NYWW in Kathmandu: Himalayan Literature Festival

International ConferenceKathmandu
Written By Stephanie

NYWW in Kathmandu: Himalayan Literature Festival--an international literary conference hosted by New York Writers Workshop in partnership with White Lotus Bookstore, Kathmandu, featuring Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Ravi Shankar, Yuyutsu Sharma, Tony Barnstone, Rochelle Potkar, Jami Proctor-Xu, Julie Williams-Krishnan, and Tim Tomlinson. Panels, workshops, readings, cultural excursions, flowing into the two-day Himalayan Literary Festival, followed by five nights in the rural areas of the Pokhara Valley on Lake Fewa, and Chitwan National Park, home to tigers, the one-horned rhinoceros, and gharial crocodiles. In the city, visits to temples, yoga & meditation centers, interactions with shamans, and with local poets and writers. In the countryside, encounters with the landscapes of the Annapurna mountains, and with the wildlife of Chitwan.

  • The Package 

    • eight workshops* – generative and evaluative (*two workshops in temples)

    • eight panel talks – a range of topics inc translation, voice, neutrality, image

    • welcome drinks + canapes, three dinners, three lunches

    • outside cultural events (optional)

    • four readings – three faculty readings, one participant reading

    • generous free time for writing & exploration 

    • airport pickup

    • inner city transportation to conference events / RT coach to Pokhara

    • accommodations at KGH Group properties (links below at †) at each location, breakfast included 

    • Early Bird Special (until March 15): US $1475 

    • March 16 onward: US $1845

    • *NYWW Members: 20% off full price

    • *NYWW Athens/NYWW Sardinia participants: 20% off full price

    • *APWT Members: 10% off full price ​

  • NYWW-K: New York Writers Workshop conference 22 May—28 May
    HLF: Himalayan Literature Festival 27—28 May
    PC: Pokhara-Chitwan excursions

    SAARC

    For full package (22 May – 2 June) (NYWW-K, HLF, PC): ₹95,000 / 150,000 npr

    For just the NYWW-K conference & HLF (22 – 28 May): ₹70,000 / 110,000 npr

    For just the HLF & PC (27 May—2 June): ₹70,000 / 110,000 npr

    For just the HLF (27-28 May—three nights accommodations starting 26 May): ₹27,000 / 40,000 npr

Faculty

TONY BARNSTONE teaches at Whittier College and is the author of 22 books and a music CD, including Pulp Sonnets; Beast in the Apartment; Buda en Llamas: Antología poética (bilingual); Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki; The Golem of Los Angeles; Sad Jazz: Sonnets; and Impure. He is also a translator or co-translator of world literature, primarily Chinese but also Spanish and Urdu.  Among his awards are: The Poets Prize, the Strokestown International Prize, the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, The John Ciardi Prize, The Benjamin Saltman Award, and fellowships from the NEA, NEH, and California Arts Council. He co-edited the anthologies Republic of Apples, Democracy of Oranges: New Eco-Poetry from China and the United States; Dead and Undead Poems; and Monster Verse. His new publications are a co-translation from the Urdu, Faces Hidden in the Dust: Selected Ghazals of Ghalib and a creativity tool, The Radiant Tarot: Pathway to Creativity. He is currently working on a libretto for an opera. Click to visit Tony’s website.  

Rukmini Bhaya Nair is a Delhi-based poet and professor of linguistics and English at the Indian Institute of Technology. Described by poet Keki Daruwalla as the author of “the first significant volume of post-modern poetry written by an Indian”, she has published three books of poetry: The Hyoid Bone (1992), The Ayodhya Cantos (1999) and Yellow Hibiscus (2004) as well as a highly acclaimed novel Mad Girl's Love Song (HarperCollins, 2013) and most recently a linguistics monograph, Keywords for India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the 21st Century. (Bloomsbury Academic. 2020). Nair studied in Kolkata and England, and obtained her doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1982. Widely recognised for her work in the areas of linguistics, cognition and literary theory, she has taught at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, the National University of Singapore and the University of Washington at Seattle. Her creative and critical writings are taught on courses at universities such as Chicago, Kent, Oxford and Washington. Her ‘polyphonous’ literary style seeks to connect her varied interests in literary theory and cultural studies. She claims that the impulse to turn out “fat academic volumes and fragile books of verse” is the same in her case – to discover the limits of language. Her ambition, she says, “is simply to write and research, whatever the genre and whatever the odds”. In 1990, Nair won the first prize in the All India Poetry Society/ British Council competition. Her work has since appeared in Penguin New Writing in India (1992), Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (2002), and several other anthologies. It has also been translated into languages as varied as Swedish, Macedonian, Bengali and Hindi.

Widely anthologized, Rochelle Potkar is a prize-winning poet, author, and screenwriter based in Mumbai. She is the author of Four Degrees of Separation (poetry), Paper Asylum (haibun) - shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2020, and Bombay Hangovers (short fiction). An alumna of Iowa’s International Writing Program (2015) and a Charles Wallace Writer’s fellow, University. of Stirling (2017), her poetry film Skirt featured on Shonda Rhime's Shondaland via the Visible Poetry Project. She is on the syllabus boards (English Lit) of two top universities in Mumbai. As a creative-writing mentor, she conducts online poetry workshops for the Himalayan Writing Retreat and was invited thrice to Iowa’s International Writing Programs: Summer Institute 2019 and Between the Lines 2022, 2023 as a creative-writing teacher. Her prize-winning manuscript of poetry Coins in Rivers is due out in April 2024 by Hachette India. (@rochellepotkar)

Jami Proctor Xu is an award winning bilingual poet and translator who writes in Chinese and English. Her poems and translations have been widely published and anthologized in many countries. She has co-organized international poetry events in China, South Africa, Eswatini, Lesotho, and Ethiopia, and she frequently reads at poetry festivals around the world. Her current projects include Pagoda, her second full-length collection in Chinese,  The Black Sheep of Jilebute, translations of poems by Jidi Majia (forthcoming in Ireland), Say to the Soul, translations of poems by Xiao Xiao, and The Rain Train, co-translations of poems by Biplab Majee (forthcoming in Kolkata). She loves teaching poetry workshops to children and adults, and spending time with poets and artists from around the world.

RAVI SHANKAR Pushcart-prize winning poet, author, editor, translator, and professor, Ravi Shankar is the author and editor of over fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, including, most recently, Tallying the Hemispheres: Selected Essays, and the award-winning memoir, Correctional. Other books include Many Uses of Mint: New and Selected Poems: 1998-2018 ; Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East, and Beyond; Autobiography of a Goddess; Deepening Groove; What Else Could it Be; and Instrumentality, poems from which have appeared around the world. Translated into over 12 languages and recipient of a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner as well as winner of the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, Shankar has taught at such institutions as Columbia University, Fairfield University, the City University of Hong Kong and the University of Sydney. He has held fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Jentel Foundation, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Blue Mountain Center and many others. He currently teaches for New York Writers Workshop and Tufts University and lives a nomadic existence centered around Boston, Massachusetts and Sydney, Australia. 

YUYUTSU SHARMA Recipient of fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and The Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature, Yuyutsu Ram Dass Sharma is a world renowned Himalayan poet and translator. Yuyutsu Sharma is one of the few poets in the world who make their living with poetry. Named as “The world-renowned Himalayan poet,” (The Guardian) “One-Man Academy” (The Kathmandu Post) and “Himalayan Neruda” (Mike Graves), Yuyutsu is a vibrant force on the world poetry stage. He has published ten poetry collections including, The Second Buddha Walk, A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems, Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems, Nepal Trilogy, Space Cake, Amsterdam and Annapurna Poems. Three books of his poetry, Poemes de l’ Himalayas (L’Harmattan, Paris), Poemas de Los Himalayas (Cosmopoeticia, Cordoba, Spain) and Jezero Fewa & Konj (Sodobnost International) have appeared in French,  Spanish and Slovenian respectively.  In addition, Eternal Snow: A Worldwide Anthology of One Hundred Twenty-Five Poetic Intersections with Himalayan Poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma has also appeared. Half the year, he travels and reads all over the world and conducts Creative Writing workshops at various universities in North America and Europe. When back home, he goes trekking in the Himalayas. Currently, Yuyutsu Sharma edits Pratik: A Quarterly Magazine of Contemporary Writing.

TIM TOMLINSON Tim Tomlinson is the author of the chapbook Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse, the poetry collection, Requiem for   the Tree Fort I Set on Fire, and the short story collection, This Is Not Happening to You. Recent work appears in Bangalore Literary   Review, Live Encounters, Tin Can Literary Review, and Best Asian Short Stories 2023 (ed. Dr Anitha Dev Pillai). A new  collection, Listening to Fish: meditations from the wet world, will appear on Nirala in Spring 2024. Tim has lived in the Bahamas,  China, Italy, the Philippines, Thailand, and various cities in the US, including New Orleans, Miami, Boston, and New York City. He is the director of New York Writers Workshop, and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. He teaches writing in NYU’s Global Liberal Studies. 

Julie Williams-Krishnan is a fine art and freelance photographer, artist, and educator who teaches photography and leads workshops at university and community level. Julie served as the Director of Programs at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts (USA) for five years. She has served a juror for the Somerville Arts Council and the Winchester Public Schools, a committee member for FlashPoint Boston photography festival, and on the committee for the Renaissance Photography Prize, an international photography competition that raises money to support younger women with breast cancer. Julie’s personal photographic practice investigates identity and personal narrative. She has exhibited her photographs at Melrose Tiny Gallery, The Sanctuary, Cambridge Art Association, the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Khaki Gallery, and Zullo Gallery in the Boston region, the Colson Gallery in Easthampton, Massachusetts, and The Center for Fine Art Photography in Colorado, A. Smithson Gallery in Texas, as well as other venues in Boston, London, and Oxford. She has also been included in online exhibitions with “Don’t Take Pictures” and “Lenscratch.” She earned her MA in Photographic Studies from the University of Westminster in London, UK. Based in Boston Massachusetts (USA) since 2010, Julie lived in London (UK) for more than 16 years and has traveled to more than 75 countries. She lives in a multi-cultural family and travels regularly to India. Learn more about Julie’s work at www.jwkphotography.com and on instagram. 

Frequently Asked Questions FAQs

  • NYWW is a nonprofit literary organization based in NYC, founded in 2001, offering workshops, conferences, consultations, mentorships, and guidance for writers at all levels, from anywhere. NYWW has hosted two highly successful international conferences: NYWW-Sardinia, 2020, and NYWW-Athens, 2022. We return with NYWW—K with our conference partner, White Lotus Bookstore, founded, owned, and directed by poet Shreejana Bhandari.  Nepalese poet and relentless world traveler, Yuyutsu RD Sharma, is a fellow coordinator of the conference and festival. Yuyu’s deep roots in and knowledge of Kathmandu, and broader Nepal, offer us a rare opportunity to dig into the region—its literary and cultural history and present scene, its ubiquitous spiritual life, and the intersections that these threads create. As the founder and editor of Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing, Yuyu also offers the opportunity for participants to publish conference-generated work in an upcoming issue of this highly esteemed journal. And, together with White Lotus, we host the first Himalayan Literature Festival at the tail end of our conference.

  • The May/June NYWW—K sessions begin with an orientation session on Wednesday, May 22. The following morning, the work begins. Each day will feature panel discussions, craft-and-manuscript workshops, and free (writing and/or exploration) time. Two workshop sessions will take place in local temples. On several nights in Kathmandu, the conference will convene for readings, and/or discussions/lectures/keynotes, followed by cultural events. NYWW will host one dinner (which is included in the tuition). Local and international writers will join the conference for events (readings/discussions/dinners). Local guides will be available for tours of the city (optional). We’ll also be offering photography workshops at this conference, with the renowned Julie Williams-Krishnan. All workshops and other activities are optional. Any and all are included in the price of the tuition. 

    The Himalayan Literature Festival (HLF) runs from May 27 - May 28, with multiple events (panels, readings, book launches, performances) at two primary locations, the Kathmandu Guest House and White Lotus Book Shop. Numerous Nepalese and regional writers, including Rukmini Bhaya Nair, K. Satchidanandan, and Sudeep Sen will participate alongside writers from Australia, China, Greece, Panama, Poland, South Africa, the UK, and the US.

  • Tuition covers all workshop and cultural activities listed above. Tuition does not include travel. Remember, NYWW—K can assist in locating budget options for those who request accommodations other than Park Village .

  • Our REFUND POLICY† is: 

    • Through April 1 Full refunds* issued until April 1 (and at any time should the program cancel due to geopolitical, biomedical, or meteorological events).

    • April 15: 50% refund.

    • May 1: 25% refund.

    • After May 1: No refund.

    † 15% non-refundable deposit on all registrations. 

    * If wire/electronic transfer, minus $25 fee. If Paypal, minus the Paypal service charge. 

  • The KGH Group will be our hosts at the following properties:

    May 22 - May 27: Park Village 
    May 27 - 29: Kathmandu Guest House (home base for Himalayan Literary Festival)
    May 29 - May 31: Waterfront Resort (on the lakefront, Pokhara)
    May 31 - June 2: Machan Country Villa (Chitwan)  
     
    These are highly reputable four-star establishments with a long history of accommodating western visitors. Food, hygiene, and space are all exemplary.

  • Once accepted into the program, you might be able to apply for additional funding through your school or university. We encourage you to apply early, to leave more time for exploring additional funding options.
    A small number of needs-based fellowships might also be available. Please send us a brief email outlining your financial circumstances, if you would like to be considered for one.

  • From North America (east coast or west), we recommend Air India. It is the most direct (one-stops to Delhi) and the most economical, with the most options. Participants coming in from elsewhere (Australia, the EU, South America, Africa) should explore options. We can provide some (limited) research assistance. Delhi is more than likely the hub most participants will be using. From Delhi, flight times are ≈ 90 minutes.
    If you arrive within the range of hours we’ll be suggesting (in the mid-March newsletter), you will be met at the airport with a coach and transferred to the Park Village resort (a trip of ≈ thirty minutes).

  • All of these questions, and more, will be answered in a newsletter in late April. US travelers apply for visa on arrival ($30, cash; there are ATMs available, but to expedite and facilitate, best to pack a few sawbucks). But for now, you might to check out this and this and this.

  • You can find CDC Guidelines here: CDC Nepal. Participants should check with their physicians, get recommendations based upon particular health needs. At this point, there are no new Covid guidelines. The Nepalese consulate here in NY recommends that, as a precaution, everyone travel with proof of prior vaccinations, but as of today (April 25), proof is not requested or required.

  • We strongly encourage all participants to purchase traveler’s insurance. New York Writers Workshop and White Lotus Bookshop, co-sponsors of the conference, festival, and excursions, assume no liability whatsoever for illnesses contracted or injuries sustained during your visit to Nepal.

  • ATMs are readily available in certain sections of Kathmandu, and out at the Lakefront. Those are two places we'll be. It's good to have some cash, but not a lot. See this link for good advice. 

  • The hotels/resorts we're staying at are equipped with adapters. However ... you might want to err on the side of caution and bring one or two along. If so, follow this link.

  • You need to be vigilant at all times. Drink only bottled water—nothing out of a tap, nothing out of a glass, nothing (and this is important, and often overlooked) nothing with ice. Brush your teeth with bottled water. Don’t use neti pots unless you fill them with sterile (bottled) water. Don’t eat salads. Don’t eat street foods. Be safe, be alert, be hyper-vigilant. Remember, too, to pack a rain jacket/slicker, maybe a light umbrella. It won't rain all day, but it will probably rain many days.

  • Kathmandu has long been a touristed city, and Nepal a touristed nation. Its health infrastructure is highly developed. Worries regarding care should medical urgencies arise should be allayed. We keep an eye on, and we’ll relay, and US State Department advisories regarding travel in Nepal. The US Embassy in Nepal updates as necessary.

    Kathmandu is ≈ 1400 meters above sea level; altitude sickness is not a problem. But remember, Sagarmatha (Everest) is nearby. Leave the city in that direction, and you will climb.

  • The conference provide local guides for most off-site activities within Kathmandu.

    Most inner-city transportation will be provided.

    NYWW expects that all participants will read up on local conditions and make decisions that are safe for them, based on their individual, specific needs.

    If any of your questions are not answered here, you can keep returning to our FAQ section, which we frequently update with useful, important information. And you can always write to us directly at newyorkwritersworkshop@gmail.com

Namaste

Stephanie www.supergrace.ch
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