CFP: E. E. Cummings Sessions at the American Literature Association’s 37th Annual Conference, Chicago, Illinois, May 20-23, 2026 

The E. E. Cummings Society will sponsor a session (or two) at the 2026 American Literature Association conference in Chicago [ https://americanliteratureassociation.org/ ]. We invite proposals for papers on any aspect of Cummings’ life and/or work. Proposals that touch upon the following topics will be especially welcome: 

• Close readings of individual Cummings poems
• Cummings the Modernist: Making it New (and Now)
• Letters, syllables, words, and spaces in Cummings’ poems
• Prominent natural images in Cummings’ poems, e.g., leaves and/or birds
• is 5 at 100.
• Cummings’ poetry and prose during and after WWII
• Cummings’ notion of “growth” and other metaphors of transformation [“never to rest and never to have:only to grow” (CP 462)]
• Cummings’ “philosophy of life”— “transcendental, romantic, prelapsarian, organicist, and individualistic”? (Friedman, Art 66). Discuss.
• Cummings’ prose (The Enormous Room, A Miscellany, EIMI, i: six nonlectures, Letters) and theatre works (Him, Tom, Santa Claus)
• Cummings and Re-Vision [For some drafts of poems, see the Cummings Archive: https://cummingsarchive.org/ ]

 Submit 250-400-word abstracts to Michael Webster (websterm@gvsu.edu) by January 28, 2026.

 For further information, consult the web page of the American Literature Association conference.

 Work Cited

 Friedman, Norman. E. E. Cummings: The Art of His Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1960. [Project Muse: https://muse.jhu.edu/book/71698 ]