If you’re heading to #AWP22, we’d love to see you there! You can find the good folks of Narrative 4 at the following events.

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N4 Director of Marketing Felice Belle, Director of Global Programs Lee Keylock, Programs Supervisor Alondra Marmolejos, and Master Practitioner Rob Spillman will be discussing the Story Exchange as a pedagogical tool for grades K through college.

Thursday, March 24
10:35 AM-11:50 AM

PANEL DISCUSSION T142.
The Narrative 4 Story Exchange: Building Empathy & Bridging Divides
with Felice Belle, Lee Keylock, Alondra Marmolejos, Rob Spillman
118A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level.

How can we move from discord to understanding and positive action? What practices can we use to scaffold students towards high-level thinking and SEL skills? Listening and retelling someone else’s story can be a powerful first step. The Narrative 4 (N4) Story Exchange is an authentic process designed to bridge difference. Through the lens of an N4 artist, educator, and student, this panel will explore practical applications of the Story Exchange in classrooms and communities.

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Author and N4 Artists Network Director Ru Freeman will be speaking about meaning and translation.

Thursday, March 24
9:00 AM-10:15 AM

PANEL DISCUSSION T113.
Disrupting the Lexicon: Making Meaning with Polyglot Texts
with Amy Brill, Nathalie Handal, Ru Freeman, Courtney Maum, Rosa Alcalá
111AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level.

Poets and novelists who collectively speak ten languages will explore how words, phrases, and cadences in other languages—in or out of translation—help create meaning, context, atmosphere, and connection in English-language texts. Are there rules for writing with multiple languages? Who makes them? Whom do they serve? What are practical, artistic, and ethical considerations for writers incorporating other languages? How does language inform the way we navigate and write the world?

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Poet and N4 Master Practitioner Faisal Mohyuddin will be in conversation about the joys and challenges of parenthood.

Thursday, March 24
1:45 PM-3:00 PM

PANEL DISCUSSION T206. Fatherhood & Grief: Writers Reflect on the Most Difficult Story
with Aaron Brown, Shann Ray, Saddiq Dzukogi, Faisal Mohyuddin
125, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level.

Three poets and one novelist reflect on the traumas of child loss, reproductive loss, and geographical/genocidal loss through the lens of fatherhood. These writers will explore what it means to name the unsayable nature of grief in their writing as both a craft and personal issue. Deconstructing societal taboos around emotion and masculinity, these writers will explore the particular nature of fatherly grief, what it means to “lose all father now” as the poet Ben Jonson wrote centuries ago.

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Saturday, March 26
10:35 AM-11:50 AM

PANEL DISCUSSION S148. No One Cares About Your Kid: Navigating Parenthood as a Poetic Subject.
with Casey Thayer, Faisal Mohyuddin, Lisa Fay Coutley, Eugenia Leigh, Neelanjana Banerjee
126A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level.

If it’s true that no one wants to hear about another person’s kids, how then do we write about parenthood? How do we differentiate our writing from the deluge of poems on parenting? How do we craft fresh, compelling work for a wide range of audiences, including nonparents? Five poets discuss how parenthood changed their relationship to their work, sharing practical writing advice for the poet-parent and techniques they developed to avoid cliché and self-indulgence.