2023 KWELI INTERNATIONAL LITERARY FESTIVAL

INAUGURAL DAY PROGRAM SCHEDULE

Saturday, July 15, 2023
All Times are EST.

8:00 - 8:10am

WELCOME by Laura Pegram

8:15 - 8:45am

KEYNOTE by Jodi M. Savage

9:00 - 10:30am

A. Publishing, Community & Culture Track

Tracy Rose Peyton “paints a portrait of collective defiance” in Night Wherever We Go, a debut novel “about a group of enslaved women staging a covert rebellion against their owners.” Peyton will be in conversation with Kaitlyn Greenidge, a Radcliffe fellow whose “work is concerned with the ways in which history and memory influence people’s everyday lives.”Featuring: Tracey Rose Peyton, Moderator: Kaitlyn Greenidge

B. Novel & Screenwriting Track

Researching the Novel, Lone Woman
In this session, celebrated author and professor Victor LaValle discusses the research that went into his new novel Lone Women and the true history that inspired it. Using the journals of Black female homesteaders, LaValle "deftly weaves history, horror, suspense and the perspectives of those rarely recorded in the West." It is 1915, the year D.W. Griffith’s inflammatory film “The Birth of a Nation” is released. Readers witness lone women who brave Badlands defined by racial and gender violence and the Chinese Exclusion Act, from Adelaide Henry, a Black homesteader forced to leave her family’s farm with a trunkful of secrets, to Fiona, a young Chinese American woman. In this session, you will see how research and imagination helped LaValle create this powerful work of art. Featuring: Victor LaValle

C. Memoir & Short Stories Track

Seven Ways of Looking at POV in Fiction (Part I of II)
Perspective is one of the most powerful and complex tools at our disposal as writers. In its most expansive definition, perspective is the narrative intelligence of a story, the reader’s host and guide into new, wonderful terrains.

In this session, we’ll define and discuss the benefits of different perspective strategies and look together at brilliant contemporary examples from writers of color. We’ll also try out some of these concepts ourselves with generative exercises. Featuring: Yohanca Delgado

NOTE: Part II of this master class will take part over zoom.

10:45 - 12:15pm

A. Publishing, Community & Culture Track

Craft & Community
Hafizah Geter has seen the ins and outs of the publishing industry as an award winning author, a former editor and a literary agent. Hafizah and Miwa Messer, the host of Barnes & Noble Poured Over podcast, will explore how to develop a thriving creative practice within a trusted community. Featuring: Hafizah Geter; Moderator: Miwa Messer

B. Novel & Screenwriting Track

Stretching Your Voice
"Find your voice." "Speak your truth." "Write what you know." These mantras all rely on the assumption that we write in order to express internal truths or our experiences. But that is only one kind of expression, and only one reason to express. In this workshop, we'll consider what it would mean to stretch your voice, to throw your voice, to take on multiple voices. We will treat the individual writer's voice as a potential cacophony, a veritable chaos of sounds and tones that we can wield--once we recognize them--to create vivid worlds and people. Featuring: Namwali Serpell; Moderator: Heran Abate

C. Memoir & Short Stories Track

Memory, Womanhood & Myth
In this session, join authors Deborah D.E.E.P Mouton and Jodi Savage as they discuss genre-bending form. Shaped by Mouton's most recent memoir, Black Chameleon, the two will discuss how myth makes room for itself across multiple genres and is an access point for deeper self examination. Featuring: Deborah DEEP Mouton; Moderator: Jodi M. Savage

12:15 - 1:30pm

LUNCH KEYNOTE | Fireside Chat with Hanif Abdurraqib + Kaitlyn Greenidge

1:45 - 3:15pm

A. Publishing, Community & Culture Track

Small & Mighty Indies
Let's delve into the indies, in a no holds barred conversation, from small presses like Graywolf which published Pulitzer Prize winning poetry collection Post Colonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz, to the University of Massachusetts Press which published Susan Muaddi Darraj's award winning short story collection: A Curious Land. We'll hear from two insiders: Dr. Chika Unigwe, winner of the Nigeria Literature Prize and debut author Yvette Lisa Ndlovu. Featuring: Chika Unigwe and Yvette Lisa Ndlovu; Moderator: Susan Muaddi Darraj

B. Novel & Screenwriting Track

Capturing the Elusive: Voice Foundations with Colloquialism
This workshop will provoke dialogue and thought on the writer's plight to develop a unique and distinctive voice. Often this process is circumvented with elusive pinpoints on sentence structures and tone. Students will examine the vernacular seeping through the undercurrents of their own families and communities to discover a rich diction in the hyper local. Featuring: Oscar Hokeah

C. Memoir & Short Stories Track

The All-Encompassing Eye: Exploring the Omniscient Third-Person Point of View
The choice of point of view can shape and buoy our stories. In this class, we will consider the "all-encompassing" 3rd person omniscient POV, its challenges and possibilities, the rewards we might claim through exploration. Featuring: Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

3:30 - 5:00pm

A. Publishing, Community & Culture Track

THE THIRD EYE | Editorial Process
Toni Morrison often talked about her long time editor Robert Gottlieb. She said that "good editors are the third eye. Cool. Dispassionate." They know what not to touch and they ask all the questions you probably would have asked yourself had there been the time. In this session, we’ll look behind the scenes at the editorial process with four brilliant artists. From marked pages with margin notes (“let’s discuss” and "love this, more please") to lengthy editorial letters with probing questions that cause shifts both small and monumental. And what about those times when they didn’t quite see eye to eye? Featuring: Magagodi Makhene/Neoma Amadi Obi & Kim Coleman Foote/Erin Wick

B. Novel & Screenwriting Track

Flooding: On Creating a Sensorial Screenplay
This talk will explore tools to create a tactile reading experience with a script. Further, we will explore ways of listening to and finding how the film may be asking to present on the page. Come with ideas! Featuring: Raven Jackson

C. Memoir & Short Stories Track

Story Shape
Structural shape can come from logical insights, but also from intuition, and from the subconscious. In this talk, we'll take a look at common story shapes, dip into the fraught history of the invention of that plot triangle we are all familiar with, and examine the nest architecture of birds and insects to understand how form and function can inform an intuitive discovery of arc and narrative that are attuned to the patterns in a writer's particular style and cultural background. Featuring: Ingrid Rojas Contreras

5:00 - 6:00pm

Author Signing

Kweli International Literary Festival is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.