Conference Program
Find below the program for the 2024 WriteAngles Conference.
Please note this is subject to change.
SCHEDULE
The conference takes place at the Northampton Center for the Arts on April 6, 2024.
Note that Arthur Williams Award winner Shanta Lee will be our keynote speaker.
Unfortunately, Honorée Fannone Jeffers had to cancel her participation for personal reasons.
| Time | Lobby | Flex room | APE room | Eli's room |
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| 8:30 - 9:00 | Registration, coffee | |||
| 9:00 - 9:15 | Welcome & Presentation of Abel Meeropol Award
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| 9:15 - 10:00 | Keynote address
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| 10:15 - 11:30 | The Life of a Book
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Writing in Community
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The Poetic Dream
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| 11:45 - 1:00 | Beyond the Book
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Who’s a Writer Anyway?
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Naming our Roots: Generating Poems from the Cultural Languages of our Experiences
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| 1:00 - 2:30 | Lunch & Networking, Book & Writing Bundles Lunch/gathering tables by county, genre, author/presenter | |||
| 2:30 - 3:45 | Writing the Urgent Now
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Using Stories to Enliven Nonfiction
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Reading Out Loud: Sharing your work with confidence
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| 4:00 - 5:15 | Creating, sustaining a satisfying writing life
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The Hard Reality of Speculative Fiction
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What’s the Story?
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| 5:30 | Open Mic! Ana Bandeira Chocolates, 48 Main Street, Northampton | More info & Directions | |||
You can support our conference presenters by buying their books here.
SESSION INFORMATION
Engaging sessions include writing workshops, author spotlights, and thought-provoking discussions on various genres. From honing your craft to exploring the latest literary trends, our program promises inspiration and insight.
Beyond the Book
Books and journals are not the only way for writers to get their words out into the larger world. In this panel discussion, we’ll explore other means of sharing your stories. What are the unique strengths and requirements of formats like podcasts, fan fiction sites, story slams, and songs? And what resources are out there to help you enter those arenas?
Creating and sustaining a satisfying writing life
Building a satisfying creative life can be challenging. Many writers juggle multiple responsibilities and can’t prioritize the space to write or find inspiration. In this panel discussion, participants will hear strategies from a diverse panel of writers with an opportunity to discuss ideas and share experiences.
Naming Our Roots: Generating Poems from the Cultural Languages of Our Experiences (Workshop)
In this generative, engaging workshop, multilingual Boricua poet María will encourage poets to freewrite experiences in their first language(s) to use as raw material for poems. María will provide a poetry sampler that will include poems bilingually side by side and poems that code-switch and writing prompts. All languages welcome!
Reading Out Loud: Sharing your work with confidence
Do you want to become more confident in sharing your writing in public? Discover and practice the art of reading your work with confidence, power, and style. Conquer stage fright and handle unexpected moments with an effective toolkit. Bring a short piece of your writing to practice making your words shine in public.
The Hard Reality of Speculative Fiction: Grounding Speculative Works in the Day-to-Day.
What’s the world for you if you can’t make it up the way you want it? In this roundtable discussion, speculative fiction writers will discuss how the real world can inspire some of the best and most impactful works of speculative fiction. The roundtable will consist of a writing prompt and guided small-group discussion, where participants will be given tips on effectively integrating ideas and themes from their own lives into their speculative fiction pieces.
The Life of a Book
How does a story become a book and get to readers? A publisher, a bookseller, and a librarian look at the challenges to publishing and promoting a book in 2024 in Massachusetts, especially for nontraditional writers.
The Poetic Dream
Dreams contain all the elements of memorable poetry: Metaphor, symbolism, vivid imagery, humor, emotional catharsis, puns, and personification. In this workshop, we will use dreams and other material from the subconscious mind to spark poems and other creative literary expressions. This workshop is open to all participants, whether they consider themselves poets or not, and whether or not they recall their dreams.
Using Stories to Enliven Nonfiction
Using Stories to Enliven Nonfiction: How can we humanize abstract concepts in a concrete world? Through interview, discussion, and writing prompts, this session will offer storytelling as a craft tool to enrich nonfiction writing by helping readers accept new ideas and recognize their own blind spots.
What’s the Story?
How do you get from a topic or premise to a full-blown story? In this workshop, writers and editors working in both fiction and nonfiction will share tools for discovering what the narrative thread is (or could be) in our work, what’s essential to it, and what can go. They’ll lead small groups in an interactive process of revising writing, with each group collectively finding their way to one or more of the potential stories embedded in them.
Who’s a Writer anyway?
Who gets to call themselves a writer? In this panel conversation, writers who work with women who are, or have been, incarcerated discuss how community projects can offer safe spaces and the confidence to help writers find their voices and transform their lives.
- Millicent Jackson (Moderator)
- Bethany Powell
- Judy Holmes
Writing in Community
Peer-led writing groups provide community and support for writers at all levels of experience. These groups might be generative, where members write new material and respond to each other’s work; critique-based, where members read and respond to each other’s more developed manuscripts; or a hybrid. In this session participants will learn about forming and maintaining these groups so that they remain safe and nurturing environments.
Writing the Urgent Now
Faced with climate change, culture clashes, military conflicts, global pandemics, and racial, social and economic inequities and divides, among other crises and chaos, writers are wrestling with how to use literature to document, cope with, resist, and change the perilous present. In this cross-genre Roundtable, we’ll examine the tensions that arise when trying to address challenges that are immediate, profound, and existential. How do we nimbly focus on rapidly moving targets? How do we immerse ourselves in global, seemingly intractable problems without submerging in despair? How can we adapt existing forms and develop new ones that speak to a population of distracted and increasingly distractible readers? How must our processes and craft evolve during this urgent now?
Open Mic Session
At the end of the day, we invite you to join us for an Open Mic event hosted by Regine Jackson at the charming Ana Bandeira Chocolates, a much-loved bakery and café in downtown Northampton.