Recasting American Literature through the Federal Writers’ Project

deadline for submissions: 
January 17, 2025
full name / name of organization: 
JJ Butts and Sara Rutkowski
contact email: 

CFP: 

We are seeking participants for a roundtable for the American Literature Association’s 2025 Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, May 21-24, 2025. This roundtable aims to further our understanding of the Federal Writers’ Project’s (FWP) literary legacy. 

 

In addition to mobilizing marginalized writers, the Project set out to document the daily lives of Americans whose experiences had been largely ignored in a white-dominant American culture. The association that many famous writers had with the FWP in the 1930s is now well established. Writers like Nelson Algren, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Anzia Yezierska to name but a few, are often cited as having been influenced as participants in the New Deal program that sent thousands of unemployed writers out to document the nation during the Great Depression. We have increasingly come to understand the FWP as crucial to the shaping of American literature during and after the Depression, as in recent years a resurging interest in the FWP has inspired a range of exciting new scholarship that highlights these connections. Indeed, the FWP’s efforts in the words of Wendy Griswold, to “recast” both the shape of and recognized participants in our national identity and to bridge cultural divides by telling the stories of Americans from all walks of life left an indelible mark on the literature of the postwar era and beyond.

However, the project of tracing the FWP literary legacies remains unfinished. There are so many more writers’ whose work both for and after the FWP is less well-known—Aurora Lucero-White, Roi Ottley, William Rollins, Eddie Shimano, Meridel Le Sueur, and Mari Tomasi among others. Moreover, there are literary works by FWP authors, connections to the FWP, and cultural dynamics driven by the FWP that remain underexplored. We’re interested in proposals for a roundtable discussion that consider how individual writers or communities of writers engaged with the FWP’s documentary methods and concerns, and we are particularly interested in proposals that trace how these engagements helped recast American culture and literature.

Please submit your proposal by January 17, 2025 at the link below: Completed papers should be short (roughly 5 pages).

https://tinyurl.com/mrwu54ks

We will notify participants of acceptance to the roundtable by January 27. The roundtable proposal will be submitted to the ALA conference committee.  

If you have any questions, please contact J.J. Butts (jj.butts@simpson.edu) and Sara Rutkowski (Sara.Rutkowski@kbcc.cuny.edu).

THEMES: Democracy, Pluralism, Representation, Race, Gender, Disability, Sexuality, Class, Labor, Minoritized Literatures, Children’s Literature, Documentary, Folk Culture, Oral History