APS at AWP!

Dear Subscribers, Contributors, Fellow Readers, Friends!

Should you be in Los Angeles next week for the AWP conference, it would be wonderful to see you.

Drop in at Booth 558 to meet A Public Space editors and industry friends; find new and special archival issues of the magazine and books; subscribe or renew your subscription; and learn about upcoming programs and events. Or find us in the audience at panels with A Public Space Writing Fellows and contributors discussing everything from the ekphrastic to the novella, whether history equals destiny, multilingual creative-writing programs, exploding the boundaries of linear narrative, oral storytelling, and more. Details below.

Applying to the 2025 Writing Fellowship? Bring your questions on Thursday, March 27, from 2:00pm-3:00pm. A Public Space editor at large Megan Cummins will be at the APS booth to answer questions about the program. Applications for this year’s fellowship close on March 31, 2025.

A Benefit for LA Fire Recovery
Wednesday, March 26, 6:30–8:00 p.m., Plaza Room I-III, Third Floor, JW Marriott Los Angeles L.A.

AWP begins with an evening to support the nonprofit advocacy organization Arts for LA, which provides crucial support for communities, artists, and organizations to advocate for an equitable, healthy, and vibrant Los Angeles region through the arts. Visit their website for wildfire relief and resources for artists and creative workers. The event is Hosted by Amber Tamblyn & Sponsored by Live Talks Los Angeles.

Panels with A Public Space Contributors and Friends

Predictable Unpredictability: Celebrating the Poetry of Reginald Shepherd
Thursday, March 27, 9:00am-10:15am, Room 408A, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
A Public Space contributors Jericho Brown, Kevin Prufer, and Camille Rankine, Timothy Liu, and Charles Stephens to celebrate the poetry of Reginald Shepherd and The Selected Shepherd (Pitt Poetry Series), selected and with an introduction by Jericho Brown, and share the impact Shepherd had on the poetry community.

New Styles for the Immigrant Novel
Thursday, March 27, 12:10pm-1:25pm, Room 502B, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
How can the familiar contours of the migrant narrative be reshaped? A Public Space Writing Fellow Bruna Dantas Lobato along with Yuka Igarashi, Nazli Koca, and Shubha Sunder discuss how their recent novels find unique approaches to dialogue, detail, scene setting, point of view, and other aspects of language and structure to tell a new story about an individual’s experience in a foreign country.

Nonfiction as Poem, Photograph, Song, or Fable
Thursday, March 27, 3:20pm-4:35pm, Room 503, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
A Public Space contributor Brian Blanchfield, Samuel Ace, Lily Hoàng, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, and Caryl Pagel discuss the boundaries of linear narrative and autobiographical account. What is made possible for an essay or memoir when it uses structures and devices more aligned with poetry, visual art, music, or fable?

Women Writers Talk Shame in the Classroom, Academia & Their Writing Lives
Thursday, March 27, 3:20pm-4:35pm, Room 511AB, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
A Public Space contributor Uche Okonkwo, Ava Winter, Tara Ballard, Alina Nguyen, and Silvia discuss how they navigate feelings of shame as teachers, as functionaries in academic institutions, and as writers. How does shame affect the creative process? Can shame be a force for good in our work, or is it always destructive?

Beyond English: Multilingual Creative Writing Pedagogies
Thursday, March 27, 3:20pm-4:35pm, Room 514, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
A Public Space contributor James Shea, José De Pierola, Francezca Kwe, and Sarah Lumba-Tajonera, all educators from around the world, explore the nature of multilingual creative writing pedagogies with an eye toward their value for students and their resistance to the global dominance of English. 

Becoming a Debut Novelist: The Journey from Agent Queries to Book Launch
Friday, March 28, 9:00am-10:15am, Concourse Hall 152, Level One, Los Angeles Convention Center
The path from finishing a book draft to launching a debut novel into the world is thrilling and exciting, but it is also long and full of twists and turns. A Public Space contributor and editor at large Megan Cummins joins fellow debut novelists Laura Spence-Ash, Denne Michele Norris, Lilliam Rivera, and Jemimah Wei to discuss all aspects of this journey, including finding an agent, selling the book, working with an editor, and navigating marketing and publicity. 

Uncertain Characters in Uncertain Times
Friday, March 28, 9:00am-10:15am, Room 402AB, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
A Public Space Writing Fellow Jai Chakrabarti, Annell Lopez, Andrew Boryga, Sheila Sundar, and Felicia Berliner discuss writing that sheds light on the internal and external struggles of finding one’s way. How do novelists craft characters who are coming into their own in a fractured and uncertain world? How do we infuse stories with the intimacy of characters’ self-awareness and their emergent understanding of the social order? 

Eyes Wide: Exploring the Extended Ekphrastic
Friday, March 28, 9:00am-10:15am, Room 503, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
Ekphrasis—“adding commentary”—traditionally lets a poet meditate on a single work of art. But increasingly poets are upending and enlarging ekphrastic forms, extending the ekphrastic to include art practices, artist’s lives, and historic, familial, and personal archives. A Public Space contributor Victoria Chang, Tess Taylor, Tyree Daye, Dean Rader, and Allison Rollins discuss their working methods and examine the challenges and rewards of extending the frame.

Whose Fault Is It, Anyway?
Friday, March 28, 10:35am-11:50am, Concourse Hall 152, Level One, Los Angeles Convention Center
When, in Julius Caesar, Cassius says, “Our fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves,” we see a question implicit in all genres of writing: Do characters and history equal destiny? Does circumstance erase choice and personal agency? APS Together host Aimee Bender, David St. John, Maggie Nelson, Danzy Senna, and Dana Johnson consider how, in their own work, the fault lines of experience intersect with both one’s present and our collective pasts.

The Translator’s Note: Bridging Linguistic & Cultural Chasms, Sponsored by ALTA
Friday, March 28, 10:35am-11:50am, Room 514, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
The Translator’s Note is an indispensable companion to poetry in translation, acquainting readers with new poets, helping editors to evaluate poems, positioning a poet’s significance within a literary landscape, defining challenges in a particular piece, and more. A Public Space contributor Nancy Naomi Carlson, Blas Falconer, Armen Davoudian, Sandra Alcosser, and Wayne Miller will address how the Translator’s Note bridges linguistic and cultural chasms while fostering an understanding and appreciation for diverse voices.

Going Indie: Why & How to Work with Independent Publishers & Bookstores
Friday, March 28, 10:35am-11:50am, Room 515A, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
How do independent presses and their authors collaborate throughout the process of publishing a book, from submission, acceptance, and editorial, to marketing, sales, and beyond? How do these publishers work with distributors and indie bookstores to raise the profile of their authors and maximize sales? A Public Space contributor Corinna Vallianatos, Lori Feathers, Suzette Mayr, Yuka Igarashi, and Alana Wilcox discuss practices and methods to foster a writer’s work. 

Of Two Minds: Cultivating a Liminal Space of Poetry & Translation
Friday, March 28, 12:10-pm-1:25pm, Room 410, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
A Public Space contributor Daniel Borzutzky, Kristin Dykstra, Laura Cesarco Eglin, Aaron Coleman, and Vivek Narayanan—poets who are also translators—explore how they shift through varied personas, both when writing poetry and when translating. Does it change or expand creativity as they are merging or moving between these personas? Does modeling the composition of poetry on translation—or vice versa—make deeper or more distinctive work possible? Can working at the intersection between poetry and translation enable one to move away from a dependence on “originality”?

Writing Sex Beyond Survival: From Traumatic to Erotic & the Awkward In-Between
Friday, March 28, 12:10-pm-1:25pm, Room 503, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
Gertrude Stein said, “Literature—creative literature—unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.” Maybe that’s because sex itself is so creative, powered as much by our dreams and our divinity as by our animal needs and desires. Writing real sex reveals characters’ fears and wounds, but also their secret yearnings and human vastness. A Public Space contributor Rebecca Wolff, Jeannine Ouellette, Gina Frangello, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Natashia Deon talk about writing that fully embodies and claims sex, with all its paradoxical harms, pleasures, and ecstasies of “life’s longing for itself.”

Poets Who Edit: The Joy & Conundrum of Wearing Two Hats
Friday, March 28, 12:10-pm-1:25pm, Room 515B, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
A Public Space contributors Srikanth Reddy, Major Jackson, and Meghan O’Rourke along with Jill Bialosky and Walt Hunter discuss what it’s like to be both a poet and a poetry editor. Does one’s own poetics interfere or highlight the poets you publish? Do you see yourself primarily as an editor or a poet? What’s it like to have to turn down so many labors of love? How do you maintain your own poetic process while publishing other poets’ work?

Poets Who Edit: The Joy & Conundrum of Wearing Two Hats
Friday, March 28, 12:10-pm-1:25pm, Room 515B, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
A Public Space contributors Srikanth Reddy, Major Jackson, and Meghan O’Rourke along with Jill Bialosky and Walt Hunter discuss what it’s like to be both a poet and a poetry editor. Does one’s own poetics interfere or highlight the poets you publish? Do you see yourself primarily as an editor or a poet? What’s it like to have to turn down so many labors of love? How do you maintain your own poetic process while publishing other poets’ work?

The Hidden History Memoir: A Panel of Writers Who Were Never Meant to Speak
Friday, March 28, 1:45pm - 3:00pm, Room 503, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
A Public Space Writing Fellow Deborah Taffa, Lenika Cruz, Jenisha Watts, and Brittany Means discuss lived experiences, street smarts, and oral storytelling as an approach to memoir writing. How do marginalized writers—artists from humble backgrounds and/or geographic distances—bring nontraditional forms of wisdom to the page? Is a lived approach to craft particularly suited to the intertwining of personal and political topics? 

NBCC Fiftieth Anniversary: All-Stars Breaking New Ground in Fiction
Friday, March 28, 3:20pm-4:35pm, Petree Hall D, Level One, Los Angeles Convention Center
A Public Space contributor Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Escoffery, and Justin Torres—three authors honored as NBCC finalists or award winners, whose work is breaking new grounds—celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the National Book Critics Circle with readings and a conversation, moderated by NBCC President Heather Scott Partington, on inspiration, research, influences on their work, writing in these times, and evolving forms.

Literary Production During Authoritarian Governments
Friday, March 28, 3:20pm-4:35pm, Room 515A, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
A Public Space contributor Sally Wen Mao, Alexandra Lytton Regalado, Myriam Gurba, Emily Jungmin Yoon, and Christopher Soto explore literary history and resistance tactics used during authoritarian governments that actively work to silence and exile writers. They will share their writing and discuss the work of notable authors to provide strategies for understanding, surviving, and resisting authoritarianism as it sprouts across the globe.

For the Love of the Novella
Saturday, March 29, 9:00am-10:15am, Room 409AB, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
The novella is a form that is in-between—not quite a short story, not quite a novel. Perhaps that in-betweenness is the reason fans of the form are so devoted; or, as Debra Spark suggests, “The novella is a Goldilocks form, not too much this and not too much that but just right.” A Public Space contributor Anne Elliott, Matt Bell, Sasha Hom, Ashley Honeysett, and Rion Amilcar Scott celebrate the form with readings and a discussion of craft possibilities and challenges, favorite novellas to use as models, and the publication landscape.

Writing (& Publishing!) Short Fiction in a World Built for Novels
Saturday, March 29, 9:00am-10:15am, Room 502A, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
The publishing industry remains largely geared toward novels. Many writers, however, come to fiction through the short form. APS Together host Lan Samantha Chang, Jeremy Broyles, Gwendolyn Paradice, Leslie Pietrzyk, and Gina Chung discuss how to reconcile the disconnect between what we feel called to write and what the industry prefers to publish.

Spirit Work: Talking (with) Sacred Texts Through Poetry
Saturday, March 29, 10:35am-11:50am, Room 408A, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
Drawing upon inherited or chosen faith traditions as we face our contemporary world and its spiritual predicament, A Public Space contributor Philip Metres, Sarah Ghazal Ali, Jessica Jacobs, Angela Peñaredondo, and Pádraig ó Tuama will offer brief remarks and readings of poems (their own and others’) that wrestle with God and religion, the architecture of awe and belief, of grief and unbelief, offering new ways of thinking of poems as spiritual practice—through imaginative contemplation, midrash, and ritual.

Out of Many, One: Writers of Color Writing the Multiple-POV Novel
Saturday, March 29, 10:35am-11:50am, Room 408B, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
Even in an industry that prizes novels over story collections, many writers of color turn to novels in stories, books composed of multiple storylines. What can the multi–point of view book offer to us—and our stories about family, diaspora, and community—that maybe no other form can? A Public Space Writing Fellow LaToya Watkins, A Public Space associate editor Sidik Fofana, Kimberly Garza, Rubén Degollado, and Jonathan Escoffery discuss the powers and pitfalls of the mosaic novel, crafting distinct voices and characters, representation, and creating a larger narrative out of many.

The Heat of the Hybrid
Saturday, March 29, 12:10pm-1:25pm, Room 502B, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center.
Systems that collide produce heat, energy. What’s true in physics is true in poetics. When systems converge, they produce heat and energy. A Public Space contributor Kimiko Hahn, Beth Ann Fennelly, Jill Bialosky, Tina Chang, and David Baker to consider the dynamic vitality of poetic hybridity—combining lyric poetry with “unpoetic” materials like science writing, journalism, medical research, and creative nonfiction. 

The Poetics of Grief: Private to Public
Saturday, March 29, 3:20 PM - 4:35 PM, Room 411, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
From Catullus to Creeley, from Dickinson to Audre Lorde, poets have always used their art to lament the outrage of death. A Public Space contributors Julie Carr and Gillian Conoley, Quenton Baker, Serena Chopra, and erica lewis read from recent works that trouble the border between the private sorrow of losing a loved one and the public grief over climate catastrophe, gun violence, and war. How do our personal losses press up against larger systemic crises? How does lament turn to demand, cry to outcry?