The C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference
will be November 3-4, 2023
Photo by Marley Cash-Powell
2023 Conference Schedule
Check-in: Friday November 3, 2023 4:30–6 pm, 7:30–8:30 pm
Registration link: events.blackthorn.io/en/1I2LTNb7/cd-wright-women-writers-conference-2023-5a4w8W1QoSf/overview
Check-in location: Lobby, McCastlain Hall
Registration link: events.blackthorn.io/en/1I2LTNb7/cd-wright-women-writers-conference-2023-5a4w8W1QoSf/overview
Check-in location: Lobby, McCastlain Hall
Friday Evening Keynote and Reception 5:00–8:30 pm
Speaker: Rebecca Gayle Howell
Location: Ballroom McCastlain Hall
Rebecca Gayle Howell is a writer, translator, and editor. Her Best Book of the Year honors include those from The Best Translated Book Awards, Foreword INDIES Awards, The Nautilus Awards, The Sexton Prize (U.K.), The Banipal Prize (U.K.), Ms. Magazine, Book Riot, The Rumpus, and Poets & Writers. Among her other honors are the United States Artists Fellowship, the Carson McCullers Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, and two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In addition to publishing, Howell also collaborates with composer Reena Esmail to produce works for classical performance, including the widely performed A Winter Breviary (Oxford University Press).
Howell is the long time poetry editor of The Oxford American and an Assistant Professor of Poetry & Translation for the University of Arkansas MFA program. She presents at venues like the Edinburgh Book Festival, the American Academy of Poets, No Kid Hungry, and the Galápagos International Poetry Festival, as well as wherever her work is taught.
Speaker: Rebecca Gayle Howell
Location: Ballroom McCastlain Hall
Rebecca Gayle Howell is a writer, translator, and editor. Her Best Book of the Year honors include those from The Best Translated Book Awards, Foreword INDIES Awards, The Nautilus Awards, The Sexton Prize (U.K.), The Banipal Prize (U.K.), Ms. Magazine, Book Riot, The Rumpus, and Poets & Writers. Among her other honors are the United States Artists Fellowship, the Carson McCullers Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, and two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In addition to publishing, Howell also collaborates with composer Reena Esmail to produce works for classical performance, including the widely performed A Winter Breviary (Oxford University Press).
Howell is the long time poetry editor of The Oxford American and an Assistant Professor of Poetry & Translation for the University of Arkansas MFA program. She presents at venues like the Edinburgh Book Festival, the American Academy of Poets, No Kid Hungry, and the Galápagos International Poetry Festival, as well as wherever her work is taught.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2022
All events for Saturday take place in McCastlain and McAlister Halls
All events for Saturday take place in McCastlain and McAlister Halls
Check-in: 8:00am–5:00 pm
Location: Lobby, McCastlain Hall
Location: Lobby, McCastlain Hall
BREAKOUT SESSIONS
There are five breakout sessions with 2-3 concurrent presentations per session. Breakout sessions are located in McCastlain and McAlister Halls.
There are five breakout sessions with 2-3 concurrent presentations per session. Breakout sessions are located in McCastlain and McAlister Halls.
Breakout Session I, 9:15–10:30 am
1. Literary Editing from a Student's Perspective
Location: McCastlain, Fireplace Room
Presenter: Kristina Coggin, Kathy Bates, Chiara Bunting, Annie Elliott
Designed for students interested in gaining editorial experience and the mentors who serve them, this panel will feature student editors of undergraduate, graduate, and national literary journals and magazines. Student editors will discuss what they have gained from these experiences and how literary editing has influenced their education and careers. In doing so, the panel will galvanize journals/programs that would like to work with student editors and offer inspiration to students who hope to gain editorial experience while still in school.
Location: McCastlain, Fireplace Room
Presenter: Kristina Coggin, Kathy Bates, Chiara Bunting, Annie Elliott
Designed for students interested in gaining editorial experience and the mentors who serve them, this panel will feature student editors of undergraduate, graduate, and national literary journals and magazines. Student editors will discuss what they have gained from these experiences and how literary editing has influenced their education and careers. In doing so, the panel will galvanize journals/programs that would like to work with student editors and offer inspiration to students who hope to gain editorial experience while still in school.
2. Poems Written With Community in Mind
Location: McCastlain, Art Lecture Hall
Presenter: Vida Cross
Vida Cross's work will explore all of the people and sensory details that populate the page. The themes that guide this work are neighborhood, neighbors, nature and crime. This is a 30 minute presentation that may include graphic images that demonstrate communal influences.
Location: McCastlain, Art Lecture Hall
Presenter: Vida Cross
Vida Cross's work will explore all of the people and sensory details that populate the page. The themes that guide this work are neighborhood, neighbors, nature and crime. This is a 30 minute presentation that may include graphic images that demonstrate communal influences.
3. Re-imagining Science Fiction thru the lens of Blackness.
Location: McCastlain, Art Lecture Hall
Presenter: Coffy Davis
Author Coffy Davis (Shoofly) will explore Afro-futurism and Science fiction creating a space for voices from the margins and examine how elements of Sci-Fi connect to oral traditions of Griots and African spirituality. While Afro-futurism is not a new concept; Octavia Butler and Zora Neale Hurston set the groundwork for today’s Jordan Peele’s and Marvel’s Black Panther, globally blackness has been largely ignored or marginalized. We will examine the intersectionality of Blackness and technology and contributions to Sci-Fi outside of usually limited literary contexts presented to us. Race, art, science and design can overlap to create aesthetically beautiful work.
Location: McCastlain, Art Lecture Hall
Presenter: Coffy Davis
Author Coffy Davis (Shoofly) will explore Afro-futurism and Science fiction creating a space for voices from the margins and examine how elements of Sci-Fi connect to oral traditions of Griots and African spirituality. While Afro-futurism is not a new concept; Octavia Butler and Zora Neale Hurston set the groundwork for today’s Jordan Peele’s and Marvel’s Black Panther, globally blackness has been largely ignored or marginalized. We will examine the intersectionality of Blackness and technology and contributions to Sci-Fi outside of usually limited literary contexts presented to us. Race, art, science and design can overlap to create aesthetically beautiful work.
Breakout Session II, 10:45 am–Noon
1. Writing Our Refusals
Location: McCastlain Fireplace Room
Presenters: Danielle Harms, Ananda Lima, Colleen Mayo, Angela Voras-Hills, and Sarah Kain Gutowski
Most writers have hang-ups and obsessions we love to write about, but how do we negotiate subjects that make us uncomfortable, feel vulnerable, or topics we've been told to avoid? Why might we write into subjects we once refused to explore? On this panel, writers will read their work and discuss how they approach such subjects, considering the rewards and consequences. The conversation will include how genre, form, and mode of writing help push us into these spaces, as well as prompts to get writers questioning their own refusals.
Location: McCastlain Fireplace Room
Presenters: Danielle Harms, Ananda Lima, Colleen Mayo, Angela Voras-Hills, and Sarah Kain Gutowski
Most writers have hang-ups and obsessions we love to write about, but how do we negotiate subjects that make us uncomfortable, feel vulnerable, or topics we've been told to avoid? Why might we write into subjects we once refused to explore? On this panel, writers will read their work and discuss how they approach such subjects, considering the rewards and consequences. The conversation will include how genre, form, and mode of writing help push us into these spaces, as well as prompts to get writers questioning their own refusals.
2. What Boils Up: The Art of Sequence Poems
Location: McCastlain Art Lecture Hall
Presenters: Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Hyejung Kook, Charlotte Pence, and Anna V.Q. Ross
Brenda Hillman once said, "Each piece [of a sequence of poems] should be an isolated gem"—A gem that is shaped by the pressure placed on it by the rest of the poems in a sequence. Indeed, through repetitions of structure, image and theme, this elongated form can both suggest and disrupt narrative and create a space where one can explore a topic from multiple directions, styles and voices. Anna V.Q. Ross, Charlotte Pence, Hyejung Kook, and Iris Jamahl Dunkle all work in this poetic form. Pence often couples the sequence with multiple personas to provide a poly-vocalic exploration of a singular subject. Kook considers compression and expansion of focus in the sequence, working with lyric, epic, and mythic materials from a variety of sources. In her recent project, Ross explores the structural constraints and repetitions of the diurnal sequence to uncover narrative and thematic threads, contextualizing motherhood and the so-called domestic within the politics and violence's of an uncertain world. And Dunkle's most recent poem sequence is based on an erasure of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath that explores the erasure of the writer Sanora Babb and the narratives of female stories from the Dust Bowl era. In this panel, each poet will share work from recent projects and share the ways in which writing in sequence enlarges and informs their poetic practice. We will end with a Q&A discussion based on Heather McHugh's theory of the sequence's ability to provoke the "consequential."
Location: McCastlain Art Lecture Hall
Presenters: Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Hyejung Kook, Charlotte Pence, and Anna V.Q. Ross
Brenda Hillman once said, "Each piece [of a sequence of poems] should be an isolated gem"—A gem that is shaped by the pressure placed on it by the rest of the poems in a sequence. Indeed, through repetitions of structure, image and theme, this elongated form can both suggest and disrupt narrative and create a space where one can explore a topic from multiple directions, styles and voices. Anna V.Q. Ross, Charlotte Pence, Hyejung Kook, and Iris Jamahl Dunkle all work in this poetic form. Pence often couples the sequence with multiple personas to provide a poly-vocalic exploration of a singular subject. Kook considers compression and expansion of focus in the sequence, working with lyric, epic, and mythic materials from a variety of sources. In her recent project, Ross explores the structural constraints and repetitions of the diurnal sequence to uncover narrative and thematic threads, contextualizing motherhood and the so-called domestic within the politics and violence's of an uncertain world. And Dunkle's most recent poem sequence is based on an erasure of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath that explores the erasure of the writer Sanora Babb and the narratives of female stories from the Dust Bowl era. In this panel, each poet will share work from recent projects and share the ways in which writing in sequence enlarges and informs their poetic practice. We will end with a Q&A discussion based on Heather McHugh's theory of the sequence's ability to provoke the "consequential."
Lunch 12:15–1:15 pm
Breakout Session III 1:30–2:45 pm
1. Not Apart, But A Part Of: C.D. Wright's Locality and Life
Location: McCastlain, Art Lecture Hall
Presenters: Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Han VanderHart, and Nicole Callihan
Well, this panel hopes to deepen the conversation–or as C.D. might say “the blanketyblankblank–”of C.D. Wright's legacy among her readers and inheritors, bringing together aspects of her personal life and poetic practice to illuminate the breadth of her work. Topics will include Wright’s sonic play, particularly her Southern poetics; her intimate, tenuous connections with men; and her sustaining, prolific friendships with women.
The panel will close with a generative writing session inspired by C.D. Wright poetry.
Location: McCastlain, Art Lecture Hall
Presenters: Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Han VanderHart, and Nicole Callihan
Well, this panel hopes to deepen the conversation–or as C.D. might say “the blanketyblankblank–”of C.D. Wright's legacy among her readers and inheritors, bringing together aspects of her personal life and poetic practice to illuminate the breadth of her work. Topics will include Wright’s sonic play, particularly her Southern poetics; her intimate, tenuous connections with men; and her sustaining, prolific friendships with women.
The panel will close with a generative writing session inspired by C.D. Wright poetry.
2. Presence on the page
Location: McCastlain Fireplace Room
Presenters: Francine Conley, Caroline M. Mar, Adrienne G. Perry, and Somayeh Shams
The Rabble Collective will present a creative reading followed by a panel discussion exploring the theme of presence. Presence can mean many things — the now, the way a person carries herself, a tense for writing. To our collective, presence means radical hope, honesty, resistance, and the practice of a love ethic. Presence also means responding to the urgent challenges of our times, whether the climate crisis, technological developments with Al, threats to democracy, or the epidemic of loneliness.
C.D. Wright was certainly a poet of presence - being present in a moment, with language, with an idea - or, as she once phrased it, "Uncommitted people don't hold my interest period." As we consider presence, we ask, "What is important to commit our attention to as writers? How might we pay attention to it in our art?" Through this reading and panel we seek to examine and engage with our audience about the meaning of presence in poetry and prose, including the literal, metaphorical, abstract, and associative.
Location: McCastlain Fireplace Room
Presenters: Francine Conley, Caroline M. Mar, Adrienne G. Perry, and Somayeh Shams
The Rabble Collective will present a creative reading followed by a panel discussion exploring the theme of presence. Presence can mean many things — the now, the way a person carries herself, a tense for writing. To our collective, presence means radical hope, honesty, resistance, and the practice of a love ethic. Presence also means responding to the urgent challenges of our times, whether the climate crisis, technological developments with Al, threats to democracy, or the epidemic of loneliness.
C.D. Wright was certainly a poet of presence - being present in a moment, with language, with an idea - or, as she once phrased it, "Uncommitted people don't hold my interest period." As we consider presence, we ask, "What is important to commit our attention to as writers? How might we pay attention to it in our art?" Through this reading and panel we seek to examine and engage with our audience about the meaning of presence in poetry and prose, including the literal, metaphorical, abstract, and associative.
Breakout Session IV, 3:00–4:15 pm
1. From Destruction to Transformation: Notes Toward an Ecofeminist Grief Poetics
Location: McCastlain, Art Lecture Hall
Presenters: Nadia Alexis, Melissa Ginsburg, and Claire Wahmanholm
Four poets, Nadia Alexis, Melissa Ginsburg, and Claire Wahmanholm will discuss and read from new work. These writers navigate issues of gender, power, and survival in an era of climate catastrophe, personal trauma, and increasing limits on the lives of women and girls.
Our poems cannot be separated from our physical and social environments, from the violence endemic to nature, from oppressive personal and political circumstances, or from the precarity of our threatened and dying ecosystem. How can we acknowledge complicity with the threat while identifying with the threatened? How can we celebrate and catalog the natural world while maintaining a sense of urgency? What agency do we have in the face of catastrophe?
As we wrestle with these questions, our work explores a range of issues: womanhood, motherhood and other forms of caretaking, personal loss, female strength, spiritual estrangement. We turn to the natural world as a source of healing and connection, to witness its beauty and energy, and to grieve its destruction.
This is a poetics which veers away from the controlled aesthetics of high lyricism in the face of an urgent need to disclose, to occupy language with our real selves, personalities, autobiographies, imaginations. Drawing from ecofabulist, confessional, elegiac, and performative modes, our poems are interested in liberation, in uncontainable nature; its (and our) capacity for transformation, even while steeped in damage and loss.
Location: McCastlain, Art Lecture Hall
Presenters: Nadia Alexis, Melissa Ginsburg, and Claire Wahmanholm
Four poets, Nadia Alexis, Melissa Ginsburg, and Claire Wahmanholm will discuss and read from new work. These writers navigate issues of gender, power, and survival in an era of climate catastrophe, personal trauma, and increasing limits on the lives of women and girls.
Our poems cannot be separated from our physical and social environments, from the violence endemic to nature, from oppressive personal and political circumstances, or from the precarity of our threatened and dying ecosystem. How can we acknowledge complicity with the threat while identifying with the threatened? How can we celebrate and catalog the natural world while maintaining a sense of urgency? What agency do we have in the face of catastrophe?
As we wrestle with these questions, our work explores a range of issues: womanhood, motherhood and other forms of caretaking, personal loss, female strength, spiritual estrangement. We turn to the natural world as a source of healing and connection, to witness its beauty and energy, and to grieve its destruction.
This is a poetics which veers away from the controlled aesthetics of high lyricism in the face of an urgent need to disclose, to occupy language with our real selves, personalities, autobiographies, imaginations. Drawing from ecofabulist, confessional, elegiac, and performative modes, our poems are interested in liberation, in uncontainable nature; its (and our) capacity for transformation, even while steeped in damage and loss.
2. This panel seeks to unpack poets relationship to influence, encourage attendees to return to the works they love, and find their poetic ancestry as a path to nurturing their own poems
Location: McCastlain, Fireplace Room
Presenters: Judy Halebsky, Molly Sutton Kiefer, and Shana Youngdahl
Creative lineage is about more than just knowing the history of a tradition, it is about building connections with the texts that move us. It is about expanding our families as we grow as writers, and learning from those who have come before us, as well as those who are growing alongside of us. But how do we find the work that will feed us over a lifetime? How do we build and keep communities with one another, and on our bookshelves, that will grow as we do? Ideally, these connections feed us as writers as we mature in our craft, interests and lives. Poets on this panel discuss how they write themselves out of tradition and into communities, how their influences have developed over time and what has stayed the same as they have grown as writers. This includes how they have worked with their peers and students to identify lineage and correspond with poetic movements as a way to grow creatively and collectively.
Location: McCastlain, Fireplace Room
Presenters: Judy Halebsky, Molly Sutton Kiefer, and Shana Youngdahl
Creative lineage is about more than just knowing the history of a tradition, it is about building connections with the texts that move us. It is about expanding our families as we grow as writers, and learning from those who have come before us, as well as those who are growing alongside of us. But how do we find the work that will feed us over a lifetime? How do we build and keep communities with one another, and on our bookshelves, that will grow as we do? Ideally, these connections feed us as writers as we mature in our craft, interests and lives. Poets on this panel discuss how they write themselves out of tradition and into communities, how their influences have developed over time and what has stayed the same as they have grown as writers. This includes how they have worked with their peers and students to identify lineage and correspond with poetic movements as a way to grow creatively and collectively.
Breakout Session V 4:30-5:45 pm
1. The Persona Poem: Navigating our emotional landscapes by inhabiting another's world
Location: McCastlain, Fireplace Room
Presenters: Frances Donovan, Jennifer Martelli, Anne Elezabeth Pluto, and Anna V. Q. Ross
In 1957, country musician, Harold Lloyd Jenkins, looked at a road map, spotted Conway, Arkansas and Twitty, Texas, and became "Conway Twitty. " We can't think of a more perfect place to discuss the use of persona than Conway, the namesake of one of the greatest rockabilly country voices in America.
Rebecca Hazelton advises us, Don 't write what you know; write what you aren 't. Persona is a centuries-old poetic technique that allows the poet and reader to engage differently with a poem; to see something or someone through the eyes of a mask. Poets Frances Donovan, Jennifer Martelli, Annie Pluto, and Anna V.Q. Ross will discuss their use of persona in their own work which examines trauma, grief, politics, love, and family. Donovan employs a variety of personae to evoke the fractured self that results from a traumatic childhood. Martelli's most recent books explore misogyny and violence through the historical figures of Kitty Genovese and Geraldine Ferraro. Annie Pluto uses persona to explore Shakespeare's women. Ross combines persona and ekphrasis to explore the erasure of women through motherhood and gender roles. They will talk about how this technique presents its own freedom and danger: how does it allow us to explore our inner landscapes? how do we decide which stories are ours to tell? What happens when we change who we are on the page?
We will also read from our work that best exemplifies the use of persona
We'll end with a Q & A.
2. Appreciating the Fray: Creating & Nurturing Virtual Spaces
Location: McCastlain, Art Lecture Hall
Presenters: Nicole Callihan, Kai Coggin, Caitlin McDonnell, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, and Sara Wallace
How might we renegotiate the idea that a poet’s work is always solitary? In what ways can we thrive if we come together? In “An American Poetry Vigil,” C.D. Wright asserts that “antithetical poetries can and should coexist… [that] they serve to define their other to a much more exacting degree than would be possible in the absence of the one or the other.” In this generative workshop, six women of a dozen who came together over Zoom during the height of the pandemic across boundaries of space, time, age, education, dis/ability, and sexual orientation, will share the generative writing model–a model of creativity, flexibility, and acceptance–which has coalesced into thousands of poem drafts, many of which have gone on to be revised and published. Panelists will first share the origins of their group and offer an exemplary mock-up of their model, then invite participants to divide into groups of 5-6 where they’ll closely read a poem together, generate a prompt, write, and share. “While I am not always equal to it,” Wright contends, “I appreciate the fray.” Participants will leave with a fresh draft, a fiercely positive approach to radical vulnerability, and an enlightened sense of community.
1. The Persona Poem: Navigating our emotional landscapes by inhabiting another's world
Location: McCastlain, Fireplace Room
Presenters: Frances Donovan, Jennifer Martelli, Anne Elezabeth Pluto, and Anna V. Q. Ross
In 1957, country musician, Harold Lloyd Jenkins, looked at a road map, spotted Conway, Arkansas and Twitty, Texas, and became "Conway Twitty. " We can't think of a more perfect place to discuss the use of persona than Conway, the namesake of one of the greatest rockabilly country voices in America.
Rebecca Hazelton advises us, Don 't write what you know; write what you aren 't. Persona is a centuries-old poetic technique that allows the poet and reader to engage differently with a poem; to see something or someone through the eyes of a mask. Poets Frances Donovan, Jennifer Martelli, Annie Pluto, and Anna V.Q. Ross will discuss their use of persona in their own work which examines trauma, grief, politics, love, and family. Donovan employs a variety of personae to evoke the fractured self that results from a traumatic childhood. Martelli's most recent books explore misogyny and violence through the historical figures of Kitty Genovese and Geraldine Ferraro. Annie Pluto uses persona to explore Shakespeare's women. Ross combines persona and ekphrasis to explore the erasure of women through motherhood and gender roles. They will talk about how this technique presents its own freedom and danger: how does it allow us to explore our inner landscapes? how do we decide which stories are ours to tell? What happens when we change who we are on the page?
We will also read from our work that best exemplifies the use of persona
We'll end with a Q & A.
2. Appreciating the Fray: Creating & Nurturing Virtual Spaces
Location: McCastlain, Art Lecture Hall
Presenters: Nicole Callihan, Kai Coggin, Caitlin McDonnell, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, and Sara Wallace
How might we renegotiate the idea that a poet’s work is always solitary? In what ways can we thrive if we come together? In “An American Poetry Vigil,” C.D. Wright asserts that “antithetical poetries can and should coexist… [that] they serve to define their other to a much more exacting degree than would be possible in the absence of the one or the other.” In this generative workshop, six women of a dozen who came together over Zoom during the height of the pandemic across boundaries of space, time, age, education, dis/ability, and sexual orientation, will share the generative writing model–a model of creativity, flexibility, and acceptance–which has coalesced into thousands of poem drafts, many of which have gone on to be revised and published. Panelists will first share the origins of their group and offer an exemplary mock-up of their model, then invite participants to divide into groups of 5-6 where they’ll closely read a poem together, generate a prompt, write, and share. “While I am not always equal to it,” Wright contends, “I appreciate the fray.” Participants will leave with a fresh draft, a fiercely positive approach to radical vulnerability, and an enlightened sense of community.
Closing Reception, 6–7:30 pm
Location: Ballroom, McCastlain
Location: Ballroom, McCastlain
