What the Archive Cannot Hold

March 2027

I am honored to join Roksana Badruddoja and Gauri Awasthi to present "What the Archive Cannot Hold," as part of the AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) Conference in Chicago, IL, March 17-20, 2027. 

How do writers narrate histories marked by silence, displacement, and archival absence? This panel examines literary nonfiction, fiction, and hybrid forms that emerge when official records fail lived experience. Through conversations on fragmentation, inherited memory, family secrecy, migration, and historical rupture, panelists explore how writers create narrative structures for what the archive cannot hold, and how silence itself reshapes narrative, memory, and literary form.