Join Milkweed Editions in booths 3012 & 3014 for
author signings, books and tote bags on sale, giveaways, and more!
SIGNINGS
John McCarthy Thursday, 12:30–1:30
Don Bogen Thursday, 2:00–3:00
Ed Pavlić Thursday, 3:00–4:00
Grady Chambers Thursday, 4:00–5:00
Claire Wahmanholm Friday, 10:00–11:00
Alex Lemon Friday, 11:30–12:30
Karen Babine Friday, 12:30–1:30
Jos Charles Friday, 3:00–4:00
Ada Limón* Friday, 4:00–5:00
Jake Skeets* Saturday, 1:00–2:00
*signing includes broadside giveaway
A Reading and Conversation with Kaveh Akbar, Jos Charles, and Fady Joudah
(F244) Friday, 1:30 – 2:45 ~ Room 201 & 202, Oregon Ballroom, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2
(Featuring Jos Charles, Fady Joudah, Kaveh Akbar, Victoria Chang) Three award-winning poets sharing their most recent work: In Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance, Fady Joudah finds tenderness for the other, the dead, and the disappeared. In feeld, Jos Charles offers a lyrical unraveling of the circuity of gender and speech. In Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Kaveh Akbar confronts addiction and the strenuous path of recovery, beginning with the wilds of the mind. Introduced and moderated by Victoria Chang. Sponsored by Milkweed Editions and Alice James Books.
HEY LOVE, LET’S HANG
Saturday, March 30
Drinks at 8 p.m. • Dance at 10 p.m.
Hey Love, 920 E Burnside St. • Portland, OR 97214
Join Milkweed Editions and Hub City at the grooviest joint walking distance from the conference center. No readings, just jams. Featuring Portland’s favorite JD Bad Wizard & her vintage tunes. Space is limited, but our hearts are not. All are welcome!
RSVP on Paperless Post or on Facebook!
Visit Milkweed’s booth (3012 & 3014) to get discounted books, signed books, and special deals:
Buy 4 books, get a tote bag free!*
*While supplies last.
(R176) Thursday, 10:30 – 11:45 ~ Portland Ballroom 252, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2 (Featuring Dolores Hayden, Marilyn Nelson, Frank X Walker, Martha Collins, Martin Espada) In recent years, many poets have turned to history as the inspiration for book-length projects. How does the poet’s craft encompass the historian’s? Panelists explore strategies for choosing a resonant subject and interpreting another era using documents, maps, landscapes, and photographs. Do historical characters and events broaden the audience for poetry? Are there different readers for poetry, historical fiction, documentary films, and narrative history or do they overlap?
Translation as the Art of Reincarnation: World Perspectives on Creative Process
(R156) Thursday, 10:30 – 11:45 ~ Room C123, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1 (Featuring Helene Cardona, Sidney Wade, Christopher Merrill, Willis Barnstone, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs) How do you find and give a new voice to a poem in a different language, infusing other cultures into your own experience? Working with Hebrew, Greek, French, Korean, Slovenian, 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.
(R185) Thursday, 12:00 – 1:15 ~ Room B110-112, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1 (Featuring Kate Hopper, Alex Lemon, Marsha Partington, Adriana Páramo, Bonnie J. Rough) Writing the body can track and reveal narratives of health and illness, ground a narrator in place and time, and allow for examination of gender and identity. We discuss these three anchor points, share the ways our writing and living bodies have shaped our work, and consider the problems and opportunities of writing other bodies (aside from the self). We will also offer exercises for grounding writing in the body and discuss how this work can be a political act.
A Reading with Maxine Hong Kingston, Marilyn Chin, and Carmen Gimenez Smith, Sponsored by Kundiman
(R209) Thursday, 12:00 – 1:15 ~ Oregon Ballroom 201-202, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2 (Featuring Maxine Hong Kingston, Marilyn Chin, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Deborah Paredez) Three prominent and essential writers take the stage to give readings of their work. A discussion follows on a variety of topics, ranging from craft to practice to activism, as we celebrate and further a discussion of Asian American and Latinx identity and solidarity. This event is moderated by CantoMundo cofounder Deborah Paredez.
What is Found in Nature: On Writing Wilderness and Other Ecological Essays
(R310) Thursday, 4:30 – 5:45 ~ Room E147-148, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1 (Featuring Allen Geé, Renata Golden, Joseph Lanham, Valerie Wayson, Sean Hill) Fish, birds, insects, flowers, trees, four-legged mammals, the weather, rock formations, snakes, minerals, bodies of water, rare or endangered species, other humans – this panel discusses how we’ve written about what we’ve encountered by chance outdoors, or how we’ve expounded upon what appeared suddenly before us, or what was gradually revealed. We include our organizational strategies for essays, and how we see greater thematic connections being made in essays by our favorite writers.
Personal, Political, Provocative: Celebrating 45 Years of The Sun
(R307) Thursday, 4:30 – 5:45 ~ Room E143-144, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1 (Featuring Sy Safransky, David James Duncan, Danusha Lameris, Susan Straight, John Brehm) January 2019 marks the forty-fifth anniversary of The Sun, a reader-supported, ad-free magazine. Each monthly issue features radically intimate and socially conscious writing that touches anyone with an open heart and a curious mind. To celebrate The Sun’s anniversary, these founder and editor join four contributors for a reading of work from the magazine.
Dear America: A Terrain.org Reading in Response to a Changing Landscape
(F122) Friday, 9:00 - 10:15 ~ Room C123, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1 (Featuring Derek Sheffield, Victoria Chang, Joe Wilkins, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Blas Falconer) Two weeks after the 2016 presidential election, Terrian.org began Its Letter to America series. This reading features some of the letters, poems, and more than the 170+ that have so far appeared in a series that presents a diverse literature of resistance and answer the call articulated in Alison Hawthorne Deming’s cris de coeur: “Be artful, inventive, and just, my friends, but do not be silent.”
(F149) Friday, 10:30 – 11:45 ~ Room B110-112, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1 (Featuring Sophia Starmack, Ari Banias, Ada Limón, Sam Ross) The Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary with a reading by former Fellows Ari Banias, Nick Flynn, Ada Limón, and Sam Ross, all of whom came to the Work Center before the publication of their first books. They’ll also share memories of their seven months in Provincetown and discuss the impact residencies and fellowships have had on the crucial early stages of their writing careers.
Reinventing the Wheel: The Tradition of Innovation in Poetry
(F177A) Friday, 10:30 – 11:45 ~ Portland Ballroom 256, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2 (Featuring Kazim Ali, Jenny Johnson, Traci Brimhall, Vandana Khanna, Blas Flaconer) Sidney famously writes, “And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way” (“Astrophel and Stella”). However, one would only need to read Homer, Virgil, and Dante, the letters between Wordsworth and Coleridge or Moore and Bishop, to recognize the long tradition of poets mentoring and inspiring other poets. The poets will challenge the notion that tradition and innovation are at odds by revealing how specific poems influenced them and led them to better understand different poetic elements.
That Which Makes Us: New Poetry From Copper Canyon Press
(F176) Friday, 10:30 – 11:45 ~ Portland Ballroom 255, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2 (Featuring Laura Buccieri, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Bob Hicok, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Arthur Sze) Join Copper Canyon Press to celebrate highly anticipated new and recent releases, with a reading by four of the most powerful voices in contemporary poetry. Addressing urgencies and heartbreaks of our time—gun violence, environmental degradation, institutionalized racism, culture pulled across borders—each author turns and returns through poetry to that which makes us human: desire, love, forgiveness.
A Poem for Our Time: Poets Nominate the Poems We Need in 2019 – and Beyond
(F213) Friday, 12:00 – 1:15 ~ Portland Ballroom 255, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2 (Featuring Nan Cohen, Ada Limón, David St. John, Major Jackson, Mathew Zapruder) Established poets from the faculty of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference each select and discuss a poem, either their own or the work of a poet they admire, that speaks to a contemporary issue of their choosing. Matters of political leadership, the environment, the state of arts, identity, and other concerns are all on the table for this careful examination of the role of poetry in these critical times.
Poetics of Oblique Violence
(F198) Friday, 12:00 – 1:15 ~ Room D139-140, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1 (Featuring Nomi Stone, Sumita Chakraborty, Sara Eliza Johnson, Paige Lewis, Roy Guzman) Of violence, Toni Morrison writes: “wanting to is doing it.” This panel responds to Morrison’s provocation by exploring the poetics of oblique violence. When a poem’s speaker hints at violence, rehearses destruction in their imagination, nests allusions to brutal acts, articulates a desire to cause pain through fictional or historical conceits, or utters dreams of mayhem in the most ambiguous terms – do these more ambivalent articulations imply desire? And, if so: is wanting to a way of doing it?
New Poetic Visions of the West
(F236) Friday, 1:30 – 2:45 ~ Room E143-144, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1 (Featuring Alyse Knorr, Kate Partridge, Sean Hill, Lee Ann Roripaugh, Olena Kalytiak Davis) Western landscapes have featured prominently in the American nature writing canon for the last 200 years. But what role can perspective play in re-envisioning poetry about the West? Using techniques from queer theory, ecopoetry, and cinema studies, these poets present historic and contemporary visions of the West that defy convention and upset tradition. Panelists will discuss how they explore themes of immigration, identity, language, and intimacy in their poems set in the West.
I Keep My Eyes Open and Have to See: The Poetry of Laura Jensen
(F290) Friday, 4:30 – 5:45 ~ Room A105, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1 (Featuring Molly Spencer, Marianne Boruch, Kevin Prufer, Miguel Murphy, Sharon Bryan) “I keep my eyes open and have to see / if something is terribly wrong here,” writes Laura Jensen in “The Creature from the Black Lagoon.” Jensen’s plain-spoken, psychologically dense poetry is a poetry of perception, liminality, wonder, terror, dallness, unpredictability, surrealism, and interiors literal and figurative. Join five poets as they discuss the singularity of Jensen’s voice, her place in the poetry of the late 20th century, and why her work deserves a wider audience today.
Challenging Tokenization: Writers of Color Respond
(S138) Saturday, 9:00 – 10:15 ~ Room F151, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1 (Featuring Analicia Sotelo, Chris Santiago, Janine Joseph, Tiphanie Yanique, Leslie Sainz) Writers from underrepresented communities often face societal pressure to share stories centered around cultural identity and immigration. These panelists trouble the institutional expectations of narratives written by people of color and share their experiences challenging tokenization while sustaining a healthy writing life.
A Job of One’s Own: How to Create a Professional Life That Works for You
(S138) Saturday, 9:00 – 10:15 ~ Portland Ballroom 251, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2 (Featuring Meggie Monahan, Natalia Sylvester, Ramiza Kaya, Nancy Reddy, Becca Wadlinger) While many writers are trained for a tenure-track university position, the academic market has become extremely competitive, requiring more than an MFA or a PhD. Here are some incredible careers you can create for your future, where your expertise with creative and critical thinking will make an impact. Panelists discuss how they arrived in their industries how you can adapt your creative skills to craft a meaningful professional career and sustained writing life.
(S149) Saturday, 10:30 – 11:45 ~ B114, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1 (Featuring Jake Skeets, Michaelsun Stonesweat Knapp, Joaquin Zihuatanejo, Arianne True, Angela C. Trudell Vasquez) This reading by recent alumni of the Institute of American Indian Arts is a gathering of emerging poetic voices who all identify as Indigenous. Varied in age, gender identity, and sexual orientation this reading promises to be as diverse as it is enthralling. These poets who come from all parts of the country have committed themselves to the act of rewriting the literary landscape by proving that indigenous poetics is both vital and vibrant.
Contemporary Poems and Their Making
(S187) Saturday, 12:00 – 1:15 ~ Room B117-119, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1 (Featuring Elise Paschen, Kevin Prufer, Kimiko Hahn, Randall Mann, Gabriel Fried) This reading features a selection of contributors to The Eloquent Poem, a new anthology arranged by poetic mode in which writers discuss the crafting of their included poems. These renowned poets read exemplars of an array of approaches – including the prose poem, the list poem, ars poetica, collage, ekphrasis, to name a few – and then discuss their poems’ genesis, offering insight into not only their writing but entire subspecies of poetry.
(S189) Saturday, 12:00 – 1:15 ~ C124, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1 (Featuring Caits Meissner, Randall Horton, Clint Smith, Jeannie Thompson, Joshua Bennett) Reaching beyond the often-discussed value and how-to of writing programs in prisons, this PEN America panel seeks to challenge personal motivations, institutional practices, and the use of rhetorical language that can inadvertently perpetuate a culture of stigma and separation. Panelists representing a range of lived, creative, organizational and policy perspectives will discuss how to collaborate more ethically, equitably and inventively with work coming out of the prison environment.
Fifty Years of FIELD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
(S217) Saturday, 1:30 – 2:45 ~ Room B115, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1 (Featuring David Walker, David Young, Stuart Friebert, Martha Collins, Kazim Ali) Since 1969, FIELD Magazine has been known as one of the country’s leading journals of contemporary poetry and poetics. In 2019, FIELD will publish its 100th and final issue. This panel, featuring two founding editors and three later additions, will discuss the magazine’s history and values, including its annual symposium of essays on the work of a major poet, its commitment to translation, and its openness to a wide variety of voices, both established and emerging.
Poetry and the Body: Writing the Corporeal
(S252) Saturday, 3:00 – 4:15 ~ Room B116, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1 (Featuring Peter Joseph Gloviczki, Alex Lemon, Kelly Davio) In this poetry craft and criticism panel, we aim to have a meaningful dialogue about how the corporeal and related elements enter into our creative processes and how they also inform the delivery of our work in public settings. Drawing from history, memory, and geography, we aim to more fully place the corporeal among the elements that guide our work. We hope poets in the audience will be inspired to consider how the corporeal informs their own creation, forms, content, and delivery.
Glitter! Legos! Origami—Oh My! Artistic Play in the Creative Writing Classroom
(S251) Saturday, 3:00 – 4:15 pm ~ B115, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1 (Featuring Alison Pelegrin, Traci Brimhall, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Oliver Bendorf, Brynn Salto) How can teachers integrate artistic play to foster a sense of experimentation? How can experiments that seem like crafts and games short-circuit the fear of risk, encourage play instead, and push student writers to reach beyond the walls of the classroom into a larger community of writers? How can teachers inspire students to take ownership of their learning experiences through hands-on work that feels like play? Do scented markers and glitter really help to get ideas to the page?
Translating Others, Translating Ourselves: Creative Writers as Translators
(S295) Saturday, 4:30 – 5:45 ~ Room D137-138, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1 (Featuring Sharon Dolin, Forrest Gander, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Don Mee-Choi, Malena Mörling) Poets and fiction writers who translate are arguably the most creative of translators and the least self-effacing. Translation is more of a collaboration and re-creation in another tongue, according to Mark Polizzotti in his new book Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto. Five writers who are translators explore how creative the act of translation is, and also whether the work they translate has affected their own creative practice.
Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. This collection shows us the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying...
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 ...
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...
Ants drunk on cherry-red hummingbird nectar. An ambulance rushing into the distance. And rain, endless rain: turning pulpy with sunlight, seemingly on the verge of a flood. These are the moments of an ordinary day—rendered, throughout these poems...
The winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize is an assured debut collection about grace—the places we search for it, and the disjunction between what we seek and where we arrive. In these poems, hinterlands demand our close attention;...
In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished author and playwright, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Max Ritvo was an exuberant, opinionated, and highly gifted poet in remission from pediatric cancer. Studded with poems and songs, their...
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...
When her mother is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, the author—a cook, collector of thrifted vintage cast iron, and fiercely devoted daughter, sister, and aunt—can’t help but wonder: Feed a fever, starve a cold, but what do we do for...
Ndiya Grayson returns to her childhood home of Chicago as a young professional, but even her high-end job in a law office can’t protect her from half-repressed memories of childhood trauma. One evening, vulnerable and emotionally disarrayed, she...
The K’iche’ creation myth of The Popol Vuh is thousands of years old, one of the only epics indigenous to the Americas. By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this verse translation—the first of its kind—breathes new life...
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...
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...
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...
