NYWW in
Kathmandu: Himalayan Literature Festival
May
22-June 2, 2024
NYWW in Kathmandu: Himalayan Literature Festival--an
international literary conference hosted by New York Writers Workshop in a
partnership with White Lotus Bookstore, Kathmandu, featuring Tony Barnstone,
Ravi Shankar, Yuyutsu Sharma, Tim Tomlinson, and others. Panels, workshops,
readings, cultural excursions, flowing into the two-day Himalayan Literary
Festival, followed by five nights in the rural areas of the Pokhara Valley on
Lake Fewa, and Chitwan National Park, home to tigers, the one-horned rhinoceros,
and gharial crocodiles. In the city, visits to temples, yoga & meditation
centers, interactions with shamans, and with local poets and writers. In the
countryside, encounters with the landscapes of the Annapurna mountains, and
with the wildlife of Chitwan.
Dates: May 22 - June 2, 2024.
The
Package
eight workshops* – generative
and evaluative (*two workshops in temples)
eight panel talks – a range of
topics inc translation, voice, neutrality, image
welcome drinks + canapes,
three dinners, three lunches
outside cultural events (optional)
four readings – three faculty
readings, one participant reading
generous free time for writing
& exploration
airport pickup
inner city transportation to
conference events / RT coach to Pokhara
accommodations at KGH Group
properties (links below at †) at each location, breakfast included
The Cost* [register thru paypal
button, or via wire transfer -- details below]
Early Bird Special (until Feb 15):
US $1475
After Feb 16: US $1845
*NYWW Members: 20% off full price
*NYWW Athens/NYWW Sardinia
participants: 20% off full price
*APWT Members: 10% off full price
The Schedule*
May 22
6:00 PM Orientation/Meet the
Faculty (reception)
7:30 NYWW Welcome Dinner
May 23
9:30 AM Convocation
10:15 AM Workshop
12:15 PM Lunch
2:00 PM Workshop
5:30 PM Reading
7:15 Dinner (open)
May 24
9:30 AM Workshop
11:15 AM Workshop
1:00 PM Lunch
2:15 PM Monkey Temple /
Shaman House
6:00 PM Reading
7:15 Dinner (open)
May 25
9:00 AM all day excursion/pack
lunch
7:00 PM Dinner (open)
May 26
10:00 AM Workshop
12:15 PM Lunch
2:00 PM Workshop
7:00 PM Dinner (open)
May 27
Himalayan Literary Festival Day 1
workshops/panels/readings/cultural
events
May 28
Himalayan Literary Festival Day 2
workshops/panels/readings/cultural
events
7:00 PM NYWW Dinner (celebration)
May 29
8:30 AM depart for Waterfront
Resort, Lake Fewa, Pohara
Evening: discussion/panel
May 30
9:30 AM Workshop
Evening: discussion/panel
May 31
8:30 AM depart for Chitwan
National Park
Evening: discussion/panel
June 1
9:30 AM Workshop
Evening: Reading
Farewell Dinner
June 2
return to Kathmandu
June 3
departures
† The KGH Group will be our hosts at the following properties:
May 22 - May 27: Park Village
May 27 - 29: Kathmandu Guest House (home base for Himalayan Literary Festival)
May 29 - May 31: Waterfront Resort (on the lakefront, Pokhara)
May 31 - June 2: Maruni Sanctuary Lodge (Chitwan)
REGISTER by wire/bank
transfer to avoid paypal fees:
TD Bank, N.A. Wilmington, DE
New York Writers Resources, Inc.
Acct # 791-5960855
SWIFT CODE NRTHUS33XXX
ABA/Routing # 026013673
NOTE: if registering via wire
transfer, please notify us at newyorkwritersworkshop@gmail.com and we'll follow
up with confirmation.
NOTE: prices reflect PayPal
processing fee
The Faculty
TONY BARNSTONE teaches at Whittier College and is the author of 22 books and a music CD, including Pulp Sonnets; Beast in the Apartment; Buda en Llamas: Antología poética (bilingual); Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki; The Golem of Los Angeles; Sad Jazz: Sonnets; and Impure. He is also a translator or co-translator of world literature, primarily Chinese but also Spanish and Urdu. Among his awards are: The Poets Prize, the Strokestown International Prize, the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, The John Ciardi Prize, The Benjamin Saltman Award, and fellowships from the NEA, NEH, and California Arts Council. He co-edited the anthologies Republic of Apples, Democracy of Oranges: New Eco-Poetry from China and the United States; Dead and Undead Poems; and Monster Verse. His new publications are a co-translation from the Urdu, Faces Hidden in the Dust: Selected Ghazals of Ghalib and a creativity tool, The Radiant Tarot: Pathway to Creativity. He is currently working on a libretto for an opera. Click to visit Tony’s website.
Rukmini Bhaya Nair is a Delhi-based poet and professor of linguistics and English at the Indian Institute of Technology. Described by poet Keki Daruwalla as the author of “the first significant volume of post-modern poetry written by an Indian”, she has published three books of poetry: The Hyoid Bone (1992), The Ayodhya Cantos (1999) and Yellow Hibiscus (2004) as well as a highly acclaimed novel Mad Girl's Love Song (HarperCollins, 2013) and most recently a linguistics monograph, Keywords for India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the 21st Century. (Bloomsbury Academic. 2020). Nair studied in Kolkata and England, and obtained her doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1982. Widely recognized for her work in the areas of linguistics, cognition and literary theory, she has taught at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, the National University of Singapore and the University of Washington at Seattle. Her creative and critical writings are taught on courses at universities such as Chicago, Kent, Oxford and Washington. Her ‘polyphonous’ literary style seeks to connect her varied interests in literary theory and cultural studies. She claims that the impulse to turn out “fat academic volumes and fragile books of verse” is the same in her case – to discover the limits of language. Her ambition, she says, “is simply to write and research, whatever the genre and whatever the odds”. In 1990, Nair won the first prize in the All India Poetry Society/ British Council competition. Her work has since appeared in Penguin New Writing in India (1992), Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (2002), and several other anthologies. It has also been translated into languages as varied as Swedish, Macedonian, Bengali and Hindi.
Jami Proctor Xu is an award-winning bilingual poet and translator who writes in Chinese and English. Her poems and translations have been widely published and anthologized in many countries. She has co-organized international poetry events in China, South Africa, Eswatini, Lesotho, and Ethiopia, and she frequently reads at poetry festivals around the world. Her current projects include Pagoda, her second full-length collection in Chinese, The Black Sheep of Jilebute, translations of poems by Jidi Majia (forthcoming in Ireland), Say to the Soul, translations of poems by Xiao Xiao, and The Rain Train, co-translations of poems by Biplab Majee (forthcoming in Kolkata). She loves teaching poetry workshops to children and adults, and spending time with poets and artists from around the world.
RAVI SHANKAR Pushcart-prize winning poet, author, editor, translator, and professor, Ravi Shankar is the author and editor of over fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, including, most recently, Tallying the Hemispheres: Selected Essays, and the award-winning memoir, Correctional. Other books include Many Uses of Mint: New and Selected Poems: 1998-2018 ; Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East, and Beyond; Autobiography of a Goddess; Deepening Groove; What Else Could it Be; and Instrumentality, poems from which have appeared around the world. Translated into over 12 languages and recipient of a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner as well as winner of the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, Shankar has taught at such institutions as Columbia University, Fairfield University, the City University of Hong Kong and the University of Sydney. He has held fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Jentel Foundation, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Blue Mountain Center and many others. He currently teaches for New York Writers Workshop and Tufts University and lives a nomadic existence centered around Boston, Massachusetts and Sydney, Australia.
YUYUTSU SHARMA Recipient of fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and The Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature, Yuyutsu Ram Dass Sharma is a world-renowned Himalayan poet and translator. Yuyutsu Sharma is one of the few poets in the world who make their living with poetry. Named as “The world-renowned Himalayan poet,” (The Guardian) “One-Man Academy” (The Kathmandu Post) and “Himalayan Neruda” (Mike Graves, Brand Called You), Yuyutsu is a vibrant force on the world poetry stage. He has published ten poetry collections including, The Second Buddha Walk, A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems, Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems, Nepal Trilogy, Space Cake, Amsterdam and Annapurna Poems. Three books of his poetry, Poemes de l’ Himalayas (L’Harmattan, Paris), Poemas de Los Himalayas (Cosmopoeticia, Cordoba, Spain) and Jezero Fewa & Konj (Sodobnost International) have appeared in French, Spanish and Slovenian respectively. In addition, Eternal Snow: A Worldwide Anthology of One Hundred Twenty-Five Poetic Intersections with Himalayan Poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma has also appeared. Half the year, he travels and reads all over the world and conducts Creative Writing workshops at various universities in North America and Europe. When back home, he goes trekking in the Himalayas. Currently, Yuyutsu Sharma edits Pratik: A Quarterly Magazine of Contemporary Writing.
TIM TOMLINSON Tim Tomlinson is the author of the chapbook Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse, the poetry collection, Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire, and the short story collection, This Is Not Happening to You. Recent work appears in Bangalore Literary Review, Live Encounters, Tin Can Literary Review, and Best Asian Short Stories 2023 (ed. Dr Anitha Dev Pillai). A new collection, Listening to Fish: meditations from the wet world, will appear on Nirala in Spring 2024. Tim has lived in the Bahamas, China, Italy, the Philippines, Thailand, and various cities in the US, including New Orleans, Miami, Boston, and New York City. He is the director of New York Writers Workshop, and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. He teaches writing in NYU’s Global Liberal Studies.
Annie Zaidi is the author of City of Incident; Prelude to a Riot; Bread, Cement, Cactus: A memoir of belonging and dislocation. She is also the editor of Unbound: 2000 Years of Indian Women's Writing. Other published works include the novella Gulab, one collection of short stories Love Stories # 1 to 14, and a collection of essays Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales. She is also the co-author of The Good Indian Girl (with Smriti Ravindra) and a short book of illustrated poems Crush (with Gynelle Alves). She received the Tata Literature Live Award for fiction (2020) for Prelude to a Riot, which was also shortlisted for the JCB prize the same year, and the Nine Dots Prize (2019) for her essay Bread, Cement, Cactus. She won The Hindu Playwright Award (2018) for her script Untitled 1 and her radio script ‘Jam’ was named regional (South Asia) winner for the BBC’s International Playwriting Competition (2011). Her work has appeared in several anthologies and literary journals including The Griffith Review, The Aleph Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Portside Review, The Missing Slate and Out of Print. She trained as a journalist and has published essays and columns in several magazines and websites, including Caravan, Republica (Italy), Griffith Review (Australia), Frontline, The Hindu, Scroll.in, BBC Hindi, Outlook, Mint Lounge, First Post, DNA, Open, Elle, GQ India and Conde Nast Traveler. She has also written and directed several short films and the documentary film, In her words: The journey of Indian women. She is currently a doctoral scholar at Durham University.
Julie Williams-Krishnan is a fine art and freelance photographer, artist, and educator who teaches photography and leads workshops at university and community level. Julie served as the Director of Programs at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts (USA) for five years. She has served a juror for the Somerville Arts Council and the Winchester Public Schools, a committee member for FlashPoint Boston photography festival, and on the committee for the Renaissance Photography Prize, an international photography competition that raises money to support younger women with breast cancer. Julie’s personal photographic practice investigates identity and personal narrative. She has exhibited her photographs at Melrose Tiny Gallery, The Sanctuary, Cambridge Art Association, the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Khaki Gallery, and Zullo Gallery in the Boston region, the Colson Gallery in Easthampton, Massachusetts, and The Center for Fine Art Photography in Colorado, A. Smithson Gallery in Texas, as well as other venues in Boston, London, and Oxford. She has also been included in online exhibitions with “Don’t Take Pictures” and “Lenscratch.” She earned her MA in Photographic Studies from the University of Westminster in London, UK. Based in Boston Massachusetts (USA) since 2010, Julie lived in London (UK) for more than 16 years and has traveled to more than 75 countries. She lives in a multi-cultural family and travels regularly to India. Learn more about Julie’s work at www.jwkphotography.com and on instagram.
Widely anthologized, Rochelle Potkar is a prize-winning poet, author, and screenwriter based in Mumbai. She is the author of Four Degrees of Separation (poetry), Paper Asylum (haibun) - shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2020, and Bombay Hangovers (short fiction). An alumna of Iowa’s International Writing Program (2015) and a Charles Wallace Writer’s fellow, University. of Stirling (2017), her poetry film Skirt featured on Shonda Rhime's Shondaland via the Visible Poetry Project. She is on the syllabus boards (English Lit) of two top universities in Mumbai. As a creative-writing mentor, she conducts online poetry workshops for the Himalayan Writing Retreat and was invited thrice to Iowa’s International Writing Programs: Summer Institute 2019 and Between the Lines 2022, 2023 as a creative-writing teacher. Her prize-winning manuscript of poetry Coins in Rivers is due out in April 2024 by Hachette India. (@rochellepotkar)
