AWP National Conference 2011

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Parent Category: Expos and Conventions

Category: Previews

Published on Thursday, 03 February 2011 05:25

Written by L E Shannon

The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference 2011 is being held February 2-5, 2011 at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel and Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC. This national conference is the largest gathering of poets and writers in the country.

The conference includes the annual bookfair, held at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. With more than 500 exhibitors, the AWP Bookfair is one of the largest of its kind.  Politics and Prose is this year’s Official Bookstore of the Conference.

This year, the Keynote Address is by Jhumpa Lahiri, who received the Pulitzer Prize for Interpreter of Maladies. Her novel The Namesake was made into a film directed by Mira Nair. Lahiri’s most recent book of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, received the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

Conversations and readings with Featured Presenters include:

Pulitzer Prize winners:

Rae Armantrout
Junot Díaz
Rita Dove
Stephen Dunn
Richard Ford
Edward P. Jones
Yusef Komunyakaa
Elizabeth Strout
Natasha Trethewey
Charles Wright

National Book Award winners:

Joyce Carol Oates
Mark Doty
Jayne Anne Phillips

American Book Award winners:

Jericho Brown
Sonia Sanchez

American Academy of Arts and Letters honorees:

Amy Hempel
Gregory Orr

Bob Hicok, awarded the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress

Kay Ryan, a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and appointed a Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress.

Some other award-winning writers include:

Chimamanda Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun, Purple Hibiscus)
Sarah Browning, director of Split This Rock Poetry Festival and DC Poets Against the War
Juan Felipe Herrera (187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border)
Rick Moody (Garden State, The Ice Storm)
Mark Nowak (Coal Mountain Elementary, Shut Up Shut Down)
Sapphire (Push)
Gary Shteyngart (The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Absurdistan)
Jeffrey Yang poet, editor at New Directions Publishing
Raúl Zurita, Latin American poetry: (Purgatorio, Anteparaiso, and La Vida Nueva)

Several other writers, teachers and publishers weigh in on panels that promise lively discussions.  Among them are:

• Faith and the Writer: Inspiration and Practice
• Mongrels, Monsters, and Mutants: New Identities in Contemporary Poetry
• So You’ve Made an eBook… Now What?
• Strategic Thievery
• A Convenient Truth: Writing and Teaching Ecofiction
• The Good Review: Criticism in the Age of Book Blogs and Amazon.com
• Relocating Poetry within the Brain: Consciousness, Emotion, and Poetic Rhetoric
• Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll: Exploring the Risqué in the Poetry Workshop
• Women on Wanderlust: Travel Writing
• Page Turners: Asian American Literature in the 21st Century
• Advice to Grantseekers from the National Endowment for the Arts
• Poetry of Resistance: Poets Take on Reasonable Suspicion (Arizona SB 1070)
• We Were All Poets in the 3rd Grade: What Happened?
• What Are You Wearing?: Exploring the Emerging Genre of Fashion Writing

For more information, visit http://www.awpwriter.org/conference/2011awpconf.php.

AWP Conference 2011
February 2-5, 2011

Marriott Wardman Park
2660 Woodley Road, NW
Washington, D.C. 20008
(202) 328-2000

Omni Shoreham Hotel
2500 Calvert Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20008
(202) 234-0700

Politics and Prose Bookstore & Coffeeshop
5015 Connecticut Ave., NW
Washington, D.C. 20008
(202) 364-1919
(800) 722-0790

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