America Abroad

A call (below) has been posted for Greeners to submit work to present as part of a conference to take place on campus May 24-5 (Saturday and Sunday, week 8). As you'll see, the focus is right up the alley for our program, and the timing is excellent. Submissions (sent to the e-mail address below) are due by May 1. This is a great chance to share your writing about your research and experiences with a broad audience. Your submission can consist of, or be adapted from, one or more excerpts from your paper. You can also propose presenting together as panels.   

P R E S S: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

May 24-5, 2008 @ The Evergreen State College, Olympia Campus

Interested in writing?

Interested in social, environmental, and economic justice?

Interested in the political dimensions of writing and the written dimensions of politics?

Interested in being interested?

We’re interested in your interest.  We are the organizers of PRESS: A Cross-Cultural Literary Conference at The Evergreen State College (May 24-25 2008, Week 7) and we’re inviting you to help make this dynamic text arts conference more dynamic—say, super dynamic.  How?  Read below our Call for Submissions.  This is your chance to dust off that portfolio or to write new work—essays, prose, poems, everything in between—and share it with your fellow Evergreen community members, the public, and the many guest writers and activists who will be coming to the Olympia campus for the conference.  All you have to do is submit your work by replying to this email or by writing to the address on our website:

http://www.evergreen.edu/writingcenter/press

All submissions will be strongly considered for panel or workshop slots.  But the deadline is approaching!  Make sure you send your work in by May 1, 2008. 

All contributors to PRESS will be published in a nationally distributed literary anthology.  Admission for all TESC students is free. 

Topics covered at PRESS will include writing as working/working as organizing; feminist poetics; experimental critical writing; literature and civil rights; globalism, globalization and literature; authorship and tyranny; commercialism and the liquidation of dangerous art.  We’re also interested in your suggestions for panels.  Read below for our CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS" 

P     R     E     S     S:

       A      Cross-Cultural Literary Conference

         @     The Evergreen State College

May 24-5 2008

Keynote speakers will include: experimental playwright, poet and activist Rodrigo Toscano (author of To Leveling Swerve), Gertrude Stein Prize-Winning writer Mark Wallace (author of Temporary Worker Rides a Subway), poet Laura Elrick (author of Fantasies In Permeable Structures), novelist and columnist Randall Kenan (author of Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the 21stCentury), poet and film theorist Tung-Hui Hu (author of Mine), poet Leonard Schwartz (author of Gnostic Blessing), poet and essayist Kristin Prevallet (author of Shadow Evidence Intelligence and Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual Art), John Bellamy Foster (Editor of The Monthly Review), poets and activists Jules Boykoff (author of Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge) and Kaia Sand, and many others.

This year’s theme is “Activism & the Avant-Garde.”  We are seeking papers, prose, poetics, groups of poems, and any hybrid text-based work that would advance discussion of at least one of the central questions posed at this conference: 1) Where is the intersection between political resistance and the Avant-Garde, both historically and now?  2) What is the function (if any) of “non-mainstream” literary work—and what do we mean by “non-mainstream”?  3) How has non-mainstream writing evolved recently?  Any work that addresses literary matters in relation to commercialism and the economics of particular literary landscapes, imperialism, ethnography, feminism, postcolonialism, translation, globalization, web technology, or particular writers and/or small presses is especially welcome.

Please RSVP to this email if you are interested in attending the conference, submitting your work, helping out with the conference planning, or just want to be on our mailing list.  We welcome input and collaboration from all TESC community members.

In Solidarity and on behalf of the PRESS Organizing Committee, 

Elizabeth Williamson

David Michael Wolach

Meghan McNealy

Tyler Bennett

Jenny Paris

Victoria Larkin

Theodora Ranelli

Sandy Yannone

Christopher Hord

Steven Hendricks

Nick Smith

Nicky Tiso