Key West Literary Seminar

Mark Doty is the author of eight books of poems and four volumes of nonfiction prose. He has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and his Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems won the 2008 National Book Award in poetry. Doty was the keynote speaker at ...

Junot Díaz reads from his Pulitzer Prize-winning debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), and, in far-ranging comments, addresses the danger inherent in a dominant authorial voice. “No matter how many ruses I use,” Díaz says, “I’m the only one speaking.R...

Edmund White, Maggie Nelson, Bich Minh Nguyen, and Patrick Ryan discuss ‘newness’ in authorial voice, using Harold Bloom's idea of ‘the anxiety of influence’ as a starting point. Nguyen's theory of ‘the Asian once-over,’ Ryan's ‘Impostor Syndrome’ and Nelson's notion of "intoxicating...

Pulitzer finalist James Gleick and theoretical physicist-cum-novelist Janna Levin discuss the tensions between science and art evidenced by her novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. Why stray from the “facts,” Gleick wonders, in telling a story of Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel, two of...

Lee Smith gave the annual John Hersey Memorial Address to open the second session of the 2008 Seminar. In a talk that was both extremely funny and unexpectedly moving, Smith recounted her development as a writer when, as a young girl, she would write herself into Nancy Drew and Bobsie Twins adventur...

Vestal McIntyre read at the 2008 Seminar from his collection of short stories, “You Are Not The One”. In “ONJ.com” a woman is delighted with her new sophisticated and witty gay friend, but during a night of progressive party-crashing it becomes clear that he is not as wonderf...

As KWLS Board Member Bob Richardson says in his introduction, Maggie Nelson is “intimately acquainted with the night”. Nelson reads from and discusses her books “Jane: A Murder” and “The Red Parts: A Memoir”. Both concern Jane, who was Nelson’s mother’...

Silas House reads from his in-progress novel, Yvonna Darling, “about a woman who kidnaps her own child after custody is unfairly taken away from her.” Ominously full of the slow summer sounds of cicadas, willow trees, and the song of a whippoorwill, this desperate passage is brought to v...

Tayari Jones, Silas House, and Lee Smith in conversation about the Southern voice in writing. From the 2008 seminar: “New Voices.”

Elisabeth Scharlatt, publisher of Algonquin Books, and Manuel Muñoz, author of The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, discuss the hurdles and biases Muñoz encountered along his way to publication. Muñoz’s roots in California’s Central Valley and his concern with voicing the stories of the ...

Edmund White talks about finding a style and a mode of expression to approach the gay subject matter which has been his life’s work. Discussing social, professional, and aesthetic attitudes toward gays and “gay literature,” White reveals his experience as an emerging writer in the ...

Hannah Pittard reads “The Year Helen Turned Forty-One,” at the 2008 Key West Literary Seminar: New Voices. It begins: The year Helen turned forty-one, she developed bronchitis and fell in love. He was tan, wore shorts in the winter, and had fantastically large calves. He rode a bicycle t...