Big Ideas, Short Forms: Sarabande Writers on the Art of Craft & Short Form
Friday, March 28 10:35-11:50 a.m. PT
Petree Hall C, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
As a publisher of hybrid works, chapbooks, novels in stories, and experimental prose, Sarabande has championed the short form for more than three decades! Here, four nationally acclaimed writers will present and discuss original short form works of various genres, including poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. They will address structure, density, beginnings and endings, sudden moves, white space, and other tools in the short form writer's toolbox.
Khaled Mattawa currently teaches in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan. He is the author of five books of poetry and a critical study of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Mattawa has coedited two anthologies of Arab American literature and translated several volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry. His awards include the Academy of American Poets Fellowship prize, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and a MacArthur Fellowship.
Kiki Petrosino is the author of White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia (2020) and three other poetry books, all from Sarabande. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her memoir, Bright, was released from Sarabande in 2022. She is a professor of poetry at UVA, where she teaches in the MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs. Petrosino is the recipient of a DeWitt Wallace/Readers Digest Fellowship from MacDowell, a Pushcart Prize, an NEA fellowship in creative writing, the UNT Rilke Prize, and the Spalding Prize, among other honors.
Whitney Collins is the author of Ricky & Other Love Stories (Sarabande, 2024) and Big Bad (Sarabande, 2021), which won the Mary McCarthy Prize, a Bronze Medal INDIES, and a Gold Medal IPPY. Her stories have won a Distinguished Story from The Best American Short Stories, a Pushcart Prize, a Pushcart Special Mention, the American Short(er) Fiction Prize, and the ProForma Contest. Collins’s fiction has appeared in AGNI, Gulf Coast, The Idaho Review, American Short Fiction, The Best Small Fictions, and Book of the Month Club’s literary magazine, Volume 0, among others.
Kristen Renee Miller is the director and editor in chief at Sarabande Books. An award-winning poet and translator, she is a 2023 NEA fellow and the translator of two books from the French by Ilnu Nation poet Marie-Andrée Gill. She is the recipient of honors from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, AIGA, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation, and the American Literary Translators Association. Her work can be found widely, including in Poetry, The Nation, and Best New Poets. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky.