Some AWP Highlights from the Ploughshares Staff

Turns out that some people went to AWP for the panels! The good folks at Ploughshares share their favorite moments from the festival, which include "listening to Seamus Haney[sic] and Derek Walcott on Thursday night," attending "Post Black? Culture, Craft, and Race in Verse (Mitchell L H Douglas, Douglas Kearney, Evie Shockley, Khadijah Queen, Randall Horton)," the "Copper Canyon Press 40th Anniversary Reading (Michael Wiegers, C.D. Wright, Jean Valentine, Bob Hicok, Dean Young)," "We Are Homer: A Reading of Collaborative Poetry and Prose (Ryan Teitman, Traci Brimhall, Laura Eve Engel, Adam Peterson, Brynn Saito, Marcus Wicker)," “Bring Out Your Dead: Writing Ghosts (and Zombies) in Literary Fiction,” organized by Ploughshares blogger Rebecca Makkai, and "Essaying the Essay, with David Lazar, Phillip Lopate, David Shields, and Lia Purpura." There's more, writes Abby Travis:

Outside of the panels, though, I mostly enjoyed the opportunity to talk to such a wide range of people, reunite with former professors, meet editors at other journals, and kick it on Emerson Row with alumni now at Birds LLC, Rose Metal Press, and Gigantic Sequins, and of course, grad student run Redivider. I discovered exactly the poem I needed: Ana Bozicevic’s “About Nietzsche” (from Rise in the Fall, by Birds) and finally got my mitts on The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction, ed. Dinty Moore, which I desperately need, 1) because the first essay is by Lia Purpura, and 2) because brevity is as difficult for me as breathing is natural.