cfp.english.upenn.edu

Call for Papers and Creative Submissions
Eighth Biennial Southern Women Writers Conference
Berry College
Mount Berry, GA
September 24-26, 2009

Conference speakers to include: Judith Ortiz Cofer, Allison Hedge Coke, Natalie Daise, Thulani Davis, Connie May Fowler, Sarah Gordon, Melissa Fay Greene, Sharyn McCrumb, Marsha Norman, Mab Segrest, and Natasha Trethewey

Since its inception in 1994, the Southern Women Writers Conference has been devoted to showcasing the works of well known and emerging southern women writers, expanding the literary canon, and developing critical and theoretical understandings of traditions and innovations in southern women’s writing.

The theme for the 2009 conference is “Many Souths: Remembering, Sustaining, Creating.” In recent decades, monolithic conceptions of the U.S. South have given way to more nuanced and particularized ways of understanding and representing the region. Yet even a cursory glance at the literary history of “the South” reveals writing marked from the very beginning by an awareness and appreciation of localized, subregional difference. Women writers have given us indelible images of regions within the region, from the mountain South to the Mississippi Delta, the Low Country to Cajun Country, and the continental-flavored coastal cities to the suburban Sunbelt. Coinciding with these geographical subregions, differences in gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, sexuality, and spirituality reveal additional “Souths” within “the South.” This year’s conference theme invites attendees to explore the ways in which southern women have used the written word to evoke these and other Souths, whether through remembering, sustaining, or creating. We invite critical and creative submissions that explore the full range of approaches to the theme, including but not limited to:
• canonical and non-canonical works of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and drama
• non-discursive works (film, photography, performance art, etc.)
• works by and about women involved in remembering or preserving vanished or vanishing regions or concepts of the South
• works by and about women involved in creating visions of New Souths
• institutions (penal, mental health, educational, religious, political)
• ecological zones
• tribal homelands and indigenous southerners
• transnational and diasporic Souths
• domestic spaces and/or workplaces
• Georgia writers

Critical Submissions: Please send 300-word abstracts or completed papers that can be read aloud in twenty minutes. If submitting a proposal for a panel, please include the names of participants and abstracts for individual papers. Male scholars are encouraged to participate.

Creative submissions: Please submit creative work (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or drama), appropriate to the conference’s thematic focus, for a twenty-minute reading. Authors should be women who meet at least one of the following criteria: were born in or grew up in the U.S. South; currently live in the U.S. South; write about the U.S. South.

All submissions should be postmarked no later than Monday, April 20, 2009 and may be sent via e-mail as attachments in MS Word format to swwc@berry.edu or by regular mail to: Southern Women Writers Conference; Berry College; Box 490350; Mt. Berry, GA 30149. Requests for multi-media equipment should accompany submissions. For more information, visit the conference website at www.berry.edu/swwc/2009.