1:45-3pm, Room 331, Summit Building
Seattle Convention Center, Level 3

Panelists: Raena Shirali, Irène Mathieu, Kiran Bath, Desiree C. Bailey

Description: In poetry as in prose, language can function both to illuminate our experiences and as a form of spell-casting against forces that seek to control it. How might a poem or essay be an antidote to respectability, ancestral incantation, or psychic shield? Through invented forms, lyrical experimentation, and negotiation of archival material, four poetry and prose writers trouble and hex colonial and patriarchal paradigms in a discussion about writing within, through, and against Western empire.

Statement of Value (shortened to fit AWP guidelines): Panelists will discuss how their craft decisions and, indeed, manipulations, trouble Western forces of oppression.This discussion will be grounded in the use of formal approaches as literal power that we wield as writers of color, in an effort to reify subversive writing as first and foremost grounded in craft. We will address representation candidly and from diverse perspectives, in a discussion where ethical authorship and thoughtful formalism coalesce and each, in turn, evolve.