cfp.english.upenn.edu

UPDATED DUE DATE FOR SUBMISSIONS BOTH CRITICAL AND CREATIVE IS 5:00PM ON MARCH 31, 2009. PLEASE EMAIL SWSWGRADCONFERENCE@GMAIL.COM WITH QUESTIONS!

The 15th Annual Southern Writers/Southern Writing Conference is a University of Mississippi Graduate Student event held in conjunction with the university's Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference.
Participants are encouraged to remain in Oxford after the SWSW Conference to attend the Faulkner Conference. More information about the 2009 Faulkner Conference will be available at www.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner/.

The Graduate Students in the Department of English invite you to submit abstracts exploring Southern literature and writers. Accepted submissions will be presented in Oxford, Mississippi, July 16-18, 2009. The keynote speaker will be Dr. Scott Romine, associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and author of The Narrative
Forms of Southern Community (LSU Press, 1999) and the recently published The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction(LSU Press, 2008).

Topics for papers or panels are not restricted to literature, however. We urge submissions on:

Defining "The South"
The U.S. South in Global contexts
Topics in race, gender, class, and identity
Southern space and place
Ecocriticism, travel narratives, nature writing, and the Southern landscape
Religion, gothic, and the grotesque
Folklore, material culture, and community
Letters, diaries, and periodicals
Oral culture, music, and food representation in Southern culture and literature

Although our conference regularly features panels on traditional Southern authors such as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, and Zora Neale Hurston, we would also like to promote panels this year on
contemporary authors such as Larry Brown, Lewis Nordan, Lee Smith, Fannie Flagg, ZZ Packer, and Edward P. Jones.

We also invite creative writers to submit poetry, short stories, or novel excerpts that deal with Southern themes or settings. These creative entries will be featured in a Friday night reading and reception at Off-
Square Books in downtown Oxford.

The conference reading limit for each paper presentation is 15 minutes.

Please send 200-300 word abstracts of critical work or entire creative works to: swswgradconference@gmail.com. Panel proposals which include three or four participants are also accepted. Please send your submissions as Word attachments and include your university affiliation, summer address, and e-mail address. The deadline for submissions is 5:00pm on UPDATED DUE DATE: March 31, 2009.

For more information, please contact swswgradconference_at_gmail.com