"Writing Across Communities: From Poetry to Praxis" 

17th Annual Red River Graduate Student Conference | February 28-29, 2020 
North Dakota State University

About Andrea Wilson, our 2020 Keynote Speaker: 
Andrea Wilson is the Founder & Executive Director of the Iowa Writers' House. A visual artist, writer, and storyteller, Andrea believes that creativity and expression define the beauty of the human experience.  In early 2014, she moved back to the UNESCO City of Literature to passionately pursue writing, only to feel disconnected from the very literary community that brought her home. The Iowa Writers' House started as an altruistic dream to create a springboard for all of those involved in using art and literature to connect themselves with the world. Today the organization reaches over 3000 writers, offers workshops and programs in both Iowa City and Des Moines, and has created strategic relationships connecting Iowa with festivals in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and other Cities of Literature across the globe. Click here to read more about the Iowa Writers' House.

The registration fee for conference participation is $35 if submitted online by January 15. Alternatively, registration is $40 if paid at the door. Important conference updates will be sent to presenters via email. 

Abstracts of about 250 words should be submitted by January 15.
Early submissions are encouraged. Contact Stephanie Lemmer, EGO President, with questions and for abstract submission: stephanie.lemmer@ndsu.edu

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CFP: "Writing Across Communities: From Poetry to Praxis"
Red River Graduate Student Conference / North Dakota State University

Deadline for Submissions: January 15
Contact Email: deborah.haley@ndsu.edu

17th Annual Red River Graduate Student Conference | February 28-29
North Dakota State University

We are excited about this year's RRGSC keynote speaker and executive director of the Iowa Writers' House, Andrea Wilson, who engages the process, the act, and the possibility of writing as an ongoing convergence with community-building praxis, blurred political and ideological boundaries, and collective human artistic potential, in order to nurture, cultivate and foster emerging and historical communities around the idea of writing across communities. But, what does it meant to write across communities? How do we move from poetry to praxis? In what ways and to what extent is the poetic always-already engage in a praxis? To what extent does the move from poetry to praxis suggest "a . . . life forever caught in the process of becoming[,]"which "leaves itself incomplete but then . . . transforms its static and unfinished condition into a complete, though never-ending, dynamic reconfiguration[?]"¹ 

Building communities through writing, redefining literacy through collaborative initiatives, and crossing boundaries between academic/institutional workers and community-oriented and marginalized populations mobilize ideas and challenge those institutionally-fortified formations of knowledge and interpretation that have historically done more to instantiate antagonistic modes of human relationality than they have to elucidate human commonalities and possibilities for coexistence. These writing communities also become crucial galvanizing initiatives from the location of a "student-focused, land-grant, research university," necessitating a praxis of writing that transgresses institutional boundaries, cuts across nationalistic borders, and articulates new approaches to writing pedagogy and practice-forging what Édouard Glissant calls a "poetics of relations."²

Because academic institutions are often rearticulated as insular, rearticulate its subjects as isolated, and dislocate learners as students of the regime of neoliberal professionalization, we invite you to come think through these difficult locales with us. We endeavor to build a conference which foregrounds internal and external pedagogical practices in relationship to institutional spaces that can often be degrading, as well as to community spaces which are often understood to be collaborative, engaging and encouraging. Further, "From Poetry to Praxis" encumbers a thinking about the politics of location. Poetry as a site, praxis as a rhetorical situation are, simultaneously, locations from which we think, act, and write across communities. As locations, then, the Red River Graduate Student Conference welcomes proposals that take up, converge with, and engage directly or indirectly this year's theme of

"Writing Across Communities: From Poetry to Praxis." The RRGSC encourages students, scholars, and community members to submit abstracts (250 words) that propose panels, talks, and presentations of about 15-20 minutes in length. Submissions from disciplines other than English Studies (Gender & Sexuality, Queer Theory, Indigenous Studies, Comparative Ethnic Studies, American Studies, Communication & Media studies, Political Science, and Sociolinguistics) are also welcomed.

1 See Neel, Jasper P. "Prologue: The Situation of Rhetoric." Aristotle's Voice: Rhetoric, Theory, and Writing in America. Southern Illinois University Press, 2013.
2 See Glissant Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing, Univ. of Michigan Press, 1997.

The registration fee for conference participation is $35 if submitted online by January 30th on the RRGSC website here: https://www.ndsu.edu/english/rrgsc/. Alternatively, registration is $40 if paid at the door. Important conference updates will be periodically sent to presenters via email. Abstracts of about 250 words should be submitted by January 15th. Early submissions are encouraged.

Please contact Deborah Haley, RRGSC Chair, with any questions and for abstract submission (deborah.haley@ndsu.edu).