AWP – Washington, DC

Wednesday, February 2nd – Saturday, February 5th, 2011
2011 Annual Conference & Bookfair
February 2-5, 2011
Washington, DC
Marriott Wardman Park & Omni Shoreham Hotels

Along with listening, gabbing, dancing and and equal measure of eating and drinking, I will also be doing serious things like these:

I Am Not a Terrorist: The Political Writer
I will be speaking on this panel along with Lorraine Adams, Nathalie Handal, Porochista Khakpour and Luis Alberto Urrea. Panel moderated by Terry Hong.

As national borders disintegrate through war and technology, fictional ones do not necessarily follow suite, often staying true to place; but must writers whose lives are political, and who function as spokespersons for worlds that American readers may never visit, write politics into their art? Writers with ties to current debates about Iran, Palestine, Algeria, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, discuss the burden of truth and the choices they make as cultural translators.

The Road Less Traveled: How to be a Writer Without a Full-time Academic Gig
I will be speaking on this panel along with Cheryl Strayed, Steve Almond, Amy Holman, Christian TeBordo, and Marisa de los Santos

The path to solvency and security for most writers is to pair writing with full-time jobs in academia. On this panel, six authors will talk about their lives as writers without the de facto college teaching gig. Panelists will discuss the range of ways they’ve supported themselves, the reasons they’ve chosen the paths they have, and also the liberations and constraints they’ve experienced as writers outside the writer-faculty track that’s so deeply embedded in what it means to be a writer today.