by Isidra Mencos
Introduction to Panelists
The 2023 AWP Conference, located in Seattle, was a first for me. I had never attended this massive annual event, which attracts thousands of writers eager to see panels, hear their favorite authors read, and buy books and literary magazines at the Book Fair.
I was there to speak on a panel entitled Writing With An Accent: Immigrant Women’s Voices in the U.S. with Allison Hong Merrill, Veena Rao, and Rakija Bhandari, as well as our moderator Parisa Saranj. We brought perspectives from India, Taiwan, Spain, and Iran. Some of the points we made during the panel were:
Fellow Panelist at the Podium
- Immigrants contribute enormously to the U.S. economy. Their voices are key to understanding the diversity of the American experience.
- Writing in English as a second language can be a boon instead of a hindrance: it can give you a different voice (more direct and shorter than Spanish, for example) and also provide you a bit of distance from the subject matter, which as a memoirist allows you to be more raw and honest.
- Avoiding negative stereotypes about your culture is key, as is integrating cultural context in a plot-driven way instead of in summary or exposition (show, don’t tell).
- If you connect organically with networks in your culture and ethnicity much before your book comes out, they will support you in force when you publish.
Aside from our presentation, I attended several panels and was impressed by the consistently high quality of the content. A couple of favorites were The Sentence is the Story, which celebrated the sheer joy of writing a memorable and beautiful sentence and offered tips to elevate our style; and Ambition of the Short Story, organized by WNBA-SF member Leslie Kirk Campbell, where four short story writers presented a passionate defense of this art form, and highlighted what it can do that cannot be done in longer forms of writing.
Isidra Presenting on the Panel
I was impressed with the organization of the Festival. With 14,000 writers going up and down the Convention Center escalators, it ran like clockwork and had topics and readings for everyone. The Book Fair was enormous, and on Saturday all the vendors offered deep discounts, so you could see writers leaving with bulging bags of books and magazines.
I had never been to Seattle before, and I enjoyed discovering some neighborhoods and cafes with WNBA-SF president Elise Marie Collins, including the original Starbucks store and a lovely Native American restaurant ?ál?al.
Fellow WNBA-SF Board Member, Lucille Lang Day, had this to say about her experience at AWP as a publisher for Scarlet Tanager Books: Scarlet Tanager Books had a strong presence at the 2023 AWP Conference in Seattle. We shared a booth at the Bookfair with Poetry Flash and hosted several book signings, including one by the latest Scarlet Tanager author, Chumash and O’odham poet Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez. Her book, A Light to Do Shellwork By (Scarlet Tanager, November 2022), sold out. We had a full house for a reading I moderated, Elder Songs: Indigenous Wisdom in Poetry, where Georgiana read with Denise Low, Robert Davis Hoffmann, and Ron Welburn, who are also Native American elders. On Friday night, Scarlet Tanager followed up with a public reception entitled Scarlet Tanager Books Celebrates Indigenous Wisdom in Poetry. Georgiana, Denise, and Robert read again at the reception, along with Deborah A. Miranda, a contributor to the Scarlet Tanager anthology Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California. Overall, we had a grand time at AWP!
Another highlight of my stay was meeting in person seven writers from my publishing house, She Writes Press, and seeing again my friend Erika Cebreros, whom I had not seen in over three years.
AWP was a wonderful experience for me, uniting intellectual stimulation with personal connections. Although I missed many presentations because the program is enormous, and you cannot be in two places at once, attendees can access many of them online after the conference is over.
Next year AWP will take place in Kansas City. If you’re planning to go, I recommend finding a conference buddy so you can enjoy some sightseeing during conference breaks; downloading the app in advance and studying the program so you can create your own schedule easily accessible from your phone; attending some evening events and readings to meet authors you admire in smaller venues; and keeping some cash in hand for the Book Fair. Happy conferencing!
Panelists Holding Their Books
Isidra Mencos is the author of Promenade of Desire—A Barcelona Memoir. Her work has been published in Chicago Quarterly Review, Front Porch Journal, The Penmen Review, Stirring Literary Journal, and Newfound, among others. Her essay, “My Books and I,” was listed as Notable in the The Best American Essays 2019.
Leave a Reply