Themes: Comfort, Healing, and Hope
Featured Speaker: Rick Bailey, humorous essayist and memoirist*
Online on Zoom
As we emerge (or do we?) from the 2020 pandemic and shutdown, we continue to struggle with the aftereffects on our students and ourselves, while facing many other challenges: environmental, economic, social, political. Where do we find comfort? How do we heal? What gives us hope? And how can we share these good things with our students and each other? How can the classroom be a space of comfort, healing and hope? Our institutions, more broadly? How are these themes conveyed through literature–our own writing or that of others?
The Michigan College English Association invites proposals for individual papers and for complete panels for our fall 2023 Conference. We welcome 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, crafting circles, and other activity-directed sessions. All proposals will be peer-reviewed. Although our organization features Michigan writers and scholars, we accept proposals from individuals outside of Michigan and outside of the United States.
Here are some possible areas for presentations:
- fiction, poetry, drama, creative nonfiction
- classroom management
- curriculum development
- computer or on-line instruction
- race, class, and gender studies
- literacy
- professional expectations/evaluation/assessment
- 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
Conference proposals are due by September 23, 2023. Early submissions are welcome. Please send your name, university affiliation, e-mail address, time preference, and a 200-word abstract or sample of creative writing to Program Chairs Ilse Schweitzer, Nancy Owen Nelson and Lori Burlingame via email at schwei53@msu.edu, nelnan@aol.com and lburlinga@emich.edu . 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, Comfort, Healing, Hope, teaching, creative writing, composition, literature, linguistics
* Rick Bailey grew up in Freeland, Michigan, on the banks of the Tittabawassee River. He taught writing for 38 years at Henry Ford College. Teaching composition online the last 15 years of his career, he wrote for and with his classes, developing voice and content that became the basis for his first collection of essays, American English, Italian Chocolate (2017) and successive collections (2019, 2021), published by University of Nebraska Press. A Midwesterner long married to an Italian immigrant, in retirement he and his wife divide their time between Michigan and the Republic of San Marino. His most recent book is And Now This: A Memoir in Essays.
Special Conference Option: Become a Documentarian!
Are you interested in attending the conference this year but lacking a paper to present?
We are looking for a small number of documentarians to attend the sessions of their choice, record their impressions, and write a short reflection to be shared on our website and social media.
Reflections will be submitted to the MCEA Board for approval, possible editing and publication.
Interested? Contact the Conference organizers at the e-mail address above.
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Graduate Student Awards
The MCEA will once again be offering two cash prizes of $50.00 for graduate students: one for best scholarly paper and one for the best creative presentation. Faculty, please share widely with your graduate students, and encourage them to enter.