The Michigan College English Association

Blog

  • Report on the College English Association Conference 2025 by Cheryl Caesar and Ed Demerly

    This year’s conference in Philadelphia on March 27-29, 2025, was widely attended by 265 presenters organized into 73 sessions. Schools from every part of the United States and nine foreign countries were represented, including universities in Nepal, Canada, Lebanon, China, Saudi Arabia, and Italy.

    Featured Speakers

    The plenary speaker, Dr Daniel Ernst of Texas Women’s University, spoke about the impact of artificial intelligence on higher education and assessment.

    Ahmed Badr, an Iraqi-American author, poet, and social engineer, was the featured speaker at the Diversity Luncheon.

    Poet, essayist, and literary critic Artress Bethany White of East Stroudsburg University spoke at the Women’s Connection Reception.

    Playwright and poet Lorene Cary of the University of Pennsylvania spoke at the All-Conference Luncheon.

    Michigan Presenters 

    Cheryl Caesar, Michigan State University

    Aaron Bush, University of Michigan

    Lynne Johnson, Northern Michigan University

    Susanna Engbers, Ferris State University

    John Staunton, Eastern Michigan University

    Roundtable Topics

    This CEA innovation included three sessions. Roundtable discussions are less formal than panels. Presenters offer “flash essays” of about 500 to 700 words, and the audience is invited to engage in open discussion. Three sessions were offered this year:

    English Education Programmatic Assessment: Navigating the Accreditation Process

    Freedom to Get Fat: A Discussion about Fatness and Fatphobia in Fiction

    Bringing Arts, the Outside, Rituals to the Classroom

    Emphasis at this Conference

    Over the years as trends change, we have seen an emphasis on new topics. Once women in literature headlined the conference, then use of the internet, indigenous work, comic novels, LGBTQ, etc. This year, AI seemed to dominate with sessions such as

    • AI in the Writing Classroom: Friend, Foe, or Facilitator
    • Reimagining Writing Pedagogy: Harnessing AI for Educational Success
    • Freeing the Writer Within: Empowering Student Writers through Effective and Ethical Use of AI
    • Surveying the Landscape: Student and Faculty Experiences with Generative AI

    Affiliates’ Breakfast

    At the breakfast, there was some discussion of conference modalities post-COVID: in-person, Zoom, or hybrid.

    Peter Elliott of Anderson University in Indiana would be interested in talking with MCEA about how we manage a Zoom conference. He has also launched a new journal, Indiana English, which is accepting submissions. 

    The Florida CEA is “reaching out for partners,” and our MCEA’s Board member RaSheeda Brown has reached out to this group by email. The Florida CEA also has a journal, the Florida Scholarly Review.

    Gloria Lessman and Heather Ann Johnson from the University of Nebraska attended the breakfast. They are not yet Affiliates, but Jeri Kraver has reached out to them from the Rocky Mountain group.

    Conference Proceedings

    The CEA Critic will publish its usual conference proceedings issue in the fall that will feature a selection of representative essays from those chosen “Best of Section,” award-winning essays, and more news from the conference.

    Save the Date

    At the conference President’s Reception, we announced that the 55th conference will take place March 26-28, 2026, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Our theme will be “Declarations,” fitting for the first state to declare independence from Great Britain. The submission site will open August 15, 2025.

  • Registration Form for the Michigan College English Association Zoom Conference Online on Saturday, October 4, 2025

    https://michigancea.org

    Themes: Survival and Healing

    Featured Speaker: Gail Griffin, poet and creative nonfiction writer

    Registration and Membership Information

    Name:                                                                                                                                                          

    Institutional Affiliation:                                                                                                                                 

    Email Address (print clearly):                                                                                                                      

    Phone Number(s): __________________________________________________________________

    I would be willing to serve as an MCEA Campus Representative (circle one):       Yes            No

    (If you are unsure, please ask Janet Heller at janetheller@charter.net about these very minimal duties.)

    New address? Note it here.    ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________                                                                                              

    The registration fee includes registration for the conference and a 2025-2026 academic year membership in the MCEA.  Please make checks out to the “Michigan College English Association.” 

    Full-time Faculty — $40.00                                                                              $ ___________                    

    Part-time, Lecturer, Adjunct, and Retired Faculty — $20.00                          $   ___________                 

    Students — $0 – free registration                                                                    $___________

    I can’t be at the conference, but here is my membership fee — $20.00        $ _______                 

    I would like to sponsor a student to attend — $10.00                                     $ __________

    TOTAL ENCLOSED                                                                                       $ _____________                    

    Mail this form with your check to the Michigan CEA 2024 Treasurer and Conference Registrar: David Settle, 1749 Woodgate Drive, Lowell, MI 49331.

    All registrations must be snail-mailed by Sept. 24, 2025. 

    If you are unable to send a check, please contact the MCEA Treasurer, David Settle, about the possibility of a PayPal transfer at mceatreasurer1@gmail.com .

  • Call for Papers: Michigan College English Association Conference via Zoom on Saturday, October 4, 2025

    https://michigancea.org

    Call for Papers: Michigan College English Association Conference via Zoom

    Saturday, October 4, 2025

    Themes: Survival and Healing

    Featured Speaker: Gail Griffin, poet and nonfiction writer*

    Our world has been torn by recent political upheavals, environmental damage, prejudice against people who are different in any way, and wars. How can we survive and heal from these conflicts? How can we discuss these issues in our classrooms? What kind of writing assignments can help students process and understand our turbulent era? Which works of literature illuminate these themes? The conference program chairs welcome papers from a pedagogical perspective, creative responses to the themes of Survival and Healing, and literary analyses of works with these themes.

    The Michigan College English Association accepts proposals from experienced academics, young scholars, and graduate students. We encourage a variety of papers, including pedagogical work, scholarly essays, creative writing, as well as workshops, creative writing circles, and other activity-directed sessions. All proposals will be peer-reviewed. Participants do not have to live in Michigan or the United States, though we often feature in-state work.

    We are also seeking documentarians to attend the sessions, take notes and write short reports to share with the Board in the weeks following the conference. The reports of previous years’ documentarians were invaluable.

    We give $50 cash awards to graduate students: one for the best scholarly essay, one for the best creative writing. Any participant wishing to submit work to the contest should send a complete scholarly paper or creative piece to Ed Demerly at edemerly@aol.com by September 18, 2025.

    Here are some possible topics for presentations:

    fiction, poetry, drama, creative nonfiction                       classroom management

    curriculum development                                         computer or on-line instruction    

    race, class, and gender studies                           literacy                                              

    English/writing departments and our society       the creative process

    union/administration differences                           film studies

    textual analysis                                                        preparing students for the work world

    teaching composition, literature, linguistics professional expectations, evaluation, and assessment

    Conference proposals are due by September 18, 2025.  Early submissions are welcome.  Please send your name, university affiliation, e-mail address, phone number, time preference, and a 200-word abstract or sample of creative writing to Program Chair David Settle via e-mail at mceatreasurer1@gmail.com . To submit a panel proposal, please include the information for all members (5 maximum participants) in the same proposal.

    Topic Tags:  call for papers, Michigan College English Association, conference, survival, healing, resilience, generative AI, teaching, creative writing, composition, literature, linguistics

    *Gail Griffin is the author of the poetry book Omena Bay Testament (Two Sylvias Press, 2023), which won the 2021 Two Sylvias Press Wilder Poetry Book Prize. She also wrote Peripheral Visions (Headlight Press, 2024). Her poetry won three awards in 2024.

    Born in Detroit, Gail Griffin grew up in the suburbs and fell into a lifelong romance with the woods and waters of northern Michigan during the summers. After college and graduate school, she returned to Michigan to begin a 36-year career at Kalamazoo College, teaching literature, writing, and women’s studies. She won both college awards for teaching and for creative work/scholarship, and in 1995 she was named Michigan Professor of the Year. In the larger community Gail became involved in anti-racist work, offering workshops on the nature and implications of whiteness. She also leads occasional community workshops in memoir writing.

    Through her work and relationships at the college, Gail discovered creative nonfiction, which became her professional focus, and poetry, which has taken second place until recently. She is the author of four books of nonfiction, including “The Events of October”: Murder-Suicide on a Small Campus (2010) and Grief’s Country: A Memoir in Pieces (2020). Her essays, flash nonfiction, and poems have won Pushcart nominations, “Notable” designations in Best American Essays, and genre awards in journals. When her first poetry chapbook, Virginals, appeared in 2021, Gail was sifting through 30 years of poems and found Omena Bay Testament, her first full-length collection. Though it looks mystical on the cover, Omena Bay is real. It curves into the Leelanau Peninsula, Michigan’s “little finger.”

  • Nancy Owens Nelson has published a new poetry book entitled Five Points South: Poems from an Alabama Pilgrimage

    Nancy Owens Nelson has published a new poetry book entitled Five Points South: Poems from an Alabama Pilgrimage (Kelsay Books, 2023). Nancy has served on the Board of the Michigan College English Association for decades, and she also taught English courses at Henry Ford College in Dearborn, Michigan.

    For information about purchasing Five Points South and her other books, please visit Nancy’s website at https://www.nancyowennelson.com

    Her other books include the memoir Divine Aphasia: A Woman’s Search for Her Father (2021) and Portals: A Memoir in Verse (Kelsay Books, 2019).

    Nanc Owens Nelson has edited and co-edited several academic books, including The Selected Letters of Frederick Manfred:  1932–1954 (with Arthur R. Huseboe) and Private Voices, Public Lives: Women Speak on the Literary Life. She has published critical essays in journals such as The South Dakota Review and Western American Literature, as well as creative nonfiction and poetry in several journals and anthologies. Her memoir, Searching for Nannie B: Connecting Three Generations of Southern Women, was published in 2015, and her poetry chapbook, My Heart Wears No Colors, was published in 2018.

  • Transitions and Transactions Conference at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in-person on April 5-6, 2024–Call for Papers –the theme is Literature and Health