“We learn when we take risks. We learn when we do something we have not done before…otherwise we are not learning.” – Dr. David Docterman, “Developing Academic Mindsets for Literacy,” 2016.

We are seeking proposals for contributions to an edited collection of essays, titled Unruly Fictions: Geographies of Genre in the Contemporary Global Novel, focused on how the contemporary global novel expands the generic boundaries of fiction. This collection returns to a question that is at this point familiar terrain within literary studies: what is a novel? Our goal in this collection is to approach this question through scholarly essays that span a broad geographic scope and rethink the idea of “global” within and beyond established binaries: global norths and souths, easts and wests, colonial centers and peripheries, travelers and travelees. 

Between the New Negro and Black Arts Movements

Langston Hughes's long career spanned these two movements, with his first collection, The Weary Blues, appearing in 1926, and his final collection, The Panther and the Lash, appearing two months after his death in 1967. The Langston Hughes Society invites papers related to the decades between the New Negro and Black Arts Movements, or to artists who are not typically associated with those movements.

In a world saturated with images in which audiovisual storytelling has dominated for decades shaping the aesthetics and expectations of the audience, and in which binge-consuming TV series on digital platforms and homemade videos on social media have become the trend of the last few years, it is quite unexpected to witness the reemergence of a storytelling that resists visual representation.  Of course, audio storytelling is not new; Stories voiced for the ear to listen have been with us since early on, for as long as there have been stories to share. What has changed in recent years, whetting our story-listening appetite anew, are the computing technologies ever rapidly developed for audio production, distribution and reception.

https://www.acla.org/poetic-language-now

Organizer: Rebecca Kosick

Co-Organizer: Nathan Taylor

Poetry has exploded off the page in recent decades, making a prominent home for itself in new semiotic and material environments. Poems circulate on subway systems, through platforms and apps, on placards at protests, in art museums, and the built environment. These poems, in turn, are composed in a variety of human and nonhuman languages, from Spanglish to mathematics, code to GPT-language models. 

Literary Druid is a journal that fosters research and creative writing in English. It welcomes all nationals to contribute for learning and research purposes. The perspective of Literary Druid is to create a niche platform for academicians and patrons to share their intellect to enrich the English language and Literature. I welcome all to learn and share.