I will be at the 2015 AWP Conference in Minneapolis, and all three panel proposals I was on were accepted for the conference (meaning, I could choose only two to be a part of!)… I’m excited to be a part of the following panels:
The first panel I’ll be presenting on is Plot IS Character, Character IS Plot, featuring faculty from the Virginia G. Piper Center at Arizona State University, where I am teaching in the “Your Novel Year” YA certificate program and also mentoring YA students. The panel will feature Jewell Parker Rhodes, Bill Konigsberg, Varian Johnson, and me, and we’ll be discussing how plot can deepen your characters in YA and middle-grade fiction as they tackle issues pertaining to social justices, diversity, environmental issues, cultural trends, and upheavals.
I will also be a part of the panel Growing Up in a Magical Space: Magical Realism in Contemporary Young Adult/Children’s Literature, also featuring authors Laura Ruby, Janet Fox, Joy Preble, and Nikki Loftin. We will be discussing pushing boundaries and blending genres in YA literature and writing magical realism, and during the panel we may be reading short excerpts of magical realism in our own fiction.
I will also be helping to organize a happy hour event for MacDowell Colony fellows and alumni off-site during the conference, so if you’ve been to MacDowell, please keep an eye on the schedule of off-site events and join us!
Fingers crossed I can find a way to do a bookstore event or a book signing while I’m in Minneapolis, too, as The Walls Around Us will be out only two weeks by then!
The full AWP schedule will be posted in October. For the list of accepted panel proposals and events, check this PDF.
For more information about the 2015 AWP conference, visit the Association of Writers & Writing Program’s website. Hope to see you there in April!