Catch a full host of ASP authors and friends at the 1455 Festival. Register here: https://web.cvent.com/event/09e46134-4022-438e-9297-72ee3f323a1d/summary

July 16th @10:30am Katherine E. Young Unspoken: New Writing on Losing a Child

Although nearly one-quarter of all pregnancies result in the loss of a child, pregnancy loss has traditionally been considered a “women’s issue” and remains largely unexplored in contemporary literature. Infertility, miscarriage, postpartum depression, and the grief associated with losing a child are themes that have also largely been neglected in literary works, both here in the U.S. and abroad. The four authors whose work features in this panel employ poetry, journalism, essay, and the prose memoir to reclaim and foreground this central human experience not just for women, but for their partners, spouses, families, communities, and societies in the U.S., Germany, and Russia.

July 16th @ 12pm Hannah Grieco Creative Nonfiction Editor Panel

What makes a work of creative nonfiction compelling and unforgettable? What’s the difference between literary nonfiction and the essays you see in freelance publications? What are nonfiction editors looking for in their literary submissions? Learn what editors want to read, what makes a piece stand out from the slush, and what mistakes writers often make when submitting their true stories to literary journals.

July 16th @ 1pm Saida Agostini In Praise of Grandmothers: Poems in Dialogue with Our Elders

We come together to honor inscribing inherited knowledge into our poems—the realities and lessons received from our grandparents’ generation. Too often powerful family stories are labeled “sentimental” by the academic workshop model. How do we reclaim them, and locate ourselves in a lineage of writers following the same instinct? Our panel of accomplished authors will discuss the intricacies of writing history and cultural inheritance into poems, providing brief illustrating readings from our work alongside our contemporaries.

July 16th @5:30 Linda Watanabe McFerrin & Rose Solari Telling Stories, Building Community

Everyone has a story to tell. The magic of sharing those stories is that while it can often be healing for the writer, it can also build bridges between peoples, cultures, groups, and nations. On this panel, four distinguished writers will discuss their own paths as builders of writing communities.