[Update] Southern Writers/Southern Writing 14 July 2011

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SWSW - Note Corrected Submission Date

Southern Writers/Southern Writing
Graduate Conference
2011 Call for Papers

The 17th 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 2011 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, 14-16 July 2011. The keynote speaker will be Dr. Martyn Bone, associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi, and author of The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction (Louisiana State University Press, 2005) and the editor of Perspectives on Barry Hannah (University Press of Mississippi, 2007). He is currently writing about literary representations of the U.S. South in transnational contexts (with a particular focus on migrant labor).

The conference regularly features panels on authors as traditional as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, and Zora Neale Hurston as well as contemporary writers like Cormac McCarthy, Lewis Nordan, Barry Hannah, Fannie Flagg, Larry Brown, and Randall Kenan. Topics for papers or panels are not restricted to literature, however. Especially welcome are submissions on

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

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 critical works is 15 minutes.

Please send a 200–300-word abstract of a critical work or an entire creative work to: swswgradconference@gmail.com. Panel proposals that 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 Friday, 14 March 2011. For more information contact Kyle Schlett at swswgradconference@gmail.com.