AWP, Baby

What crappy weather for walking around downtown today! There are hundreds of panels, but I have my eye on a few. From the AWP Conference Schedule for today:

R143. Deviant Fictions by Women. (Kathryn Davis, Jaimy
Gordon, Kate Bernheimer, Kellie Wells)

In her introduction to Halldór Laxness’s novel Under the Glacier,
Susan Sontag says, “Narratives that deviate from [the] artificial
norm” of realist fiction “and tell other kinds of stories, or appear
not to tell much of a story at all…still, to this day, seem innovative
or ultraliterary or bizarre,” suggesting they “occupy the outlying
precincts of the novel’s main tradition,” and it is with some of
these deviant, Martian fictions that this panel will be concerned.
Panelists will read from and discuss their work.

R159. A Tribute to Leon Stokesbury. (John Holman, Leon
Stokesbury, Katie Chaple, Maudelle Driskell, Delisa Mulkey)

Three former students honor Leon Stokesbury on his 20th year as
a creative writing professor at Georgia State University. Stokesbury
is co-winner of the first Associated Writing Programs Poetry
Competition in 1975 for his book Often in Different Landscapes.
Speakers will discuss Stokesbury’s influence and read from their
work before Stokesbury shares his poetry.

R184. Publishing the ATL. (James Iredell, Dan Veach, Daren
Wang, Tania Rochelle, Megan Sexton, Christopher Bundy)

This panel, consisting of editors from Atlanta journals and magazines (Five
Points, the Atlanta Review, GSU Review, Verb, the Chattahoochee Review,
and Terminus), focuses on each publication’s mission to serve both its immediate
and greater literary community. Panel participants discuss their
editorial preferences in terms of their pub’s specific audience, be it international,
academic, student, audio, independent, and combinations of these.

R195. Robert Dana Tribute Reception: Sponsored by
Anhinga Press and the Chattahoochee Review.