Conference Schedule
October 10 - 12, 2024
Over 70 craft talks, panels, workshops and more
Craft. Culture. Community.
The Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference features over 70 craft talks, workshops, panels, and readings.
The conference spans a variety of genres and forms—fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, memoir, and genre fiction—with additional sessions on the business of writing from getting an agent to getting published. We often highlight special topics or issues such as travel writing, climate change, graphic novels, translation, disability studies, hybrid forms, social justice, and more.
In addition to regular sessions, the conference offers group readings, our keynote and opportunities to connect and engage with writing industry professionals.
If you have any questions, contact DNRSConference@asu.edu.
2024 schedule
Day 1: Thursday, October 10
Session 1: (9:00 - 10:15 am)
Facilitator: Caroline Kim
Genre: Fiction
Telling is so much more than just narrative summary or a means of bridging one scene to the next. In this generative workshop we’ll look at examples in which telling shows great action, reveals deep character, and allows greater play with voice (even, or especially, in third person!). We’ll use these as a launch for in-class exercises.
Facilitator: Jacqueline Balderrama, Elena Karina Bryne, Jenny Irish, Alexandra Van de Kamp
Category: Poetry, Multi-genre
As writers, we don’t always color between the lines. In this panel, four writers discuss how they borrow from other genres and even other arts disciplines in developing their work. Using specific examples, panelists discuss how their outside-their-genre readings, experiences in other art forms and interests in different genres inform their creative practice.
Facilitator: Hayan Charara
Category: Poetry
When we read poems, we want to see the poet or speaker as human, as someone with faults, someone who is “real.” In short, we want to encounter a unique individual—a particular person with particular thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Yet we also want the “personal” to be meaningful and useful to someone other than the poet or speaker. We want the voice we encounter to at least try to make sense of the world the poem describes. Carl Dennis calls this attempt “the voice of authority” and for a poet or poem to have it, three virtues are necessary. We will discuss these virtues and create a poem that possesses them. The ultimate goal is to write a poem that is committed to its subject, inclusive in its deliberations, and finally communal in its reach.
Facilitator: Patricia Murphy
Category: Business of Writing
The diverse world of literary publishing is changing more rapidly than ever. We will examine several top markets, identifying trends in design, editorial preferences, leadership, and technology. We will also discuss methods for managing submissions in a fast-paced publishing environment.
Facilitator: Susan Nguyen
Genre: CNF, Poetry
In this workshop, we’ll explore the liminal nature of lyric essays. Is it a cross-section between memoir and poetry or a poetic essay? Something you don’t know until you see it? The answer lies somewhere in between. The lyric essay’s undefinable, genre-bending nature has made it a space for writers, especially those creating from the margins, to challenge or resist content, form, and the world in which we live. As the essayist Erica Trabold writes, “The most powerful lyric essays reclaim silence from the silencers, becoming a space of agency for writers whose experiences are routinely questioned, flattened, or appropriated.” We will discuss guiding principles for different forms of the lyric essay, read short examples, and use them as jumping-off points for generating new work.
Facilitator: TC Tolbert
Genre: Poetry, Multi-genre
In this experiential, collaborative, and generative workshop, we will poetically explore grief and some of its other living companions: love, contemplation, silence, beauty, creation, and joy. The workshop will include a variety of invitations to make and be made: generative writing prompts, full sensory and playful engagements, and reading and reflection.
Facilitator: Kristine Morgan
Genre: Multi-genre
Before I came to fiction writing, I studied film directing, acting, improv comedy, and screenwriting. Looking at excerpts in craft and theory across different mediums, we will discuss where these ideas overlap and where they differ. Throughout the workshop, be prepared for quick writing exercises inspired by the forms we examine. We will also read short excerpts in fiction, essay, and poetry that exist in conversation with other mediums to illuminate some of the principles I'm excited to talk about. Excerpts include: How Music Works by David Byrne, Create Dangerously by Albert Camus, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, by Alexander Chee, Equilibrium by Tiana Clark, The First Bad Man by Miranda July, Whereas, by Layli Long Soldier, On Directing Film by David Mamet, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer, Narrative Theory and Adaptation. by Jason Mittell, Creative Quest by Questlove, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders.
Facilitator: Jack Galati, Destiny Pinder-Buckley, Timothy Provenzano, Jacob Simmons
Genre: Business of Writing
Panelists discuss different paths and influences that led them to choose writing and to enter an MFA and what the MFA experience provides them. How do you know when it is time to commit to an MFA? What are real-world expectations, experiences, and discoveries you should expect?
Session 2 (10:30 am - 11:45 pm)
Facilitator: Melissa Kwasny
Category: Poetry
Grief is universal. All peoples, and most animals, experience it. It is also individual. We each suffer grief uniquely. It is perhaps our strongest emotion and yet the most difficult to describe to others. In this generative workshop, we will read and write poems that explore a few of the ways that poems can provide a language for our deepest losses. In particular, we will focus on three forms: the elegy, the epistle, and the fractured image, referencing the work of poets such as Paul Celan, Louise Glück, M.L. Smoker, Sherwin Bitsui, Lucy Brock Broido, Mark Doty, and many others. Along the way, we will share writing strategies to use in healing from grief, taking a look at Roland Barthe’s "Mourning Diary" and John Berger’s “Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead.”
Panel | Culture-Keeping: Navigating the Experience of Immigration and Diaspora (10:30 am - 11:45 pm)
Facilitator: Hayan Charara, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Susan Nguyen, Cindy Ok, Alberto Ríos
Category: Multi-genre
Immigration and diaspora experiences are often described as creating a divided consciousness – a sense of being in two worlds or two countries at once. This is intensified by the losses that such movement from one country to another often involves. In this panel, writers discuss what “culture keeping” means for them—how do they navigate experiences of cultural shift and sometimes loss? How does memory of a previous homeland inform what we write or how?
Facilitator: Camille Acker
Category: Fiction
We're often disconnected from place. Physically we're in one space, but we're on our phones or meeting virtually. But good fiction needs defined spaces to keep our characters grounded and give our stories depth and heart. A place isn't just setting, a place can be a character all its own, direct the plot, and inform the language. In this generative workshop, we'll talk and write all about place, so you leave with detailed spaces for your characters to inhabit. We'll use great descriptions of places written by critically acclaimed contemporary writers for you to model and work through prompts to bring out your best creative thinking about the world you want to show in your writing.
Facilitator: Deborah Taffa
Category: CNF
This presentation tackles memoir as a political act. How do authors perform their personal remembrances in order to articulate, not only a single consciousness, but a broader (tribal) experience of the world? If a good memoir tells us what happened, a great memoir reveals societal pressures at play in what happened. None of us are shaped in a vacuum, so how can we weave the broader strokes of American society into our stories to reveal universal tensions in our communities? Join us as we walk through the rewards and pitfalls of bringing research threads to your personal narratives. How might you keep readers attached to your protagonist’s narrative arc while also weaving in hidden histories, governmental policies, and stories of social activism?
Facilitator: Estella Gonzalez
Category: Fiction
In this generative workshop, writers will use the power of childhood memories and mapping to help them create the beginnings of a flash fiction piece, memoir, or a narrative poem. With the help of the five senses and modification exercises, participants will dig deeper into their pasts to enhance and develop their writing into an evocative text.
Facilitator: Elena Karina Byrne
Category: Poetry, Multi-genre
This workshop will combine topic discussions with writing prompts. During our interactive, problem-solving adventure, we will adopt new ways of looking at and understanding our poems. Whether you consider yourself a lyric, narrative, or hybrid writer, this class will offer fresh approaches to your writing and revision processes. The intersection of the arts is alive! Poetry & Film (both visual mediums) suspend Time. Both marry the interior and exterior worlds of the main character or speaker. The two genres translate experience anew, demanding the writer show with image, sound & action. Both poets and filmmakers examine the kinesthetic power of visual and linguistic interactions within the dream-like realms of memory and the visual imagination. As a poet, you are like an actor, director & cinematographer, screenwriter/narrator, stage designer, documentarian, and scene editor…Let's celebrate how and when poetry and filmmaking share key elements of engagement.
Facilitator: Ames O'Neill
Category: Multi-genre
Despite the fact that queer communities, especially those which intersect race and class, are made more vulnerable by the climate crisis, policy continues to exclude queer solutions and instead reflects the cis-heteronormative practices which fuel both the climate crisis and the discrimination against these communities globally in the form of barriers to disaster responses, climate asylum, and family reunification. First, I will present applications of queer ecologies in poetics and fiction and methods of queering our understanding of our responsibilities as literary citizens in the climate crisis. The generative writing exercise and discussion to follow will encourage attendees to consider writing as a radical act of freedom, and in queering our understanding of and solutions to the climate crisis, we could access our freest selves. We will draw connections between gender understandings and the transitioning climate and encourage community-building discussion based on writing into collective identity and hopeful solutions.
Facilitator: Angie Dell, Charissa Lucille, Devin Pope, Vic Saturnhex
Category: Business of Writing
This panel spotlights the possibilities and practicalities of collaborative publishing for writers eager to be read. Members of Paper Jam + Print, the collaborative print studio in downtown Phoenix that houses SATURNHEX, Shut Eye Press, and Wasted Ink Publishing, join Devin Kate Pope, a writer who has worked with them to publish a zine, and discuss the opportunities within collaborative publishing that fall outside the “traditional publishing” or “self-publishing” binary—especially for writers who have an activist message that receives pushback in traditional publishing, and/or writers who want partners in the publishing process. Our panel explores the ethos the three presses share: to provide accessible, intentional, D.I.T. (Do It Together) printing opportunities, and how their collaboration works in real-time. Attendees can expect to leave the panel with a grasp of the theories behind DIT publishing and how they can get more involved in Phoenix or other communities, and online.
Session 3: (12:00 pm - 1:15 pm)
Facilitator: Diana Khoi Nguyen
Genre: Multi-genre
The word lyric has roots in the Greek stringed instrument, lyre, and thus the lyric mode necessitates musicality and sound in its expressive forms—be it emotive poetry, prose, or any other artistic form. For this generative craft session, we will pay close attention to what happens when lyric is embroidered in a block of prose and how this transforms the nature of syntax, of the sentence at an elemental level. To begin, we will examine a suite of prose poems and lyrical passages from poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, extracting tools to craft lyrical sentences of our own.
Facilitators: Sally Ball, Patricia Murphy, Cecilia Savala, Gionni Ponce
Genre: Business of Writing
Revision often is a source of anxiety and even dread. “First word, best word,” is an old saying, at least in poetry, but most writers who are in it for the long haul end up learning to love revision the hard way. Our panel will discuss their sometimes torturous, sometimes joyful relationship with revision and what revision has shown them as well as providing their “pro tips” for becoming a devoted and even inspired reviser.
Facilitator: Jacqueline Balderamma
Genre: Poetry, Multi-genre
This generative workshop will ask attendees to consider the large impact of small forms. Together we'll explore how the micropoem intersects challenge culture, daily writing, and small steps toward ‘the long poem.’ Participants will respond to prompts on traditional and new forms to create new writing, learn about poetic craft, and engage in a lively and encouraging discussion around works drafted during the event.
Facilitator: Phillip B. Williams
Genre: Multi-genre
In this class, we will discuss strategies for moving across fiction and poetry genres using tool sets presumably unique to either. How can plot, narration, and manipulation of time assist with writing a poem? How can sound play, modes (lyrical, narrative, and dramatic), and imagistic precision assist with writing fiction? Participants will engage in several writing exercises that explore the benefits of craft lessons from either genre and show that the distance between fiction and poetry can be bridged without (much) intimidation.
Facilitator: Ramona Reeves
Genre: Fiction
Character-driven fiction depends on layered characters that jump off the page. As readers, we recognize when a writer has developed layered characters. We may comment that the characters seem like real people, and we may become invested in those characters’ desires, motivations, dreams, etc., but how does one go about developing layered characters, and does every character in a short story or novel require complex layering? Is it simply a matter of description? We will briefly discuss different types of characters in fiction, define layering, discuss which characters necessitate multiple layers, and look at ways to create layered, round characters. This workshop will include short readings and generative exercises to help attendees gain an understanding of how other writers have developed layered characters in fiction.
Facilitator: Alberto Ríos
Genre: Literature, Multi-genre
Magical Realism as a genre stems largely from Latin American literature in the period called “el boom,” which encompasses the second half of the 20th century. This session will look at some historic antecedents, most specifically Surrealism, and move up to the present. We will discuss issues in translation and with cultures and languages generally as they have created not simply a genre of literature, but music and other art forms as well. The session will include some reactive writing which we may share time permitting.
Facilitator: Justin Petropoulos
Genre: Poetry
In this workshop, we will be combining aspects of collage and formal poetry to create text-based self-portraits. We will begin by briefly discussing self-portraiture, formal poetry, and collage as genres and how they can work together to create a reflection of the writer. We will then go step-by-step through the process of collaging a self-portrait. Each poet will be asked to bring six source texts to the workshop that reflect an aspect of themselves: an obsession like gardening, a beloved novel or folktale, a set of instructions for a board game, a family recipe. You can bring any texts that in some way connect you to the world. You will leave the workshop with a working poem draft and an anatomy that you can modify or repeat to write other poems in the future.
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The 2024 DNRS Conference Teaching Fellows share a page or a poem from new never-before-heard work, following the popular “One Page Salon” model. A book signing will follow.
Session 4: (2:30 pm - 3:45 pm)
Facilitator: Regina Brooks
Genre: Business of Writing
Learn the secrets to crafting book proposals that captivate publishers and propel your manuscript toward successful publication. In this presentation, participants will learn the essential elements of an undeniable book proposal. From crafting a compelling hook to outlining platform strategies, attendees will learn to tailor their proposals to stand out in a competitive market and increase their chances of securing a publishing deal. Whether you're a seasoned author seeking to refine your pitch or a new writer just starting out, this workshop will give you the tools and knowledge to transform your book idea into a sellable masterpiece.
Facilitators: Brent Amenreyo, Francisco Aragón, Laura Villareal
Genre: Poetry
Over the last two decades, Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS), has enhanced the visibility, appreciation, and study of Latinx literature both on and off the campus of the University of Notre Dame, with a particular focus on poetry. The initiative puts an emphasis on programs that support newer voices, foster a sense of community among writers, and place Latinx writers in community spaces. Letras Latinas director Francisco Aragón and Letras Latinas associates Brent Ameneyro and Laura Villareal will each present a sampling of their poems. Following their readings, they will also offer testimonios on their trajectories in publishing, criticism, editing, and literary curating, including not only what they have done from their respective posts at Letras Latinas, but also the varied work they did before Letras Latinas, thereby offering three distinct models to learn from. On the occasion of Letras Latinas’ 20th anniversary (2004 – 2024), join them for this reading and conversation that illuminates what it looks like to be a working poet and literary citizen.
Facilitators: Camille Acker, Tara Ison, Sarah Viren, Phillip B. Williams
Genre: Fiction, CNF
How do we incorporate or relate to history in our fictional and creative nonfiction work? What are the risks and rewards of research? What does being true to the story really involve, and what are the challenges in navigating a relationship to history in your work? Our panelists discuss different ways they have used history as a jumping-off point and a guide in crafting their creative work.
Facilitator: Ayling Zulema Dominguez
Genre: Poetry
In this class, we will root our anticolonial explorations in Patty Krawec and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s notions of re-becoming kin and embodying our forgotten histories. If we treat the page as subversive playground rather than rigid blank space, it gives voices of diaspora a chance to recollect and re-weave cultural stories and threads of belonging. We’ll draw inspiration from poets like Emily Lee Luan, Anthony Cody, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Keith S. Wilson, Safia Elhillo, and Warsan Shire. These poets all push at the boundaries of the colonial languages they write in, and collapse time and distance, along with other constraints, as they write futures into being in the present, all of which will inform our creative responses and ruminations.
Facilitator: Tarah Knaresboro
Genre: Multi-genre
Too often, the seeds of good ideas get crushed by overthinking, self-judgment, and fear. As a result, we wind up staying in our comfort zones, or abandoning ideas altogether. In this generative workshop, we will focus on turning the thinking brain off and letting our intuitive creative energy take the reins. We will go through a series of unconventional prompts that engage with play, intentional imperfection, and mess-making. The goal is for you to leave the workshop with additional perspective on your artistic instincts, a set of tools you can use to develop new ideas, and the sense of inspiration that comes from seeing your mind activate in new ways
Facilitators: Pamela Uschuk and Joni Wallace
Genre: CNF
In this generative class, we will look at hybrid and off-kilter approaches to crafting memoir in the remarkable genre of the micro form. We’ll explore and try several approaches to this phenomenal genre to create a short linked series of vividly rendered lived experiences. By the end of class, expect to have new work, ideas for revision, and a new appreciation for the visceral power of micro memoir.
Facilitators: Zoe Flavin
Genre: Fiction
Join Zoe Flavin, a writer and former education manager at Planned Parenthood, for this generative workshop on incorporating sex and sexuality into your fiction writing. We’ll start by reading excerpts from writers like James Baldwin, Mary Gaitskill, Alyssa Songsiridej, and Raven Leilani. Then, we’ll ground ourselves in a definition of sexuality and the many ways it can show up in your writing. The second half of the workshop will be spent putting our learning into practice through generative exercises. You’ll leave with a better understanding of what makes sex writing work in fiction and how to incorporate it into your own writing. This workshop will be LGBTQ+ friendly and taught with a trauma-informed lens.
Session 5: (4:00 pm - 5:15 pm)
Facilitators: Daisy Atterbury, Michelle Gurule, Jane Kalu, Marisa Tirado
Genre: Literature, Multi-genre
Several writers from the Southwest, who work in multiple genres, but in intersecting topics of sexuality, gender, queer studies, and feminism, explore the representation of dead girls in literature, drawing upon feminist and queer lenses to interrogate the power dynamics inherent in such representations. Prepare to leave with new ideas and perspectives and compelling literary examples.
Facilitators: David Foster, Wendy J. Fox, Cindy Kibbe, Lorraine Wheat
Genre: Business of Writing
A diverse panel of writers from a range of genres and at different stages of their careers discuss their best “lessons learned” and what you can learn from them in forging a writing life—from best practices to create a productive writing group to what you need to know to move toward publication and beyond. This “kitchen cabinet” of writers will share their hard-earned wisdom about forging a writing life.
Facilitators: Sasha Anaya, Emad Jabini, Polly Llewellyn, Winslow Schmelling
Genre: Business of Writing
Teaching, research, nonprofit work, or just plain work—most writers have to do things besides their own writing to get by in the world. Our panels discuss how their adjacent activities and outside interests feed into their writing practice and how to turn these other activities into resources and even assets.
Facilitator: David Dell'oso, Russ Kazmierczak, Mona Morsy
Genre: Multi-genre
Comics have been a definitive American medium for over 100 years, with a rich history in newspaper and literary publication and a controversial cultural reputation. This panel will explore those topics and ultimately establish comics' storytelling power, through 1) an analysis of comics' origins, 2) their mythical and therapeutic impact on creator and reader alike, and 3) the signature ways they combine narrative and graphic design to create a completely unique piece of literature. Just as their heroes are known for “saving the day,” reading and making comics can make a relevant, positive impact on self and the community—and participants will leave the panel with a new perspective on the medium, and perhaps the inspiration to contribute to it.
Facilitator: Brandon Blue
Genre: Poetry
Every poem we read presents itself in form, in an arrangement to best hear the argument a poem voices. When a poet decides to write a received form (a form invented by another), that poet must contend with the history and residual meanings that form holds and decide to continue that history or subvert it. In this generative workshop, we will pay close attention to the ways poets have written into and subverted the sonnet in order for each member to choose their own form to write into. By paying close attention to the meanings of forms that have stood the test of time, we will fill them with our own perspectives to craft complex and provoking poems.
Facilitators: Dean Newlund
Genre: Business of Writing
As a writer you need to network but as a sensitive introvert (perhaps) or someone who doesn’t want to pursue transactional relationships (an idealist in other words!) what do you do? Learn the principles of honest, heartfelt networking and community building from Dean Newland founder and CEO of Mission Facilitators International, a boutique training and development firm based out of Phoenix, Arizona, with the sole purpose of helping organizations—and people— become more connected to their purpose and their people.
6:15 - 7:45 pm
Location TBD
Day 2: Friday, October 11
Session 1: (9:00 am - 10:15 am)
Facilitator: Sherwin Bitsui
Genre: Poetry
This workshop explores Indigenous poetics, focusing on Contemporary Diné poetry, language, and worldview. Participants will blend theory and practice to create unique poems inspired by ecological immersion. We will establish a harmonious (or dissonant) connection between poetry and place. This workshop provides dedicated time and space for reflection on nature alongside the industrialized world.
Facilitators: Caroline Kim, Ramona Reeves, Juan Carlos Reyes
Debut authors talk about what they learned and what they feel is essential as you navigate the path from first manuscript to publication and beyond. From reading a contract to devising a strategy for book promotion, this panel will help you get your first book experience as well as prepare for a great second act.
Facilitator: Jonathan Danielson
Genre: Fiction
How do we write about Arizona? What do we write about when it comes to Arizona? What does Arizona literature even look like and why? In this session, we examine Arizona's rich landscapes, cultures, histories, politics, and populations as inspiration for creative writing, and discuss why certain stories do and don't get told. We will explore the aesthetic choices available to writers when crafting narratives set in Arizona's dynamic physical and conceptual landscapes. From rugged deserts to high pines and urban sprawls, from native traditions to snowbird vacation plans and a rich cowboy heritage, Arizona offers a wide array of possible narratives to explore. Participants will learn about the unique assemblages that converge to construct Arizona and discuss what deliberate aesthetic choices they can make to enhance the authenticity and depth of their place-based narratives.
Facilitator: Sarah Viren
Genre: CNF
In this workshop, we will consider the self, or selves, we craft on the page. How do we accurately but evocatively portray that self? How do we write about ourselves in conversation with the communities, ideas, conflicts, histories, and landscapes that comprise both the self and this world? We’ll talk through different approaches to writing the “I,” including Virginia Woolf’s imagining of an “I now” and “I then” and Philip Lopate’s understanding of the self as character and spend time drafting our own flash essays grounded in an “I” who both thinks and acts.
Facilitator: Lois P. Jones
Genre: Poetry
Psychometry comes from the Greek, psukhē meaning “spirit, soul” and metron, to “measure.” It is the process where impressions about a person or object are received through contact with an article. This workshop delves into what remains of energetic histories and how to transform these impressions into poems. Poetry as we know it is not only experiential but a divination into other possible worlds. You don’t have to be a believer, a clairvoyant, or a psychic to practice psychometric writing. Everyone has the ability to read the history of an object by touching it. Such impressions can be perceived as images, sounds, smells, tastes, vibrations and even emotions. We will use various methods to generate new work as we look at inspiration from poets whose work intersects these worlds including Rainer Maria Rilke, Joanna Klink, Tomas Tranströmer, Natalie Diaz, Joseph Fasano, and others. Bring an object to the workshop which has the potential to bridge this world. Photographs, maps, jewelry, stones, coins, ornaments, books, clothing, even a leaf, or twig significant to your life and landscape.
Facilitator: Larry Chavis
Genre: Multi-genre
Many of us write from the margins in hopes of inspiring others and even ourselves. But what are we on the margin of? This session is an introduction to the systemic inequality and bias that exists throughout the US economy. By understanding the unseen forces that work against almost all of us, you will have a better appreciation for the road you have traveled. I am a business school professor and an economist. I am also Native American and an MFA student at IAIA who is writing to better appreciate my own superpowers. I will introduce a set of accessible, engaging and graphically oriented materials that show the impact of place (especially where we grew up) on our lived experiences and economic opportunities and give examples of how this knowledge has influenced my own writing.
Facilitator: Sally Ball
Genre: Multi-genre
In this class, we'll see some examples from ASU Distinctive Collections, including HOLD, Ball's large-scale limited-edition collaboration with the award-winning Czech gravurist Jan Vičar. We will think about the role of image in the imagination: whether that image is made of words, or fully pictorial, and about what happens when language and visual arts are brought together. The class will conclude with some thoughts also about writing in response to visual artworks and a generative ekphrastic exercise.
Facilitators: April Bannister, Patrick De Leon, Siobhan Jean-Charles, Hana Saad
Genre: Multi-genre
This panel will discuss how writing on mental health, mental illness, and madness can provide relief for authors dealing with their own mental health as well as advocate for and offer awareness for others suffering, a population that is largely misunderstood, stigmatized, and ignored. Confessional writing may be vulnerable and difficult, but it is also vital in its contributions to literature as well as to the broader social conversations surrounding mental health. Participants will discuss how these concerns animate their work and provide examples of how this work can inform and enlarge a creative practice.
Session 2: (10:30 am - 11:45 pm)
Facilitator: Alexandra Van de Kamp
Genre: Poetry
Have you ever read a poem that truly wowed you and found yourself asking “How did the poet accomplish this?” This workshop is designed to answer just that question. We’ll dive into contemporary American poetry by closely examining an array of cutting-edge poets. We’ll track the power and the passion of every poem to identify key writing techniques that will expand our own poetry making. Together, we will access a diverse palette of tones and structures. Through this process of deep admiration and attention, participants will draft poems with a refreshing sense of play, experiment with a bolder poetic brush, and feed their poetic sensibility in surprising ways. Participants will generate 1-2 new poems and leave with new tools and fresh approaches to fuel future writing. Some of the poets we will explore will be Melissa Studdard, Joanna Klink, Patricia Spears Jones, Michelle Whittaker, César Leonardo de León, and others.
Facilitators: Tami Haaland, Melissa Kwasny, Justin Petropoulos, Karen Rigby
Genre: Poetry
From use of traditional form to experimental, avant-garde, and even invented forms, form is an essential part of a writer’s tool chest. In this panel, three writers will discuss their different approaches to form and how form provides a process of creative reinvention and/or discovery.
Facilitator: Debra Magpie Earling
Genre: Fiction
Do you wish to discover stories or add new meaning and shape to a lackluster narrative[s]? How can our emotional geographies become imaginative geographies that ignite our storytelling? In this generative workshop/talk, we will look at the many ways our emotional geographies can deepen and expand our writing and offer limitless inspiration.
Facilitator: Jenny Irish
Genre: Multi-genre
"I don’t wait to be struck by lightning and don’t need certain slants of light in order to write." – Toni Morrison. In this generative workshop, carefully designed prompts spark the beginning of a new piece, assisting writers in the conception of a story, poem, or creative essay. We will look at examples of sensory writing, the use of sonic elements, and associative movement. After discussing examples together, we will spend time writing in response to three different prompts: 1) use of our senses, 2) use of sonic elements, and 3) word association as a generative tool. If time allows, participants will be invited to share.
Facilitator: Karen Odden
Genre: Fiction
Well-drawn, diverse, complex secondary characters add important narrative elements such as nuance, humor, suspense, and conflict to a novel or short story. This hands-on workshop presents seventeen different types of secondary characters and explores ways they can contribute to the main plot line and themes while being more than merely the protagonist’s friends, foes, and foils – who can sometimes feel like “cardboard cutouts.” Using familiar examples such as the Harry Potter series and The Queen’s Gambit, we draw upon psychologist Dan McAdams’s concept of the “personal myth” to examine a secondary character’s backstory, world views, and desires. Then we discuss how to feather that artfully into a narrative. Participants respond to several writing prompts about a secondary character in their own work-in-progress, and they leave with additional exercises. A complete slide deck presents concepts in an interactive and clear way.
Facilitator: Rebecca Loggia
Genre: Poetry
The goal of this workshop is for each participant to walk away with a draft of a poem and/or the tools to feel more confident creating graphic poems that address experiences of illness or disability. After a brief overview of graphic poetry, narrative medicine, and how the two can be blended to make poetry that is powerful in addressing the experience of illness, students will then work to create a graphic poem of their own (for example, a blackout poem from medical text). Materials, including medical text, graphics, markers, etc. will be provided (though participants are more than welcome to bring their own medical records if desired).
Facilitator: Chloe Jensen
Genre: Fiction, CNF
This interactive, generative session—modeled on graduate fiction writing classes—will explore the relationship between author and narrator/speaker. We’ll begin by looking at how authors from Virginia Woolf to Alexander Chee have approached the relationship between the self-holding the pen and the self on the page. What is “autofiction,” and why is it controversial? We’ll explore how, and why, writers across genres might specify a story’s point of telling, from essayist Phillip Lopate’s idea of “double perspective” to Elif Batuman’s idea of “diachronic writing,” in which the author acknowledges their own evolution during the writing process. Finally, you’ll get a chance to apply these tools and techniques in your own work. In addition to new work, you’ll take home concrete strategies for reframing and breathing new life into existing projects. This class is open to writers in all genres.
Queer ecologies (of which there are many, as many as there are expressions of self or micro-seasons in our world) are based on the relationship between our own understandings of and experiences with nature and our understandings of queer experience (bodily, interpersonal, or otherwise). Because queer ecology has such a broad thematic scope, the panel is organized around the more specialized writing concerns and interests of the poets, fiction writers, artists, and activists involved. Our panel aims to queer our discussions of climate by uplifting the voices of local climate storytellers who are writing into futuristic solutions centered on education, regional resiliency, and community building. What connections do poets, fiction writers, and artists draw between the transitioning climate, the body which is neither here nor there/bodily evolution, and land and water as that which informs and queers an understanding of self, community, and future?
Session 3: (12:00 pm - 1:15 pm)
Facilitator: Cindy Juyoung OK
Genre: Poetry
In an open reading and writing session, writers approach blankness, the page's holes, and read them newly as acts, as the page's wholes. What spaces do we record and what breaks do we honor? Where do we hold, wander, and skip in and past the poem? How do limits on language affect poetic patterns? Reading examples from poets Divya Victor, Layli Long Soldier, Douglas Kearney, and John Murillo leads to both theoretical frameworks of visual, verbal, and archival gaps and practical tools for engagement. Exercises then fill constructions of physical and mental holes while creating more questions and perforations in the text. Writing into the empty page, as well as creating it to redact, remake, and return, words and their containers can become new even to their writers. Revision and writing are treated as acts that collaborate with one another, inherently paired to imagine page as space and turn them. In this generative workshop, the fissure usually understood as aftermath becomes an occasion to begin.
Genre: Multi-genre
Much has been made in the popular press of increased visibility and attention to Indigenous voices and perspectives as signaled by television shows like Reservation Dogs, and films like Scorcese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Our panel discusses what they are seeing and what they see as the challenges of authentically reflecting Indigenous voices and histories at this complicated and often conflicted social and historical moment.
Facilitator: Tara Ison
Genre: Fiction
"The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like." — E.L. Doctorow. Let’s take a look at the perils and joys of "research-based" or "research-inspired" fiction—how writers might transform the potentially dry facts and figures of "research" (historical, scientific, biographical, etc.) into resonant characters, metaphorical jewels, nuanced language, and dramatic narrative.
Facilitator: Tami Haaland
Genre: Poetry
This workshop will explore the multilayered riches that memory offers to the writer, including events, dreams, images, conversations, speculations, and notions that seem to remain vivid even if they do not connect to external circumstances. Memory is by nature malleable, emotional, potentially nebulous, and specific. Through a series of examples, questions and prompts, we will explore how memory can inform our writing, regardless of genre. If participants choose, they are welcome to bring a meaningful object, photograph, or simply an idea to the workshop.
Facilitator: Aaliyah Daniels
Genre: Literature, Multi-genre
"Nightmare Noir" explores the language of horror tropes from Gothic origins to modern pop culture, focusing on the influence of monsters in the dehumanization of Black and brown bodies. This presentation delves into questions surrounding the allure of vampires, the relegation of werewolves to secondary status, and the prevalence of redemption arcs for white monsters. Through critical analysis, participants uncover how these narratives perpetuate racial biases and examine strategies for reclaiming and subverting these tropes. By empowering POC voices and perspectives, "Nightmare Noir" aims to help in the reshaping of discourse surrounding horror and foster a more inclusive and representative genre.
Facilitator: Sarah Yaron
Genre: Fiction
Point of view (POV) is the lens through which your readers experience your narrative. In this workshop, we'll explore the various POV options available to writers, from the intimate first-person to wide-reaching omniscient panoramic. You'll learn how to harness the power of each perspective to enhance your storytelling and immerse your readers in your fictional world.
Facilitator: Cecilia Savala
Genre: Business of Writing
This class will frame demonstrations of organizational strategies for writers using Google Drive and Sheets. Participants will learn to use these resources to track multiple drafts and document all edits, while also managing the drafting process and eliminating the fear of "losing" a good draft to revision. In this class, we will model the use of Google Drive as a file cabinet in which to organize current and past drafts. We will use Google Sheets to organize individual poems or stories according to name, ranked tier, draft, or time since last touched, with space for name changes, links, and other notes.
In this reading, the 2024 DNRS Conference Teaching Fellows will share a page or a poem from new work following the popular “One Page Salon” model with a book signing to follow.
Session 4: (2:30 pm - 3:45 pm)
Facilitators: Dara Yen Elerath, Anushah Jiwani, Susan Nguyen, Aria Pahari, and Edie Tsong
Genre: Poetry, Multi-genre
The use of hybrid forms is a way to resist limitations and expand possibilities. This reflects how many artists and writers today live and work in a world of multiple identities and languages. Writers from Kundiman SW— Anushah Jiwani, Aria Pahari, Dara Yen Elerath, Edie Tsong, and Susan Nguyen—share their work and discuss their practices, moving from in-between spaces to occupying and claiming space.
Featured Writers Prose Reading Group # 2: Jenny Irish, Tara Ison, Ramona Reeves, Phillip B. Williams
Facilitator: Andrew Hudson
Genre: Fiction, Genre
How do we write about that whole Covid thing? Approaching five years after 2020, it still seems like a lot of fiction is just pretending the pandemic didn't happen. Meanwhile, recent novels that do touch on Covid don’t always feel adequate to the task. And yet, the Covid years beg for a literary response. This session will explore metaphorical, speculative, and craft approaches to writing stories that attempt to capture the weirdness and tragedy of 2020 and all that came after. Along the way, we’ll ask whether we’ve really gotten enough distance to see those events clearly, and how we can peel away the numbness and trauma to reconnect with our individual and collective pandemic experiences. Plus, we will consider what to do with all those manuscripts we wrote to pass the time in lockdown.
Facilitator: Ariana Benson
Genre: Poetry
"Giving Voice" is a two-part lecture and generative workshop in which students will explore the history of the use of lyric persona as a means of radical resistance (particularly in the history of African American literature) and the ways poetry allows for marginalized histories to be told and experienced beyond traditional means. I plan to use several specific poets' (ex. Ai, Patricia Smith, etc.) work as examples of this concept, discuss the ethical questions surrounding writing in another's voice, and finally provide prompts through which students can give voice to both nonhuman objects and figures beyond their personal experience in order to craft their own persona poems.
Facilitator: Stephanie Austin
Genre: CNF
The conversation around memoir and writing one’s family is not new. I have a story to tell, and that story is one I happen to want to publish, and that story involves people I know. How do I tell this story without being exploitative? When your characters are “real people” then what? Even Disney villains now have a backstory. Even when you are writing yourself, you are not a hero or a villain. You are also filled with complexity and nuance. You as a “character” must exhibit a level of agency. We will complete a generative writing exercise where you write a happy memory/scene of your person and a sad memory/scene of your person. Your person can also be yourself. What is something wonderful you/your person did? What is something awful you/your person did? Offering a traumatic moment against a non-traumatic moment builds empathy and nuance in your CNF “characters”.
Facilitator: Shawnte Orion
Genre: Multi-genre
This workshop will explore editing innovations by classic film directors, including Sergei Eisenstein's silent-era Soviet Montage Theory and Michelangelo Antonioni's poetry of images and apply those concepts to contemporary writing, through playful exercises and interactive prompts that embrace purpose, chance, and mistake. Poets and writers of other genres are all welcome.
Facilitators: Ben Shahon and Inbal Gilboa
Genre: Business of Writing
Join JAKE: The Anti-Literary Literary Magazine staff members Ben Shahon (editor-in-chief) and Inbal Gilboa (managing editor) as they walk you through the early days of starting a fiction magazine both on and offline. Learn about common pitfalls, the tricks of the trade, developing your editorial voice, chapbook development and printing, how to get published in online reviews (eventually), avoiding burnout, and making friends in local literary circles! Hear about the things they did right, the things they did wrong, and the ways in which publishing spheres are changing and why you (yes, you) should start a literary magazine today!
Session 5: (4:00 pm - 5:15 pm)
Facilitators: Sally Ball, Tami Haaland, Justin Petropoulos, Patricia Murphy, TC Tolbert
Facilitators: Brandon Blue, Chloe Jensen, Zack Lesmeister
Join an uncensored conversation between writers in multiple genres who have made sex an integral part of their work. Learn how you can use the power of sexual/sensual diction and syntax to create a strong voice and mirror dynamics in non-sexual interactions/encounters, and why it’s important to defy the “fade to black” convention. Audience interaction and questions will be encouraged, and you’ll take home concrete strategies and techniques for expanding the boundaries of your own writing.
Facilitators: María Esquinca, Saúl Hernández, Saba Keramati, jj peña
In this panel, the four panelist-poets will cover different mediums or techniques we use to enter into our craft and words. Sometimes we believe “writer's block” is real, when in reality we might just be needing to use a path that hasn’t been explored to get into a given piece of work. Each of us will read one poem and then we will ask questions to each other about what the beginning process looked like for each poem. We will also talk about other mediums we continue to use or methods we have learned for entering a poem.
Facilitator: Tarah Knaresboro, Frankie Concepcion, Amanda Machedo, Sarah Viren
Genre: CNF
For many writers, incorporating their own life experiences into their work is a key part of their artistic process. But what happens when our memories are lost to us, or exist only in blurry fragments? We know from neuroscience research that our memories are imperfect, more so than many of us consciously realize—and this may be especially true for memories of traumatic events. Given these realities, what do we do when we want to write about our own past? In this panel, four writers of creative nonfiction will discuss their approaches to writing about their own lives and reckoning with the complexities of memory. What approaches might we use to find what’s been lost? When might we be better off writing around a lost memory? What happens when our memories conflict with the memories of others? How might we leverage fractured memory in our work? How do we take care of ourselves psychologically when delving into potentially dark spaces?
Facilitators: Camille Acker, Debra Magpie Earling, Gionni Ponce
Facilitator: Ayling Zulema Dominguez, Kinsale Drake, TBA
The panel consists of a reading featuring different members of the NDN Girls Book Club, as well as a Q&A period where the book club members can share more information about its inception, its goals and programming, and future endeavors. Panel speakers will present on what it means to write modern Indigenous poetry and prose; what are the subjects being explored, to what end, and how is representation in historically exclusionary spaces and industries being challenged. The panel will also provide prompts, reading suggestions, and take-away wonderings for attendees to continue to explore the topics discussed.
Featuring Nicole Sealey and John Murillo
5:45 - 7:00 pm
Day 3: Saturday, October 12
Session 1: (9:00 am - 10:15 am)
Facilitator: Brooke Sahni
Genre: Poetry
A poetry chapbook, often defined as a short book containing 30 or fewer pages, is becoming an increasingly popular form. Kelli Russell Agodon, whose sold-out chapbook, Geography, was one of Floating Bridge Press’s best sellers, talked about how the experience of having a chapbook had benefited her: “[The chapbook] helped me understand the publishing process a little better before my full-length collection. Also, crafting the chapbook really allowed me to focus on one particular subject.” We will begin this workshop talking about the chapbook, focusing on themed or linked poems and the importance of ordering. We will look at examples from writers such as Leila Chatti, Layli Long Solider, and Kelli Russell Agodon, before diving into our own generative exercises. We will also discuss avenues for chapbook publication.
Facilitator: Gionni Ponce
Genre: Fiction
Writing can be an incredible cerebral and analytical activity, particularly when we are thinking through the overarching why’s and how’s of our stories. Because of this, writers often want to write thought-full characters. Though the characters are traveling through space and time, they may be simply thinking through a tough decision. They don’t take much action(!) and the story’s plot line stalls. (I'm speaking from experience.) Using sections of Benjamin Percy’s craft book Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction, this workshop will focus on creating tension, suspension, action, and thrills in our works. Percy’s work has been recommended by authors as far-ranging as Carmen Maria Machado, Dan Chaon, and Dean Koontz.
Facilitator: Christian Teresi
Genre: Literature, Poetry
There is a long history of poetry and its techniques being used to not only enhance other artistic mediums but also more practical and quotidian acts like religious observance, marketing, and diplomacy. Some of the greatest poets regularly used poetic theories to advance objectives in their professional and personal lives: James Dickey wrote copy for Coca-Cola, Nobel laureates Pablo Neruda, Czeslaw Milosz, and Saint-John Perse were all diplomats, Carlos Drummond de Andrade was a civil servant, and Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit priest. This session will discuss the history and usefulness of poetry as an everyday act where the practice is taken out of the classroom and academia and made essential to careers and personal traditions.
Facilitators: Hanna Ur. Gabhain, Catherine Garbinsky, Anne Abraham Gassaway
Who we are can be a complicated question, encompassing parts of ourselves or our experiences that can be challenging to define and/or hard to own. In this panel, four writers explore the idea of origin story and how it impacts their work.
Facilitator: CD Eskilson
Genre: Poetry
What are we saying when we call something a “monster?” The word comes from the Latin word monstrare, meaning 'to demonstrate'. In this sense, a monster is quite literally demonstrative—it reveals a deeper truth about a society that challenges its dominant narratives. The monster is an inverted mirror exposing our warped perceptions, anxieties, and social values. Monstrosity has therefore been applied to dehumanize perceived Others based on race, gender, ability, and other socio-cultural factors. At the same time, monsterhood offers a powerful means by which we might reject and work beyond the violent forces of white supremacy, patriarchy, or ableism. In this workshop, we’ll explore the work of poets who have reinvented and repurposed classic monster narratives for their own radical ends. We’ll craft poems that write against as well as through the tropes and values embodied by our favorite creatures to reach a poetics or self-determination and liberation.
Genre: Multi-genre
Facilitator: Laura Gaddis
Genre: Fiction, CNF, Multi-genre
Participants will explore writing as an act of exploration and discovery. We’ll look at how every story, in fiction and narrative nonfiction, has layers and how we can go about excavating the true story underneath. What makes a story universal to readers? What makes readers have a stake in what the author has to say? Using ideas based on Vivian Gornick’s “The Situation and Story,” we’ll apply Gornick’s principles to students’ writing. We’ll discuss how to excavate underlying themes and meaning through details and symbols. We’ll also identify how the trajectories of the story arc and the situation arc fit together to create a story a reader will find satisfying. Through a short craft talk, generative writing exercises, and small-group workshopping, students will take time to write, read, discuss, and explore their work for deeper meanings and themes.
Session 2: (10:30 am - 11:45 am)
Facilitator: Amy Casey
Genre: Fiction
Debut author Amy E. Casey shares a unique approach to letting the setting of a work drive the process of writing fiction. She will lead participants through a generative craft workshop–writers will test different approaches for leveraging sense of place to create emotional resonance, seeing how setting and characterization can intertwine to inform and heighten one another. Casey suggests a process called “worldwalking” as a next step to worldbuilding: instead of simply knowing things about the world of a story, this session strengthens the ability to mentally and empathetically traverse it. Bring your writing materials, whether laptop, notebook, or napkin, and worldwalk with us.
Facilitator: Kimberly Blaeser
Genre: Poetry
What inconvenient knowledge do you hold? What disenfranchised voices do you carry? Can you/How can you write from contested spaces? This generative workshop will offer prompts and examples from other writers to inspire new poems. We will explore the tension of writing the forbidden or writing unwelcome voices and stories. Authors from Paul Celan to Joy Harjo have expressed the need for poetry in the worst moments of history. How is our writing “doubled” in a time of censorship? Can lyric taunt itself into truth? Participants will experiment with forms such as the contrapuntal poem, epistolary poem, erasure poem, and docu-poem. We will create “jazz” poetry in which we join our disparate voices in one conversation, one creative piece.
Facilitator: amara MC
Genre: Multi-genre
How do we write about trauma? What are the steps we can take as artists? The only way out of trauma is writing through trauma. When we move trauma from outside our bodies and onto the page, we release the weight. Trauma is no longer held within our bodies, but on the periphery, where we can look at it from afar and begin to make edits and transition from the situation to the story. There is often a debate whether writing is healing or craft, but for many of us, it is both. Trauma writing is excruciating, but the only way to get to the other side, is to do the work. In this workshop, we will discuss and do exercises to write through the trauma to not only understand the trauma, but to be changed by it and thus be able to connect with our readers and their traumas.
Facilitators: Matt Ferraz, Denise Tolan, Judith van Praag
Genre: CNF
Effective memoir often touches on subjects that are difficult to discuss, buried – or even ignored. In this panel, three memoirists discuss their different approaches to the genre and why telling the story that frightens you is so often part of telling the story.
Facilitator: Daniel Mills
Genre: CNF
Writing about food and wine is closely linked to travel writing, history, and cultural criticism. It is a topic that is both deeply personal and universal. Today, we are in a time when restaurants, chefs, and sommeliers are celebrated like never before. At the same time, the plight of employees and other “essential workers” within the industry point to greater issues concerning labor. There is a need for writers who can capture an industry that is constantly changing in nuanced and interesting ways. This presentation will explore the basics of food and wine writing– how to start, where to get published, and the different aspects to the topic.
Tucson poet Richard Siken is a poet, painter, and filmmaker. His book Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, selected by Louise Glück, a Lambda Literary Award, a Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon, 2015) and I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). He will be reading with Christian Teresi, a poet, essayist, and translator whose first collection What Monsters You Make of Them was just released by Red Hen Press.
Genre: Multi-genre