2019 Women’s Caucus Reading & Mingle at AWP Portland

Join The Women’s Caucus, YesYes Books, and Little A for a brief reading, conversation about publishing and writing, and time to mingle and speak one-on-one with authors, caucus members, and publishers. This year’s lineup includes Susan Bernhard, Tiana Clark, Tanya Olson, and Erika L. Sánchez. Wine and non-alcoholic beverages will be served.

Susan Bernhard is a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship recipient and a graduate of the GrubStreet Novel Incubator program. She was born and raised in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana, is a graduate of the University of Maryland, and lives with her husband and two children near Boston. WINTER LOON (Little A, December 2018) is her debut novel.

Tiana Clark is the author of the debut poetry collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is the winner of a 2019 Pushcart Prize, as well as the 2017 Furious Flower’s Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize and 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She was the 2017-2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. Clark is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (M.F.A) and Tennessee State University (B.A.) where she studied Africana and Women’s studies. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, BuzzFeed News, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Oxford American, Best New Poets 2015, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.

Tanya Olson’s second book, Stay, will be released in late spring 2019 from YesYes Books. Her first book, Boyishly, was published by YesYes Books in 2013 and received a 2014 American Book Award. In 2010, she won a Discovery/Boston Review prize and she was named a 2011 Lambda Fellow by the Lambda Literary Foundation. Her poem “54 Prince” was chosen for inclusion in Best American Poems 2015. Tanya Olson lives in Silver Spring, Maryland and is a Senior Lecturer in English at UMBC (University of Maryland, Baltimore County).

Erika L. Sánchez is the daughter of Mexican immigrants, and is a poet, novelist, and essayist living in Chicago. She is the author of a collection of poems, Lessons on Expulsion (Graywolf, 2017) as well as the young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2017), which was a New York Times Bestseller and a National Book Awards finalist. Sánchez graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude from the University of Illinois at Chicago, then traveled to Madrid, Spain on a Fulbright Scholarship. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico. Since graduate school, Sánchez has received a CantoMundo Fellowship, a Bread Loaf Scholarship, the 2013 “Discovery”/Boston Review Prize, and a 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from The Poetry Foundation. She was recently named a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many prestigious literary journals, including Pleiades, Copper Nickel, Vinyl Poetry, Guernica, Boston Review, ESPN.com, the Paris Review, Gulf Coast, and POETRY Magazine. Her poetry has also been featured on “Latino USA” on NPR and published in Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015).