Online Zoom Conference – 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 Chairs Janet Heller and David Settle via e-mail at janetheller@charter.net and 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 received 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.”