T122.

Living & Writing the LGBTQIA Rural Life

121A, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
Thursday, March 24, 2022
9:00 am to 10:15 am

 

This panel discusses the complexities, challenges and opportunities queer writers can face when writing in and about rural communities. LGBTQIA presenters of various walks of life and career stages explore this question from perspectives that include multigenerational inhabitants of rural US communities and transnational experiences. We consider the possibilities for creating queer writing alliances across social differences, geographies, careers, and disciplines.



Outline & Supplemental Documents

Event Outline: Living_and_Writing_the_LGBTQIA_Rural_Life_Panel_Outline.pdf

Participants

Moderator:

Catharine Wright teaches courses such as Writing Gender and Sexuality and Outlaw Women at Middlebury College. She has earned prizes for her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in literary, queer, and feminist magazines. She just wrote a novel about a queer town clerk in a rural town.

François Clemmons, PhD, won a Grammy for a recording of Porgy and Bess, founded the Harlem Spiritual Ensemble, and was famously Officer Clemmons, the neighborhood policeman on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. His recently published memoir intimately details his life story as an artist with rural roots.

Estela González's narratives on race, class, gender, sexuality, and environmental justice appear in the Barcelona Review, Flash Frontier, Flyway, Label Me Latina, Solstice Literary Magazine, and several anthologies. Her novel Arribada was a finalist for the Feminist Press’s Louise Meriwether Award.

Alex Bacchus—hyperpolyglot, Fulbright alum, and multidisciplinary artist—is expected to graduate in 2022. Their artistry is inspired by holding queer, racialized identities; descending from free and forced migrations; and unpacking these profound meanings while living in North America.

Patricia Powell is the author of Me Dying TrialA Small Gathering of BonesThe Pagoda, and The Fullness of Everything. She is the recipient of a PEN award, a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writer's Award, and the Ferro-Grumley award for queer fiction. Powell teaches in the MFA program at Mills College.

#AWP24

February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center