2017 Conference Schedule
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2017
Events on Friday take place in multiple locations, noted below.
Registration and Check-in 4–5:45 pm and 7–8:30 pm
Location: Lobby, McCastlain Hall
Conference participants, and those wishing to register on-site, may check in before or after our evening keynote. Conference badge is not required to attend the Friday evening keynote. It is required for the Saturday lunch keynote.
SOLD OUT! Pre-Conference Workshop ~ What’s Inside: A Writing Workshop at the ESSE Purse Museum & Store 1–3 pm
Facilitator: Monda Strange Fason
Location: ESSE Purse Museum & Store, Little Rock
This hands-on, pre-conference writing workshop open to all genres and skill levels takes place in Little Rock rather than on the UCA Campus. One of only three purse museums in the world, ESSE Purse Museum & Store explores concepts of art, history, and the feminine. What’s Inside features a guided tour of the museum followed by a prompt-driven workshop designed to get words on the page in a short amount of time. There will be time to share rough drafts and a future opportunity for publication of pieces begun in the workshop.
Pre-Conference Off-Site Reading ~ My Other Job 4–5:30 pm
Facilitator: Michele Battiste
Location: Blue Sail Coffee, Donaghey Hall (corner of Donaghey & Bruce)
Join us for locally roasted coffee, delicious snacks, and poetry. Poets from Utah to NYC come together for this eclectic reading, featuring Michele Battiste, Jessica Rae Bergamino, Sommer Browning, Joy Katz, Leslie Anne Mcilroy, and Soraya Shalforoosh.
Friday Evening Keynote 6–7 pm
Speaker: Tayari Jones
Location: Auditorium, Room 107, College of Business
Tayari Jones is the author of the novels Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, Silver Sparrow, and An American Marriage (Algonquin Books, February 2018). Her writing has appeared in Tin House, The Believer, The New York Times, and Callaloo. A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, she has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, United States Artist Fellowship, NEA Fellowship and Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship. Silver Sparrow was named a #1 Indie Next Pick by booksellers in 2011, and the NEA added it to its Big Read Library of classics in 2016. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is currently an Associate Professor in the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark University.
Opening Reception 7–8:30 pm
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
Mark the historic occasion of our inaugural conference! Join us for an opening reception, featuring remarks from Jenny Davis, First Lady of UCA and veteran high school English teacher. Heavy hors d'oeuvres will be served.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2017
All events for Saturday take place in McCastlain Hall and in McAlister Hall.
Registration and Check-in 8 am–5 pm
Location: Lobby, McCastlain Hall
Conference participants, and those wishing to register on-site, may check in at the conference table.
Conference Book Fair 8 am–5 pm
Location: Lobby, McCastlain Hall
Authors and presses will be present in the McCastlain Hall Lobby.
Continental Breakfast & Networking 8–9 am
Location: Ballroom, McCastlain Hall
Conference participants are invited to attend and participate in casual networking opportunities with other writers. A breakfast of pastries, fruit, and coffee will be served.
BREAKOUT SESSIONS
There are four breakout sessions with four concurrent presentations per session. Breakout sessions are located in McCastlain and McAlister Halls, and rooms are marked on the included maps.
Breakout Session I 9:15–10:30 am
1. Practical Solutions: Writing Memoir on Illness and Abuse, Creating Diverse Characters, and Building Workshops for Writing Moms
(Andrea Avery, Autumn Konopka, Cynthia Lewis, Leslie McGrath)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
This presentation will address a range of practical obstacles women writers face and offer possible solutions. Avery and Lewis tackle issues of writing memoir about difficult subjects that sometimes challenge the idea of a narrative arc or create extra barriers to reaching the reader. McGrath challenges writers to create female characters that reflect the whole range—from the beatific to the murderous—of our being. And Konopka addresses the sad truth that both mothers and writers are severely undervalued in our economy and offers practical advice on how to create kid-friendly writing workshops.
2. Reaching Out: Organizations and Institutions Using Literary Arts as Outreach with Women and Girls
(Karen Schubert, Janine Harrison, Laura Madeline Wiseman, and Colleen Wells)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
The literary arts are a means for giving voice to women and girls. This panel will discuss several outreach writing projects dealing with such themes as writing resistance to violence; therapy and trauma; empowerment and connection; and bridging gulfs in sociohistorical experience. From readings to roundtables to workshops to oral histories, presenters will expand on the power of the literary arts to create a space for women and girls.
3. The Poetry of (Un)Motherhood: Creative Reading
(Alyse Bensel, Karen Craigo, Rhiannon Dickerson, and L. Ann Wheeler)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
Conflicting expectations in the academy, in social circles, and among family continue to complicate women’s relationships to motherhood. Four poets will read from poetry that calls these stereotypes into question and interrogates what it means to be a mother and to not be a mother. How does the societal pressure put on women to be “good” mothers and the shunning or shaming women of when they are “bad” mothers (or even refuse to be mothers) manifest in poetry? How do women, as poets, respond to such stereotypes and accusations? This poetry reading will address these fraught perspectives.
4. Brass Brassieres: Four Southern Women Authors on the Intersection of Place, Race, Religion, Gender, and Genre
(Sybil Baker, Sarah Einstein, Carrie Meadows, and Bianca Spriggs)
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
Four women writers in three genres (fiction, poetry, nonfiction) and from two regions—the American South and Appalachia—will read and discuss how their writing reflects the intersection of place, race, gender, religion, and genre. Sarah Einstein will read a creative nonfiction piece about being a Jewish Appalachian writer, Carrie Meadows will present poems inspired by artists from various Southern backgrounds alongside poems inspired by Appalachian women in her own family, and Sybil Baker will discuss her new novel which is about three sisters living in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Bianca Spriggs, an Affrilachian poet, will read and discuss her work.
Breakout Session II 10:45am–Noon
1. The Topography of Contemporary Publishing
(Janet Sylvester, Cassie Selleck, Eliza Borné)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
This panel will discuss the panelists’ concurrent roles as writers, publishers, and promoters of publishing—from a self-published novel that has now topped sales of over 200,000 and inspired a new publishing company, Obstinate Daughters Press; to the promotion of a social-justice focused journal, Duende, dreamed into existence by women and supported by them; to the work of the first female editor of the iconic southern journal, The Oxford American.
2. I See What You’re Saying: Mixed Media Works
(Shanley Wells-Rau, Margot Douaihy, Bri Hermanson, Emma Murray, Lindsey Harding)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
If a writer creates pictures with words, and an illustrator makes words with pictures, what narrative possibilities emerge when the two work in tandem or when a single creator works with both media? Stepping beyond ekphrasis, this panel shares engaging pedagogical and craft approaches for visual rhetoric, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and artistic experimentation. Examples offered will emphasize visual storytelling and how to enable the space of the page to creative a narrative that blends image and text.
3. Lilith of the South: Creative Reading by Women Writing in, from, and of the South
(Amie Whittemore, Andrea Jurjević, Amy Fant, and Sarah McCartt-Jackson)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
On this creative panel, poets originally from the South and those who now call it home will read and discuss their work, which draws inspiration from the geography and culture of the South. As feminist writers, their work is informed by female experience and overlays issues of domesticity and intimacy with their experience of the South, whether as outsiders or natives. Through this at once fraught and tender palimpsest, their work raises questions: What does feminism look like in the 21st century South? How does it subvert and engage with the South’s literary and cultural inheritance?
4. Reconciling the South with Self: Women Writers and Crafting Fiction Beyond the Canon
(Megan Clark, Ra’Niqua Lee, Abigail Greenbaum, and Nora Bonner)
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
This panel explores the various ways that women writers in the South develop their craft and the challenges they face in doing so. Being a woman in the South means making space for oneself amongst a traditionally white, male canon that dominates the cultural and regional landscape. Some of us choose to work with and disrupt this framework, while others seek to dismantle it entirely.
Lunch Keynote 12:15–1:45 pm
Speaker: Cara Brookins
Location: Ballroom, McCastlain Hall
Cara Brookins is the author of Rise: How a House Built a Family, a nationally acclaimed memoir about escaping domestic violence with her four children and building a 3,500 square foot home from the ground up with their own hands. Rise was a 2017 Indie Next Pick and was selected for Barnes & Noble’s What We’re Reading. Brookins is a fiction writer with seven published novels and hosts a weekly podcast with Macmillan.
Breakout Session III 2 –3:15 pm
1. Scarce as Hen’s Teeth: Creating Community for Female LGBTQ Writers
(Jane V. Blunschi, Peggy Konert, Path Hennon, Mendy Knott, and Jan VanSchuyver)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
Hen’s Teeth was created to provide a space for LGBTQ women writers to practice their craft, develop unique literary voices, and establish a community where writers produce honest, authentic work, relying on the knowledge that their ideas are respected and supported. Participants will discuss the group’s origins, their personal experience as writers, and the benefits of belonging to a writing group. They’ll reflect on Hen’s Teeth’s origins and offer insight and suggestions for those interested in establishing a circle of powerful women writers in communities where their voices may be otherwise underrepresented.
2. A Call to White Women — “Because The Warp Is Everywhere”
(Joy Katz, Jo McDougall, Nicole Cooley, and Stacy Pendergrast)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
This panel celebrates C. D. Wright as a Southern white disrupter of American skin privilege. Four writers discuss the urgency to write about one’s own whiteness as well as the special charge of women—and mothers—to fight both overt and more coded racism. As the panelists share their own writing, they speak frankly about the need to narrate personal experiences that contribute to or challenge a system of seized privilege. At this “backlash” time, when civil rights gains are threatened, the panelists show how C.D.’s writing serves to strategically and effectively guide them.
3. In Her Place: An Ecopoetical Reading and Incitement to Write from Where We Are
(Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Ashley M. Jones, Melissa Range, Heidi Lynn Staples)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
What can place-based and ecopoetical work reveal about the South? The four poets featured here use diverse formal strategies to write from the southern landscapes they know, love, and struggle with. They explore ecological vibrancy and decline, historical erasure and resurrection, regional speech and song, and the intersections between environmental and social justice. Each will read from recent work, then present a prompt designed to inspire writing from place and aid ecopoetical practice. A zine containing the prompts will be offered to audience members.
4. Fiolet & Wing: Using Fabulist Elements to Write the Difficult in Women’s Poetry
(Stacey Balkun, Jade Hurter, Catherine Moore, Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers)
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
In women’s literature, myth and magic easily co-exist with domestic concerns; indeed, they often amplify the drama of the ordinary. Amber Sparks describes “domestic fabulism” as writing that possesses an “immersion, an exploration of self and situation—of the dread that lives and lurks at home, where we cannot escape it.” This panel will blend critical presentations exploring domestic fabulism in women’s poetry with readings of poems from our anthology, specifically poems that address trauma through mystical elements.
Breakout Session IV 3:30–4:45 pm
1. How to Have It All (No, Really, We’re Asking): Women Who Write, Parent and Work Full-Time
(Michele Battiste, Sommer Browning, Leslie Anne Mcilroy, and Soraya Shalforoosh)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
Much has been made of balancing work and family, especially when study after study shows that women shoulder the majority of unpaid domestic labor. But what happens when working mothers—especially those outside of academia—are also writers? How do women maintain writing lives and identities when their jobs and families demand so much? Four working mothers/poets will discuss the writing-related challenges they face and their strategies to overcome them. They will address topics such as time, identity, creating community, accessing opportunities, managing multiple roles, meeting demands, and nurturing relationships.
2. Literary Influences: A Look at the Women who have Inspired
(Jessica Rae Bergamino, Mary Ruth Marotte, Jocelyn Cullity)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
From the forgotten to the well known, women writers and characters from the past have a vital role to play in inspiring women writers of today. Whether tracing the origins of inspirational Arkansan women writers or rereading historical events through a feminist lens, this panel addresses the importance of representation in historical narratives. Panelists reflect on the ways in which earlier women writers either built on established forms or rebelled against them to create new visions, also exploring what happens when women’s voices are left out of our stories and histories.
3. Disturb & Enrapture: the queer & feminist missions of Sibling Rivalry Press, a Creative Reading (Megan Volpert, Annah Anti-Palindrome, Imani Sims, Valerie Wetlaufer, and Theresa Davis)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
Founded in 2010 in Little Rock, Arkansas, Sibling Rivalry Press is the only press, large or small, to ever win Lambda Literary Awards in both Gay Poetry and Lesbian Poetry. The American Library Association has honored twenty-one SRP titles on its annual list of recommended LGBT reading. SRP's mission is to make good trouble, taking up Adrienne Rich's call to "disturb and enrapture" readers. This reading showcases five SRP authors that reflect the diverse and thought-provoking goals of Sibling Rivalry Press.
4. Alternative Fictions: Fan Fiction and YA SciFi
(Sarah Loch and Adrianne Finlay)
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
This mix of presentation and reading highlights the many ways that women writers embrace and explore various fiction models. This panel includes a discussion of how fanfiction can jumpstart a writer’s best practices and build an inclusive community for writers to a creative reading from a forthcoming Young Adult SciFi novel.
Closing Reception 5–6:30 pm
Location: Ballroom, McCastlain Hall
Join us for a reading by the Nan Snow Emerging Writer Award winners, closing remarks from the conference director, and heavy hors d'oeuvres. The Executive Committee congratulates our Nan Snow Emerging Writer Award winners: Stacy Pendergrast, first place, for the essay “Lily-er Than White”; Abigail Greenbaum, second place, for the story “Limits”; and Alyse Bensel, third place, for the poems “Ivy in Every Parallel Universe," “Baking and the Men I've Loved, Including You," and “Lunar.”
Events on Friday take place in multiple locations, noted below.
Registration and Check-in 4–5:45 pm and 7–8:30 pm
Location: Lobby, McCastlain Hall
Conference participants, and those wishing to register on-site, may check in before or after our evening keynote. Conference badge is not required to attend the Friday evening keynote. It is required for the Saturday lunch keynote.
SOLD OUT! Pre-Conference Workshop ~ What’s Inside: A Writing Workshop at the ESSE Purse Museum & Store 1–3 pm
Facilitator: Monda Strange Fason
Location: ESSE Purse Museum & Store, Little Rock
This hands-on, pre-conference writing workshop open to all genres and skill levels takes place in Little Rock rather than on the UCA Campus. One of only three purse museums in the world, ESSE Purse Museum & Store explores concepts of art, history, and the feminine. What’s Inside features a guided tour of the museum followed by a prompt-driven workshop designed to get words on the page in a short amount of time. There will be time to share rough drafts and a future opportunity for publication of pieces begun in the workshop.
Pre-Conference Off-Site Reading ~ My Other Job 4–5:30 pm
Facilitator: Michele Battiste
Location: Blue Sail Coffee, Donaghey Hall (corner of Donaghey & Bruce)
Join us for locally roasted coffee, delicious snacks, and poetry. Poets from Utah to NYC come together for this eclectic reading, featuring Michele Battiste, Jessica Rae Bergamino, Sommer Browning, Joy Katz, Leslie Anne Mcilroy, and Soraya Shalforoosh.
Friday Evening Keynote 6–7 pm
Speaker: Tayari Jones
Location: Auditorium, Room 107, College of Business
Tayari Jones is the author of the novels Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, Silver Sparrow, and An American Marriage (Algonquin Books, February 2018). Her writing has appeared in Tin House, The Believer, The New York Times, and Callaloo. A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, she has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, United States Artist Fellowship, NEA Fellowship and Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship. Silver Sparrow was named a #1 Indie Next Pick by booksellers in 2011, and the NEA added it to its Big Read Library of classics in 2016. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is currently an Associate Professor in the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark University.
Opening Reception 7–8:30 pm
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
Mark the historic occasion of our inaugural conference! Join us for an opening reception, featuring remarks from Jenny Davis, First Lady of UCA and veteran high school English teacher. Heavy hors d'oeuvres will be served.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2017
All events for Saturday take place in McCastlain Hall and in McAlister Hall.
Registration and Check-in 8 am–5 pm
Location: Lobby, McCastlain Hall
Conference participants, and those wishing to register on-site, may check in at the conference table.
Conference Book Fair 8 am–5 pm
Location: Lobby, McCastlain Hall
Authors and presses will be present in the McCastlain Hall Lobby.
Continental Breakfast & Networking 8–9 am
Location: Ballroom, McCastlain Hall
Conference participants are invited to attend and participate in casual networking opportunities with other writers. A breakfast of pastries, fruit, and coffee will be served.
BREAKOUT SESSIONS
There are four breakout sessions with four concurrent presentations per session. Breakout sessions are located in McCastlain and McAlister Halls, and rooms are marked on the included maps.
Breakout Session I 9:15–10:30 am
1. Practical Solutions: Writing Memoir on Illness and Abuse, Creating Diverse Characters, and Building Workshops for Writing Moms
(Andrea Avery, Autumn Konopka, Cynthia Lewis, Leslie McGrath)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
This presentation will address a range of practical obstacles women writers face and offer possible solutions. Avery and Lewis tackle issues of writing memoir about difficult subjects that sometimes challenge the idea of a narrative arc or create extra barriers to reaching the reader. McGrath challenges writers to create female characters that reflect the whole range—from the beatific to the murderous—of our being. And Konopka addresses the sad truth that both mothers and writers are severely undervalued in our economy and offers practical advice on how to create kid-friendly writing workshops.
2. Reaching Out: Organizations and Institutions Using Literary Arts as Outreach with Women and Girls
(Karen Schubert, Janine Harrison, Laura Madeline Wiseman, and Colleen Wells)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
The literary arts are a means for giving voice to women and girls. This panel will discuss several outreach writing projects dealing with such themes as writing resistance to violence; therapy and trauma; empowerment and connection; and bridging gulfs in sociohistorical experience. From readings to roundtables to workshops to oral histories, presenters will expand on the power of the literary arts to create a space for women and girls.
3. The Poetry of (Un)Motherhood: Creative Reading
(Alyse Bensel, Karen Craigo, Rhiannon Dickerson, and L. Ann Wheeler)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
Conflicting expectations in the academy, in social circles, and among family continue to complicate women’s relationships to motherhood. Four poets will read from poetry that calls these stereotypes into question and interrogates what it means to be a mother and to not be a mother. How does the societal pressure put on women to be “good” mothers and the shunning or shaming women of when they are “bad” mothers (or even refuse to be mothers) manifest in poetry? How do women, as poets, respond to such stereotypes and accusations? This poetry reading will address these fraught perspectives.
4. Brass Brassieres: Four Southern Women Authors on the Intersection of Place, Race, Religion, Gender, and Genre
(Sybil Baker, Sarah Einstein, Carrie Meadows, and Bianca Spriggs)
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
Four women writers in three genres (fiction, poetry, nonfiction) and from two regions—the American South and Appalachia—will read and discuss how their writing reflects the intersection of place, race, gender, religion, and genre. Sarah Einstein will read a creative nonfiction piece about being a Jewish Appalachian writer, Carrie Meadows will present poems inspired by artists from various Southern backgrounds alongside poems inspired by Appalachian women in her own family, and Sybil Baker will discuss her new novel which is about three sisters living in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Bianca Spriggs, an Affrilachian poet, will read and discuss her work.
Breakout Session II 10:45am–Noon
1. The Topography of Contemporary Publishing
(Janet Sylvester, Cassie Selleck, Eliza Borné)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
This panel will discuss the panelists’ concurrent roles as writers, publishers, and promoters of publishing—from a self-published novel that has now topped sales of over 200,000 and inspired a new publishing company, Obstinate Daughters Press; to the promotion of a social-justice focused journal, Duende, dreamed into existence by women and supported by them; to the work of the first female editor of the iconic southern journal, The Oxford American.
2. I See What You’re Saying: Mixed Media Works
(Shanley Wells-Rau, Margot Douaihy, Bri Hermanson, Emma Murray, Lindsey Harding)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
If a writer creates pictures with words, and an illustrator makes words with pictures, what narrative possibilities emerge when the two work in tandem or when a single creator works with both media? Stepping beyond ekphrasis, this panel shares engaging pedagogical and craft approaches for visual rhetoric, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and artistic experimentation. Examples offered will emphasize visual storytelling and how to enable the space of the page to creative a narrative that blends image and text.
3. Lilith of the South: Creative Reading by Women Writing in, from, and of the South
(Amie Whittemore, Andrea Jurjević, Amy Fant, and Sarah McCartt-Jackson)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
On this creative panel, poets originally from the South and those who now call it home will read and discuss their work, which draws inspiration from the geography and culture of the South. As feminist writers, their work is informed by female experience and overlays issues of domesticity and intimacy with their experience of the South, whether as outsiders or natives. Through this at once fraught and tender palimpsest, their work raises questions: What does feminism look like in the 21st century South? How does it subvert and engage with the South’s literary and cultural inheritance?
4. Reconciling the South with Self: Women Writers and Crafting Fiction Beyond the Canon
(Megan Clark, Ra’Niqua Lee, Abigail Greenbaum, and Nora Bonner)
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
This panel explores the various ways that women writers in the South develop their craft and the challenges they face in doing so. Being a woman in the South means making space for oneself amongst a traditionally white, male canon that dominates the cultural and regional landscape. Some of us choose to work with and disrupt this framework, while others seek to dismantle it entirely.
Lunch Keynote 12:15–1:45 pm
Speaker: Cara Brookins
Location: Ballroom, McCastlain Hall
Cara Brookins is the author of Rise: How a House Built a Family, a nationally acclaimed memoir about escaping domestic violence with her four children and building a 3,500 square foot home from the ground up with their own hands. Rise was a 2017 Indie Next Pick and was selected for Barnes & Noble’s What We’re Reading. Brookins is a fiction writer with seven published novels and hosts a weekly podcast with Macmillan.
Breakout Session III 2 –3:15 pm
1. Scarce as Hen’s Teeth: Creating Community for Female LGBTQ Writers
(Jane V. Blunschi, Peggy Konert, Path Hennon, Mendy Knott, and Jan VanSchuyver)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
Hen’s Teeth was created to provide a space for LGBTQ women writers to practice their craft, develop unique literary voices, and establish a community where writers produce honest, authentic work, relying on the knowledge that their ideas are respected and supported. Participants will discuss the group’s origins, their personal experience as writers, and the benefits of belonging to a writing group. They’ll reflect on Hen’s Teeth’s origins and offer insight and suggestions for those interested in establishing a circle of powerful women writers in communities where their voices may be otherwise underrepresented.
2. A Call to White Women — “Because The Warp Is Everywhere”
(Joy Katz, Jo McDougall, Nicole Cooley, and Stacy Pendergrast)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
This panel celebrates C. D. Wright as a Southern white disrupter of American skin privilege. Four writers discuss the urgency to write about one’s own whiteness as well as the special charge of women—and mothers—to fight both overt and more coded racism. As the panelists share their own writing, they speak frankly about the need to narrate personal experiences that contribute to or challenge a system of seized privilege. At this “backlash” time, when civil rights gains are threatened, the panelists show how C.D.’s writing serves to strategically and effectively guide them.
3. In Her Place: An Ecopoetical Reading and Incitement to Write from Where We Are
(Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Ashley M. Jones, Melissa Range, Heidi Lynn Staples)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
What can place-based and ecopoetical work reveal about the South? The four poets featured here use diverse formal strategies to write from the southern landscapes they know, love, and struggle with. They explore ecological vibrancy and decline, historical erasure and resurrection, regional speech and song, and the intersections between environmental and social justice. Each will read from recent work, then present a prompt designed to inspire writing from place and aid ecopoetical practice. A zine containing the prompts will be offered to audience members.
4. Fiolet & Wing: Using Fabulist Elements to Write the Difficult in Women’s Poetry
(Stacey Balkun, Jade Hurter, Catherine Moore, Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers)
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
In women’s literature, myth and magic easily co-exist with domestic concerns; indeed, they often amplify the drama of the ordinary. Amber Sparks describes “domestic fabulism” as writing that possesses an “immersion, an exploration of self and situation—of the dread that lives and lurks at home, where we cannot escape it.” This panel will blend critical presentations exploring domestic fabulism in women’s poetry with readings of poems from our anthology, specifically poems that address trauma through mystical elements.
Breakout Session IV 3:30–4:45 pm
1. How to Have It All (No, Really, We’re Asking): Women Who Write, Parent and Work Full-Time
(Michele Battiste, Sommer Browning, Leslie Anne Mcilroy, and Soraya Shalforoosh)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
Much has been made of balancing work and family, especially when study after study shows that women shoulder the majority of unpaid domestic labor. But what happens when working mothers—especially those outside of academia—are also writers? How do women maintain writing lives and identities when their jobs and families demand so much? Four working mothers/poets will discuss the writing-related challenges they face and their strategies to overcome them. They will address topics such as time, identity, creating community, accessing opportunities, managing multiple roles, meeting demands, and nurturing relationships.
2. Literary Influences: A Look at the Women who have Inspired
(Jessica Rae Bergamino, Mary Ruth Marotte, Jocelyn Cullity)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
From the forgotten to the well known, women writers and characters from the past have a vital role to play in inspiring women writers of today. Whether tracing the origins of inspirational Arkansan women writers or rereading historical events through a feminist lens, this panel addresses the importance of representation in historical narratives. Panelists reflect on the ways in which earlier women writers either built on established forms or rebelled against them to create new visions, also exploring what happens when women’s voices are left out of our stories and histories.
3. Disturb & Enrapture: the queer & feminist missions of Sibling Rivalry Press, a Creative Reading (Megan Volpert, Annah Anti-Palindrome, Imani Sims, Valerie Wetlaufer, and Theresa Davis)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
Founded in 2010 in Little Rock, Arkansas, Sibling Rivalry Press is the only press, large or small, to ever win Lambda Literary Awards in both Gay Poetry and Lesbian Poetry. The American Library Association has honored twenty-one SRP titles on its annual list of recommended LGBT reading. SRP's mission is to make good trouble, taking up Adrienne Rich's call to "disturb and enrapture" readers. This reading showcases five SRP authors that reflect the diverse and thought-provoking goals of Sibling Rivalry Press.
4. Alternative Fictions: Fan Fiction and YA SciFi
(Sarah Loch and Adrianne Finlay)
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
This mix of presentation and reading highlights the many ways that women writers embrace and explore various fiction models. This panel includes a discussion of how fanfiction can jumpstart a writer’s best practices and build an inclusive community for writers to a creative reading from a forthcoming Young Adult SciFi novel.
Closing Reception 5–6:30 pm
Location: Ballroom, McCastlain Hall
Join us for a reading by the Nan Snow Emerging Writer Award winners, closing remarks from the conference director, and heavy hors d'oeuvres. The Executive Committee congratulates our Nan Snow Emerging Writer Award winners: Stacy Pendergrast, first place, for the essay “Lily-er Than White”; Abigail Greenbaum, second place, for the story “Limits”; and Alyse Bensel, third place, for the poems “Ivy in Every Parallel Universe," “Baking and the Men I've Loved, Including You," and “Lunar.”