2019 Conference Schedule
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2019
Events on Friday take place in multiple locations, noted below.
SOLD OUT: Pre-Conference Workshop ~ Place-Based Writing: A Generative Workshop 1:30–4:30 pm
Location: Cadron Settlement Park, Lower Pavilion (6200 Hwy. 319, Conway, AR 72032)
Led by Alison Pelegrin, an award-winning poet and veteran creative writing professor from Covington, LA, this generative workshop on writing about place is for writers of any genre or skill-level. Held at the historic Cadron Settlement Park on the Arkansas River about 15 minutes from the University of Central Arkansas by car*, participants will receive multiple prompts and plenty of time for generating new writing. While some prompts may ask participants to respond to the park itself, others will allow more open-ended writing about any place with which a participant may be familiar. There will also be time for sharing work with others in the group. Light refreshments will be served. Seats for the workshop are limited. See information on pricing on the general conference page.
*Carpools leaving from UCA will be arranged for participants without transportation.
Alison Pelegrin is the author of four books of poems, most recently Waterlines (LSU Press). The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Louisiana Board of Regents, and the Louisiana Division of the Arts, she also won the Akron Poetry Prize. Recent work of hers has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, The Bennington Review, Poetry East, and Broadsided. She may be found online at alisonpelegrin.com and occasionally tweets @alisonpelegrin.
SOLD OUT: Editorial Consultations
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
In order to help our attendees better understand the publishing industry and gain access to publishing opportunities, conference participants can register for twenty-minute editorial consultations with visiting editors. Participants will submit 3-5 pages of poetry, 10-15 pages of prose (novel/memoir excerpts, essays, or stories), or a query letter or book proposal prior to the conference, and then meet with an editor and receive astute feedback during a one-on-one conversation on Friday afternoon (a few slots may also be available on Saturday).
SOLD OUT: If you are interested in participating in a consultation, please email Dr. Jennie Case at [email protected] prior to registering with your genre and time preferences. Once Dr. Case has responded to you and confirmed a consultation slot, register for the conference by selecting the "conference + editorial consultation" or the "conference + pre-conference workshop and editorial consultation" (if you are interested in both and the timing works) option. Please do not pay for a consultation before confirming your slot with Dr. Case. See pricing information on the general conference page.
SOLD OUT: Participating editors:
Eliza Borné, Editor of the Oxford American (creative nonfiction, memoir, or pitches for magazine essays)
Sara Lewis, Associate Editor of the Oxford American (fiction, creative nonfiction, memoir, or pitches for magazine essays)
Kim Brown, Founder and Editor of Minerva Rising Press (fiction or creative nonfiction)
Erin Wood, Founder and Director of Et Alia Press (creative nonfiction and memoir, essays or book proposals)
Jenny Molberg, Director of Pleiades Press (poetry, including book proposals)
Rhett Iseman Trull, Founder and Editor of Cave Wall Press (poetry)
Registration and Check-in 4:30–6 pm, 7:30–8:30 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, and admittance to the breakout sessions.
Friday Evening Keynote and Reception 5–8:30 pm
Speaker: Camille Dungy
Location: Ballroom, McCastlain Hall
Camille T. Dungy’s debut collection of personal essays is Guidebook to Relative Strangers (W. W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. Dungy is the author of three additional books of poetry and has edited or co-edited several anthologies. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. Dungy can be found online at camilledungy.com.
*Camille Dungy's keynote reading will begin at 6 pm and will be followed by a book signing and reception. Heavy hors d'oeuvres will be served. The event is free and open to the public. All other events require conference registration.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2019
All events for Saturday take place in McCastlain and McAlister Halls.
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. While accepted proposals for 2019 have not been assigned specific sessions as yet, a list including presenters is included below.
Breakout Session I, 9:15–10:30 am
1. Women and Publishing
(Erin Wood, Eliza Borné, Jo McDougall, Crystal C. Mercer, and Molly Bess Rector)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
Small press leadership and publishing, New York publishing houses, academic presses, book and textile arts, magazine publishing, manuscript editing, and writing—these women have done it all and have each shared their stories in Women Make Arkansas: Conversations with 50 Creatives by Erin Wood (Et Alia Press, 2019). The five will discuss how to land internships and jobs in publishing, how to break through barriers, self-publishing versus large press versus small press, tips to keep publishing and editing jobs from killing your own writing, and how to avoid potential pitfalls along the way.
2. “Woman Must Write Herself”: Exploring the Value of Visceral and Confessional Writing in Publication
(Erin Slaughter, and Lena Ziegler)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
This presentation will focus on the importance of creating space in the literary world for traditionally devalued forms of writing by women: writing that is emotional, bodily in nature, viscerally confessional, or overtly feminine in style or content. Presenters will dissect the gendered expectations of what it means to write “literary” poetry and prose, and explore work from The Hunger, a literary journal founded by the presenters, which focuses on showcasing this type of writing. Presenters and attendees will have the opportunity to share their own experiences with writing and publishing, and how this approach can help enact social change.
3. Matriarchs in Triptych and across Cultures (Creative Reading)
(Gina Ferrara, Julie Kane, and Melinda Palacio)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
Anne Sexton famously wrote, "A woman is her mother. That's the main thing." Female poets have a long tradition of presenting mothers in their poetry. How does the frequent presence and recollection of mothers define who we are? Across cultures, specifically Hispanic, Irish, and Sicilian, what similarities do mothers share and what differences? Must daughters look back at their matriarchal predecessors before crossing any kind of threshold? This reading will respond to these questions in triptych, via three cultures.
4. Women's Work (and Play): Creating Community through Poetic Collaboration (75-minute Workshop)
(Amy Ash and Callista Buchen)
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
Collaborative poetry has experienced a recent resurgence, challenging the inaccurate (and gendered) stereotype of the poet as solitary genius. In this workshop and discussion, participants will be invited to explore and experiment with writing collaborative poetry, exploring different ways to engage in collaborative conversations and discover what can that bring to our work. We'll discover not only how collaboration might shape and enhance our own poetic voices, but more importantly, the ways in which poetic collaboration can create an atmosphere of women’s solidarity, support, and empowerment so necessary in our world today.
Breakout Session II, 10:45 am–Noon
1. Literary Criticism 2.0
(Zoë Russell, Vida Cross, and Jill E. Crosby)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
Zoë Russell will discuss women writing in the YA genre, a genre that teaches young adults that their voice is necessary, valued, and capable of changing the world. Vida Cross explores what we ask of students who are presented with Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper” in light of the MeToo Movement. Jill E. Crosby examines common criticisms of Ursula K. LeGuin's masculine pronoun use in The Left Hand of Darkness, a novel with an otherwise genderless protagonist, and compares it to her later short story “Coming of Age in Karhide”, which takes place in the same setting as her novel.
2. Outside/Inside: Women Writers Navigating Archival Research and Copyright
(Lizzy Petersen, Robin Wheeler, and Allison Schein Holmes)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
Traditionally, archivists are seen as “gatekeepers” to research, an institution characterized by dated technologies and incomplete systems. In truth, navigating archives is a “lived process” (Kirsch & Rohan, 2008), where the point-of-view and experiences of researchers can impact the process and final product. In this panel, poet Lizzy Petersen and non-fiction writer Robin Wheeler will discuss their writing projects and how archival research played a part in their work, as well as their experiences with copyrighted materials. Audio archivist Allison Schein Holmes will discuss her work as a female archivist and how she is changing the notion from “gatekeeper” to “facilitator.”
3. Poetics of Gender and Labor (Creative Reading)
(Taneum Bambrick, Dorothy Chan, Jos Charles, Jenny Molberg, and Claire Meuschke)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
Our five panelists are interested in the labor of identifying the ways in which gender becomes a tool to order bodies, how the erasure of indigenous experiences can fragment a sense of family identity, the ways that being a child of immigrants means also being the child of labor, the danger of working alongside men in the isolation of various parks and maintenance job sites, and what it means to attempt to generate poetry about our perpetrators, especially when they are active in and have influence over the very community where we seek to promote ourselves and our work.
4. Uncanny Activisms: Poems as Spells, Curses, Prayers, and Blessings
(Lesley Wheeler, Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Anna Maria Hong, Ashley M. Jones, Hyejung Kook, and Jane Satterfield)
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
Protest poetry informs us about crisis, attempting to inspire change among human beings. This roundtable, however, addresses an increasingly common variety of protest poetry that delivers its petitions for change to the more-than-human world. Participants—poets, editors, critics, and reviewers—will discuss who and what influenced them to experiment with this mode; what or whom poetic prayers and spells try to reach; what stylistic and structural elements help focus such a poem’s energy; and what social, environmental, and personal transformations the authors of such poems seek.
Lunch Keynote 12:15–1:45 pm
Speaker: Jami Attenberg
Location: Ballroom, McCastlain Hall
Jami Attenberg's latest novel is All This Could be Yours. Attenberg is a New York Times bestselling author of five novels, including The Middlesteins and Saint Mazie. She has contributed essays about sex, urban life, and food to The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and Lenny Letter, among other publications. She divides her time between Brooklyn and New Orleans. Attenberg can be found online at jamiattenberg.com.
Breakout Session III 2–3:15 pm
1. The Interview
(Lacey Thacker, Sara Mitchell, and Deana Hamby Nall)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
Interviewing skills can make or break a writing project that requires input from outside sources, but few people are born interviewers. Learn tips on interviewing, including why two interviewers can be better than one, overcoming interview anxiety, the rules of recording, and how to (ethically) get the information you really want.
2. "Bitches Get Stuff Done”: The Costs of Emotional Labor on Academic Women Writers
(Louise Krug, Jen Colatosti, and Nicole Emmelhainz)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
Professorships seem like the holy grail: discussing writing and mentoring students, plus plenty of time left to write. But what happens when the demands of teaching, professional development, and service combine with the social expectations placed on women to serve as caretakers and take on additional, often invisible work in their home lives? Three women who are writers and full-time professors discuss the impact the emotional and mental demands of academic jobs have had on their writing lives.
3. Nan Snow Emerging Writer Award Winners (Creative Reading)
(Callista Buchen, Allison Frase Reavis, Abby Minor, and Rachel Ranie Taube)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain 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 2019 winners as they read from their work.
4. Across Species Lines: Women Writing Animals
(Kate McIntyre, Anne Barngrover, Trudy Lewis, Leanna Petronella, and Wendy Oleson)
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
From the surrealist provocation of Leonora Carrington’s hyena to Marianne Moore’s prickly array of creatures to the minutely observed weasels of Annie Dillard or the strange symbiosis of insect-like aliens and humans in Octavia Butler, women writers have long been probing the intricacies of human-animal relations. Five women writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction discuss the pressing need for more animals on the page in these times of ecological crisis, the role of animals in their own work, and why the inclusion of animal and nonhuman characters in creative works can be viewed as a feminist act.
Breakout Session IV, 3:30–4:45 pm
1. Finding the River, Building the Bridge: Navigating Nontraditional Paths to Writing Careers
(Erin Adair-Hodges, Jennifer Jordán Schaller, Rebecca Aronson, and Anna V. Q. Ross)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
This panel seeks to explore the challenges writers face when attempting to build their writing lives in ways that deviate from the traditional track of degree/advanced degree/academic job/book. Panelists will discuss their own paths as a way to engage in a larger conversation about the importance of providing alternate narratives for how one becomes a writer. The group will also focus on strategies for negotiating a road for which they’ve not been given a map.
2. Shout about It: Promotion Basics for Writers (75-minute Workshop)
(Caitlin Hamilton Summie)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
Nowadays, agents want authors to have “platforms.” Once accepted for publication, authors are expected to assist with publicity. What’s a writer to do? Veteran book publicist and marketing expert Hamilton Summie walks writers through the basics of book publicity—such as understanding the publication landscape, learning what a platform is, defining your audience, understanding timelines, and more—so that you can help to create and celebrate your writing successes. Hamilton Summie encourages participation and uses exercises to move all workshops past lectures into a dynamic dialogue.
3. Blood Lines: Writing and Uniting Reproductive Experiences (Creative Reading)
(Abby Minor, Jane V. Blunschi, and Natalie Giarratano)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
Too often reproductive experiences are depicted as fixed, isolated dots: Images of joyful birth over here, of sad abortion over there, and of menstruation, menopause, and more scattered around the edges of a blank page. And yet the truth is that our reproductive lives more closely resemble embroideries that are multidimensional and intertwined. This reading brings three writers together to share works about a range of complex reproductive experiences, and to highlight connections between reproductive lives and identities such as race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and class. Bring your own stories and questions so that we can connect the dots together.
4. Strange Horizons: A Feminist Speculative Poetry Reading (Creative Reading)
(Amie Whittemore, Amelia Martens, Rochelle Hurt, and Maya James)
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
“When women speak truly they speak subversively,” Ursula K. Le Guin noted. In the spirit of subversion, panelists will read from their poetry and discuss how speculative poetry is especially well-suited for women as it provides a space to interrogate social and environmental issues and to envision feminist alternatives to today’s problems. They will read from their work and share why they apply speculative tropes to their poetry and how envisioning the marvelous can console and direct us toward horizons of greater truth.
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.
SOLD OUT: Pre-Conference Workshop ~ Place-Based Writing: A Generative Workshop 1:30–4:30 pm
Location: Cadron Settlement Park, Lower Pavilion (6200 Hwy. 319, Conway, AR 72032)
Led by Alison Pelegrin, an award-winning poet and veteran creative writing professor from Covington, LA, this generative workshop on writing about place is for writers of any genre or skill-level. Held at the historic Cadron Settlement Park on the Arkansas River about 15 minutes from the University of Central Arkansas by car*, participants will receive multiple prompts and plenty of time for generating new writing. While some prompts may ask participants to respond to the park itself, others will allow more open-ended writing about any place with which a participant may be familiar. There will also be time for sharing work with others in the group. Light refreshments will be served. Seats for the workshop are limited. See information on pricing on the general conference page.
*Carpools leaving from UCA will be arranged for participants without transportation.
Alison Pelegrin is the author of four books of poems, most recently Waterlines (LSU Press). The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Louisiana Board of Regents, and the Louisiana Division of the Arts, she also won the Akron Poetry Prize. Recent work of hers has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, The Bennington Review, Poetry East, and Broadsided. She may be found online at alisonpelegrin.com and occasionally tweets @alisonpelegrin.
SOLD OUT: Editorial Consultations
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
In order to help our attendees better understand the publishing industry and gain access to publishing opportunities, conference participants can register for twenty-minute editorial consultations with visiting editors. Participants will submit 3-5 pages of poetry, 10-15 pages of prose (novel/memoir excerpts, essays, or stories), or a query letter or book proposal prior to the conference, and then meet with an editor and receive astute feedback during a one-on-one conversation on Friday afternoon (a few slots may also be available on Saturday).
SOLD OUT: If you are interested in participating in a consultation, please email Dr. Jennie Case at [email protected] prior to registering with your genre and time preferences. Once Dr. Case has responded to you and confirmed a consultation slot, register for the conference by selecting the "conference + editorial consultation" or the "conference + pre-conference workshop and editorial consultation" (if you are interested in both and the timing works) option. Please do not pay for a consultation before confirming your slot with Dr. Case. See pricing information on the general conference page.
SOLD OUT: Participating editors:
Eliza Borné, Editor of the Oxford American (creative nonfiction, memoir, or pitches for magazine essays)
Sara Lewis, Associate Editor of the Oxford American (fiction, creative nonfiction, memoir, or pitches for magazine essays)
Kim Brown, Founder and Editor of Minerva Rising Press (fiction or creative nonfiction)
Erin Wood, Founder and Director of Et Alia Press (creative nonfiction and memoir, essays or book proposals)
Jenny Molberg, Director of Pleiades Press (poetry, including book proposals)
Rhett Iseman Trull, Founder and Editor of Cave Wall Press (poetry)
Registration and Check-in 4:30–6 pm, 7:30–8:30 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, and admittance to the breakout sessions.
Friday Evening Keynote and Reception 5–8:30 pm
Speaker: Camille Dungy
Location: Ballroom, McCastlain Hall
Camille T. Dungy’s debut collection of personal essays is Guidebook to Relative Strangers (W. W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. Dungy is the author of three additional books of poetry and has edited or co-edited several anthologies. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. Dungy can be found online at camilledungy.com.
*Camille Dungy's keynote reading will begin at 6 pm and will be followed by a book signing and reception. Heavy hors d'oeuvres will be served. The event is free and open to the public. All other events require conference registration.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2019
All events for Saturday take place in McCastlain and McAlister Halls.
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. While accepted proposals for 2019 have not been assigned specific sessions as yet, a list including presenters is included below.
Breakout Session I, 9:15–10:30 am
1. Women and Publishing
(Erin Wood, Eliza Borné, Jo McDougall, Crystal C. Mercer, and Molly Bess Rector)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
Small press leadership and publishing, New York publishing houses, academic presses, book and textile arts, magazine publishing, manuscript editing, and writing—these women have done it all and have each shared their stories in Women Make Arkansas: Conversations with 50 Creatives by Erin Wood (Et Alia Press, 2019). The five will discuss how to land internships and jobs in publishing, how to break through barriers, self-publishing versus large press versus small press, tips to keep publishing and editing jobs from killing your own writing, and how to avoid potential pitfalls along the way.
2. “Woman Must Write Herself”: Exploring the Value of Visceral and Confessional Writing in Publication
(Erin Slaughter, and Lena Ziegler)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
This presentation will focus on the importance of creating space in the literary world for traditionally devalued forms of writing by women: writing that is emotional, bodily in nature, viscerally confessional, or overtly feminine in style or content. Presenters will dissect the gendered expectations of what it means to write “literary” poetry and prose, and explore work from The Hunger, a literary journal founded by the presenters, which focuses on showcasing this type of writing. Presenters and attendees will have the opportunity to share their own experiences with writing and publishing, and how this approach can help enact social change.
3. Matriarchs in Triptych and across Cultures (Creative Reading)
(Gina Ferrara, Julie Kane, and Melinda Palacio)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
Anne Sexton famously wrote, "A woman is her mother. That's the main thing." Female poets have a long tradition of presenting mothers in their poetry. How does the frequent presence and recollection of mothers define who we are? Across cultures, specifically Hispanic, Irish, and Sicilian, what similarities do mothers share and what differences? Must daughters look back at their matriarchal predecessors before crossing any kind of threshold? This reading will respond to these questions in triptych, via three cultures.
4. Women's Work (and Play): Creating Community through Poetic Collaboration (75-minute Workshop)
(Amy Ash and Callista Buchen)
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
Collaborative poetry has experienced a recent resurgence, challenging the inaccurate (and gendered) stereotype of the poet as solitary genius. In this workshop and discussion, participants will be invited to explore and experiment with writing collaborative poetry, exploring different ways to engage in collaborative conversations and discover what can that bring to our work. We'll discover not only how collaboration might shape and enhance our own poetic voices, but more importantly, the ways in which poetic collaboration can create an atmosphere of women’s solidarity, support, and empowerment so necessary in our world today.
Breakout Session II, 10:45 am–Noon
1. Literary Criticism 2.0
(Zoë Russell, Vida Cross, and Jill E. Crosby)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
Zoë Russell will discuss women writing in the YA genre, a genre that teaches young adults that their voice is necessary, valued, and capable of changing the world. Vida Cross explores what we ask of students who are presented with Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper” in light of the MeToo Movement. Jill E. Crosby examines common criticisms of Ursula K. LeGuin's masculine pronoun use in The Left Hand of Darkness, a novel with an otherwise genderless protagonist, and compares it to her later short story “Coming of Age in Karhide”, which takes place in the same setting as her novel.
2. Outside/Inside: Women Writers Navigating Archival Research and Copyright
(Lizzy Petersen, Robin Wheeler, and Allison Schein Holmes)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
Traditionally, archivists are seen as “gatekeepers” to research, an institution characterized by dated technologies and incomplete systems. In truth, navigating archives is a “lived process” (Kirsch & Rohan, 2008), where the point-of-view and experiences of researchers can impact the process and final product. In this panel, poet Lizzy Petersen and non-fiction writer Robin Wheeler will discuss their writing projects and how archival research played a part in their work, as well as their experiences with copyrighted materials. Audio archivist Allison Schein Holmes will discuss her work as a female archivist and how she is changing the notion from “gatekeeper” to “facilitator.”
3. Poetics of Gender and Labor (Creative Reading)
(Taneum Bambrick, Dorothy Chan, Jos Charles, Jenny Molberg, and Claire Meuschke)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
Our five panelists are interested in the labor of identifying the ways in which gender becomes a tool to order bodies, how the erasure of indigenous experiences can fragment a sense of family identity, the ways that being a child of immigrants means also being the child of labor, the danger of working alongside men in the isolation of various parks and maintenance job sites, and what it means to attempt to generate poetry about our perpetrators, especially when they are active in and have influence over the very community where we seek to promote ourselves and our work.
4. Uncanny Activisms: Poems as Spells, Curses, Prayers, and Blessings
(Lesley Wheeler, Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Anna Maria Hong, Ashley M. Jones, Hyejung Kook, and Jane Satterfield)
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
Protest poetry informs us about crisis, attempting to inspire change among human beings. This roundtable, however, addresses an increasingly common variety of protest poetry that delivers its petitions for change to the more-than-human world. Participants—poets, editors, critics, and reviewers—will discuss who and what influenced them to experiment with this mode; what or whom poetic prayers and spells try to reach; what stylistic and structural elements help focus such a poem’s energy; and what social, environmental, and personal transformations the authors of such poems seek.
Lunch Keynote 12:15–1:45 pm
Speaker: Jami Attenberg
Location: Ballroom, McCastlain Hall
Jami Attenberg's latest novel is All This Could be Yours. Attenberg is a New York Times bestselling author of five novels, including The Middlesteins and Saint Mazie. She has contributed essays about sex, urban life, and food to The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and Lenny Letter, among other publications. She divides her time between Brooklyn and New Orleans. Attenberg can be found online at jamiattenberg.com.
Breakout Session III 2–3:15 pm
1. The Interview
(Lacey Thacker, Sara Mitchell, and Deana Hamby Nall)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
Interviewing skills can make or break a writing project that requires input from outside sources, but few people are born interviewers. Learn tips on interviewing, including why two interviewers can be better than one, overcoming interview anxiety, the rules of recording, and how to (ethically) get the information you really want.
2. "Bitches Get Stuff Done”: The Costs of Emotional Labor on Academic Women Writers
(Louise Krug, Jen Colatosti, and Nicole Emmelhainz)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
Professorships seem like the holy grail: discussing writing and mentoring students, plus plenty of time left to write. But what happens when the demands of teaching, professional development, and service combine with the social expectations placed on women to serve as caretakers and take on additional, often invisible work in their home lives? Three women who are writers and full-time professors discuss the impact the emotional and mental demands of academic jobs have had on their writing lives.
3. Nan Snow Emerging Writer Award Winners (Creative Reading)
(Callista Buchen, Allison Frase Reavis, Abby Minor, and Rachel Ranie Taube)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain 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 2019 winners as they read from their work.
4. Across Species Lines: Women Writing Animals
(Kate McIntyre, Anne Barngrover, Trudy Lewis, Leanna Petronella, and Wendy Oleson)
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
From the surrealist provocation of Leonora Carrington’s hyena to Marianne Moore’s prickly array of creatures to the minutely observed weasels of Annie Dillard or the strange symbiosis of insect-like aliens and humans in Octavia Butler, women writers have long been probing the intricacies of human-animal relations. Five women writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction discuss the pressing need for more animals on the page in these times of ecological crisis, the role of animals in their own work, and why the inclusion of animal and nonhuman characters in creative works can be viewed as a feminist act.
Breakout Session IV, 3:30–4:45 pm
1. Finding the River, Building the Bridge: Navigating Nontraditional Paths to Writing Careers
(Erin Adair-Hodges, Jennifer Jordán Schaller, Rebecca Aronson, and Anna V. Q. Ross)
Location: Fireplace Room, McCastlain Hall
This panel seeks to explore the challenges writers face when attempting to build their writing lives in ways that deviate from the traditional track of degree/advanced degree/academic job/book. Panelists will discuss their own paths as a way to engage in a larger conversation about the importance of providing alternate narratives for how one becomes a writer. The group will also focus on strategies for negotiating a road for which they’ve not been given a map.
2. Shout about It: Promotion Basics for Writers (75-minute Workshop)
(Caitlin Hamilton Summie)
Location: Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall
Nowadays, agents want authors to have “platforms.” Once accepted for publication, authors are expected to assist with publicity. What’s a writer to do? Veteran book publicist and marketing expert Hamilton Summie walks writers through the basics of book publicity—such as understanding the publication landscape, learning what a platform is, defining your audience, understanding timelines, and more—so that you can help to create and celebrate your writing successes. Hamilton Summie encourages participation and uses exercises to move all workshops past lectures into a dynamic dialogue.
3. Blood Lines: Writing and Uniting Reproductive Experiences (Creative Reading)
(Abby Minor, Jane V. Blunschi, and Natalie Giarratano)
Location: Baum Gallery, McCastlain Hall
Too often reproductive experiences are depicted as fixed, isolated dots: Images of joyful birth over here, of sad abortion over there, and of menstruation, menopause, and more scattered around the edges of a blank page. And yet the truth is that our reproductive lives more closely resemble embroideries that are multidimensional and intertwined. This reading brings three writers together to share works about a range of complex reproductive experiences, and to highlight connections between reproductive lives and identities such as race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and class. Bring your own stories and questions so that we can connect the dots together.
4. Strange Horizons: A Feminist Speculative Poetry Reading (Creative Reading)
(Amie Whittemore, Amelia Martens, Rochelle Hurt, and Maya James)
Location: Mirror Room, McAlister Hall
“When women speak truly they speak subversively,” Ursula K. Le Guin noted. In the spirit of subversion, panelists will read from their poetry and discuss how speculative poetry is especially well-suited for women as it provides a space to interrogate social and environmental issues and to envision feminist alternatives to today’s problems. They will read from their work and share why they apply speculative tropes to their poetry and how envisioning the marvelous can console and direct us toward horizons of greater truth.
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.
