Each year, writing program directors nominate their students’ work for the Intro Journals Project, AWP’s literary competition for the discovery and publication of the best new works by students enrolled in AWP member programs. Winning entries are published in participating literary journals.

Join us Tuesday, August 10, 2021, at 6:00 p.m. ET as five more 2021 Intro Journals winners read a selection of their work and discuss their creative process, the inspiration behind their winning piece, and where they are headed next. Intro Journals General Editor Dave Essinger of the University of Findlay leads the conversation with Danielle Harms, Jonathan Winston Jones, Ae Hee Lee, Emily Anne Standlee, and Steven Vineis.

The premiere of this Virtual AWP event will also include a live Q&A on YouTube. To receive a reminder and a direct link to this free event, as well as updates on future events, register online. Registration is free, and you do not have to be a member of AWP to do so. However, to participate in the live Q&A, you must be signed in on YouTube.

Participant Bios:

Dave Essinger’s first novel, Running Out, was released in print in 2017 and audiobook in 2018. He has recently finished a postapocalyptic novel featuring teens stranded on an Ohio Air Force base, and his new project Compassion Fatigue stars an epically stressed-out veterinarian. Dave is a fiction reader for Slice magazine and general editor of the AWP Intro Journals Project. He teaches and edits the literary magazine Slippery Elm at the University of Findlay. dave-essinger.com

Danielle Harms writes from Wisconsin, where she is a PhD student in English at UW-Milwaukee. She is the creative nonfiction editor for Cream City Review and a graduate student advisor for Furrow, an undergraduate journal of literature and art. Her writing has been published in the Diagram, Denver Quarterly, and the Offing. She really likes lakes and bikes. You can find her online at Danielle.HarmsBoone.org.

Jonathan Winston Jones’s work has appeared in Ploughshares and Ruminate. One of his essays was notable in The Best American Essays: 2019. His news journalism has appeared in the Advocate and elsewhere. He holds a master's in human rights from the University of Manchester and a master's in public policy from the University of Chicago. He is completing an MFA at Northwestern University.  

Ae Hee Lee was born in South Korea and raised in Peru. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks: Dear bear, (Platypus Press, 2021) and Bedtime || Riverbed (Compound Press, 2017). She holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame, where she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her poetry has been published at the Georgia Review, New England Review, Southern Review, and elsewhere.

Emily Anne Standlee lives in a 100-year-old apartment building in Midtown Kansas City and cut her teeth working for the Missouri Review, New Letters, and Nashville Review. She is the recipient of a 2021 Great Midwest Writing Contest Award in Nonfiction and recently had an essay chosen by Cinelle Barnes as winner of Sand Hills’ national literary competition. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Passengers, HASH, Midwest Review, Sand Hills, and Tampa Review.

Steven Vineis was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. In addition to the Hayden’s Ferry Review, his work has appeared in Brooklyn Vegan, the GSU Review, the Talon, Portals, Between the Lines, and a bunch of staple-bound, Xeroxed punk zines in the 2010s. He recently completed a novel entitled Misery Vendor and plans to resume his touring musician schedule once that’s a thing again.