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Embracing Survival, a memoir by Dydine Umunyana, tells the story of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide against Tutsis at the hands of Hutu perpetrators through the eyes of the four-year-old-child that she was when the horror occurred. Separated from her family, she barely survived the conflict. While the physical killing eventually stopped, the mental and emotional torture continued, affecting her, her family, friends, and community until acceptance paved a way forward.
Now 27 years old and living in the United States, she writes that she has "learned that we cannot do for others what we cannot do for ourselves. By nourishing the light within ourselves, we find strength we never knew was there...one's own life experiences are not meant to be kept, but to be shared and learned from." 
On Wednesday, March 14, 2018, the night before the awards ceremony, many of the finalists read from their work at the New School Here is the complete video. See below for order of appearances.
Welcome: Luis Jaramillo, Interim Director, The New School Writing Program
Opening Remarks: Kate Tuttle, President, National Book Critics Circle
Poetry
Nuar Alsadir, Fourth Person Singular (Liverpool University Press/Oxford)
James Longenbach, Earthling (Norton)
Layli Long Soldier, Whereas (Graywolf)
Frank Ormsby, The Darkness of Snow (Wake Forest University Press)
Criticism
Carina Chocano, You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages (Mariner)
Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story (Graywolf)
Camille T. Dungy, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (Norton)
Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (Coffee House)
Kevin Young, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News (Graywolf)
Autobiography
Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir (Abrams)
Biography
Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Metropolitan Books)
Edmund Gordon, The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography (Oxford)
Howard Markel, The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek (Pantheon)
William Taubman, Gorbachev: His Life and Times (Norton)
Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (Knopf)
Fiction
Joan Silber, Improvement (Counterpoint)
Nonfiction
Jack E. Davis, The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea (Liveright)
Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (Simon & Schuster)
Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (Riverhead) 
We welcome Ada Limón to the set, author of Bright Dead Things: Poems. Limón was a finalist for the National Book Award, The National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Limon’s next book, The Carrying: Poems is due to be released this summer.
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
From National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Ada Limon comes The Carrying—her most powerful collection yet.
Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility—"What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?"—and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: "Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal." And still Limon shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. "Fine then, / I'll take it," she writes. "I'll take it all."
In Bright Dead Things, Limon showed us a heart "giant with power, heavy with blood"—"the huge beating genius machine / that thinks, no, it knows, / it's going to come in first." In her follow-up collection, that heart is on full display—even as The Carrying continues further and deeper into the bloodstream, following the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world. 
Meredith discusses her new memoir with New York Times Journalist Wesley Morris.
Meredith Goldstein, the mastermind behind the Boston Globe advice column Love Letters, is coming to the Strand for the release of her new memoir! In Can't Help Myself, Goldstein takes readers through the origins of the column, its wild online-to-print success, and reveals what was happening in her own life as Love Letters grew. Despite her calm and collected attitude in writing, Goldstein doesn’t have it all figured out for herself. She has her own questions about aging parents, office break-ups, dating-in-your-thirties, feminism, porn habits, and Tinder. In Can't Help Myself, we watch as Love Letters becomes Goldstein’s anchor, helping her through painful breakups and a family cancer diagnosis, just as she anchors her readers through their own setbacks and tragedies. With humor (the ex she calls “Draco Malfoy,” the millennial pals she calls “The Rachels”) and the collective empathy of a dedicated online community, Can't Help Myself is an extraordinary and touching portrait of a single woman navigating the difficulties of life and love for both herself and thousands of others. 
Alexander Chee is with us at AWP 2018 talking about his newest book, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays. Mr. Chee has won numerous awards and fellowships, is an Associate Professor at Dartmouth College as well as being a contributing editor at The New Republic, an editor at large at The Virginia Quarterly Review and a critic at large at The Los Angeles Times.
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing—Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley—the writing of his first novel, Edinburgh, and the election of Donald Trump. 
Writers convene to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Sarah Schulman’s cult classic novel “After Delores.”
Panelists, from left to right: Davey Davis, Kay Gabriel, Tina Horn, Sarah Schulman
Sarah Schulman's acclaimed 1988 novel is a noirish tale about a no-nonsense coffee-shop waitress in New York who is nursing a broken heart after her girlfriend Delores leaves her; her attempts to find love again are funny, sexy, and ultimately even violent. “After Delores” is a fast-paced, electrifying chronicle of the Lower East Side's lesbian subculture in the 1980s.
Davey Davis writes about culture, sexuality, technology, and genderqueer embodiment. Their first novel, “the earthquake room,” was released by TigerBee Press in late 2017. You can find them on Twitter at @k8bushofficial.
Kay Gabriel is the author of “Elegy Department Spring” (BOAAT Press, 2017), the finalist for the 2016 BOAAT chapbook prize selected by Richard Siken. She's one-fifth of Negative Press, a gay Marxist poetry collective, and an editor for Vetch. Find her provocations on Twitter @unit01barbie.
Tina Horn is a non-fiction NSFW writer, audio producer, queer punk, and true karaoke believer. She produces and hosts the kinky slut podcast “Why Are People Into That?!,” and is the author of two nonfiction books, “Love Not Given Lightly,” and “Sexting.” She is a Lambda Literary Fellow and the winner of two Feminist Porn Awards. TinaHorn.net / @TinaHornsAss
Sarah Schulman is the author of 19 books, most recently THE COSMOPOLITANS (chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the best American novels of 2016), CONFLICT IS NOT ABUSE (winner of The 2017 Publishing Triangle Nonfiction Prize) and MAGGIE TERRY, a novel of murder and discovery which will be published in September 2018. A playwright, screenwriter, and AIDS historian, Sarah is currently collaborating with the great Marianne Faithfull on a stage play, "The Snow Queen" featuring 24 of Marianne's songs from her long career. 
Brit Bennett on The Mothers
Rich Fahle talks with Brit Bennett about her debut novel, The Mothers at the 2018 AWP Conference & Book Fair.
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
Set within a contemporary black community in Southern California, Brit Bennett's mesmerizing first novel is an emotionally perceptive story about community, love, and ambition. It begins with a secret.
"All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we'd taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season."
It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, seventeen-year-old beauty. Mourning her own mother's recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor's son. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. They are young; it's not serious. But the pregnancy that results from this teen romance—and the subsequent cover-up—will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth. As Nadia hides her secret from everyone, including Aubrey, her God-fearing best friend, the years move quickly. Soon, Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey are full-fledged adults and still living in debt to the choices they made that one seaside summer, caught in a love triangle they must carefully maneuver, and dogged by the constant, nagging question: What if they had chosen differently? The possibilities of the road not taken are a relentless haunt.
In entrancing, lyrical prose, The Mothers asks whether a "what if" can be more powerful than an experience itself. If, as time passes, we must always live in servitude to the decisions of our younger selves, to the communities that have parented us, and to the decisions we make that shape our lives forever. 
Event held on March 15, 2018 at the New School, New York, NY
Welcome: Luis Jaramillo, Interim Director, The New School Writing Program
Opening Remarks: Kate Tuttle, President, National Book Critics Circle
John Leonard Prize: Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf)
Introduced by Daniel Akst
Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing: Charles Finch
Introduced by Katherine A. Powers
Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award: John McPhee
Introduced by Michael Schaub and Stacey Vanek Smith
Poetry
Layli Long Soldier, Whereas (Graywolf)
Introduced by Tess Taylor
Criticism
Carina Chocano, You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages (Mariner) Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story (Graywolf)
Introduced by Carlin Romano
Autobiography
Xiaolu Guo, Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China (Grove)
Introduced by Laurie Hertzel
Biography
Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Metropolitan Books)
Introduced by Elizabeth Taylor
Nonfiction
Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (Simon & Schuster)
Introduced by Mary Ann Gwinn
Fiction
Joan Silber, Improvement (Counterpoint)
Introduced by Tom Beer Comedian/actor Mike Epps gets semi-serious in this wide-ranging fan Q&A on his career in Hollywood, his advice to up-and-coming comics, and why Richard Pryor wasn’t too impressed with his backyard. His new memoir is “Unsuccessful Thug: One Comedian’s Journey from Naptown to Tinseltown.”
Michael Elliot Epps is a stand-up comedian, actor, film producer, writer, and rapper. He is best known for playing Day-Day Jones in “Next Friday” and its sequel, “Friday After Next,” and also appearing in “The Hangover” as "Black Doug". He was the voice of Boog in “Open Season 2.” As of 2010, Epps was the executive producer on a documentary about the life story of a former member of Tupac Shakur's Outlawz, “Napoleon: Life of an Outlaw.” He is also known for playing Lloyd Jefferson "L.J." Wade in “Resident Evil: Apocalypse” and “Resident Evil: Extinction.” 
Actor/comedian Jimmy O. Yang and actress/rapper Awkwafina (aka Nora Lum) discuss Yang’s new book “How to American,” their roles in the upcoming film adaptation of “Crazy Rich Asians,” growing up Asian-American and why Nora never became a meat inspector.
As a stand-up comedian, actor, and fan favorite as the character Jian Yang from the popular HBO series Silicon Valley, Jimmy O. Yang has achieved the American dream, but he wasn’t born into it. He started his journey as a teenage immigrant from Hong Kong, determinedly chasing the elusive Hollywood career. He defied his parents’ wishes, learning English by watching BET RapCity for three hours a day, and worked as a strip club DJ while pursuing a career in comedy. He was almost deported during a trip abroad before finally becoming a US citizen. Now he’s written a memoir recounting it all.
In his book “How to American,” Jimmy O. tells those stories and many more, while sharing some hard-earned lessons and insightful advice for those looking to achieve the American Dream.
