friday, 4:30 pm – 5:45 pm • Room 13, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Eric Pankey, Jerry Harp, Carol Frost, David Koehn.) A panel of Donald Justice's former students from both the University of Iowa and the University of Florida will discuss his reputation as a poet, as an expert on poetic form, and as an innovated teacher. Justice has been described by the Poetry Foundation as "one of the twentieth century's most quietly influential poets." The panel will investigate and illuminate his ongoing posthumous influence.
Bridging Campus and Community: Approaches to University-Community Writing Programs
(S130) Saturday, 9:00 am – 10:15 am • Room 20 & 21, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Nancy Reddy, Emari DiGiorgio, Jan Beatty, Dora Malech, Erika Jo Brown.) Universities are rich in resources that support writing—not just money, but space, human capital, the ability to generate publicity—but these resources are often used to support writers who already have the privilege of academic affiliation. Panelists representing a range of programs, including community workshops, an emerging writers conference, and partnerships with underserved communities, describe ways writers inside academia can leverage resources to support writers beyond their campus.
Free and Constrained: Writing, Translating, and the Creative Process, Sponsored by ALTA
(S159) Saturday, 10:30 am – 11:45 am • Room 15, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Don Bogen, Geoffrey Brock, Martha Collins, Mira Rosenthal.) While poets writing and revising their own work can be relatively free, poets translating face the constraint of the original. What's carried over from the struggle with a poem in another language to the struggle with a draft or the blank page? Four poet-translators discuss how their creative processes differ in each mode and what each offers the other.
Beyond the Margins: Expanding a Book Review Section
(S145) Saturday, 10:30 am – 11:45 am • Meeting Room 4, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
(Richie Hofmann, Shauna Osborn, Adam Clay, Rochelle Hurt.) What is the role of the book review in 2018? How can lit mags help to raise the discourse of reviewing? How does a reviewer successfully transition from the specifics of one book to a broader dialogue? How can we better support books by people of color, people who are queer, trans, living with disabilities, and authors at the intersection of these identities? Editors gather to discuss the challenges of expanding a book review section, and what it takes to edit and publish a vibrant review.
The Worst Writing Advice I Ever Got
(S180) Saturday, 12:00 pm – 1:15 pm • Ballroom C, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Melissa Stein, Mark Doty, Chris Abani, Ada Limón, Hannah Tinti.) Bad advice: it’s all over the place. Five intrepid prose writers and poets dish up counterproductive counsel offered by teachers, by friends and family, by other writers, by naysayers and ambition-squashers and status-quo-preservers everywhere (sometimes even in our own heads). We’ll explore how we develop resilience and courage and confidence and voice as writers and, along the way, may just sneak in a wealth of eminently useful, real-world advice.
The Glories of Impossible Translations: International Perspectives on Creative Process
(S196) Saturday, 12:00 pm – 1:15 pm • Room 23, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Helene Cardona, Sidney Wade, Hilary Kaplan, Willis Barnstone, Christopher Merrill.) Is it cliché to say that translation is impossible? Can one ever truly translate the likes of Sappho, Lorca, or Baudelaire with their sophistication, cleverness, and verbal music? Working with Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Hebrew, Greek, French, Spanish, and Turkish, this panel’s poets, translators, and scholars discuss their roles as intermediaries, technicians, and alchemists dancing between languages to create inspired texts spanning cultural differences, geographic distances, and time.
Draining the Swamp: The Future of Environmental Writing on a Changing Planet
(S221) Saturday, 1:30 pm – 2:45 pm • Room 13, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Taylor Brorby, Nick Neely, Alison Deming, Joe Wilkins, Rose McLarney.) This panel explores environmental creative writing in the midst of radical political and climatic change. If stories help us imagine alternatives to how we live, then inspired and strategic writing is our best hope to keep this planet alive and healthy. These five cross-genre writers will discuss environmental writing’s Transcendental roots, its strides towards greater inclusiveness, and where it must go now given rising tides, species loss, and overall environmental injustice and instability.
How Creative Writers Can Work with Archivists: A Crash Course in Cooperation
(S217) Saturday, 1:30 pm – 2:45 pm • Room 5 & 6, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Pamela Pierce, Erin Wahl, Jennifer Sinor, Sean Hill, Jeff Gundy.) This panel provides concrete suggestions for how writers can work effectively with archivists. Writers from three genres will share how they made their research experiences successful and the variety of approaches they took with primary sources. Creative writing from primary materials can also result in archivists going along for the journey. Librarians from two different institutions will contribute their own experiences working with writers, highlighting both physical and digital archives.
Reports from the Field: Recent Candidates Discuss the Academic Job Hunt
(S201) Saturday, 1:30 pm – 2:45 pm • Grand Salon B, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
(Stephanie Devine, Ryan Habermeyer, Nick White, Sara Eliza Johnson, LaTanya McQueen.) Five candidates: two with tenure-track jobs, one with a term position, one pursuing a fellowship, and one on the market for the first time, relay their unique experiences navigating the academic job market. This panel offers advice covering all stages of the job search. We discuss missteps made, the potential problems marginalized candidates face, the decisions that went into the positions chosen, and what we wish we'd known before we began.
Women for Women—Building Community Through Mentorship
(S239) Saturday, 3:00 pm – 4:15 pm • Florida Salon 6, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
(Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Parneshia Jones, Patricia Smith, Cynthia Dewi Oka, Ellen Hagan.) Friendships with fellow women writers are essential. They are balm and salve, they mend and protect, they channel and calm. Northwestern University Press gathers its powerhouse of women writers for a reading and celebration. This multigenerational, multicultural collective of poets is dedicated to building a thriving and diverse range of voices that act as a buoy for one another, lifting and encouraging both craft and community as they rise up together.
Horizon on Fire: The Poet as Journalist Here and Abroad
(S245) Saturday, 3:00 pm – 4:15 pm • Ballroom D, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
(Jeffrey Brown, Christopher Merrill, Tom Sleigh, Eliza Griswold.) This will be a panel presentation/discussion/reading that will explore and exemplify the ethics and aesthetics which effect poets who are also journalists. The panel members represent print and broadcast media. They will talk about how a TV news story or a piece of journalistic writing can end up being transformed into a poem—or vice versa. The panel will also talk about how ethical and artistic demands on writers are altered in an era in which facts are routinely ignored in favor of ideology.
Midway through the journey of his life, Dan Beachy-Quick found himself without a path, unsure how to live well. This collection of essays, fragments, marginalia, images, travel writing, and poetry follows him through the result: a classical...
Love poems to the lovely and unlovely, the loved and unloved, finding tenderness for the other, the dead, and the disappeared. This is a collection that translates between the heart and the mind, the flesh and the more-than-flesh, the word ...
This masterful companion to Day Unto Day finds common ground between contradictions—beauty and horror, joy and mortality, the personal and the political. Like its predecessor, this collection begins with time: six sequences, each written...
This collection deftly spans not only the physical space of global cities, but more intangible and intimate distances: between birth and death, father and son, past and present, metaphor and reality. From experiences defined by an urban landscape...
The Trakl siblings were gifted and troubled: Georg a poet, Grete a pianist, and both gone at a young age. Inspired by their mysterious and intense relationship, the winner of the 2017 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry is a keening...
The author was in the Bahamas, pursuing bonefish—one of the world’s most elusive creatures—when he had a life-changing encounter with David Pinder, a legendary bonefishing guide. Here he tells Pinder’s story, as well as that of an ecology, of an...
Growing up on his family’s land in South Carolina, the author fell in love with the subtle beauties of the natural world around him—and grew up to be one of the lone black men in a predominantly white field. This memoir is a riveting exploration...
Tormented by the loss of his wife, department store window-dresser Colton Kemp decides to raise his newborn twins in secrecy and isolation, to become human mannequins. “A book that makes grand promises and delivers” (New York Times), ...
Bringing together a wide range of perspectives—industry veterans and provocateurs, writers, editors, and digital mavericks—this collection reflects on the current situation of literary publishing, and provides a road map for the shifting...