Part cocktail party, part game-show-style fun, this event will be a chance for you to mingle with fellow writers and experience the Battle of the Genres. The below authors will compete for the title of the Ultimate Craft Champion, while you cheer them on with drinks, cheers, and good-natured heckling.With Melissa Febos, Sequoia Nagamatsu, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Ruth Joffre.
In Other People’s Trades, Primo Levi describes his “vagabond and dilettantish curiosity” about jobs other than his own. This panel features writers who have thought deeply about what their characters do for work—at times fulfilling, at times dangerous, occasionally invented, and usually calling for arcane knowledge, skills, and habits of mind. From sponge diver to film professor, physicist to umbrologist, our characters’ professions afford us uncanny access into their inner and outer worlds. With Tim Horvath, Sequoia Nagamatsu, and Joy Baglio.
Room 2505AB, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 2
“If you opened me up, you’d find Ohio,” writes Maggie Smith. Writers from all coasts wrestle with the question of how to write place, but it’s especially charged in the Midwest, where our forests and lakes, our asphalt and industry are so often called fly-over country. How can stories dig deeper into the truth of this place and its people? Whether we’ve been here our whole lives, left and returned, or never want to go back, the Midwest lives in the body, not in our heads but our bones.
Room 2505AB, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 2
