More than 13,000 writers and readers, and over 700 exhibitors were represented at the Association for Writers and Writing Programs Conference that took place at the Washington Convention Center in Seattle last month. Both CascadiaNow! and the Cascadia Poetry Festival had a table, and Cascadia was well represented with speakers and workshops during the weekend, including:
- Cascadia Chronicles – Integrating Writing with Digital Geo-Visualization | A very cool panel presentation and discussion by five Central Washington University Professors that showcased Cascadia Chronicle, an emerging online digital space that explores the meanings of place through the creative integration of scholarship, creative nonfiction, and poetry into geo-visualization platforms. Scholars, creative writers, and technical specialists discuss the conceptual, artistic, and technological challenges of this new kind of digital humanistic initiative.
- Cascadia – Reading and Writing the Bioregion – This event celebrates Manoa Journal’s publication of Cascadia: The Life and Breath of the World, a pathbreaking anthology of literature from the Pacific Coast’s Cascadia region. The reading will showcase authors from the cross-border region in which the 2014 conference is being held, articulate how Cascadia’s literary aesthetics and poetics are ecologically grounded; and explore the role of contemporary Cascadian writing in community building, citizenship, and spirituality.
Over the course of the weekend, we were also able to reach out with hundreds of faculty, students, writers, academics, poets and researchers about Cascadia and our emerging Cascadia movement.
