“They’ll Never Write a Poem”: Neurodivergent Poets on Their Writing Lives, Sponsored by Sarabande Books
Thursday, March 5, 12:10 p.m. to 1:25 p.m. ET
Ballroom I, Baltimore Convention Center, Level 400
In April 2025, the US health secretary made the claim that there will never be an autistic poet. Five award-winning poets set the record straight in a reading and discussion of their work and lived experiences as neurodivergent writers. Topics include, but are by no means limited to, intersectionality and neurodivergence, reframing creative practices, novelty-fueled nervous systems, pitching divergent projects, our most off-brand skills, and accessibility in the literary field.
Panelist bios:
Stine An is the author of S_MMER CR_SH (Sarabande Books, 2025) and the translator of Today’s Morning Vocabulary by Yoo Heekyung (Zephyr Press, 2025). She is a poet, translator, and performer in NYC, and her work explores diasporic poetics, experimental translation, and virtual performance. She is a 2024 NEA Translation fellow, and her poems and translations appear in Best Literary Translations 2024, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere.
Photo Credit: Su Yon An
Lauren Haldeman is the author of the graphic novels Wild That We’re Alive and Team Photograph (Sarabande, 2022), as well as the poetry collections Instead of Dying (winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry), Calenday, and The Eccentricity Is Zero. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has received a Vermont Studio Center residency, an Iowa Arts Fellowship, and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, The Rumpus, The Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Fence, and others. She is currently posting her comics on Instagram at @laurenhaldeman.
Photo Credit: Lauren Haldeman
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with her partner and several intense mammals. She is the author of the poetry collection My Heresies (Sarabande, 2025), as well as Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize. Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize. Stefanescu’s poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as editor, reviewer, and critic for various journals and is currently working on a novel-like creature. Photo Credit: Him
A native New Orleanian, Karisma Price is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University. A poet and screenwriter, she is the author of I’m Always So Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023) which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice Pick. Her work has appeared in publications including Poetry, Indiana Review, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, and elsewhere. She is a 2025 Whiting Award Winner in Poetry, a Cave Canem fellow, and a 2023 winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review, and was awarded the 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation. She holds an MFA in poetry from New York University.Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan
Kristen Renee Miller is the director and editor in chief at Sarabande Books. An award-winning poet and translator, she is a 2023 NEA fellow and the translator of two books from the French by Ilnu Nation poet Marie-Andrée Gill. She is the recipient of honors from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, AIGA, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation, and the American Literary Translators Association. Her work can be found widely, including in Poetry, The Nation, and Best New Poets. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky.Photo Credit: Alexa Rivera
