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Chautauqua Writers' Festival June 21–24, 2023

Chautauqua Writers’ Festival

June 21–24, 2023
Hope and its Entanglements

The 2023 Chautauqua Writers’ Festival takes place over the four days (Wednesday to Saturday) before Week One of Chautauqua Institution’s summer season commences and will be happening in person and on the grounds this year.

In addition to the Festival’s tradition of intensive workshops and optional à la carte one-on-one conferences with award-winning contemporary authors, attendees can also experience panel conversations, and a keynote address. The 2023 theme is “Hope & its Entanglements” and these various conversations will draw fruitful and urgent connections between the personal, the political, and the craft of writing. All of these features are included in the cost of Standard Registration and available as an option to any workshop participant.

Alternatively, Explorations Registration will make it possible for anyone to pay a reduced rate to attend everything other than workshops, fostering an even more vibrant, dynamic convening of writers from near and far. Explorations Registration is available through June 21. Learn more below about registration, applications to join a panel, and our incredible faculty!

More details are upcoming, and registration will be open soon.

Contact

Sony Ton-Aime
Michael I. Rudell Director of the Literary Arts
stonaime@chq.org
716.357.6255

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
Writers’ Festival Director
writersfestival@chq.org

Co-Sponsors:
Just Buffalo
Wick Poetry Center
Writers & Books

2023 Keynote

2023 Faculty

Registration

2023 Schedule

Director

Past Faculty

2023 Keynote

Joseph OsmundsonJoseph Osmundson

Joseph Osmundson is a scientist and writer based in New York City. His most recent book of essays, Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things In Between (W.W. Norton & Co. 2022), was named a most anticipated book of 2022 by Literary Hub. His previous book, Inside/Out (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018), was praised by Kiese Laymon, who commented, “I don’t know that there is a writer in this country doing as much with queer theory, narrative momentum, whiteness, sexual identity and the literal outside as Joseph Osmundson.” His debut book, Capsid: A Love Song (Indolent Books, 2016) won the POZ Award for best HIV writing (fiction/poetry) and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. His writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Gawker, The Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, The Lambda Literary Review, and The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere, too.  With three other queer writers, he co-hosts a podcast, Food 4 Thot, covering dicks drama, and discourse.

In an interview with The Rumpus, Osmundson was asked what his forthcoming book, Virology, addresses: “As you know, I’m a scientist, and this book does a lot more of the lyric science writing that I so love. It puts my life and sex and family on the same page as the molecules that build our bodies, our pleasures. I’ve wanted a family since I was like five, and as I grow older it seems more and more impossible because families rely on other people. Having kids takes money. Money and other people have been the great struggles of my life. The book is an attempt to understand where I come from and why, as a queer body, I need these things so badly, and how I can try not to succumb to the fact that all bodies, even and especially our own bodies, will eventually let us down with their/our fallibility.”

His scientific research has been supported by the American Cancer Society, published in leading biological journals including Cell and PNAS. He has a PhD from The Rockefeller University in Molecular Biophysics, and is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor of Biology at NYU

2023 Faculty

Oliver de la PazOliver de la Paz (poetry)

Oliver de la Paz is the author and editor of seven books: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His newest work, The Diaspora Sonnets, is forthcoming from Liveright Press in 2023. With Stacey Lynn Brown he co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. A founding member, Oliver serves as the co-chair of the Kundiman advisory board. He has received grants from the NEA, NYFA, the Artist’s Trust, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and has been awarded multiple Pushcart Prizes. He is the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA, and he teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.   

Workshop: TBD


Leila ChattiLeila Chatti (poetry)

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, and four chapbooks. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing and Writing. Her poems appear in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, Kenyon Review, POETRY, and elsewhere. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University and at Smith College, where she is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence.

Workshop: TBD


Akil KumarasamyAkil Kumarasamy (fiction)

Akil Kumarasamy is the author of the novel, Meet Us by the Roaring Sea (FSG, 2022), and the linked story collection, Half Gods (FSG, 2018), which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, American Short Fiction, BOMB, among others. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an assistant professor in the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program.

Workshop: TBD


Joseph OsmundsonJoseph Osmundson (nonfiction)

Joseph Osmundson is a scientist and writer based in New York City. His most recent book of essays, Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things In Between (W.W. Norton & Co. 2022), was named a most anticipated book of 2022 by Literary Hub. His previous book, Inside/Out (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018), was praised by Kiese Laymon, who commented, “I don’t know that there is a writer in this country doing as much with queer theory, narrative momentum, whiteness, sexual identity and the literal outside as Joseph Osmundson.” His debut book, Capsid: A Love Song (Indolent Books, 2016) won the POZ Award for best HIV writing (fiction/poetry) and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. His writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Gawker, The Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, The Lambda Literary Review, and The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere, too.  With three other queer writers, he co-hosts a podcast, Food 4 Thot, covering dicks drama, and discourse.

His scientific research has been supported by the American Cancer Society, published in leading biological journals including Cell and PNAS. He has a PhD from The Rockefeller University in Molecular Biophysics, and is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor of Biology at NYU.

Workshop: TBD

Registration

Institutions hoping to sponsor the attendance of their undergraduate or graduate students may do so at discounted registration rates. Contact Emily Carpenter at ecarpenter@chq.org.

Standard Registration: $500 (deadline June 15) / Early-bird Standard Registration: $450 (deadline April 30)
Includes four workshop meetings with a small group of writers; an introductory intensive with all workshop participants; opportunities for a la carte individual consultations with workshop faculty; all components of Explorations Registration.

Explorations Registration: $200
Includes faculty readings, a community reading, the keynote address and panel discussions.

Sponsored Students Standard Registration ($300 before April 30, $450 after April 30)

2023 Schedule

Day 0: Tuesday, June 20
3 p.m. EDT onward: Check-in to room at Athenaeum Hotel

Day 1: Wednesday, June 21
8–9 a.m. EDT: Festival check-in, Athenaeum Hotel lobby
9–11 a.m. EDT: Introductory Session with Megan Stielstra (workshop participants only); The Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall – Ballroom
11:10–11:30 a.m. EDT: Director’s Welcome; The Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall – Ballroom
2–4 p.m. EDT: Workshops
6 p.m. EDT: Faculty Reading; Hall of Philosophy

Day 2: Thursday, June 22
10 a.m.–12 p.m. EDT: Workshops
2–3:15 p.m. EDT: Craft Panel
3:15-4 p.m. EDT: Breakout Session
6:30 p.m. EDT: Keynote Conversation & Reception; Athenaeum Hotel Parlor and Lobby

Day 3: Friday, June 23
10 a.m.–12 p.m. EDT: Workshops
2–3:15 p.m. EDT: Poetry Makerspace Tour
6:30 p.m. EDT: Community Reading; The Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall – Ballroom

Day 4: Saturday, June 24
10 a.m.–12 p.m. EDT: Workshops
12:15–12:35 p.m. EDT: Festival Farewell; The Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall – Ballroom

Director

Originally from Buffalo, New York, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is the author of Travesty Generator (Noemi Press), a book of computational poetry that received the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Anna Rabinowitz prize for interdisciplinary work and longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. Their other poetry books include How Narrow My Escapes (DIAGRAM/New Michigan), Personal Science (Tupelo Press), a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press), and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press). Their fifth book, Negative Money, is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in 2023. They are an Associate Professor in the departments of English, Africana Studies, and Art & Design at Northeastern University.

Past Faculty

Fiction Faculty

  • Lee K. Abbott
  • Dean Bakopoulos
  • Aimee Bender
  • Ron Carlson
  • Dan Chaon
  • Peter Ho Davies
  • Anthony Doerr
  • Tony Earley
  • Brian Evenson
  • Abby Frucht
  • Jaimy Gordon
  • Derek Green
  • Laura Kasischke
  • Jill McCorkle
  • Tom Noyes
  • Alissa Nutting
  • Stewart O’Nan
  • Pamela Painter
  • Ann Pancake
  • Deesha Philyaw
  • Alberto Álvaro Ríos
  • Jess Row

Nonfiction Faculty

  • Faith Adiele
  • Valerie Boyd
  • Tom Bridwell
  • Brian Broome
  • Beth Ann Fennelly
  • Thomas French
  • Philip Gerard
  • Diana Hume George
  • Lee Gutkind
  • Barbara Hurd
  • Mary Karr
  • Porochista Khakpour
  • Greg Kuzma
  • Suzannah Lessard
  • Jacob Levenson
  • Joe Mackall
  • Nancy McCabe
  • Dinty W. Moore
  • Leslie Rubinkowski
  • Mike Scalise
  • Patsy Sims

Poetry Faculty

  • Maggie Anderson
  • Robin Becker
  • Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
  • David Citino
  • Martha Collins
  • Carl Dennis
  • Denise Duhamel
  • Stephen Dunn
  • Frank X. Gaspar
  • Margaret Gibson
  • francine j. harris
  • Yona Harvey
  • William Heyen
  • Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
  • Dorianne Laux
  • Rajiv Mohabir
  • Malena Mörling
  • Hoa Nguyen
  • Alicia Ostriker
  • Stanley Plumley
  • Lia Purpura
  • Bruce Smith
  • Maura Stanton
  • Michael Waters
  • Marcus Wicker

Keynotes, Panelists and Breakout Leaders

  • Meg Day
  • Devin Donovan
  • Kate Glavin
  • Jimin Han
  • DaMaris B. Hill
  • Nicole Homer
  • Linda Lowen
  • Maria Maldonado
  • Susannah Nevison
  • Jillian Powers
  • Kenyatta Rogers
  • Mike Scalise
  • Mathias Svalina
  • Jim Tobin

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