Epistemologies and Pathways to Truth

The University of Maryland’s Graduate English Organization (GEO) invites creative work relating to the theme of “Epistemologies and Pathways to Truth” for our 19th annual graduate student conference, to be held in person on Friday, March 27, 2026 at UMD, College Park. In conjunction with our standard call for papers, we are also asking for creative works that engage broadly with ideas of truth or knowledge. There are many possibilities for how these pieces could operate, so all methods, forms, and genres are welcome: short or excerpted prose work, poetry, non-fiction, lyrical essays, art focused research, hybrid works, etc. 

Submissions of five pages for prose (approx. 1500 words), three to five poems (no more than seven pages), or concise excerpts of hybrid/multi-modal work should be submitted to englgeo@umd.edu with the subject line “Conference Submission Creative Work” by Friday Dec 5th, 2025 for early decision and January 5th for final decision. Readings of work should last for approximately 10 minutes. Potential topics can focus on a wide range of issues, including (but not limited to):

• Narratives that shed light on living within a “knowledge” 

• Illustrating the way in which truth is recognized, reconciled, or confronted as a function of self, sensory, personal history, etc. 

• Describing the process of truth or belief

• Challenging preexisting notions of truth

• Engaging in ekphrastic processes of “understanding” or “knowing” 

• Thinking about how we know ourselves or our interiorities

• Posing questions of the self, society, the mind, history, etc.

• Using sensory or phenomena to assert knowing

• Broadening queer approaches to knowledge

• Intertextual projects that think and combine texts

• Hybrid works that expand knowledge beyond the page