Friday, March 22, 11:30 AM—12:45 PM
SAS Writer's Craft
QUEERING THE LOVE POEM with CHEN CHEN
Though perhaps the love poem has long been queer (think of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Sappho’s fragments), in this generative session we’ll discuss contemporary examples that further (or differently) queer and complicate the love poem—and indeed, love itself. How can a love poem also be a political poem? A protest poem? Or a political poem for how it reimagines relationships of all kinds? A queer love poem may be about a speaker and a beloved (or beloveds), but it may also be about friendship, community, family both blood and chosen, self-love, caring for the planet, and speaking back to the social systems that limit agency, that attempt to erase queerness. We’ll read work by Essex Hemphill, Natalie Diaz, Jericho Brown, Charif Shanahan, Muriel Leung, Justin Chin, F. Douglas Brown, Yanyi, and others as models for our own writing from and into queerer forms of love.
Hotel Monteleone, Lobby Level, Royal B
Included in SAS Weekend Registration or $25
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Saturday, March 23, 11:30 AM—12:45 PM
Literary Discussion
THE PROFANE AND SACRED/POETRY
This discussion explores ruptures and raptures that occur when poets run headlong into gods and religions in their writing. In no small part a rejection of what “the canon” has historically held sacred, these writers talk about what it means to create space for foreign bodies, subversive thoughts, and transgressive actions on the literary (mine)field. How do we say the unsayable? When our cultures, histories, lived experiences, and in fact the bodies we inhabit are rendered other or less than or profane, how do we elevate them, how do we make space for them in the world? How do we hold holy (however we define that word) what we've been told to forget, to bury? These authors reflect on what it means to manifest our deepest selves in our writing, even when—especially when—our most sacred selves are selves that the world wants to look away from.
Panelists: Jubi Ariolla-Headley, Stephanie Burt, Chen Chen, Erin Hoover, and Ed Madden
Moderator: Brad Richard
Hotel Monteleone, Lobby Level, Royal C
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Sunday, March 24, 11:30 AM—12:45 PM
Reading Series
SAINTS AND SINNERS: WRITERS READ
Sponsored by the John Burton Harter Foundation
Take the rare opportunity to hear authors in their own voice. This highlighted Festival event has authors share their vivid imaginations with their new creations, or revisiting a past work that holds special meaning. Please join us in welcoming: Stephanie Burt, Chen Chen, Lucian Childs, AE Hines, Rose Norman, Ed Madden, and T.Q. Sims for this year’s mix of established and exciting new writers.
Hotel Monteleone, Lobby Level, Royal D
Sunday, March 24, 7pm
QUEER AF OFFSITE
Hosted by LMNL Arts
Come listen to work by Chen Chen, Kazim Ali, Ching-In Chen, Meghan Sullivan, Daniel Meltz, T.Q. Sims, Kay Murphy, Nayelly Barrios, A.E. Hines, & Charlie J. Stephens.
@ The Domino