BOA Author Signing Schedule (Booth 527)
Thursday, March 8:
Friday, March 9:
Saturday, March 10:
Panels Featuring BOA Authors
Thursday, March 8
Michael Waters
Topic: Pitt Poetry Series Reading: The Florida Connection, R198
Location: Room 25, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Time: 12:00 pm to 1:15 pm
Description: Five poets with recent books in the Pitt Poetry Series read from their work.
Dan Albergotti
Topic: Waccamaw Journal’s 10th Anniversary Celebration Reading, R245
Location: Virginia Barber Middleton Stage, Sponsored by USC, Exhibit Hall, Tampa Convention Center, Third Floor
Time: 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
Description: Waccamaw, a project of Coastal Carolina University's Athenaeum Press and the Master of Arts in Writing Program there, is celebrating its 10th year. Graduate students lead the publication in collaboration with faculty, and they are please to invite you to revel in their collected marvels. They've released a print anthology to mark the occasion with selected works from the twenty biannual issues. Natasha Tretheway, Kevin Wilson, the late Jake Adam York, and many other voices that helped define this decade of literature appear in its pages. Such writers from the print edition as well as from recent issues will read selected works in a playful atmosphere. Come join in the festivities!
Lee Upton
Topic: Teach Me All the Things: New Approaches to Multi-& Hybrid-Genre Writing, R238
Location: Florida Salon 5, Marriot Waterside, Second Floor
Time: 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
Description: While hybridity is all the rage in lit mags and progressive presses, how does blurring or opening genre play out in undergraduate and graduate classrooms where students approach genre with traditional boundaries and/or processes in mind? Our panelists, all multi- or hybrid-genre writers as well as multigenre textbook authors and hybrid anthology editors, offer both personal and pedagogical perspectives to welcome students to the piquant, generative world of genre jambalaya.
Geffrey Davis
Topic: Writing Fatherhood, R291
Location: Room 23, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Time: 4:30 pm to 5:45 pm
Description: How do men reckon with their lives and roles as fathers? In this multigenre reading, writers who are fathers read from work exploring their identities, their struggles and their joys, and the ways they make sense of their complex and at times confounding place in the family and in the culture.
Erika Meitner
Topic: Tikkun Olam: Jewish Poets on Mending the World, R284
Location: Room 14, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Time: 4:30 pm to 5:45 pm
Description: Dating back 2,000 years, the concept of Tikkun Olam conveys a responsibility among Jews to help repair the world. This panel will explore how Jewish poets interpret that ethical commandment in their work and balance the solitude of writing with social engagement and activism. Panelists will discuss the particular ways poetry can (and can’t) respond to cultural and environmental crisis, and how writers can, as Grace Paley exhorts, “Go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.”
Friday, March 9
Kathryn Nuernberger
Topic: Writing That Raids the Real: Research in Three Genres, F113
Location: Florida Salon 4, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
Time: 9:00 am to 10:15 am
Description: All writers reconstruct the world. Often we use imagination, but mining science, family history, interviews, or Project Muse can add context and metaphor. Panelists with books in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction discuss ways to investigate, including how to determine what research might be productive, such as interviewing George W. Bush, hanging around fracking sites, following arsonists, or milking libraries. They offer practical advice for crafting distinctive writing using factual materials.
Aimee Parkison
Topic: Still In the Trenches: Gender, Race, and Class in Creative Writing
Location: Room 23, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Time: 10:30 am to 11:45 am
Description: With the rise of creative writing spaces centering women/writers of color, are gender, race, and class finished conversations? This panel brings together diverse women writers to ask how these social forces continue to shape women's experiences of creative writing from learning in or teaching the workshop to publishing work to administering a program. Where are we today with regard to positions of power and our access to publication? The panelists will share visions and strategies for equity.
Jacqueline Osherow
Topic: Oy Vey es Florida: Poetry on the Jewish American Experience. F160
Location: Room 15, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Time: 10:30 am to 11:45
Description: From Borsht belt to sitcom humor, Jews have long traditions of making comedy from tragedy, including in the stand-up house of poetry. Jews compose over 50% of many Florida cities such as the oft' ridiculed "Boca," where portraits of Jewish shoppers overwhelm images of Jewish thinkers or writers. This panel brings poets of all ages, sexualities, and regions to kvetch and kvell through verse about the Jewish American experience. Secular or religious, righteous or salacious—all tucheses welcome.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar & BOA Publisher Peter Conners
Topic: Preserving the Memory: Strategies for Keeping the Work of Deceased Poets Alive, F198
Location: Room 24, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Time: 12:00 pm to 1:15 pm
Description: A staggering number of poets have left us over the past decade, poets whose presence in our ongoing conversations about poetics and culture remains important. Creative actions by family members, editors, publishers, academics, and readers can help to make sure these writers retain a seat at the table. This panel will speak to specific cases, what has been done, and what we hope to do in the future to preserve their memory.
Kathryn Nuernberger
Topic: Sustainable: On Writing Long and Linked Poems, F283
Location: Grand Salon D, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
Time: 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
Description: In an age of digestible snippets, we grow hungry for occasions to practice the fine art of paying attention. An art form rooted in mindfulness, the long poem is one way of practicing deliberate attention. Drawing on their own experiences writing and publishing long poems, linked poems, project books, and novels-in-verse, this panel will discuss both the rich literary tradition of long and linked poems, as well as provide insights into the process and craft of creating your own sustained lyrics.
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
Topic: Undocupoets Speak, F252
Location: Room 1, Tampa Convention, First Floor
Time: 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
Description: In 2015, Undocupoets published an open petition asking for ten highly visible and renowned first book poetry contests to reconsider and remove the language stating US citizenship as a requirement for submission/publication. In fall 2016, they established the Undocupoets Fellowship. Janine Joseph joined them in order to begin this fellowship to help undocumented writers pay book contest fees. Here they will discuss their goals moving forward and the marginalization of undocumented writers.
Kai Carlson-Wee
Topic: Poetry on the Big Screen, F262
Location: Room 17, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Time: 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
Description: With recent blockbuster films like Patterson and Neruda, poetry has been having a Hollywood moment on the screen. While poetry and film have had a long history, increased interest in indie filmmaking and social media has made it possible for poets to reach a larger, more diverse audience through multimedia. Five panelists–who have directed award-winning poetry films, documentaries, and visual poems–will screen their work and discuss the process of adapting poetry to the big screen.
Jayson Iwen & Huda Fakhreddine
Topic: Negotiating Cultural Bias in Translation, F284
Location: Room 3&4. Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Time: 4:30 pm to 5:45 pm
Description: Edward Said famously claimed that “texts are not finished objects” and that interpretation itself lends meaning. But what is the role of the translator, especially when coming from a culture entirely different from that of the work she’s translating? What kinds of cultural assumptions or prejudices might she bring to bear on the work? Can she, or should she, acknowledge these assumptions? As practicing translators, we ask what’s at stake in the translation of cultural texts, particularly poetry.
Saturday, March 10
Jillian Weise
Topic: Leap: Disjunction, Disconnection, and Useful Dissonance in Contemporary Poetics, S131
Location: Room 22, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Time: 9:00 am to 10:15
Description: We leap because we want to jumpstart a traditional narrative, and take it up and out in a metaphorical rocket, adding lyrical and meditative weight to an otherwise predictable poem. We leap because it is a way to violently birth the poem, then lift it to the world as a gesture of greatness, a 360 degree display of the deep unconscious. The panel will discuss the origins of leaping, from the deep image poets of the 1960s to our contemporary poets.
Geffrey Davis
Topic: Why (Not) Say What Happened?: On Writing Confessional Poetry, S222
Location: Room 14, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Time: 1:30 pm to 2:45 pm
Description: The 20th century saw both the birth of confessional poetry and its backlash. Today, the position of the “poetry of the personal” within contemporary poetry remains controversial, as poets tangle with the stakes of writing about the self. Join five poets for a candid conversation about their relationship to the confessional label; its usefulness—and misuse—when ascribed to poets writing about race, gender, and sexuality; and interrogating the ongoing dialogue between poet, speaker, and reader.
Ryan Habermeyer
Topic: Reports from the Field: Recent Candidates Discuss the Academic Job Hunt, S201
Location: Grand Salon B, Marriot Waterside, Second Floor
Time: 1:30 pm to 2:45 pm
Description: 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.
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
Topic: Draining the Swamp, S237
Location: Florida Salon 4, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
Time: 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
Description: Writing has always served as a form of social and political resistance. From the ghettos of war-torn Warsaw to the American civil rights movement, writers have historically been a voice for the unrepresented and catalysts for social change. This panel will explore how our current social and political landscape has galvanized this traditional role of the writer, ways to get involved with current movements, and the importance of writing as a political act.
Bruce Beasley
Topic: The Dream Work of Poetry, S259
Location: Room 22, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Time: 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
Description: "The dream," says Jean Paul Richter, "is an involuntary form of poetry." Four poets known for their dreamlike forms discuss how the work of dreams and the work of poems overlap through such shared techniques as metaphor and metonymic substitution, hyperassociation, parataxis, puns, and other wordplays, radical condensation and juxtaposition, multiple meanings, homophones, allusion, resistance to paraphrasable meaning, and granting of permission for strange and jarring new ways of making sense.
Laure-Anna Bosselaar
Topic: To the Left of Time: A Tribute to Thomas Lux, S288
Location: Room 24
Time: 4:30 pm to 5:45 pm
Description: Thomas Lux was among the most influential poets in contemporary American poetry. Over his more than forty-year career as poet and teacher, he published sixteen collections of poems, helped to define some of the most celebrated writing programs in the United States, and mentored thousands of students. His friends Stuart Dischell, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Alan Shapiro, Katie Chaple, Ginger Murchison, and Travis Denton celebrate Lux’s life and work.
