poetry

Color and texture are often perceived as “wallpaper” – a humdrum backdrop against which the action of a literary work unfolds. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper; Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls…; and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, among many others, purposely and effectively challenge such perception. This creative session (re)considers the author as artist, (re)casting color and texture as deliberate, meaningful components of literary experience. Open to considering a variety of authors and genres in relation to its theme, this creative session particularly welcomes papers highlighting color and/or texture as relate to either Gilman, or Shange, or Walker.

The MLA has recently opened slots for additional “just-in-time” sessions for this year’s convention (to be held virtually from January 7-10, 2021). The session organizers invite abstracts for 15-minute presentations exploring the work of William Wordsworth in light of this year’s convention theme of ‘persistence.’

Most poets have written ars poetica to define their role and explain the meaning of their poetry for themselves and for society.  Some poets see poetry as a purely verbal act, a creative challenge to revitalize language. Others see themselves as a spokesperson for the silent or a prophet seer to bring awareness to the reader. Many poets are skeptical of the value of their poetry for society; they see their writing as a “useless” act meaningful only for themselves. This panel seeks to examine how different Latin American poets view their poetry and whether their perspective changes or is expanded in times of crisis: civil war, dictatorship, epidemics, revolution, ecological crisis, etc.

Because in the United States access to a quality education
is raced and classed, educational opportunities--or rather,
the dearth of them--are linked to imprisonment. Kathryn
Hanson and Deborah Stipek write, “Dropouts are 3.5
times more likely to be arrested than high school
graduates. Nationally, 68 percent of all males in prison do
not have a high school diploma.” Even more strikingly,
Begin to Read reports that 85% of juveniles tried in
juvenile court and over 60% of incarcerated adults are
functionally illiterate.

The website devoted to Muriel Rukeyser invites submission of short essays (for instance on individual poems); blogs (on any topic related to Rukeyser); approaches to teaching Rukeyser's work; creative work inspired by Rukeyser; and reviews of recent works on or related to the poet's life and work.  We are also interested in discussions/summaries of dissertation research, interesting archival finds, visual material, etc.

For inquiries, please contact Elisabeth Daumer at edaumer@emich.edu and visit the website at http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/.

MELOW (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the World), in collaboration with the Dept of English, Shoolini University, Solan, invites you to participate in its 20th International Conference in Oct 2020 (exact dates to be announced. The theme this time is “Four Hundred Years of American Literature” which aims at taking a look at the landmarks that dot the literary landscape of the USA.

submissions are currently invited for issue seven of adjacent pineapple. 

this issue will be edited from Glasgow by Colin Herd and Dubai by Anushree Prashant. 

submissions accepted on a rolling basis. deadline for inclusion in issue 7 is 30th September.

we are interested in poetry, fiction, non-fiction and hybrid forms of writing and text art. work in translation is welcome. there are no guidelines in terms of length, style or formatting. 

Please consider submitting a manuscript for our special issue, Opening the Ecological Text, in the peer-reviewed, open-access journal, Humanities.  Here is the call for papers and the link where you can submit:

Call for Papers

SPECIAL ISSUE OF SPENSER STUDIES:

                        “COMPANIONABLE THINKING: SPENSER WITH…”

Edited by

David Hillman, Joe Moshenska, and Namratha Rao

CFP deadline: 30 September 2020

FIRST REMINDER

CFP: Poetry and the Victorian Visual Imagination: New Conversations 

A special issue of Victorian Poetry, Winter 2022

Guest Editors: Jill Ehnenn and Heather Bozant Witcher

Deadline for Submissions: August 31, 2020

When Germans and Americans move back and forth between the continents, they participate in an important cross pollination influencing both the intellectual and artistic worlds of both cultures. Whether they came with the waves of people that journeyed westward in the wake of the German Revolution of 1848, or because of wars and economic needs, or from diaspora across Europe they brought new ideas and artistry to America. During the maturation, commercial expansion and the technological explosion of the new world in the twentieth century, programs fostering education like the Fulbright exchange, sent millions of Americans back to Germany to study, teach, report, work and to live permanently.

As José Esteban Muñoz has argued, the antirelational or antisocial thesis—the polemic against reproduction, the insistence that the figure of the child serves only to promise a collective future that thwarts and forecloses anything not assimilable to heteronormativity—fails to account for modes of futurity that are already legible now, particularly in aesthetic objects that serve as “maps” of concrete utopian thinking. Such maps, historically relational and collectively forged, open spaces for thinking about a future that is not yet here—but also help us locate elements of the utopian that are already present.

Addressing 'The Memoir Problem': Blocked Memories, Documentary Traces, and Hybrid Forms (Creative Panel)

North American Poetry2000-2020/1: Poetics, Aesthetics, Politics

14-16 October 2021, Institut Universitaire de France, Paris

Organized by Vincent Broqua (Université Paris 8), Olivier Brossard (Université Gustave Eiffel / Institut Universitaire de France), Abigail Lang (Université de Paris)