BOA is thrilled to be back at AWP this year at Booth 1127! Stop by to see us, get an early (and signed) copy of one of our forthcoming spring books and recent backlist, and grab a sticker!
As we prepare, we wanted to share our signing schedule and all of our authors' panels here. AWP will be held from March 23–26, 2022 in Philadelphia, PA in the Pennsylvania Convention Center. More details can be found on AWP's website.
Author Signings at the BOA Booth
Erika Meitner, Useful Junk
Thursday, March 24, 2022, 10:00 am to 10:45 am
Justin Jannise, How to be Better by Being Worse
Thursday, March 24, 2022, 1:00 pm to 1:45 pm
Dustin Pearson, A Season in Hell with Rimbaud
Thursday, March 24, 2022, 3:00 pm to 3:45 pm
Camille Guthrie, Diamonds
Friday, March 25, 2022, 10:00 am to 10:45 am
B. K. Fischer, Ceive
Friday, March 25, 2022, 1:00 pm to 1:45 pm
Danni Quintos, Two Brown Dots
Thursday, March 24, 2022, 3:00 pm to 3:45 pm
Rachel Mennies, The Naomi Letters
Saturday, March 26, 2022, 10:00 am to 10:45 am
Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes, Are We Ever Our Own
Saturday, March 26, 2022, 1:00 pm to 1:45 pm
Renia White, Casual Conversation
Saturday, March 26, 2022, 3:00 pm to 3:45 pm
AWP Panels featuring BOA Authors
Reckoning with Anti-Asian Violence: Reshaping Our Narratives and Communities (Su Cho, Lisa Low, Danni Quintos, Anni Liu) (In person)
Thursday, March 24, 2022, 10:35 am to 11:50 am
121A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
In light of this year’s cultural reckoning with anti-Asian hate, how do we acknowledge both recent violence and longstanding history? How do we move forward in our writing practices and communities? This panel will focus on how we address racism, violence, and stereotypes through poetry and poetics—including lyric essay, ars poetica, and received forms—as a way to examine our indoctrination into racism, unlearn and heal from harmful ideologies, and reteach ourselves and our audiences.
Re-Presenting the Past: Poets Writing the Holocaust Toward a Humane Future (Maya Pindyck, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, Elana Bell, Luisa Muradyan, Alicia Ostriker)
Thursday, March 24, 2022, 12:10pm to 1:25pm
123, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
What can writing poetry about the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust do to address white supremacy? How can Jewish poets—specifically mothers—rewrite a narrative of exceptionalism for future generations while staying true to the particularities of Holocaust trauma? This panel takes up these questions through the voices of five poets, all mothers, whose writing explores intersections of Jewish trauma, inheritance, motherhood, and poetry’s capacities for antiracist work.
The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood (Nancy Reddy, Emily Pérez, Erika Meitner, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Faylita Hicks) (In person)
Thursday, March 24, 2022, 12:10 pm to 1:25 pm
123, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
What can writing poetry about the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust do to address white supremacy? How can Jewish poets—specifically mothers—rewrite a narrative of exceptionalism for future generations while staying true to the particularities of Holocaust trauma? This panel takes up these questions through the voices of five poets, all mothers, whose writing explores intersections of Jewish trauma, inheritance, motherhood, and poetry’s capacities for antiracist work.
The Sentence as Itself: Vivifying Grammar in Writing Classrooms (B. K. Fischer, Camille Guthrie, Emily Suazo, Bronwen Tate, Jared Jackson) (In person)
Thursday, March 24, 2022, 3:20pm to 4:35pm
120AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
Say the word "grammar," and most students flee, but attention to the mechanics of the sentence as a dynamic form can illuminate new possibilities for writers in any genre. Four writer-teachers with experience from grade school to grad school will speak about the generative potential that conversations about grammar and syntax have in their classrooms and their own work. Challenging ideas of “correctness,” they engage students in understanding how grammar underpins voice, vernacular, and expression.
Beyond Representation: Intersections of Poetry and Mental Illness (Sara Eliza Johnson, Sumita Chakraborty, Rachel Mennies, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Aricka Foreman) (Virtual)
Thursday, March 24, 2022, 3:20pm to 4:20pm
The intersection of poetry and mental illness has a problematic history in the cultural imagination, from Blake’s mythologized “madness” to Plath’s romanticized suicide. In recent years this connection has been demystified, illuminating that the lived reality of writing with these disabilities is complex—as is the relationship between one’s conditions and their art. How do mental illnesses consciously and subconsciously impact poetics? This panel convenes five poets to discuss their experiences.
Racially-Conscious Literary Criticism (Erik Gleibermann, Emily Bernard, David Mura, Felicia Rose Chavez)
Thursday, March 24, 2022, 3:20pm to 4:25pm
109AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
Just as astute fiction writers build their racial awareness to portray racial realities outside their own, discerning literary critics can develop such awareness to review books with unfamiliar racial experience. How can critics deepen understanding of an author’s racially informed artistic tradition? Should critics seek editorial guidance to identify potential racial blind spots? This diverse panel brings together critics and creative writers to explore these and other questions.
The Revolution Will Be Serialized: Literary Journals and Political Movements (J A Bernstein, Julia Brown, Katie Edkins Milligan, Dustin Pearson, Gilad Elbom) (In person)
Friday, March 25, 2022, 9:00 am to 10:15 am
115C, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
“The literary history of the thirties,” George Orwell warned in 1940, “seems to justify the opinion that a writer does well to keep out of politics.” Yet eighty years later, most literary journals, like most presses and institutions, have felt the need to confront political realities, including assaults on democracy, police brutality, sexual abuse, and more. Are there risks in embracing these aims? What is the effect on the art they produce? Can journals remain relevant without becoming dogmatic?
Winning Over the Haters: Fostering Student Appreciation for Poetry (Lindsay Tigue, Paisley Rekdal, Chen Chen, Tomás Morín, Jennifer Popa) (In person)
Friday, March 25, 2022, 10:35 am to 11:50 am
113C, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
Time and time again, undergraduates—even those with a self-professed interest in literature—will come to creative writing classes claiming they don’t “get” or care for poetry. How do we engage students in a genre they’re certain they don’t like or understand? On this panel, professors will discuss strategies across a range of university courses detailing how they open students’ minds to poetry and what lessons, prompts, and activities have helped foster a love for poetry among their students.
No F*cks to Give: Women on the Poetics of Sex and Raunch (Kendra DeColo, Dorothy Chan, Tiana Clark, Erika Meitner, Diane Seuss) (Virtual)
Friday, March 25, 2022, 10:35 am to 11:35 am
Women artists have long used raunch as a tool of empowerment and comedic relief to claim space and assert identity in healing and transgressive modes. In this joyful and bawdy reading, five women poets will celebrate sex, profanity, and raunch, asserting what Audre Lorde writes: “In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.”
"If I Speak for the Dead": Jewish Poems of Ancestry (Dan Alter, Daniel Khalatschi, Jennifer Kronovet, Elvira Basevich, Gail Newman)
Friday, March 25, 2022, 10:35am to 11:50am
121A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
A growing body of contemporary Jewish poetry imagines its way into the worlds of our recent ancestors, whether literal, literary, or in spirit. What are the challenges of writing to investigate or recover these lineages through layers of diaspora and receded languages? What are the possibilities? Each poet will read their own poems and speak to their writing process and related craft considerations.
Reunions Revised & Revisited: Writing About (Re)Connecting with Birth Families (John Gallaher, Nari Kirk, Gary Jackson, Diana Joseph, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs)
Friday, March 25, 2022, 12:10pm to 1:25pm
123, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
Writers who are adopted or otherwise estranged from their biological parents face particularly challenging artistic questions about how familial reconciliation (or lack thereof) can be transformed from raw experience into poems, stories, or essays. These five writers will discuss how they’ve crafted their own experiences facing adoption, parentage, and identity into literary work—and, in doing so, explore the relationship between experience and art and how each informs the other.
Documenting the Undocumented: Writing the U.S./Mexico Border Across Genres (Jennifer De Leon, Rene Colato Lainez, Aida Salizar, Ricardo Nuila, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo) (In person)
Friday, March 25, 2022, 12:10 pm to 1:25 pm
115C, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
The border. ICE. The wall. Asylum. Human cages. How can we truthfully represent the current immigration crisis at the border in our writing? What are political and philosophical concerns, particularly when authors inherit stories they are in effect still living and when readers might expect a happy ending? Authors across categories—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young adult and children’s books—talk frankly about the struggles and benefits of writing la frontera.
Publishing Books in Translation: An Overview of Best Practices, Sponsored by CLMP (Bruna Dantas Lobato, Khaled Mattawa, CJ Evans, Sunyoung Lee) (Virtual)
Friday, March 25, 2022, 1:45pm to 2:45pm
Editors of indie presses and magazines demystify the process of publishing works in translation, including what they need to know to acquire works, managing international rights, how they handle the editing process, and how translators can submit their work.
Transparency and Transformation: the Literary Institution at the Tipping Point (Keetje Kuipers, Ruben Quesada, Joyce Chen, Crystal Williams, Rob Arnold) (In person)
Friday, March 25, 2022, 3:20 pm to 4:35 pm
121A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
Many literary institutions are reckoning with a history of exclusion and discrimination. However, after accusations have flown and mea culpas been made, most have chosen to work behind closed doors as they try to reinvent the systems of power among their staff and on their board. Come hear from leaders at organizations who are undertaking this necessary DEI work out in the open, where transparency and accountability allow for vulnerability, and where misstep can be an opportunity to grow.
Unmake the Patriarchy of Your Mind (Kristen Millares Young, Alexandra Teague, Anastacia Renée, Laura Read, Sonora Jha) (In person)
Friday, March 25, 2022, 3:20 pm to 4:35 pm
109AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
For millennia, patriarchal expectations have shaped literature’s socioeconomic context and making. This intersectional panel brings together five award-winning writers who rewrite the patriarchy's impact on our lives and art as Black, Latinx, South Asian, and white women—from persona poems as a Black womanist or in the voice of Baba Yaga, to centering Latinxs in tales of settler colonialism, to poems that confront workplace sexism, to a mother's essays about wringing the toxic from her son.
Controlled Chaos & June Swoons: Life as a Low-Residency MFA Director (Meg Kearney, Donald Quist, Sophfronia Scott, David Hicks)
Friday, March 25, 2022, 3:20pm to 4:35pm
120AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
Four directors, from rookie to veteran, provide a sneak peek behind the scenes of their low-residency MFA programs, from start (proposing the program to a dozen confused committees) to finish (running a fake graduation ceremony). Topics include to MFA or not to MFA; why there are so many low-res programs now; building a program that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive; the difference between traditional and low-res; the "affordability factor"; and the "wow factor."
Retrograde Radical: Marilynne Robinson's Cosmic Realism (Ted Pelton , Elisabeth Sheffield, Aimee Parkison, Michael Rizza)
Saturday, March 26, 2022, 9:00am to 10:15am
125, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
Four innovative novelists, all seasoned fiction workshop leaders, discuss how Robinson achieves her remarkable effects, engaging women's and men's lives, race, Christianity, and American cultural history in novels simultaneously unadorned and complicated, regional and universal, and reminding us that novelists can be our public intellectuals. Panelists will tease out how Robinson does what she does and what we can learn from this work, with insights for both pedagogy and our own writing.
“Something Done to Something, with Something, by Someone”: Teaching Ekphrasis (Camille Guthrie, Phillip B- Williams, Khaled Mattawa, Shin Yu Pai, Katie Peterson)
Saturday, March 26, 2022, 12:10 to 1:25pm
109AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
W.J.T. Mitchell describes ekphrasis as “something done to something, with something, by someone, for someone.” Teaching and writing ekphrastic poetry elicits questions about power, positionality, knowledge, appropriation—and the anxiety and pleasure of influence. How is the genre evolving and creating innovative ways for poetry to respond to the visual arts? Four writer-teachers who teach and write ekphrasis discuss their progressive pedagogy that imagines this genre in radical, inclusive ways.
The Poet’s Voice: Conversations with the Archive (Diana Marie Delgado, Julie Swarstad Johnson, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Francisco Aragón, Urayoán Noel)
Saturday, March 26, 2022, 12:10pm to 1:25pm
115C, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
Poetry Centered, a new podcast from the University of Arizona Poetry Center, invites poets to curate selections from Voca, the center’s online audiovisual archive of 1,000+ recorded readings from 1963 to today. In each episode, new constellations of meaning emerge, coalescing as intergenerational conversations across time and space. The producers and three poets who have hosted episodes will reflect on voices they encountered in the archive and how this experience shaped their present thinking.
Research as Survival: On Archival Research as Creative Practice & Reparative Act (Sophia Stid, Carlina Duan, Kathryn Nuernberger, Chet-la Sebree, Jennifer Loyd)
Saturday March 26, 2022, 12:10 pm to 1:25pm
120C, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
“I do not intend to speak about, just nearby,” Trinh T. Minh-ha says in her film Reassemblage, critiquing the documentary genre. What does it mean to speak nearby, as women writers who practice archival research and make work in conversation with difficult histories? How do we reclaim and remake the act of research itself? How do we speak with, without speaking for? Join us for a conversation on the joys, challenges, ethics, and possibilities of research as creative practice and reparative act.
New Directions in the American Sonnet (Ted Mathys, Kazim Ali, Dora Malech, John Murillo, Simone Muench)
Saturday, March 26, 2022, 12:10 pm to 1:25 pm
118BC, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
The American sonnet is having a moment. This panel features scholars and poets discussing the contemporary sonnet and the ways in which today’s writers subvert, revise, and creatively destroy the sonnet as an inherited form. How, the panel asks, do poets reimagine this prescribed form to engage questions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and power in America? How do today’s sonnets negotiate constraint and agency, tradition and innovation?
Call It a Beginning: An Undocupoets Anniversary Reading (Anni Liu, Wo Chan, Aline Mello, Jan-Henry Gray, Janine Joseph) (In person)
Saturday, March 26, 2022, 3:20 pm to 4:35 pm
121A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
To celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Undocupoets Fellowship, a grant awarded to poets who are currently or who were formerly undocumented in the US, this reading features the debut collections of four recipients of the fellowship. This dynamic reading presents a complex and nuanced narrative of the undocumented experience and highlights each poet’s differences in approach and vision. Each poet will also share a poem written by another Undocupoets Fellow to preview the books yet to come.
Your Life as a Mechanical Centipede: Writing Past the Documentary Impulse (Adam McOmber, Daschielle Louis, Ira sukrungruang , Brian Leung) (Virtual)
Saturday, March 26, 2022, 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm
A wide variety of events—from the social to the political—spark our writerly imaginations. Closest at hand, often, are the latest injustices and/or cultural outrages. We feel we must write about the "thing itself." This panel will offer a series of disruptions suggesting alternatives to the writer's sometimes essayistic, editorial impulses. Perhaps there is more opportunity in the unexpected. Perhaps we can find more ways to reach the reader when they have their guard down.
Check back soon for a list of off-site events!
