2018 Conference Schedule
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2018
Events on Friday take place in multiple locations, noted below.
Pre-Conference Workshop ~ Comics 101 with Amy Letter 1–4 pm
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
Anyone can learn to speak comics. No matter your artistic skill or experience level with comics, this workshop will provide hands-on instruction in the basics of creating a short comic, from character creation to thumbnailing, to layout and rendering, motion effects, and word balloons. We’ll focus on communicating using the medium, not any particular drawing style or “level” of drawing skill (stick figures are ok!). There will be time for participants to share their work and receive brief feedback; supplies will be provided.
Amy Letter is a writer, artist, and professor of Fiction and New Media at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, whose work has been published in journals including Fantastic Floridas, Quarterly West, and Puerto del Sol, and gallery spaces including the 18 Rabbit gallery and the Jaffe Center for Book Arts. More at amyletter.com
Pre-Conference Workshop ~ Diving into the Wreck: #MeToo and the Power of Telling with Monda Strange Fason 1–4 pm
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
Should we hold our breath or is it time to exhale? Join us as we wend our way through a series of inspiring words and images to explore our personal and collective #MeToo power. Writing is required, but sharing is not. Writers gift bags, chocolates, and unwavering acceptance will be provided.
Monda Strange Fason has taught creative and academic writing for 23 years. She is currently at Conway High School teaching the nearly grown.
Registration and Check-in 4–5:45 pm and 7–8 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, and admittance to the breakout sessions.
Friday Evening Keynote 6–7 pm
Speaker: Allison Joseph
Location: Auditorium, Room 107, College of Business
Allison Joseph lives in Carbondale, Illinois, and directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University, where she is the Judge Williams Holmes Cook Endowed Professor of English. She also serves as poetry editor of Crab Orchard Review. Joseph is the author of over 16 books of poetry, both full-length collections and chapbooks. Her latest full-length book of poetry, Confessions of a Barefaced Woman, is just out from Red Hen Press, and she will read from a brand new chapbook at the conference, Corporal Muse.
*Allison Joseph's keynote is free and open to the public. All other events require conference registration.
Opening Reception 7–8:30 pm
Location: Ballroom, McCastlain Hall
Join us for an opening reception with Allison Joseph. Heavy hors d'oeuvres will be served.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2018
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.
Breakout Session I, 9:15–10:30 am
1. Finding Our Ways: Role Models, Mentors, Friends
(Anna Leahy, Mary Cantrell, Rachel Hall, Vida Cross)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
Four writers who’ve known each other for more than thirty years (and therefore shared the same initial teachers) discuss the importance of women role models, mentors, and friends in aesthetics, writing habits, and careers. From Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me to Claire Vaye Watkins’s “On Pandering” to #MeToo to Binders, this panel examines who we read, how we learn from and encourage each other, how we build personal and professional connections across distance, and why we must talk openly about the ways differences still divide women. We’ll invite audience conversation about best practices, tips, examples, pitfalls, and alternatives.
2. Women’s Writing, Women’s Persuasion: Feminist Rhetorics in Contemporary Public Discourse
(Jen Talbot, Marrissa Lawson, Caroline Harrod)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
This panel offers an exploration of feminist and women’s rhetorical practices in contemporary public discourse. Viewing “writing” broadly, the three speakers each analyze the work of feminist rhetors in a variety of modes including alphabetic text, visual and material rhetorics, digital rhetorics, and so on. Through these examples, each speaker seeks to illuminate a characteristic principle or practice of rhetoric as employed by women and/or toward feminist ends.
3. The Poetics of Fury: Creative Reading
(Kathryn Nuernberger, Taneum Bambrick, Janine Joseph, Jennifer Maritza-McCauley, Jenny Molberg)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
Though often dismissed as shrill, a harpy, or irrationally emotional, feminine anger can be a force for change in an oppressive system. As Audre Lorde says, “Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.” With #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, Immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and so much more on their minds, this panel of 5 poets will read from their work and discuss the aesthetics of anger, the intersectional critical theory that informs their thinking, and the writers who have inspired and influenced them. They will also consider what possibilities might lie on the other side of a fully expressed and deeply understood outrage.
4. Women in Journalism
(Debra Hale-Shelton, Donna Stephens, Tammy Keith)
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister HallThree veteran journalists discuss the challenges women have faced in journalism for decades. In that time, these women have seen and endured gender disparities in pay, promotions and assignments, as well as sexual harassment, discrimination and condescension – sometimes in the newsroom and sometimes on assignment. The three will discuss the progress women have made in the industry and the problems that still exist.
Breakout Session II, 10:45 am–Noon
1. Women Writing Pain: How We Archive and Historicize our Stories
(Anna Harris-Parker, Giada Biasetti, Liana Babayan)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
This panel seeks to examine the various roles physical and psychological pain play in poetry, short fiction, and novels written by women across the globe. Panelists will discuss how poets and writers use literature as a vehicle for expressing difficult experiences and reclaiming appropriated narratives. This conversation covers work by Mary Jo Bang, Laura Esquivel, Faïza Guene, Marie Howe, Jenny Zhang, and Mercedes Valdivieso.
2. Writing Grants: Tools for Getting Projects Funded
(Abby Minor, Carey Smitherman Clark, Joyvin Benton)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
Whether as individual artists or as members of a creative collective, many writers face the need of securing support through applying for grants. Panelists with experience in grassroots arts programming supported by grants, in teaching grant writing, and in professional fundraising positions, will present information on grant writing from a variety of angles. Audience participants will be encouraged to ask questions about the key skills involved in grant writing, including how to start or advance a career in grant writing and how to have the best shot at funding their creative projects.
3. Creative Readings by Edwards, Knorr, & Phoenix
(Veverly Edwards, Alyse Knorr, Cal Louise Phoenix)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
Edwards will read her essay “The Burning House,” which interrogates the challenges Black mothers face in raising their children in a world that views them as a threat. Knorr will read from “If Even Death,” a poetic sequence inspired by the Book of Ruth that explores queer love and friendship between women, using Biblical figures Ruth and Naomi as central characters. Phoenix will read from Studies in Lechery: A Memoir, which aims to expand the realities of her own trauma into a broader context by including a research-based narrative.
4. Reinventing Ever After: Women Reclaim the Fairy Tale: Creative Reading
(Donna Vorreyer, Sally Rosen Kindred, Stacey Balkun, Mary McMyne)
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
Traditional fairy tales reinforce stereotypes and gender roles, but when reinvented, they can become vehicles of female empowerment and strength. Melding familiar plots and characters with issues and concerns of the modern age, four poets will read from work that weaves new meaning into old stories, exploring what it means to be both woman and wolf, both girl and witch, both hunter and prey. By bridging the mystic gap between imagination and reality, these poets reclaim the power of the story by being the tellers of the tale, the agents of the moral, allowing these stories to remain familiar while resonating with the challenges of today’s society.
Lunch Keynote 12:15–1:45 pm
Speaker: Megan Mayhew Bergman
Location: Ballroom, McCastlain Hall
Megan Mayhew Bergman was raised in North Carolina and now lives on a small farm in Vermont. She works at Bennington College as the Director of Special Programs, where she oversees the Robert Frost Stone House Museum and teaches in the literature department. She is also the Director of Middlebury's Breadloaf Environmental Writer's Program. Scribner published her first story collection, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, in March 2012, and her second, Almost Famous Women in January 2015. Bergman is an essayist for The Paris Review and contributes literary criticism to The Washington Post and New York Times.
Breakout Session III 2–3:15 pm
1. Learning from Others: Collaborations in Person, in the Classroom, or across Decades
(Debra Kaufman, Mary Marotte, Ashley Wurzbacher)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
Debra Kauman will discuss the Illuminated Dresses project, in which she collaborated with women playwrights and other artists to produce a shared theatrical piece that considered the personal transformation the might occur while while putting on a dress. Ashley Wurzbacher’s presentation will offer an approach to teaching women's literature that emphasizes the gender-based challenges to creativity and authorship, and the innovative ways women writers have confronted them. Mary Marotte will discuss how Arkansas poet Marcia Camp spent the last two decades writing the biography of another Arkansas writer, Bernie Babcock, but can no longer continue the project, which has passed to Marotte. Marotte asks: What can an English professor do to uphold the legacies of both of these writers?
2. Writing for Broadcast
(Sarah Whites-Koditschek, Sonia Paul, Katy Henriksen)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
This panel of female broadcasters will discuss the distinct craft of writing for radio, television, and documentary film. They'll explore what makes great broadcast writing, their careers as women in the traditionally more masculine field, and what they’ve learned from their favorite journalists.
3. Bad Moms: On the Page & IRL: Creative Reading
(Angela Mitchell, Lauren Goodwin Slaughter, Sarah Harris Wallman, Kerry Madden-Lunsford)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
Four writers of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction will read from their work focusing on “bad moms”; the panel will conclude with a discussion about motherhood as subject and mothers as artists. How are mothers as writers subjected to both positive and negative judgements and assumptions? What are the expectations of their readers & peers? In what ways is writing both an act of healing and subversion for mothers? This panel will deepen the understanding of the challenges and perspectives of the artist-mother and the vital importance of the work she creates.
4. Nan Snow Emerging Writer Award Winners
(Ellie Black, Stacey Balkun, Jennifer ‘Coffy’ Davis, Taneum Bambrick
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
The conference demonstrates its commitment to promising new women-identifying writers by sponsoring the Nan Snow Emerging Writer Award. This session draws attention to our 2018 winners, as each writer reads from her work.
Breakout Session IV, 3:30–4:45 pm
1. Practical Jokes: A Queer Comic Vision
(Jessica Alexander, Rachel Levy, Jessica Rae Bergamino, Meg Day, Jaclyn Watterson)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
The comic narrative offers a delightful irreverence: it topples the mighty, defiles the inviolate, and sets its heroes loose upon the establishment. But just how serious can the comic mode become? Can it be used as a queer, feminist tool to combat inequality and institutional abuse? What are some of the aesthetic strategies, political functions, and liberating capacities of this form? The panelists will explore the serious work of a queer, feminist comic vision.
2. Everything (New) South Must Converge: Writing and Reckoning with Today’s Southern Identity
(Megan Clark, Nora Bonner, Ally Wright, Ra’Niqua Lee, Hannah Doyle)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
Five women discuss what it means to be a writer in the New South, particularly in Atlanta. They’ll reckon with the legacy of the Southern writer in this literally and figuratively ever-changing landscape, and take on what it means to call this place home—or to yearn to—while reimagining what that means.
3. Who You Calling a Broad? Nasty Poets of the Dirty South: Creative Reading (Alison Pelegrin, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Wendy Taylor Carlisle)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
Outsiders love to fetishize the South and its ugly roots, to paste carnival's shine over a history of injustice, ignorance, political embarrassments, and ecological disaster. This reading features southern women reading their grittiest work. Subjects include the obstacles and triumphs faced by these writers who are called on to defend and define their territory while creating work that bears witness to and celebrates lived experiences in a region so often co-opted by others.
Closing Reception, 5–6:30 pm
Location: Ballroom, McCastlain Hall
Join us for closing remarks by the conference director. Heavy hors d'oeuvres will be served.
Events on Friday take place in multiple locations, noted below.
Pre-Conference Workshop ~ Comics 101 with Amy Letter 1–4 pm
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
Anyone can learn to speak comics. No matter your artistic skill or experience level with comics, this workshop will provide hands-on instruction in the basics of creating a short comic, from character creation to thumbnailing, to layout and rendering, motion effects, and word balloons. We’ll focus on communicating using the medium, not any particular drawing style or “level” of drawing skill (stick figures are ok!). There will be time for participants to share their work and receive brief feedback; supplies will be provided.
Amy Letter is a writer, artist, and professor of Fiction and New Media at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, whose work has been published in journals including Fantastic Floridas, Quarterly West, and Puerto del Sol, and gallery spaces including the 18 Rabbit gallery and the Jaffe Center for Book Arts. More at amyletter.com
Pre-Conference Workshop ~ Diving into the Wreck: #MeToo and the Power of Telling with Monda Strange Fason 1–4 pm
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
Should we hold our breath or is it time to exhale? Join us as we wend our way through a series of inspiring words and images to explore our personal and collective #MeToo power. Writing is required, but sharing is not. Writers gift bags, chocolates, and unwavering acceptance will be provided.
Monda Strange Fason has taught creative and academic writing for 23 years. She is currently at Conway High School teaching the nearly grown.
Registration and Check-in 4–5:45 pm and 7–8 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, and admittance to the breakout sessions.
Friday Evening Keynote 6–7 pm
Speaker: Allison Joseph
Location: Auditorium, Room 107, College of Business
Allison Joseph lives in Carbondale, Illinois, and directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University, where she is the Judge Williams Holmes Cook Endowed Professor of English. She also serves as poetry editor of Crab Orchard Review. Joseph is the author of over 16 books of poetry, both full-length collections and chapbooks. Her latest full-length book of poetry, Confessions of a Barefaced Woman, is just out from Red Hen Press, and she will read from a brand new chapbook at the conference, Corporal Muse.
*Allison Joseph's keynote is free and open to the public. All other events require conference registration.
Opening Reception 7–8:30 pm
Location: Ballroom, McCastlain Hall
Join us for an opening reception with Allison Joseph. Heavy hors d'oeuvres will be served.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2018
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.
Breakout Session I, 9:15–10:30 am
1. Finding Our Ways: Role Models, Mentors, Friends
(Anna Leahy, Mary Cantrell, Rachel Hall, Vida Cross)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
Four writers who’ve known each other for more than thirty years (and therefore shared the same initial teachers) discuss the importance of women role models, mentors, and friends in aesthetics, writing habits, and careers. From Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me to Claire Vaye Watkins’s “On Pandering” to #MeToo to Binders, this panel examines who we read, how we learn from and encourage each other, how we build personal and professional connections across distance, and why we must talk openly about the ways differences still divide women. We’ll invite audience conversation about best practices, tips, examples, pitfalls, and alternatives.
2. Women’s Writing, Women’s Persuasion: Feminist Rhetorics in Contemporary Public Discourse
(Jen Talbot, Marrissa Lawson, Caroline Harrod)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
This panel offers an exploration of feminist and women’s rhetorical practices in contemporary public discourse. Viewing “writing” broadly, the three speakers each analyze the work of feminist rhetors in a variety of modes including alphabetic text, visual and material rhetorics, digital rhetorics, and so on. Through these examples, each speaker seeks to illuminate a characteristic principle or practice of rhetoric as employed by women and/or toward feminist ends.
3. The Poetics of Fury: Creative Reading
(Kathryn Nuernberger, Taneum Bambrick, Janine Joseph, Jennifer Maritza-McCauley, Jenny Molberg)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
Though often dismissed as shrill, a harpy, or irrationally emotional, feminine anger can be a force for change in an oppressive system. As Audre Lorde says, “Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.” With #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, Immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and so much more on their minds, this panel of 5 poets will read from their work and discuss the aesthetics of anger, the intersectional critical theory that informs their thinking, and the writers who have inspired and influenced them. They will also consider what possibilities might lie on the other side of a fully expressed and deeply understood outrage.
4. Women in Journalism
(Debra Hale-Shelton, Donna Stephens, Tammy Keith)
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister HallThree veteran journalists discuss the challenges women have faced in journalism for decades. In that time, these women have seen and endured gender disparities in pay, promotions and assignments, as well as sexual harassment, discrimination and condescension – sometimes in the newsroom and sometimes on assignment. The three will discuss the progress women have made in the industry and the problems that still exist.
Breakout Session II, 10:45 am–Noon
1. Women Writing Pain: How We Archive and Historicize our Stories
(Anna Harris-Parker, Giada Biasetti, Liana Babayan)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
This panel seeks to examine the various roles physical and psychological pain play in poetry, short fiction, and novels written by women across the globe. Panelists will discuss how poets and writers use literature as a vehicle for expressing difficult experiences and reclaiming appropriated narratives. This conversation covers work by Mary Jo Bang, Laura Esquivel, Faïza Guene, Marie Howe, Jenny Zhang, and Mercedes Valdivieso.
2. Writing Grants: Tools for Getting Projects Funded
(Abby Minor, Carey Smitherman Clark, Joyvin Benton)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
Whether as individual artists or as members of a creative collective, many writers face the need of securing support through applying for grants. Panelists with experience in grassroots arts programming supported by grants, in teaching grant writing, and in professional fundraising positions, will present information on grant writing from a variety of angles. Audience participants will be encouraged to ask questions about the key skills involved in grant writing, including how to start or advance a career in grant writing and how to have the best shot at funding their creative projects.
3. Creative Readings by Edwards, Knorr, & Phoenix
(Veverly Edwards, Alyse Knorr, Cal Louise Phoenix)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
Edwards will read her essay “The Burning House,” which interrogates the challenges Black mothers face in raising their children in a world that views them as a threat. Knorr will read from “If Even Death,” a poetic sequence inspired by the Book of Ruth that explores queer love and friendship between women, using Biblical figures Ruth and Naomi as central characters. Phoenix will read from Studies in Lechery: A Memoir, which aims to expand the realities of her own trauma into a broader context by including a research-based narrative.
4. Reinventing Ever After: Women Reclaim the Fairy Tale: Creative Reading
(Donna Vorreyer, Sally Rosen Kindred, Stacey Balkun, Mary McMyne)
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
Traditional fairy tales reinforce stereotypes and gender roles, but when reinvented, they can become vehicles of female empowerment and strength. Melding familiar plots and characters with issues and concerns of the modern age, four poets will read from work that weaves new meaning into old stories, exploring what it means to be both woman and wolf, both girl and witch, both hunter and prey. By bridging the mystic gap between imagination and reality, these poets reclaim the power of the story by being the tellers of the tale, the agents of the moral, allowing these stories to remain familiar while resonating with the challenges of today’s society.
Lunch Keynote 12:15–1:45 pm
Speaker: Megan Mayhew Bergman
Location: Ballroom, McCastlain Hall
Megan Mayhew Bergman was raised in North Carolina and now lives on a small farm in Vermont. She works at Bennington College as the Director of Special Programs, where she oversees the Robert Frost Stone House Museum and teaches in the literature department. She is also the Director of Middlebury's Breadloaf Environmental Writer's Program. Scribner published her first story collection, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, in March 2012, and her second, Almost Famous Women in January 2015. Bergman is an essayist for The Paris Review and contributes literary criticism to The Washington Post and New York Times.
Breakout Session III 2–3:15 pm
1. Learning from Others: Collaborations in Person, in the Classroom, or across Decades
(Debra Kaufman, Mary Marotte, Ashley Wurzbacher)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
Debra Kauman will discuss the Illuminated Dresses project, in which she collaborated with women playwrights and other artists to produce a shared theatrical piece that considered the personal transformation the might occur while while putting on a dress. Ashley Wurzbacher’s presentation will offer an approach to teaching women's literature that emphasizes the gender-based challenges to creativity and authorship, and the innovative ways women writers have confronted them. Mary Marotte will discuss how Arkansas poet Marcia Camp spent the last two decades writing the biography of another Arkansas writer, Bernie Babcock, but can no longer continue the project, which has passed to Marotte. Marotte asks: What can an English professor do to uphold the legacies of both of these writers?
2. Writing for Broadcast
(Sarah Whites-Koditschek, Sonia Paul, Katy Henriksen)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
This panel of female broadcasters will discuss the distinct craft of writing for radio, television, and documentary film. They'll explore what makes great broadcast writing, their careers as women in the traditionally more masculine field, and what they’ve learned from their favorite journalists.
3. Bad Moms: On the Page & IRL: Creative Reading
(Angela Mitchell, Lauren Goodwin Slaughter, Sarah Harris Wallman, Kerry Madden-Lunsford)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
Four writers of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction will read from their work focusing on “bad moms”; the panel will conclude with a discussion about motherhood as subject and mothers as artists. How are mothers as writers subjected to both positive and negative judgements and assumptions? What are the expectations of their readers & peers? In what ways is writing both an act of healing and subversion for mothers? This panel will deepen the understanding of the challenges and perspectives of the artist-mother and the vital importance of the work she creates.
4. Nan Snow Emerging Writer Award Winners
(Ellie Black, Stacey Balkun, Jennifer ‘Coffy’ Davis, Taneum Bambrick
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
The conference demonstrates its commitment to promising new women-identifying writers by sponsoring the Nan Snow Emerging Writer Award. This session draws attention to our 2018 winners, as each writer reads from her work.
Breakout Session IV, 3:30–4:45 pm
1. Practical Jokes: A Queer Comic Vision
(Jessica Alexander, Rachel Levy, Jessica Rae Bergamino, Meg Day, Jaclyn Watterson)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
The comic narrative offers a delightful irreverence: it topples the mighty, defiles the inviolate, and sets its heroes loose upon the establishment. But just how serious can the comic mode become? Can it be used as a queer, feminist tool to combat inequality and institutional abuse? What are some of the aesthetic strategies, political functions, and liberating capacities of this form? The panelists will explore the serious work of a queer, feminist comic vision.
2. Everything (New) South Must Converge: Writing and Reckoning with Today’s Southern Identity
(Megan Clark, Nora Bonner, Ally Wright, Ra’Niqua Lee, Hannah Doyle)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
Five women discuss what it means to be a writer in the New South, particularly in Atlanta. They’ll reckon with the legacy of the Southern writer in this literally and figuratively ever-changing landscape, and take on what it means to call this place home—or to yearn to—while reimagining what that means.
3. Who You Calling a Broad? Nasty Poets of the Dirty South: Creative Reading (Alison Pelegrin, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Wendy Taylor Carlisle)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
Outsiders love to fetishize the South and its ugly roots, to paste carnival's shine over a history of injustice, ignorance, political embarrassments, and ecological disaster. This reading features southern women reading their grittiest work. Subjects include the obstacles and triumphs faced by these writers who are called on to defend and define their territory while creating work that bears witness to and celebrates lived experiences in a region so often co-opted by others.
Closing Reception, 5–6:30 pm
Location: Ballroom, McCastlain Hall
Join us for closing remarks by the conference director. Heavy hors d'oeuvres will be served.