AWP 2025

Author Signings at Booth #325!

Thursday, March 27-Saturday, March 29, 2025
10-5pm daily at the Los Angeles Convention Center

Join us for signings throughout the week:

Thursday

Simmons Buntin        

10-11am Thursday     

Simmons Buntin will be signing his new book Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far, which Janisse Ray calls “a field guide to a father’s love” and Michael P. Branch says is a “beautifully written love letter to the intertwining tendrils of nature and community. He will also sign the acclaimed anthology Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, more relevant than ever.

Rob Carney    

2-3pm Thursday         

In The Book of Drought, Rob Carney skips ahead to the ending, setting his unnamed Listen-Recorder in a near-future landscape newly wrecked by drought. Instead of water: dead lakebeds. Instead of wild animals: bones. The sky is now cloudless, and the city’s faucets are dry. No one has adjusted yet, but some gather in an empty river to grieve, remember, and to tell their stories, the stories that become this book. Part dystopian warning, part dry-humor protest, part mythology and song—get ready for some sad-mad beauty, but with open-eyed hope. Winner of the 2023 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, selected by Richard Blanco. ROB CARNEY is the author of nine books of poems, most recently The Book of Drought (Texas Review Press 2024). He received the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Foundation Award for Poetry and has written a featured series called “Old Roads, New Stories” for the award-winning online journal Terrain.org for the last nine years. Favorite drink: coffee. Favorite animal: the Great White. He is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University and lives in Salt Lake City.

Brian Turner   

3-3:30pm Thursday   

Brian Turner has a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country (W.W. Norton in the U.S.; Penguin/Random House in the UK), and five collections of poetry, from Here, Bullet to The Dead Peasant’s Handbook (Alice James Books). He’s the editor of The Kiss and co-edited The Strangest of Theatres.

Friday           

Derek Sheffield          

12-12:30pm Friday    

I will be signing copies of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. This book has been the most popular poetry anthology in the Northwest since it was published. It has won many awards...and it's not done yet. I will also be signing copies of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy and Not for Luck, selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. www.dereksheffield.com

Derek Sheffield received a 2024 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. His other collections include Not for Luck, selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, Through the Second Skin, runner-up for the Emily Dickinson First Book Award, Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy. He teaches in Western Colorado University's low-residency MFA program, edits poetry for Terrain.org, and can often be found in the woods along the eastern slopes of the Cascade Range near Leavenworth, Washington.

Dean Rader    

12:30-1pm Friday      

Dean Rader will be available to answer questions about Cy Twombly and sign copies of his recent collection of poems, Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, published by Copper Canyon Press. Part art book, part poetry book, Before the Borderless represents the first time the estate of a major American artist has partnered with a press and a poet to produce a book such as this. It was named one of ten “mesmerizing” books of modern poetry by Book Riot.

CMarie Fuhrman        

1-2pm Friday  

CMarie Fuhrman signs Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return Personal essays that speak to our urgent need to protect wild spaces. In the heart of Idaho's Salmon River Mountains, a woman unknowingly begins what becomes a journey of understanding. Haunted by personal loss and the complex history of the American West, she seeks beauty and understanding at alpine lakes, beside wild rivers, crosscountry skiing, on trails, and with her dogs. Here, amidst granite peaks and endangered beings, she confronts the challenges and awe of nature, the ethics of hunting, the past, an uncertain future, and the depths of her own being. As she navigates physical and emotional landscapes, she grapples with questions of identity, belonging, and the delicate balance between humanity and the wild. This is more than a personal narrative; it is a powerful call for environmental awareness, the feminine, understanding of history, and a celebration of beauty. With unflinching honesty, CMarie Fuhrman examines the complexities of history, the sacredness of the land, and the urgent need to protect our wild spaces. These essays resonate with a deep reverence for Indigenous people, history, and the natural world. They will speak to anyone who has found refuge in nature, wrestled with the past, or dared to envision a brighter tomorrow.

Christina Rivera          

2-3pm Friday  

Debut author Christina Rivera will be celebrating the launch of her new book and signing copies of MY OCEANS: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women (Northwestern University Press, March 2025). To celebrate the launch, she's also offering free Selkie bookmarks and whale-pun pencils (while supplies last!). Come stop by! She'd love to meet you! MY OCEANS braids lyrical prose with embodied climate science, and explores the kinship between marine animals, humans, and Earth’s blue womb. For ecofeminists, fans of Terry Tempest Williams and Rachel Carson—and for anyone who feels themself disintegrate in the presence of the sea—MY OCEANS offers a wondrous descent into the deep waters of interbeing in which we swim. Rivera's essays have won a Pushcart Prize, the John Burroughs Nature Essay Award, and appeared in Orion, The Cut, The Kenyon Review, Longreads, and Terrain.org, among other places.

Annie Wenstrup         

3-4pm Friday  

Annie Wenstrup Signing The Museum of Unnatural Histories   

In The Museum of Unnatural Histories (Wesleyan University Press, March 25, 2025) Dena'ina poet Annie Wenstrup delicately parses personal history in the space of an imagined museum. Outside the museum, Ggugguyni (the Dena'ina Raven) and The Museum Curator collect discarded French fries, earrings, and secrets—or as the curator explains, together they curate moments of cataclysm. Inside the museum, their collection is displayed in installations that depict the imagined Indigenous body. Into this "distance between the learning and the telling," Wenstrup inserts The Curator and her sukdu'a, her own interpretive text. At the heart of the sukdu'a is the desire to find a form that allows the speaker's story to be heard. Through love letters, received forms, and found text, the poems reclaim their right to interpret, reinvent, and even disregard artifacts of their own mythos. Meticulously refined and delicately crafted, they encourage the reader to "decide/who you must become.”

Saturday               

 Chaun Ballard

1-2pm Saturday

Chaun Ballard will be signing his debut full-length poetry collection: Second Nature published in 2025 by BOA Editions Ltd. // Winner of the 23rd annual Poulin Prize, Chaun Ballard’s gripping debut collection weaves childhood experiences, historical events, and family stories into a living tapestry of memory that celebrates the landscape of Black America, both rural and urban. Riddled with the ghostly voices of family and friends, Second Nature is fearless in its wrestling with America’s fractured past and troubled present. In these poems, W.E.B. DuBois and Frederick Douglass have a conversation, Michael Brown meditates on the nature of the cosmos, Johnnie Taylor’s guitar sings in sonnets, and the road Walt Whitman set out upon comes alive for a new generation. Chaun Ballard chapbook, Flight, was the recipient of the 2018 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize and is published by Tupelo Press. His poems have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Obsidian, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Atlantic, The Missouri Review, The New York Times.

Geffrey Davis 

2-3pm Saturday         

Geffrey Davis signs copies of his third poetry collection, One Wild Word Away. When tensions veer between hope and despair, the ensuing fracture can swing like a scythe and cut a ragged seam between past and present. In One Wild Word Away, Davis weaves a deft set of poems about illness, family, loss, and rebirth. The luxurious sonics and crisp descriptions in each line are haunted by grief and buoyed by love as the speaker confronts generational trauma and the loss of a loved one while in the process of raising his own son. A recipient of the James Laughlin Award, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Davis teaches with the University of Arkansas’s Program in Creative Writing & Translation and with The Rainier Writing Workshop. He also serves as Poetry Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.

Teddy Macker

3-4pm Saturday         

Teddy Macker is the author of the collection of poetry, This World, voted a “Best Book of 2015” by the Englewood Review of Books. His work appears in the Los Angeles Times, Orion, The Sun, Tin House, and other publications. After teaching literature at UC Santa Barbara for many years, he now works as an elementary school administrator. He lives with his wife and daughters on a farm in Carpinteria, California.