Special Report: Debuting After Fifty panel at AWP
Sara Lippmann, Melanie Pappadis Faranello, Chin-Sun Lee, Nita Noveno and Zeeva Bukai discuss the joys and challenges of debuting later in life
First thing Thursday can be a tough time slot at the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference.
At about 8.55am, the “Debuting After Fifty” event at the Baltimore Convention Center was overflowing. Audience members waved others over to indicate the handful of remaining seats and the panel proceeded with the doors open, so those who couldn’t fit into the room could listen. Organizers later told panelists that they’d had to turn away a sizable number of people.
As the panel got underway, moderator Sara Lippmann told the crowd: “You’re not alone.”
What followed was a thoughtful, engaging discussion about the challenges and opportunities of debuting in one’s own time. Bloom is pleased to bring you this report, which draws on the written resource from the event.
—Leah De Forest
Sara Lippmann: I’m so pleased to introduce this incredible group of panelists. When Melanie approached me with the idea for this panel, I was so delighted I believe I audibly squealed. This is precisely the panel I needed, the panel that could have allayed some of my own anxiety when all those arbitrary, youth-fueled markers of having a book at thirty, at thirty-five, at forty passed me by. I remember being told in grad school, when I was far too young to grasp it, that the difference between a published and unpublished writer is perseverance. That’s true. But it’s equally true that you have to have something to say. These writers all speak vital volumes through their work. So without further ado, let’s hear from them, who are not only among the most wonderfully talented authors I know, but also the most generous, hard working and wisest, proving we do only get better with age.
The first question today is: what has your path to publication been like? Melanie?
Melanie Pappadis Faranello: I’d been at this a very long time before publishing this debut. It’s not my first full-length manuscript. I wrote four novels, queried three of them, and in between kept writing stories or other short pieces. The stories in the book accumulated over the years until I realized I had enough for a collection. It was important for me to let go of the end result (getting published or not) in order to just keep writing. I got my MFA in 2002 and published this debut in 2026. That’s a lot of life and years in between.
The book contains stories written over many years and different life phases—single, married, new mother, etcetera … a lot of different selves! I had to shift my thinking and realize that the book represents a range rather than a specific moment in time. Nothing is ever really finished because we keep evolving with time, so we could potentially keep revising, but it’s about letting the work go.
When I won an “Emerging Writer Award” at age 49, Eileen Myles, 75-year-old poet, said to the award winners, what does that even mean to be emerging? I’m still emerging! Isn’t everyone emerging all the time? I love that.
Chin-Sun Lee: I started writing at forty, got my MFA at forty-five, and had the goal of publishing my first book by the time I turned fifty. It didn’t happen until I was fifty-nine. If I’d known when I first started that it would take almost twenty years, I may not have been deterred, because I can be stubborn AF—but I would have been very depressed. When you finally achieve something after working and waiting so long, it’s incredibly validating. It feels like you’ve crossed a threshold. And in many ways, you have. But what I’ve learned in the two years since my debut is that the goalpost keeps changing, and if you’re not careful, chasing validation will curdle the joy of what made you want to write in the first place.
I’m not the first to say that writing is one thing and publishing, another. But I had to experience the process of publishing to truly understand this. Writing and making art are purely individual expressions, within your control. Publishing, on the other hand, is mostly outside your control. If I hadn’t learned over the years to hone patience, resilience, equanimity, and self-confidence, I’d be pretty miserable. The market right now is very tough, especially for literary fiction, and for most authors, each new book can feel like starting over. For older writers especially, who didn’t grow up immersed in social media, building a platform can be daunting.
How do you assess what is worth your time to pursue? How do you reach an audience in a way that feels authentic to you? When do you push beyond your comfort zone and when do you set boundaries that are non-negotiable? How do you temper ambition with gratitude? Most of all, how do you separate the challenges of publishing from the uniquely personal challenges of making your art?
These are the questions I’ve wrestled with and, in my best moments, reconciled.
Nita Noveno: I didn’t set out to be a writer. I started by writing family stories, which led me to explore my family history and eventually focus on my father. I’ve been a teacher first, during, and after writing this book, so teaching and writing have always been closely connected. My life shifted after a breakup, which opened me to poetry, and eventually I pursued an MFA in creative nonfiction. I left my high school teaching job of several years, spent a month in the Philippines reconnecting with family and collecting stories, and later returned to teaching, first as an adjunct, then full-time at CUNY, so I could keep writing and have some financial stability.
Publication has been a long journey. It took twenty-four years from my MFA to the moment I learned my manuscript had won the Red Hen Women’s Prose Prize and would be published. The hardest part was staying engaged with my own story through all the rejections and revisions, and a bit of luck helped too, when the right judge connected with the manuscript. Along the way, workshops, residencies, and revisiting old pieces—like a recent online workshop I took—kept me connected to writing while still teaching full-time. I see this debut not as an endpoint, but as part of an ongoing journey, and I hope I can find the same focus with future writing that I found with this book.
Zeeva Bukai: I was forty years old when I completed my MFA. I had a young family and it was always a balancing act between family, work, school, and writing. Writing was the only thing that was mine alone and so I did it whenever I could. At night after putting the kids to bed, or if they were afraid of the dark and wanted me in the room with them until they fell asleep, I wrote in the glow of the nightlight. I loved it when my kids took gymnastics and art classes. Then I could drop them off, sit in my car or in a cafe and write. However, no matter how much writing I did back then, I always felt that I was missing craft and skills, so I set out to study with writers I admired. I took workshops and went to conferences, met other writers and formed writers groups.
And still, it was a long and rugged path to publishing my debut. It took me ten years to write it, with many fits and starts and it wasn’t the first novel that I’d written. I managed to get four chapters of Anatomy published and wrote other short stories during that time and got those published. Once I placed Anatomy with Delphinium Books, I wrote the next novel—much shorter, quicker. That one comes out in February.
Sara: Here’s our next question: what has perspective/age/life experience afforded you in terms of publishing later in life?
Melanie: Perspective is gained over the long haul, the steady work, the rejections, the perseverance. It takes some of the shine out of the highs or lows and feels more grounding to be at something for so long, becomes part of who you are regardless of external measures of success or failure. The best advice I ever got when I was twenty that I think about often was: take the wins with as much enthusiasm as the losses.
Chin-Sun: Patience, equanimity, and gratitude. Also, a ton of material. I write fiction, but my imagination is informed by what I’ve observed and experienced throughout my life, and the questions raised from those observations and experiences. It’s an oblique way of examining those questions enacted through stories.
Nita: It’s given me a longer view, and I do compare myself to my own past work. Life experience helps me see what matters in my story/life and what doesn’t, even if the process can feel slow or uncertain. Age has become both a lens and liberation.
Zeeva: Age has given me perspective, equilibrium, gratitude, and the ability to temper my expectations and not fall into a pit of disappointment and despair when I can’t get the story right, or no one wants to publish it, or not enough people are reading my book. I’ve learned rejection is an opportunity to revise and to roll with the punches, to focus on what’s important and that is the writing itself. I’ve also learned that I am the final arbiter of my work. I’ve learned to be proud of it. I can’t control whether my work gets published, but I can control putting my butt in the chair and writing.
Sara: How have you remained committed through the years? What have you learned from returning to the work over the long haul?
Melanie: Long haul equals life experience and relationships and a wider community that is built over the years. Community is a great goal for everything we do.
Chin-Sun: I stay committed because there’s no other work that satisfies my need for creative expression. When I don’t write, I don’t feel like myself. I’ve been lucky to know so many writers as well, which helps me through the ups and downs of this vocation. I might push through the long haul regardless—but it feels less lonely to be in community.
Nita: Honestly, it’s been a mix of devotion, doubt, and luck. I didn’t write every day, and sometimes I struggled to return to write. (Still do.) Workshops, residencies, and writing groups have kept me connected, and revisiting old drafts has shown me how much a story can change over time.
Zeeva: I get great pleasure from writing, from creating. It’s the art of it, the composing that brings me back to the work over and over again. I hold onto that. I see writing as resistance; it’s ageless. If my characters are fifteen or twenty then I’m fifteen or twenty, and if they are seventy, then I’m seventy and if they are men or children, then that is what I am too. That chameleon quality of slipping into a character’s skin, creating and developing stories excites me. This pleasure, this satisfaction, the feeling that I am creating an entire world with people who are interesting to me, in situations that are interesting to me is what always brings me back. And if I’m lucky enough to share my vision, my stories with others, well, there’s nothing better than it. But here’s the kicker, no matter how many times I do it, no matter how many stories I write, it’s all problem solving. I still struggle to find my way through. Only now, I know I will, whereas before I didn’t.
Sara: Many of us grew up in the analog era. For older writers who didn’t grow up immersed in social media, building a platform can be daunting. How has our platform-oriented culture affected your publishing experience?
Melanie: Keep perspective, it’s up to you how much of yourself to put into the pressures of marketing and publicity. Also important to find the other things that balance you, the things that keep you going outside of this. If I think of “platform” as building community, it shifts the focus in a good way. I’m navigating the publishing process by integrating my community work/the community poem project.
Chin-Sun: I’ll be frank: I find that aspect of it depressing. But as a realist, it’s unhelpful to dwell on the negative. So, I try to reframe “platform” as: how can I best connect to my readers? Because honestly, the best part of publishing has been engaging with actual readers, people who don’t know me but connect to my work. Social media is only one avenue; cultivating relationships with booksellers who can champion your work is another; and though Substack has become saturated, newsletters that offer something to the reader beyond self-promotion can be a way to connect as well.
Nita: I’m active on social media from running my reading series and posting personally on occasion, but I don’t want it to take over my life. I value the connections and communities that have been built online, but I also value peace, so I focus on sharing myself and my work in ways that feel sustainable and authentic.
Zeeva: Oy! Social media, self promoting, all of that sharing with an audience you don’t see is terribly daunting. When I first started writing, publishers would arrange and pay their authors to go on book tours. Now authors need to do it themselves or hire publicists. So, while putting yourself out there on whatever social media platform you use is difficult and awkward, it also gives authors the opportunity to reach a wider audience. And for that I’m grateful. I’m not good at social media. I struggle with the technology, but it has introduced me to readers I’d never have met before. And it gives people a way to reach out to me too and that’s wonderful and fun.
Sara: How has age as a defining category affected (if at all) your publishing experience? And what are some specific ways you have navigated the publishing experience?
Melanie: I’ve shifted to thinking of writing as a life-long process/embodiment rather than a finish line defined by publishing industry and/or cultural timeline markers of age. Though age can also be empowering.
Chin-Sun: Weirdly, being a writer “of a certain age” has become a niche novelty that brings its own kind of attention. But when I pick up a book that interests me, I don’t think about the writer’s age. I’ll glance at their photo and bio, and I admit to being influenced by a great cover—but in the end, it’s all about the prose. I agree with Melanie that there’s no finish line, and that with age comes resilience and clarity.
Nita: I don’t have a clear answer about how age has affected my publishing experience. It doesn’t feel like the determining factor so much as one part of a much bigger picture. Balancing teaching, writing, and life meant pacing myself, and I navigated publishing through persistence, staying engaged with the story, submitting repeatedly, and leaning on a community of writers and artists along the way.
Zeeva: Sure, publishers are always looking for the next young thing, but writing is about the long haul and experience breeds intellectual and emotional growth, which makes for richer, more textured stories. So, I don’t worry about my age when it comes to publishing. I feel lucky that I’ve found a publisher who believes in my work, who doesn’t care how old I am. All they care about is the story.
Sara Lippmann (Moderator) is the author of the novel Lech and the story collections Doll Palace and Jerks. Her fiction has won the Lilith Fiction Prize and has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, The Chicago Review of Books, LitHub and elsewhere. With Seth Rogoff, she co-edited the anthology Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible (SUNY Press). She is a founding member of the Writing Co-Lab, an artist-run online teaching cooperative, and the editor-in-chief of Epiphany magazine. Her new novel, Hidden River, is forthcoming in May 2026 from Tortoise Books.
Melanie Pappadis Faranello is the author of the debut story collection, Everybody Needs Something, which won the 2025 Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence from Columbus State University Press. Her stories and essays have appeared in Swamp Pink, Electric Literature, StoryQuarterly, Hippocampus, Vol 1. Brooklyn, HuffPost Personal, Blackbird, StorySouth, Catamaran, Connotation Press, and nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. She won an Emerging Writer Award from Key West Lit. Seminars for her novel-in-progress. Originally from Chicago, she lives in West Hartford, CT. She’s at work on a novel and is the founder of Poetry on the Streets.
Chin-Sun Lee is the author of the debut novel Upcountry (Unnamed Press 2023), listed among Publishers Weekly’s Big Indie Books of Fall 2023 and Debutiful’s Best Debut Books of 2023. She’s one of Poets & Writers’ 5 Over 50 Debut Authors of 2023 and is also a contributor to Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing 2023) and the New York Times bestselling anthology Women in Clothes (Blue Rider Press/Penguin 2014). Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, LitHub, The Georgia Review, The Rumpus, Joyland, and The Believer Logger, among other publications. She writes, edits, and teaches in New Orleans. Her new novel, Soon You’ll Be Just Like Us, will be forthcoming with Creature Publishing in spring 2027.
Nita Noveno is the recipient of the 2024 Women’s Prose Prize from Red Hen Press for her hybrid memoir Mud on the Moon, forthcoming in August 2026. She teaches composition and literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and is the founder and host emeritus of the Sunday Salon reading series in New York City. A graduate of the MFA Creative Writing Program at The New School, her work has appeared in MĀNOA, Identity Theory, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s Open City and The Margins, among others. Originally from Southeast Alaska, she lives in Queens, NY.
Zeeva Bukai is the author of the novels The Anatomy of Exile, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction, and The World Between. Her stories have appeared in Smashing the Tablets: A Retelling of the Hebrew Bible, CARVE, December, Image Journal, Lilith, The Master’s Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and elsewhere. Her honors include fellowships at the Center for Fiction, Hedgebrook, and Byrdcliff Artist in Residence program. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and is the Assistant Director of Academic Support at SUNY Empire State University.
Leah De Forest was born in Geelong, Australia, and lives in Boston. Her debut novel, Any Kind of Known Tomorrow, is out from Betty on 9/15/26. Her fiction, essays and criticism have appeared in Griffith Review, CRAFT Literary, Fiction Writers Review, and Kill Your Darlings, among other venues. Leah is a senior editor at Bloom.
well shit.