SELECT PANELS ATTENDED
With 550 events, choosing what panels to attend is a terrible challenge. Then again, too much compelling stuff is a good problem to have! Click the link in each title to learn more about the panelists.
PUBLISHING DIVERSELY: Challenges and Successes
It's one thing to talk about diversity. It's something else to actually achieve it. Small press publishers, authors, and arts leaders will share their approaches to addressing, and achieving, diversity and representation in independent literary publishing.
THE VEIN OF JADE: What a single detail can reveal in nonfiction
"When the vein of jade/is revealed in the rock," Lu Chi writes in his classic The Art of Writing, "the whole mountain glistens." Likewise, a single detail can reveal the meaning and mystery of a scene, an essay, or a book. Practitioners of various nonfiction forms, from journalism to hybrid, each choose a particular detail from a well-regarded nonfiction and show how it becomes—by its context, its imagery, its power to—the vein of jade that allows the whole to glisten.
BODY OF WORK: Exploring disability, creativity, and inclusivity
What is the physical body’s relationship to the creative mind? Four writers with disabilities will discuss their writing lives, and how social progress and technology are transforming representations of the human body. What effect has this had on literature? Where do we read ourselves in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry? Our panelists will discuss whether or not literature is representing the current climate and how they have represented their own bodies in writing over time.
INVISIBLE SCAFFOLDS: The Writer-Editor Collaborative Process
Successful collaborations between writers and editors must involve mutual trust and respect in order to best serve manuscripts and the needs and vision of the presses that publish them. This panel of widely experienced editors, poets, fiction writers, and critics will explore the challenges and rewards of those collaborative processes that guide manuscripts from their initial acceptance, through various stages of revision, and ultimately, to publication.
KEYNOTE ADDRESS BY AZAR NAFISI (one of the more moving and motivating experiences of Erin's life)
Azar Nafisi is best known as the author of the national bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which spent over 117 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Her other work includes Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov’s Novels, the memoir Things I've Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter, The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books, and the children’s book BiBi and the Green Voice. Among her numerous honors include the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, a Nonfiction Book of the Year Award from Booksense, the Frederic W. Ness Book Award, the Latifeh Yarsheter Book Award, and the Persian Golden Lioness Award for literature. She has lectured and written extensively in English and Persian on the political implications of literature and culture, as well as the human rights of Iranian women and girls. Nafisi is currently a Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC, where she was a professor of aesthetics, culture, and literature, as well as was Director of The Dialogue Project & Cultural Conversations.