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.
REGISTER THRU PAYPAL
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)
