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Bloof poets at AWP

AWP 2025 Los Angeles banner from the AWP website, including dates: March 26–29 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. An LA skyline and sunset provides a backdrop in mostly oranges.

We, as in the press, will not be at AWP this year. But several of our poets will be. Here’s a little list to help you spot them in Los Angeles.

PANELS & OFFSITES

MARISA CRAWFORD
Switchback Books / Meekling Press / Futurepoem Reading 

Thursday 3/27, 8–10 p.m.
MONKSPACE
4414 W. 2nd Street
Los Angeles

with Fulla Abdul-Jabbar, Marisa Crawford, Lindey Choi, Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough, CR Grimmer, MC Hyland, Stephon Lawrence, Sylvia Jones, Heather McShane, Manuel Paul López, Darby Price, Olivia Muenz, and Rachel Jihye Han.


MARISA CRAWFORD & MORGAN PARKER
OFFSITE: AWP After Party at Tabula Rasa
Hosted by Morgan Parker

Sunday 3/30, 4–8 p.m.
TABULA RASA BAR
5125 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles

with Will Alexander, Juan Amador, Cathy Linh Che, Gabrielle Civil, Marisa Crawford, Sarah Ellen Flower, Tori Gesualdo, Katja Grover, Elisabeth Houston, Genevieve Husdon, Cherene Sherrad-Johnson, Christine Larusso, Tomas Moniz, Alex Moreno, Joseph Mosconi, Paasha Motamedi, Angel Nafis, Lisa Locascio nighthawk, Jennifer Sappettone, Charif Shanahan, Natalie Shapero, Callie Siskel, Adam Stutz, Lynne Thomson & MORE.


DANIELLE PAFUNDA
THURSDAY 3:20 PM – 4:35 PM
AWP PANEL: Still Surreal: A Poetics of Revolution
Room 402AB Level Two LA Convention Center

Will Alexander, C. Francis Fisher, Joyelle McSweeney, and Danielle Pafunda. How do contemporary practitioners of US surrealist poetics grow from, resist, or reenvision André Breton’s 1920s movement? What does it mean to be surrealist amidst the postmodern horror of climate collapse, hyperrealist global warfare, and the absurdity of the twenty-four hour news cycle? Witness writers on the margins—women, BIPOC, LGBTQ+—adopt surrealist practice for personal and political expression to engage its long-standing ideologies and revolutionize its anachronistic tactics.  


Cover for Along the Road Everyone Must Travel by Danielle Pafunda (Saturnalia, 2025)

DANIELLE PAFUNDA

THURSDAY 6:00–8:00 p.m.
OFFSITE READING: Black Ocean / Burnside Review / Saturnalia
Bar Henry
1228 W Sunset Blvd.


DANIELLE PAFUNDA & KATIE JEAN SHINKLE

FRIDAY 12:10 p.m.–1:25 p.m.
PANEL: Reimagining Futures Through Speculative Writing
Room 408B Level Two LA Convention Center

Ching-In Chen, Kenning JP Garcia, Danielle Pafunda, Katie Jean Shinkle, and Dior Stephens. Writers know that who imagines the future and how they imagine it has a profound cultural impact on the eventual present moment. Just as Octavia Butler influenced 2024 when she set Parable of the Sower there in 1993, we BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and disabled innovative and speculative writers rescript those bleak futures spun from our present day marginalization that have been imagined for us. We offer worldbuilding strategies to construct futures rooted in our resistance, liberation, safety, and joy.


BECCA KLAVER
Thursday, Mar 27, 2025
3:20 p.m.—4:35 p.m.
PANEL: Teaching Amidst Trauma: Practices for Our Times
Room 502A, Level Two
Los Angeles Convention Center

Moderator: Miranda McLeod  Presenters: Diego Báez, Marcus Jackson, Becca Klaver

Creative writing classrooms can be repositories for artifacts of traumas both personal and public. As university instructors, how do we teach in a time of accelerating emergency? How can we effectively invite students into the time-honored tradition of making art in the face of existential crisis? How can we do so without turning workshop into group therapy? In this panel, we’ll share lesson designs, community practices, and tips for classroom management and self-care for teachers and learners.

IN THE BOOKFAIR

MARISSA CRAWFORD will also be signing books with Switchback Books on Friday at 12:00 noon and Saturday at 3:00 p.m. with Feminist Press.

DANIELLE PAFUNDA will be signing her new book, Along the Road Everyone Must Travel, on Thursday from 12:00 to 12:30 at the Saturnalia Books table (619). And Friday 10:30 a.m.–12:00 noon Danielle will be signing The Book of Scab at Ricochet Editions @USC’s Bookfair Booth (426).

[Probably more TK. We’ll keep adding …]

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Our 2022–2023 Handmade Chapbook Series

Bloof Books is thrilled to announce our new series of chapbooks for 2022–2023:

Ryan Gosling Wearing a T-shirt of Macaulay Culkin
Wearing a T-shirt of Ryan Gosling
Wearing a T-shirt of Macaulay Culkin
Marisa Crawford & Morgan Parker

Romance in Twelve Lines
Bruna Beber, translated by Sarah Rebecca Kersley

If Your Lungs Are Skied Make the Scar Song Echo
Until All the Winged Things Bleed Your Poetry
Steven Karl

dear Elsie / seltzer
Nicole Steinberg

Take Me to the Water
Irene Vázquez

dwellswarm
Reagan Wilson

Additionally we will be publishing a chapbook we held over from 2020 (aka the Uncertainty Year), by a poet already part of the Bloof collective:

three tides
Pattie McCarthy

ABOUT THE POETS

Bruna Beber (Duque de Caxias, Rio de Janeiro, 1984) is a Brazilian poet and translator. She is the author of five books of poetry, including a fila sem fim dos demônios descontentes (the endless line of unsatisfied demons, 2006); balés (ballets, 2009), and the critically acclaimed Rua da padaria (Bakery street, 2013) and Ladainha (Litany, 2017). She is also the author of a children’s book, Zebrosinha, illustrated by Beta Maya (2013). Her translations into Portuguese include books by Eileen Myles, Sylvia Plath, Dr. Seuss, Shakespeare (a new Brazilian translation of Hamlet, published in 2019), Louise Glück, Mary Gaitskill, and others. Her work has been translated into various languages and has appeared in journals and anthologies in Germany, Argentina, Italy, Mexico, and the United States. She is based in the city of São Paulo and has recently completed a Master’s degree in literary history and theory from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). Website: www.brunabeber.com.br / Instagram profile: @brunabeber_ (Photo credit: Rafael Roncato)

Marisa Crawford is the author of the poetry collections Reversible and The Haunted House from Switchback Books. She is co-editor, with Megan Milks, of We Are th Baby-Sitters Club: Essays & Artwork from Grown-Up Readers (Chicago Review Press, 2021), and founder of Weird Sister. Her writing has appeared in the Nation, Harper’s Bazaar, BUST, VICE, Hyperallergic, Bitch, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. marisacrawford.net. (Photo credit: Lauren Desberg)

Steven Karl is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently, Sister (Noemi Press, 2016). He is the editor-in-chief for Sink Review, an online journal dedicated to experimental contemporary poetry. Recent poems have appeared in the tiny, jubilat and the Tokyo Poetry Journal, and a collaborative Dos-à-dos art book with Joseph Lappie will be forthcoming in 2022. Born in Philadelphia, he currently lives in Tokyo with his wife and daughter. stevenkarl.wordpress.com.

Sarah Rebecca Kersley is a translator, poet and editor, originally from the UK and based in Brazil for over a decade. Her work has appeared in places such as The Elevation Review, Asymptote Journal, Denver Quarterly, Isele Magazine, and elsewhere. She co-runs Livraria Boto-cor-de-rosa, a bookshop and small press focused on contemporary literature, in the city of Salvador, Bahia, where she is based. Instagram profile: @sarahrebeccakersley. (Photo credit: Ana Reis).

Pattie McCarthy is the author of seven books of poetry and over a dozen chapbooks. She teaches literature and creative writing at Temple University where she is a non-tenure track associate professor.

Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On?; and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. Parker’s debut book of nonfiction is forthcoming from One World. morgan-parker.com (Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths)

Nicole Steinberg is the author of Glass Actress (Furniture Press Books, 2017) and Getting Lucky (Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2013), as well as various chapbooks, most recently Fat Dreams (Barrelhouse, 2018). She is the editorof a literary anthology, Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens (SUNY Press, 2011), and her work has been featured or reviewed in the New York TimesNewsweekFlavorwireBitch, and Hyperallergic. She is the 2021–2022 Poet Laureate of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and she can be found online at nicolesteinberg.net or @nicolebrett.

Irene Vázquez is a Black Mexican American poet, journalist, and editor. Irene graduated from Yale with a BA in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and English, as part of the 2021 cohort of Mellon Mays-Bouchet Fellows. Recently, Irene was named a winter/spring 2022 Brooklyn Poets Fellow. Irene’s works have appeared or are forthcoming in Muzzle, the Oxford American, and the lickety-split, among others. Mostly Irene likes drinking coffee, impulse-buying books, and reminding people that the South has something to say. Irene’s work can be found at www.irenevazquez.com. (Photo credit: Gerardo Monarca Velasquez)

Reagan Louise Wilson is a writer & artist who lives in Los Angeles. Some of her work can be found in the Portland Review, Matter Monthly, CONE, and Simultaneous Times, as well as several long lost zines. She is currently at work on a strawberry garden and a novel about care work in catastrophic times. The kiddo she looks after wondered if “& blah blah blah…” could really be included in this official bio.

SUBSCRIBE NOW

These chapbooks will be released individually (on a schedule to be determined, starting this summer) for $10 each + $3 shipping, featuring hand-printed linocut covers and hand-sewn in natural twine. Or subscribe now to collect the whole series, and save $10.