F250. The Safe Space of the Essay: Navigating Student Pain on the Page

Room 006C, Henry B. González Convention Center, River Level
Friday, March 6, 2020
3:20 pm to 4:35 pm

 

In nonfiction classes every day, students make themselves vulnerable, writing about suicide, gender and sexual violence, debilitating anxiety, and more. As teachers, what is our role for these students? Do we respond only to the work or offer something more? Where is the line between caring instructor and mental health professional? And what of legal obligations—navigating mandatory reporting while maintaining trust? Panelists discuss approaches to these issues of the essay’s safe space.


Participants

Moderator:

Jeremy B. Jones is the author of the memoir Bearwallow. His essays appear in Oxford American, the Iowa Review, Brevity, and elsewhere. He is an associate professor of English at Western Carolina University, and is the series coeditor of In Place, a book series from WVU Press.

Cassandra Kircher's book, Far Flung: Improvisations on National Parks, Driving to Russia, Not Marrying a Ranger, the Language of Heartbreak, and Other Natural Disasters, was published in spring of 2019. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart and noted in Best American Essays. She teaches at Elon University.

Catina Bacote’s nonfiction has been published in Ploughshares, Tin House, the Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, The Common, The Sun, Southern California Review, and the anthology This Is The Place: Women Writing about Home. She is an assistant professor at St. John's University in New York City.

L.M. Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas has creative nonfiction and literary translation MFAs from the University of Iowa. She is the author of Drown Sever Sing and Don’t Come Back. She is a Rona Jaffe fellow and works as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago.

Nicole Walker is the author of Sustainability: A Love Story, Egg, Microcosm, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and a collection of poems, This Noisy Egg. She edited, along with Margot Singer, Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction. She directs the MFA Program at Northern Arizona University.

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