poetry

Writing the Black Country is a blog edited by Dr Paul McDonald and R. M. Francis, from the Centre of Transnational and Transcultural Research at University of Wolverhampton in the UK. It's designed to showcase writing about England's industrial Midlands, and we are interested particularly in poetry and short prose pieces that focus on specific areas within the region.

We're less interested in writing about the region generally, but are looking for site, place or area specific work. For example, using a town, a street, a site as a point of departure or as setting for a work of fiction or poetry.

In time, this blog will transition, becoming an online, interactive literary map.

The idea of a “lost generation” still has a hold on the popular imagination over ninety years after it was popularized via the epigraph of The Sun Also Rises.  For literary scholars and historians, though, that idea is critically worn-out if not simply useless.  This panel seeks to understand anew this old idea.  Questions to be addressed include but are not limited to:

How has the idea of the lost generation been critically and historically misunderstood and/or abused?

Call for Participation for

The Fourth International Symposium on Intermedial Studies

Intermedial Practice and Theory in Comparison
Hangzhou, China, 15-17 November 2018

La Ceiba: The Undergraduate Journal of Central American Studies is now accepting submissions for its spring 2018 special issue, themed “DACA, TPS, & Uncertainty: Immigrant Lives in the Contemporary U.S.” From the White House and State Capitols to city councils, immigration policies are currently intensely debated and contested, resulting in a myriad of changes in federal, state, and municipal laws.

This CFP seeks work that examines the intersection of animal studies with contemporary ecopoetry from around the world. The human/nonhuman distinction entails an interdiction as much as establishes the safety of a boundary that maintains human hegemony in relation to other species. Yet, the animal can powerfully redirect attention toward the necessity of humility as well as deconstruct ideas of autonomy and superiority too often entangled with human self-understanding. This panel asks how the animal negates or reifies the human/nonhuman distinction, but also how the animal speaks, or is silenced, in contemporary ecopoetry. How does the animal appear as an ethical imperative in the age of the Anthropocene and of the Sixth Mass Extinction?