Join us for a delightful evening of poetry and good cheer! Featuring Kazim Ali, Remica Bingham-Risher, erica lewis, Evie Shockley, and Danielle Vogel. Free! Free drink tickets for the first 40 guests.
Visit us at Booth 3114. All poetry and fiction books are 40% off with discount code QAWP40.
Author Signing Schedule. All signings at our booth.
Thursday 1–2 PM, Camille Dungy / Trophic Cascade
Friday 1–2 PM, Kazim Ali / Sukun: New and Selected Poems 2–3 PM, Remica Bingham-Risher / Room Swept Home 3–4 PM, Dianne Bilyak / Nothing Special 4–5 PM, Evie Shockley / suddenly we
Saturday 1–2 PM, Danielle Vogel / A Library of Light 2–3 PM, erica lewis / mahogany 3–4 PM, Remica Bingham-Risher / Room Swept Home
Thursday, February 8, 9:00 AM to 10:15 AM Room 2215B, Kansas City Convention Center, Street Level Lauri Scheyer, Donna Harper, Tyrone Williams, David Grundy, and Kathy Schultz.
Calvin C. Hernton (1932–2001) is renowned as an anti-racist sociologist, literary critic, champion of Black women, and a founder of Umbra, which was a model for the 1960s Black Arts Movement. He is less well-known as a poet but recent attention has generated much acclaim. Based on new appraisals of his stature as a major poet, this panel will reveal him as an overlooked but very important figure who insisted on combining the roles of critic, teacher, poet, race theorist, and social commentator.
Friday, February 8, 12:10 PM to 1:25 PM Ballroom A, Level 2, Kansas City Convention Center Remica Bingham-Risher, Courtney Faye Taylor, Bettina Judd, Robin Coste Lewis, and Patricia Smith.
These five Black women writers have crafted works that center those most often removed from history or those that are splayed across it as specimen, silent and reluctant. Hybrid texts help illuminate the forgotten and missing or can create a collage of the living, serving as rescue and reclamation. The poets featured here have embodied, reckoned with, and reinvented the archive: sometimes they raise the dead, sometimes they build a spectacular future, but they always refuse to look away.
Four diverse memoirists come together for a discussion of the joys and perils of writing timely memoirs from the middle of the country, exploring issues related to voice, persona, research, and tension in developing a well-constructed memoir.
T180. The Unsung Masters Reading Thursday, February 8, 12:10–1:25 PM Room 2502B, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 2 Kevin Prufer, Niki Herd, Michael Peterson, *Kazim Ali, Dana Levin
Each year, the Unsung Masters Series publishes a book devoted to the life and work of a great but little known author. Volumes include large selections of the author’s work printed alongside interviews, articles, drafts, photographs, and ephemera. This reading brings together the editors of four recent volumes who will read from the work of poets Shreela Ray, Tom Postell, Bert Meyers, and Laura Hershey. This event should lead to great discoveries for those who attend.
Join Furious Flower Poetry Center, the nation’s first academic center dedicated to educating, celebrating, and preserving Black poetry, for a thirtieth anniversary poetry reading and conversation! Camille T. Dungy, Joel Dias-Porter, and Nate Marshall, who participated in Furious Flower’s conference held in 1994, 2004, and 2014, will share their work and experiences. Executive Director Lauren K. Alleyne will forecast the 2024 conference in September and Assistant Director L. Renée will moderate.
In its fiftieth anniversary year, the National Book Critics Circle gathers literary critics who have been defining the future of contemporary cultural criticism. Two NBCC criticism award chairs, who have had their fingers on the pulse of critical engagement for the past decade, are joined by three NBCC-honored critics in a reading and wide-ranging conversation about the future of the form.
This event will take place in person in the Kansas City Convention Center and will be livestreamed for virtual audiences. All livestreamed events include open captions and ASL interpretation.
Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Reimagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters (fall 2023) edited by Danielle Legros Georges and Artress Bethany White represents a celebration and reconsideration of Wheatley’s eighteenth-century poems by twenty award-winning Black contemporary poets. This anthology, meant to enhance the poet’s legacy for today’s readers, contains a selection of Wheatley Peters’s original poems, translations/re-inscriptions of those poems, and a short reflective essay by each poet.
These writers have mental and physical disabilities that are not obvious at first glance. They will discuss new literary framings of disability in terms of social marginalization, “othering,” and denial of agency rather than simply personal struggles to overcome. Do writers with unseen disabilities have an obligation to speak about their conditions? Is it enough to “raise awareness” about one’s condition? How can writers also undermine ableist perspectives through their work?
