F265. I Pledge Allegiance to More Than Myself: Literary Citizenship in the Classroom

Room 22, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Friday, March 9, 2018
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

 

No one becomes a writer in a vacuum. Five writers, who prioritize literary citizenship in their teaching, share strategies for involving students in book clubs, community workshops, reading series, press work, and other public activities. Pushing beyond problematic models of “outreach,” we ask students to consider the systems of guidance and support they have benefitted from, their relationships to their own communities, and how they might contribute in ways that evoke needed change.


Participants

Moderator:

Tessa Mellas's collection Lungs Full of Noise won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. An assistant professor at the University of Maine at Machias, she runs the Maine Writers Series. Her PhD is from the University of Cincinnati. She is working on an ecofabulist novella in flash and a book of essays.

Meagan Cass's collection ActivAmerica won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. She holds a PhD from the University of Louisiana Lafayette and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. An associate professor at the University of Illinois Springfield, she coedits Shelterbelt Press.

Karen Craigo is the author of No More Milk and Passing Through Humansville (forthcoming). She is a three-time recipient of grants from the Ohio Arts Council and a former Fine Arts Work Center fellow, and she teaches writing at Missouri State University.

Abigail Cloud is an instructor in English, publishing, and creative writing at Bowling Green State University. She serves as editor in chief of Mid-American Review. Sylph is her first poetry collection.

Jennie Frost is a queer poet. She is the current literary arts director at Sundress Academy for the Arts where she works closely with visiting writers. Jennie runs the Sundress Reading Series in Knoxville, Tennessee, and will join the MFA program at Ole Miss in the fall.

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