african-american

44th Annual West Indian Literature Conference

Freedom, Creative Spirit, & the Poetic Imagination

Where: University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus

When: October 7-11, 2026

Abstracts: Proposals are to be submitted by June 1, 2026

How can you free people? . . . When every move you make is to get them to accept conditions of unfreedom, when you use power to twist and corrupt what it is to be human, when you ask people to accept shame as triumph and indignity as progress? —Earl Lovelace, Salt (1996)

Panel proposal #6 for the ASAP 17 Conference 
Madison, WI | October 15-17, 2026

How Soon is Now? Co-Constructing Hope for the Collective Present

The American Literature II: Literature after 1870 Permanent Section of the Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA) is seeking proposals for this year’s in-person convention in Chicago, Illinois. This year’s theme for the conference is “After the Archive”; accordingly, the Permanent Section encourages presentations that focus on the notion of the archive. Some questions to be considered in context of American literature after 1870 are:

Session Abstract: The genre of African American poetry has a long legacy of both preserving tradition and evolving to suit current times and places. This session invites discussion of the defining features that have been maintained over time as well as patterns of bold experimentation. Rather than seeing tradition and innovation as opposing aesthetic directions, this session hopes to examine ways they have co-existed in this genre and been mutually fruitful. 

CFP: The Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA)

2026 MMLA Convention—12-14 November 2026—Chicago, IL

Convention Dates: November 12-14, 2026
Convention Location: voco Chicago Downtown-Riverwalk (350 W. Wolf Point Plaza Building 1, Chicago, IL 60654)

2026 Convention Theme: “After the Archive.”

Convention Panel: Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies Permanent Section

Theme: After the Archive: Archival Recovery, BIPOC Pedagogical Labor, and Lived Resistance

Please consider submitting abstracts for a guaranteed stream of panels on Early American Environments to be held at next year’s Society of Early Americanists conference (March 18-20, 2027, Chicago; https://www.societyofearlyamericanists.org/conferences/upcoming). We are interested in scholarship that considers questions of environment and ecology in the early Americas, broadly defined to include the transatlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific worlds. How are concerns such as climate change, extractivism, and environmental justice or methodologies such as ecocriticism shaping our reading of early American texts and materials?

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

Book project: Sinners Reader: The Blues, Black Horror, and the Jim Crow South Editor, DuEwa M. Frazier (editor of Introduction to Afrofuturism: A Mixtape in Black Literature & Arts)

Resources for American Literary Study (Penn State UP), a peer-reviewed journal of archival and bibliographical scholarship in American literature, invites submissions for our upcoming 2026 adn 2027 issues. Covering all periods and genres of American literature, RALS welcomes both traditional and digital approaches to archival and bibliographical analysis. We also welcome proposals for our "Prospects" series in which scholars forecast future developments (and identify scholarly gaps) in the study of major authors.

Instructions for submissions may be found @ http://www.psupress.org/Journals/jnls_rals.html. 

DEADLINE: April 5, 2026

Meditations on The Black Garden

Special Issue of African American Review, 2027

Guest-edited by Brandy Underwood (California State University, Northridge); Mia Alafaireet (The University of Texas at Austin); Samantha Pinto (The University of Texas at Austin)

Abstracts due to AARBlackgardensSI@gmail.com by May 1, 2026.

Call for Abstracts:

Afrofuturism in African Literature
Edited Volume — Call for Contributions

Children’s accounts of violence occupy a paradoxical space in public discourse: they are framed as both essential, unquestionable evidence, and, sometimes at the same time, as unreliable and prone to outside influence. Both framings rely on cultural constructions of the child’s “innocence.” This panel invites papers examining narratives of violence told by children, with a particular interest in experiences of institutional or state violence. How do these narratives complicate familiar tropes of children as voiceless victims in need of saving, or of certain topics as exclusively “adult” or “childish”?  How do child narrators themselves exploit, resist, and play with or into these tropes?

This is a guaranteed panel for the MLA's Teaching of Literature Forum.  This roundtable discusses experiences and pedagogical approaches to teaching literature under authoritarianism and state violence widely conceived. Panelists discuss whitewashing and erasing literary histories, global efforts at repressing liberatory literacy, heightened classroom surveillance, teaching anti-fascist literature, and more.

Deadline for submissions: Friday, March 27, 2026

Please send 250-500-word abstracts and CVs to Danica Savonick (danicasavonick@gmail.com ) and Brandi Locke (blocke@udel.edu). 

This sessions welcomes 300-word abstracts that actively engage the ways that Black-girl centered literature (novel, poetry, media, etc.) reimagines modes of resistance, resilience, and world-making through historical and modern definitions of freedom and emancipation.