Thursday, June 17th, 2010
Location: VIRTUAL CONFERENCE
WLA Co-Presidents for 2020 will be Dr. Rebecca Lush, California State University San Marcos, and Dr. Kerry Fine, Arizona State University.
Information for Graduate Students:
Connecting with other grads:
The graduate students of the WLA have a Facebook group page that is used for networking. Simply request to join and one of the Graduate Student Representatives will add you to the group. Or, if you are not on Facebook, you can contact the grad reps directly about networking opportunities during the conference: Jillian Moore Bennion (jillian.bennion@gmail.com) & Surabhi Balachander (surabhib@umich.edu).
WLA Awards 2020:
Graduate students: Please consider submitting your essay for the J. Golden Taylor Award, the Dorys Crow Grover Awards, or the Louis Owens Award. All applications and accompanying materials are due by September 4th.
All presenters sharing creative work: Please consider submitting your WLA 2020 material for the Creative Writing Award. All applications and accompanying materials are due by September 4th.
We are ready to receive your submissions. The deadline is July 15, 2020.
All users of the WLA Conference Conftool portal need to create a new user account. Those from previous years have been deleted.
https://www.conftool.pro/wla-conference-2020/
Despite these less-than-ideal circumstances, we ask you to join us in focusing on the positives of this unexpected turn of events. An online meeting will allow us to try a nearly carbon neutral conference format which our sister organization ASLE has done in the past. We are also happy to have increased accessibility with an online environment. We recognize that online is not a substitute for the connection and experience we enjoy each year at our face-to-face meetings, but we hope to connect with you all virtually this October and then in person in Fall 2021 in Santa Fe.
October 21-24, 2020
Vortex Mosaic Surfboard, by Cherrie LaPorte. [2014]. Image courtesy of Cherrie LaPorte. Photo © Phil Ireland.
Due to the unusual and unprecedented public health concerns and attendant restrictions on university sponsored-travel related to COVID-19,the 2020 conference will be held virtually.
The American West and the western have long been nurtured by visual culture, in particular via the California-specific locations of Hollywood and its ties to the film industry and San Diego as the international headquarters for comic book culture. Drawing on this mixture, the theme “Graphic Wests” invites proposals that take up the graphic in all its connotations, from graphic content to visual texts as well as the intersections of the two when considering the varied literatures and cultural products of the North American West. We also invite papers that address the unique culture of Southern California, such as surf and coastal literatures, along with papers that examine California writers and themes.
The 2020 Distinguished Achievement Award winners include poet Juan Felipe Herrera (21st National Poet Laureate), and fiction author Stephen Graham Jones, whose works exemplify “Graphic Wests.” Confirmed speakers include: Stephen Graham Jones and graphic novelist, playwright, and singer/songwriter Arigon Starr.
Since we originally intended to host this meeting in Southern California, we are still interested in proposals that focus on issues related to California and the American West but as always, the WLA meeting remains interested in proposals that focus on any aspect of the literatures and cultures of the North American West (including Canada and Mexico).
In addition to proposals on any aspect of the literatures and cultures of the North American West, the WLA especially encourages panels and papers that explore the following topics:
• Comic books/graphic novels set in the West and/or western comics
• Filmic and televisual representations of the West/western
• Borderlands literature
• Graphic violence, language, and/or sexuality in the West/western
• Texts set in the West, or that take up western themes, that incorporate visual elements or make use of graphic design in their engagement with language
• Approaches to teaching texts and topics of the North American West
• California writers and texts (Le Guin, Steinbeck, Didion, Mary Austin, John Rollin Ridge, Helen Hunt Jackson, María Ruiz de Burton, etc.)
• Writers and texts that explore California surfing and beach culture
• The work of invited speaker Arigon Starr
• The work of Distinguished Achievement Award Winner Juan Felipe Herrera
• The work of Distinguished Achievement Award Winner Stephen Graham Jones
While we are still interested in traditional 4 person panels, this format may not be as captivating in an online format. We encourage proposals for innovative formats that will take advantage of the virtual (and graphic) nature of the conference. We are also implementing a range of formats including:
Lightning Talks – 5-6 presenters. Each with a 5-7 minute presentation time. Proposals can range from concise traditional-type presentations to Ignite or PechaKucha 20×20 style talks. Abstracts for Lightning Talks should be 200 words.
Conversation Panels – (Preformed Panels Only) Propose to help facilitate a focused conversation on a topic relevant to WLA members. Each scheduled conversation will have 2 or 3 leaders to share responsibility for its focus, depth, concreteness. This is NOT a traditional panel or a roundtable. This is a conversation that should include an audience participation component. Each of the 2 or 3 conversation leaders will submit an abstract of no more than 250 words explaining their individual contribution.
Public Intellectual Panels – (Preformed Panels Only) 3 presenters each with a 15-minute maximum for a talk designed particularly for an audience drawn from the general public. Be sure to identify your intended audience in your abstract (your local community gathered at the public library, a retirement community, etc…) and take care to shape your presentation for a non-academic audience. Abstracts for public intellectual talks should be 250 words.
Roundtables – Proposals for a Roundtable (5-6 presenters) should be presentations of 5-6 minutes each. Roundtables differ from Lightning Talk panels in that the while preformed Lightning Talk panels might be thematically coherent each presentation is individual. Roundtables typically take the shape of a larger discussion or debate based on the brief comments of the presenters. The organizer must submit an overview of the Roundtable in an abstract of no more than 250 words. Each presenter on the Roundtable will submit an abstract of no more than 200 words explaining their individual contribution.
Creative Writing/Work(s) – 4 presenters. Each with a 15-minute maximum presentation time. Present your original creative work (in any genre). Abstracts for the Creative track should be 150-200 words.
Presenters on preformed panels and roundtable discussions must submit proposals individually.
The deadline for submissions is July 15, 2020.
Proposals can be submitted using the WLA Conference Conftool portal: https://www.conftool.pro/wla-conference-2020/.
Please submit questions to Rebecca M. Lush or Kerry Fine at WLAConference2020@westernlit.org.
CHECK BACK FOR MORE INFORMATION. It will be posted here as it becomes available.
Tags: Literature and cultures of the American West, literature of the American West, regional studies, Western Literature Association Conference, WLA Conference participation
Tags: Literature and cultures of the American West, literature of the American West, regional studies, Western Literature Association Conference, WLA Conference participation
Posted in news | Comments Off on WLA Conference 2020
Tuesday, January 20th, 2015
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June 18, 2018
Dear WLA Members,
We hope summer is treating you well, and we look forward to welcoming you to St. Louis in October! To that end, we want this conference to be open to as many as possible, so we are extending the proposal deadline to July 1, 2018.
Understanding Our Place: Conference Proposals, Conference Theme, Conference Site
St. Louis’s Old Courthouse, where the Dred Scott case was initiated. Along with the Gateway Arch and the Museum of Westward Expansion, the Old Courthouse comprises the Gateway Arch National Park (which, until 2018, was called the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial). The linkage of these sites is a reminder of the intricate relations between U.S. imperialism and histories of enslavement.
Please submit proposals for individual papers and complete sessions to ConfTool. Remember that ConfTool accounts don’t carry over from year to year, so if you haven’t created a 2018 account, you must do so before you submit your proposal. Remember that we welcome critical and creative writing proposals on any aspect of literature and culture of the North American West—but we’re also happy to receive submissions that tie to this year’s conference theme: “Indigenous Hubs, Gateway Cities, Border States.”
The Saint Louis Art Museum is housed in the only World’s Fair building—the “Palace of Fine Arts”—designed to be permanent.
The 2018 conference will be held at the historic Chase Park Plaza hotel, constructed in 1922, located in the city’s Central West End neighborhood. The Central West End was home to some of St. Louis’s most well-known writers: T.S. Eliot, Tennessee Williams, Kate Chopin, and William S. Burroughs, for example, all lived in the neighborhood. Today, it is a walkable area teeming with restaurants and shops, including the independent bookstore Left Bank Books. It is also adjacent to St. Louis’s 1,300-acre Forest Park, the site of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (which popularized the ice cream cone and Dr. Pepper as it celebrated U.S. imperialism), and today the St. Louis Art Museum and the Missouri History Museum.
Chase Hotel (early 1920s), by W.C. Persons. Missouri Historical Society Collections.
As a site for jazz-age partygoing among well-heeled St. Louisans, our conference site was featured on the front page of the New York Times on January 2, 1923, when an article described a riot that ensued when federal agents sent to enforce prohibition law raided the “fashionable Hotel Chase” on New Year’s Eve. A “barrage of chairs, glassware, plates, knives and forks were hurled promiscuously,” the Times noted. “Women became hysterical” while the “rumpus was in swing” until the “officers retreated.” “One woman,” a police sergeant reported, “had me by the collar as we were leaving.”
We can’t promise that level of excitement, but we can promise an exceptional conference line-up that examines the literature and culture of the North American West from creative and challenging angles, asking critical questions about what constitutes region and role it has played in shaping culture, identity, and power.
Looking Forward to the Program: Special Events and Guests
These questions, of course, can be seen animating the work of our Distinguished Achievement Award winners in both creative writing and criticism:Percival Everett and José E. Limón.
Everett’s 2015 short story collection, Half an Inch of Water, based in Wyoming, “paints a vibrant picture of the West that layers itself subtly but assertively over the prevailing mythos of the lonely white cowboy,” according to a review in the Los Angeles Times.
Percival Everett counts among his many accolades two Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards and a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction. He is the author of around 30 books, many set in the American West. These include the parodic genre western God’s Country, as well as Suder, Walk Me to the Distance, Watershed, Wounded, Assumption, and the recent short story collection, Half an Inch of Water. No contemporary African American author has represented the black western experience in such extensive, nuanced, and complex ways. Everett is currently a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
José E. Limón’s American Encounters requires we consider—perhaps now more urgently than ever—the following vision: “I wish to imagine the possibilities of a transformation of [the relationship between Greater Mexico and the United States], so that all children who live today along the Texas border can once again enjoy the waters of the Rio Grande—so that all of the children of Greater Mexico and the United States may play along the border and beyond, carrying their Mexico and their United States within them, . . . crossing this frontier at their pleasure, in equality, and in a peaceful and plentitudinous light of day” (José E. Limón, American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture [Boston: Beacon Press, 1999], 6).
José E. Limón is the Notre Dame Foundation Professor of American Literature Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and the Mody C. Boatright Professor of American Literature Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. His interdisciplinary work brings together literature, anthropology, and folklore in studies of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Greater Mexico, and American regions and nations broadly conceived. Among his books are Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas, Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican American Social Poetry, American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture, and Américo Paredes: Culture and Critique. He is currently working on a book titled Neither Friends, Nor Strangers: Mexicans and Anglos in the Literary Making of Texas.
The plenaries by these Distinguished Achievement Award winners, while certainly the centerpiece of our conference, are not the only events of note.
Mural at Ponderosa Steakhouse, W. Florissant Ave., Ferguson, MO. 2014. 6’x8′. Image courtesy of COCA—Center of Creative Arts. Photo © Michael Kilfoy.
On our opening night, we will be screening and discussing the film Whose Streets?, which documents the activism that grew from the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown, Jr., in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri. This will be followed by a discussion moderated by Jonathan Smith, Vice President for Diversity and Community Engagement at Saint Louis University and a scholar of African American literature.
During the conference, we will hear from Teresa McKenna, a foundational scholar in Chicana feminist studies and Associate Professor Emerita at the University of Southern California, who will read from her memoir.
We will learn about the possibilities of public humanities collaborations from Sara L. Schwebel, Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, who has collaborated with Channel Islands National Park on a digital humanities project for K-12 teaching organized around the children’s book Island of the Blue Dolphins and the indigenous woman, whose isolation due Spanish colonial policies of reducción and trade, inspired it. Professor Schwebel’s talk will lead nicely into presentations by the WLA/Charles Redd Center K-12 Teaching Award winners on Saturday.
East St. Louis poet, scholar, and activist Eugene B. Redmond will read from and speak about his work at the 2018 WLA Past-President’s lunch.
We will also engage local borders when we hear from poet, scholar, and activist Eugene B. Redmond during the Past-President’s lunch on Thursday. Dr. Redmond, along with fellow East St. Louisan Katherine Dunham and St. Louisan Maya Angelou, was an architect of the Black Arts Movement in the region. From his earliest poetry, Redmond has been a place-based poet. A poem titled “Carryover,” for example, which he read at East St. Louisan Miles Davis’s funeral, proclaims, “I have been tattooed for life: / A thought called EAST SAINT LOUIS / Is etched on each Island of my Brain.” “EAST SAINT LOUIS will rise!” It “Will rise from the muddy gutty Mississippi. / Will rise disguised as AFRICA” (in Gerald Early, “Ain’t But a Place”: An Anthology of African American Writings about St. Louis [St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1998], 481).
The ancestral Mississippian city of Cahokia is directly across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. Monks Mound, pictured here, is the largest structure on the site and is the largest earthen mound north of Mexico. St. Louis was once nicknamed “Mound City,” but today only one mound within the city limits has escaped destruction: Sugarloaf Mound, which was purchased by the Osage Nation in 2009. The tribe hopes to preserve the mound and develop an interpretive center to teach St. Louisans about their city’s history from an indigenous perspective.
Candice Ivory, the “Queen of Avant Soul,” will perform at the 2018 WLA banquet.
And we’re delighted to be honoring the WLA’s 2018 award winners at the banquet on Friday night, where the “Queen of Avant Soul,” the fabulousCandice Ivory, will be joining us to perform. Today a St. Louisan, but with roots in Memphis, Tennessee, Ivory is immersed in the gospel, blues, jazz, and soul traditions of both places. We let her know that the WLA likes to dance!
In Closing, In Friendship, In Appreciation
If it wasn’t clear from the above, we are delighted to share this conference with you, our dear colleagues and friends, who have done so much to push our field in new and exciting directions. This is a preview of what’s in store—but there’s even more to come!
Most importantly, of course, is the tremendous compendium of critical and creative work on the North American West by you—the membership. So please do submit any remaining proposals by July 1, 2018. Thank you for all your contributions—we cannot do this conference, and we cannot do our work in western literature, in all its diversity, without you.
Best wishes,
Michael and Emily
Your 2018 WLA Co-Presidents
June 9, 2018
Dear WLA Members:
Just a quick reminder and a little bit of conference news.
Reminder: we are ready to start receiving proposals (deadline June 15) for the 2018 Western Literature Association conference, to be held October 24-27, in the Chase Park Plaza Hotel in St. Louis.
Bit of news: Remember to bring your dancing shoes to the conference, because Candice Ivory will be performing at the banquet: http://candiceivory.com/biography/
Below is the how-to-submit-a-proposal-through-Conftool instructions:
To submit a proposal, go to: https://www.conftool.pro/wla-conference-2018/
Please keep in mind a few things:
Michael K. Johnson and Emily Lutenski
Your WLA Presidents 2018
May 18, 2018
Dear WLA Members:
Just a quick reminder that we are ready to start receiving proposals (deadline June 15) for the 2018 Western Literature Association conference, to be held October 24-27, in the Chase Park Plaza Hotel in St. Louis.
To submit a proposal, go to: https://www.conftool.pro/wla-conference-2018/
Please keep in mind a few things:
Michael K. Johnson and Emily Lutenski
Your WLA Presidents 2018
April 16, 2018
Dear WLA Members:
Greetings from St. Louis! We are looking forward to getting your paper, panel, and roundtable proposals for the 2018 Western Literature Association conference, to be held October 24-27, in the Chase Park Plaza Hotel in St. Louis.
We are ready to start receiving your proposals!
To submit a proposal, go to: https://www.conftool.pro/wla-conference-2018/
Please keep in mind a few things:
Michael K. Johnson and Emily Lutenski
Your WLA Presidents 2018
February 15, 2018
Dear WLA Members:
Greetings from the edge of the West (and the edge of the East), from the gateway city of St. Louis, Missouri, where we are busy with preparations for the Western Literature Association St. Louis 2018 Conference, to be held October 24-27 in the Chase Park Plaza Hotel. The conference theme is “Indigenous Hubs, Gateway Cities, Border States.”
Among the conference highlights that we wanted to mention, Distinguished Achievement Award winners Percival Everett (creative writing) and José E. Limón (criticism) will be present at the conference and will be reading from their work.
Percival Everett is a two-time winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards for Fiction, a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, and the author of around 30 books, including the parodic genre western God’s Country, as well as multiple books set in the American West, including Suder, Walk Me to the Distance, Watershed, Wounded, Assumption, and his recent short story collection, Half an Inch of Water. No other contemporary African American author has accomplished as extensive (and complex) a representation of African American western experience. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
José E. Limón is the Notre Dame Foundation Professor of American Literature Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and the Mody C. Boatright Professor of American Literature Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a distinguished scholar of Mexican American literature and culture in wide-ranging and interdisciplinary work that brings together the study of literature, anthropology, and folklore in studies of literature of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Greater Mexico, and region and nation more broadly conceived. He is the author of four books, including Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas and Américo Paredes: Culture and Critique. He is currently working on a book titled Neither Friends, Nor Strangers: Mexicans and Anglos in the Literary Making of Texas.
We particularly look forward to proposals that engage the literary and critical work and legacies of our two Distinguished Achievement Award winners.
Our deadline for papers, panels, and other session ideas is June 15, 2018. Please see the original CFP and list of proposed themes we’d like to highlight below, but, as always, we welcome proposals on any aspect of the literature and culture of the North American West.
Proposals should be submitted through the ConfTool link, which will be posted on this page once ConfTool has been set up to receive proposals.
Soon we will be posting a follow-up letter with more information on other conference activities (including possibilities for a Saturday excursion), as well as transportation and hotel information.
Stay tuned!
Michael K. Johnson and Emily Lutenski
Your WLA Presidents 2018
Mural at Ponderosa Steakhouse, W. Florissant Ave., Ferguson, MO. 2014. 6’×8′.
Image courtesy of COCA—Center of Creative Arts. Photo ©Michael Kilfoy.
The 2018 annual conference of the Western Literature Association will take place October 24-27 at the Chase Park Plaza Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri. “Indigenous Hubs, Gateway Cities, Border States” is derived from this location. This region, at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, has been urban for thousands of years: Cahokia, directly across the river from today’s St. Louis, housed the largest pre-Columbian civilization north of Mexico and was long a hub for trade, communication, and transportation throughout indigenous North America. Today it is well known for its impressive earthen mounds, which the Osage Nation, among other tribal groups, counts as an important ancestral site. Long before St. Louis was known as the “Gateway to the West,” it was nicknamed “Mound City.”
St. Louis would become a North American borderland, shaped by French, Spanish, and U.S. contact and conquest. With Missouri’s 1821 entry into the nation as a slave state, St. Louis became envisioned as a gateway to western freedom even while it maintained southern bondage. This position made it possible for hundreds of enslaved people, including Dred Scott, to attempt to sue for their freedom in St. Louis. During the Exoduster movement, St. Louis indeed became a gateway to freedom for many African Americans migrating away from postbellum southern oppression. An emblem of white flight and urban disinvestment in the 20th century, today St. Louis is home to newer immigrant communities and central to the Black Lives Matter movement. It continues to serve as a microcosm of U.S. racial histories and of both stubborn divisions and promising coalitions across lines of race, class, region, and nation. “Indigenous Hubs, Gateway Cities, Border States” is meant to evoke these confluences and crosscurrents.
Both Distinguished Achievement Award Winners, Percival Everett and José E. Limón, will be attending the conference, and each will give a reading.
We welcome proposals on any aspect of the literatures of the North American West, but especially encourage panels and papers that explore the following topics:
• St. Louis (or other western places) as Indigenous Hubs, Gateways, or Borderlands
• The African American West
• Jazz and Blues and the American West
• The Art and Literature of Black Lives Matter
• St. Louis Freedom Suits
• The Work of Distinguished Achievement Award Winner Percival Everett
• The Critical Legacy of Distinguished Achievement Award Winner José E. Limón
Proposals for panels and roundtable discussions should include an abstract for each paper or presentation. The deadline for submissions is June 15, 2018. Please submit questions to Michael K. Johnson or Emily Lutenski at WLAConference2018@westernlit.org.
For more information, check back periodically.
Tags: call for papers, CFP 2018, José E. Limón, Percival Everett, St. Louis, Western Literature Association Conference, WLA, WLA Conference participation
Posted in news | Comments Off on WLA Conference 2018