The New Ethics for Writers of Color in A Post-Truth Era
My creative writing students want to talk about the business of literature. They want to talk cover letters, agents, MFA programs, fellowships.
AWP
Being Seen: Latinx and Queer Visibility at Writing Conferences
Visibility isn’t a vague term. You either see Latinx and Queer writers or you don’t. I don’t want to believe that literary conferences deliberately exclude writers, but I do believe that an oversight is made when a conference planning committee doesn’t try to represent every aspect of the literary community.
This is Normal: Reading Evil in the Everyday
On Twitter, people keep saying this “isn’t normal.” In this story, the villain is an exception to the rule of normalcy. Maybe, I thought, that story is easier to tell than the real one.
Writers Descend on Washington, Promptly Resist
The literary community descended on Washington, DC last week for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ annual conference, and participants seized the opportunity to register their dissent with the current administration.
The 2016 Ploughshares Count
Every year at the open of the annual AWP Conference, we publish our gender statistics, taking a cue from VIDA’s important work. While we don’t collect demographic information on any of our writers, we publish the gender statistics of those whose gender identities we can find documented elsewhere (their work, their social media profiles, etc.)…
Why the MFA System Should Be Used to Subvert Cuts to the NEA
The scariest part of the proposed cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities is that people seem to have accepted them already.
Writing Trauma: Notes of Transcendence, #4—The Situation and the Story
Writing in second person point of view, I found power in a situation in which I’d felt powerless. I was no longer the victim but the witness…
On Questioning Narrative Sequence
At the Contemporary Museum of Art in Montreal, Ragnar Kjartansson’s “The Visitors” plays on nine screens in a dark theater. Each screen features a single musician set to the backdrop of a room in a chateau, which is in disrepair: one woman in a pale lace dress plays cello with a French door open to…
Round-Up: AN UNTAMED STATE Film Adaptation, Robots, and AWP16
From a film adaptation of Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State to robots writing fiction, here’s a look at this week’s literary news: Author, essayist, and editor Roxane Gay can now add another title to her list of credentials: screenwriter. It was announced last week that Gay’s novel An Untamed State will be made into a…