Sponsored by the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University, the 2012 Desert Nights, Rising Stars conference will be held February 23-26 in Tempe.  The conference brings writers of all levels together for four days in Tempe to study fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction.
This year’s conference faculty includes Sally [...]

everal months ago, during AWP, a young writer approached the FWR table while I was working the bookfair. He asked about our organization, and I happily launched into my usual pitch about our mission–to promote and support the work of emerging writers, as well as to re-professionalize writing about writing. We chatted a bit about [...]

Despite the boycott, Preeta Samarasan travels to Sri Lanka for the Galle Literary Festival and finds friends, eager young writers, and a love for a country that reminds her powerfully of her native Malaysia. She reflects on the power of free speech in a country recovering from many years of civil war.

In the final essay in our series on criticism, Keith Taylor recalls the pleasure of a “chance to review a new collection of poems in a place where several thousand people might read it, and to actually be paid something for our labors.” Has the Internet created room for “a more expansive tone to the discussion of contemporary poetry” – or made an already diminishing realm more clubby? Taylor’s experience as both poet and reviewer reveals the shaping potential of creating art and criticism.

Third in our series on criticism, Stacey D’Erasmo’s essay tackles the misconception that reviewing “is, at best, a career opportunity and, at worst, a distasteful and potentially troublesome task best avoided.” In particular, she addresses the fact that the culture of the MFA program may have steered fiction writers away from the craft of reviewing. Yet she urges us to remember that many of our greatest writers were also critics who engaged in the vigorous cultural conversation that centers on books. And that it’s not only necessary for us to revive this discussion, but also a pleasure to be involved.

This week we’re revisiting the 2011 AWP Conference in more ways than one. Yesterday we posted Jeremiah Chamberlin’s introductory talk for the AWP panel he moderated, “The Good Review: Criticism in the Age of Book Blogs and Amazon.com.” This morning, we posted Charles Baxter’s discussion of “Owl Criticism” from the same panel. Stay tuned for [...]

We continue our series on criticism with an essay by special guest Charles Baxter, who was a participant in the 2011 AWP conference panel “The Good Review: Criticism in the Age of Book Blogs and Amazon.com,” moderated by Jeremiah Chamberlin. Joining them were Stacey D’Erasmo, Gemma Sieff, and Keith Taylor. In his essay, Baxter writes that a trustworthy review has “a kind of doubleness: the reviewer manages to assert somehow that the book under discussion is of some importance for one reason or another; and second, a good review provides a formal description of the book’s properties, so that you could reconstruct it from the reviewer’s sketch of it.”

Earlier this month, Editor Jeremiah Chamberlin moderated a panel on criticism at the 2011 AWP Conference entitled “The Good Review: Criticism in the Age of Book Blogs and Amazon.com.” Joining him were Charles Baxter, Stacey D’Erasmo, Gemma Sieff, and Keith Taylor. In this essay, adapted from his talk at that panel, he discusses why liking a book should have nothing to do with a review, and how this thoughts on criticism have changed since running an independent bookstore.

Each year the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation selects five native English speaking (NES) writers and five Bulgarian writers to participate in the Sozopol Fiction Seminar, which takes places in the tiny, historic town of Sozopol, Bulgaria, on the Black Sea. In 2009 I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of the NES fellows. Joining [...]

Each spring the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation selects five English speaking writers and five Bulgarian writers to participate in the Sozopol Fiction Seminar, which takes places in the tiny, historic town of Sozopol, Bulgaria, on the Black Sea. Four of the 2010 English speaking fellows–Kelly Luce, Carin Clevidence, Charles Conley, and Paul Vidich–collaborate on a group portrait of their experience at this year’s seminar.