Teaching Literary Magazines in the Classroom

February 17, 2016 3:15 pm | Tags: , , | No Comments

At AWP 2015, I was one of five panelists discussing literary magazines and how to teach them in a classroom. Along with my colleagues Rebecca Morgan Frank, Rachel May, Jenn Scheck-Kahn, and Christina Thompson, we discussed the various ways that a literary magazine can be integrated into a college classroom. It’s a pretty good discussion that was, if I remember right, held on Saturday afternoon, toward the tail end of the conference when everyone is running out of steam, and yet, the whole thing went well and I had a wonderful time participating.

If you want to skip ahead, I chime in around the 21:30 mark. But you should listen to the whole thing! It’s good and stuff. Enough hype: listen to the podcast in its entirety here.

Follow Michael on Twitter: @mpnye

The AWP 2014 Master Plan

February 25, 2014 10:51 am | Tags: | No Comments

One of my favorite events of the year, the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference (here on out just “AWP”), kicks off next Wednesday. Each year, the conference is held around this time of year, somewhere between February to April, in a different city. Last year, the conference was in Boston, where I used to live, and will be in cities such as Chicago, DC, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and so forth, in the coming years. Every year, a slew of the literati attend: authors, teachers, graduate and undergraduate students, writing programs, literary centers, small presses, literary magazines and pretty much anything else you can think of that might be affiliated with such a great big event. This year, AWP is predicting roughly fourteen thousand people will be attending the conference.

I’ll be one of them. And here’s what I’m gonna do while I’m there. (more…)

Unwinding From The Windy City

March 6, 2012 9:39 am | Tags: | No Comments

I’ve been attending the AWP conference for a couple of years now, and it always has the same effect on me: endless anticipation, then a massive four-day adrenaline kick, then days of exhaustion. In the past, I’ve written about my AWP experience, post-conference, in a series of quick points because, by this point, that’s the only way my brain is remembering things anyway. Here is my 2010 and my 2011 experience.

This year, I went to Chicago to, of course, represent The Missouri Review. What this means is letting the conference attendees know about what we have been doing, what we are doing, and what we will be doing. It’s also for talking to other editors about what they are doing with their magazines, swapping ideas and tips and sharing information. Also, discovering the new magazines, and meeting the writers. So many writers. Writers that The Missouri Review has published, would like to publish, haven’t yet published, and all the other thousands of people there, many of whom, I simply want to say hello and tell them I enjoy their writing.  (more…)