Tag Archives: AWP

Spellbound at AWP 2013

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AWP is a massive writers’ conference that is held annually in an urban convention center.  Official readings and panels take place in sterile, look-alike rooms, with florescent lights above rows of stackable seats.  As we anticipated our reading at AWP 2013 in Boston, the desire was blare our music, spraypaint the walls, do something, anything, to strangify our rectangle of space.

However, there is something to the sameness of each conference room: the environments are equalized.  It is up to each reader to do the transporting, the transforming–each reader must bring her own magic, and it must come from her pages, from her voice.

And at our AWP reading, we were spellbound.

We had a kickass lineup, and that’s the truth. First, bam, Margo Jefferson–who made her way from NYC in a snowstorm to be with us–she took us into the “we” of her youth when she read Twain and Baldwin as not just a young scholar, but as a young girl of the Negro elite.  She shared the resultant epiphanies, kept us rapt by her mind’s journeying.

Keya Mitra followed, beguiling us with the story of Anita and her two wombs, each the home of a baby created by another man: one, who is her Indian-American husband; the other, her great Anglo Austin lover.  We laughed, we grimaced, we laughed some more.  She finished and we knew why she had been declared a best new American voice.

And then our last reader was Justin Torres. For those of us who have read We the Animals, there was no reason to expect, or wish, that his reading of the work would add anything more to his stunning novel.  Wrong.  His voice was hypnotic, full of desire, elegy, and light. If Torres would have dropped to a bare whisper we would have fallen out of our chairs trying to listen.  Before starting, he said he had stopped reading that opening chapter, that he felt it all read-out, but decided that on this occasion to share. We hate to break it to him, but his declaration may be like the Stones declaring they were dropping “Satisfaction” from the set list…  nice try, but no one is going to let him get with that. Classic work resists retirement. away

All we know is that by reading’s end, we were all very satisfied.

The FPP Interview: Margo Jefferson

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Renowned critic and nonfiction writer Margo Jefferson will take the FPP Harlem stage at AWP in Boston this Friday, March 8, 2013 with Justin Torres and Keya Mitra.  We talk to her about her about separating the personal from “bigger things” and pursuing another kind of authority.  Come hear her @ 3:00 pm. Room 110, Plaza Level. F229.

What emotional concerns are you pursuing in your current project?  What emotional concerns appear to be pursuing you?  How does a self worth selfdom emerge from family, history, biology? What were, what are its needs, its demands its punishments and rewards? How do selves get revised & remapped?

How have you navigated the challenge of writing a personal history that reveals your own misperceptions about access to privilege?  Make that present tense, i.e. still navigating.  To read the rest of the interview, go here.

Come Check Out FPP at Our AWP Reading in Boston!

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We are thrilled to announce our line up for our reading at the Associated Writers and Writing Programs Conference (AWP) in Boston to be held Friday, March 8 @ 3:00 pm. Room 110, Plaza Level, F229. We have an incredible line up in Margo Jefferson,  Keya Mitra, and Justin Torres–with our own Amy Benson leading the discussion about the origins of the series and why we find so much possibility in the first person plural.  Here is a little more information about our readers:

Margo Jefferson is a cultural critic and the author of On Michael Jackson. She was a staff writer for Newsweek and The New York Times and received a Pulitzer Prize in 1995, Her essays have been widely published, and anthologized in The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death Best African American Essays, 2010; The Mrs. Dalloway Reader; and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. She’s also written and performed a theater, “Sixty Minutes in Negroland.” She teaches writing at Columbia University.

Keya Mitra is currently an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Gonzaga University and graduated in 2010 with a doctorate from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, where she also earned her MFA.  In 2008, she spent a year in India on a Fulbright grant in creative writing.  Her fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Best New American Voices, Ontario Review, Orchid, Event, Fourteen Hills, Torpedo, and Confrontation, and her nonfiction has been published in Gulf Coast and American Literary Review.  Her story received special mention in the Pushcart Prize XXXVII Anthology, and she has been nominated for two Pushcart prizes.  She has completed a short story collection, a novel, and a memoir.

Justin Torres is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. He was the recipient of a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, and Glimmer Train. Among many other things, he has worked as a farmhand, a dog walker, a creative writing teacher, and a bookseller; he is now a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

Amy Benson‘s prose has recently appeared in Triquarterly, BOMB Magazine, PANK, Boston Review, The New England Review, Seneca Review, Black Warrior Review, diagram, and Hotel Amerika, among other journals. Her book, The Sparkling-Eyed Boy, was chosen by Ted Conover as the 2003 winner of the Bakeless Prize in Creative Nonfiction from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University.