Psyched!!!

AWP is almost here!  It's like a non-stop party for writers, and I'm completely geeked out with excitement, like I get every time.  Parties and cocktails and old friends and fascinating panels--and a big fresh fluffy hotel bed to crash into every night.  (Aaahhh.  I'm just old enough to love that moment for itself.)   

This year, I'm really proud to be chairing a panel that's been forever in the making:  "Memoir and Latinidad," about the intersections between the genre of memoir and Latin@ issues.  If you'll be there, please come!  If you know a memoirist, or a Latin@, or a Latin@ memoirist who'll be there--or someone who teaches memoir and wants to amp up his or her knowledge about how ethnicity inflects it--please send them to

Thurgood Marshall East
10:30-11:45 a.m. on Thursday, February 3.

Here are my crazily major panelists (it's going to take me  my whole 12 minutes just to read out their awards):

Rigoberto González, lookin' mighty fine . . .


















                                  Gustavo Pérez Firmat, also lookin' fine--and also shockingly friendly and approachable for someone who's todo brilliant and prolific . . .













Luis J. Rodriguez, lookin' all rugged and thoughtful . . .















. . . and Stephanie Elizondo Griest, lookin' all smart and beautiful.












These are all awesome, awesome people, and--since I've gotten sneak previews of their papers--I'm dead serious when I tell you that they have some really fascinating and surprising things to say.  Seriously.  If you teach and/or write memoir, you're gonna wanna know this stuff. 

I'm also happy to be reading a brand-new essay on a panel hosted by Lorraine López called Reverent Irreverence:  Women Writing Spirituality.  One of my favorite writers--and one of the funniest I know, too--will be on the panel, too:  Heather Sellers.  I can't wait to hear everyone read.

As a teaser, here's the first line of mine:

Mired in the culty weirdness of my upbringing, I imagined strange things as a child.

Believe me:  strange things.  And I ain't just a-kiddin', as we used to say in West Virginia.

So that panel is in Thurgood Marshall West, on Friday the 4th at noon. 

About both of these panels, I'm ridiculously excited.  I have to confide, though:  I'm also excited about getting to debut my pretty new coat.  (If you happen to see me with it on--and that will be easily accomplished, since I may not take it off, at all, ever--please do spare a moment to drink it in.)

Hope to see you there!  If you're a reader of the blog but we haven't met yet, do come up and introduce yourself!