Participation Type
Performance
Session Title
Outliers: Women's Voices of Place and Displacement
Session Abstract or Summary
“Whether we go or stay…we should turn our faces outward from this place,” writes poet Irene McKinney in her homage to Hazel Dickens. What does it mean to go, to stay, to turn our faces toward a remembered and evolving Appalachia that encompasses urban communities, small towns, and rural areas? As our geographic boundaries change, how do our personal, political, and spiritual questions impact our artistic choices? This group of women writers, whose work emanates from the local and has gained a national stage, will examine evolving concepts of female identity, inclusion and exclusion, race, location and dislocation, expectation, and desire, engaging with diverse communities and encouraging others to write their own lives in artful ways. They will read from their recent nonfiction and discuss the form's flexibility and possibilities from short essay to full-length memoir.
Presentation #1 Title
Outliers: Women's Voices of Place and Displacement
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
“Whether we go or stay…we should turn our faces outward from this place,” writes poet Irene McKinney in her homage to Hazel Dickens. What does it mean to go, to stay, to turn our faces toward a remembered and evolving Appalachia that encompasses urban communities, small towns, and rural areas? As our geographic boundaries change, how do our personal, political, and spiritual questions impact our artistic choices? This group of women writers, whose work emanates from the local and has gained a national stage, will examine evolving concepts of female identity, inclusion and exclusion, race, location and dislocation, expectation, and desire, engaging with diverse communities and encouraging others to write their own lives in artful ways. They will read from their recent nonfiction and discuss the form's flexibility and possibilities from short essay to full-length memoir.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Cathryn Hankla has authored fourteen books in multiple genres, including the story collection Fortune Teller Miracle Fish (2011), poetry collections Great Bear (2016) and Galaxies (2017), and the forthcoming memoir, Lost Places: on losing and finding home (Mercer University Press, 2018). She teaches in the Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University and serves as Poetry Editor for The Hollins Critic.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #2
Karen Salyer McElmurray’s Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey, was an AWP Award Winner for Creative Nonfiction. Her novels are The Motel of the Stars and Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, winner of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. With poet Adrian Blevins, she has co-edited a collection of essays from Ohio University Press, Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia. She teaches at Gettysburg College and in West Virginia Wesleyan’s Low Residency MFA Program.
Presentation #3 Abstract or Summary
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #3
Jessie van Eerden is the author of the novels Glorybound (WordFarm, 2012), winner of ForeWord Reviews’ Editor’s Choice Fiction Prize; My Radio Radio (Vandalia Press, 2016); and the essay collection The Long Weeping (Orison Books, 2017). Her work has appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, The Oxford American, Willow Springs, and other publications. Jessie holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa and directs the low-residency MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan College.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #4
Crystal Wilkinson is the author of Blackberries, Blackberries, winner of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature, and Water Street, finalist for UK's Orange Prize for Fiction and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and The Birds of Opulence, winner of the 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Award in Literary Excellence. She serves as Appalachian Writer-in-Residence at Berea College. She and her partner, artist Ron Davis, are founders and editors of Mythium Literary Journal.
Conference Subthemes
Diversity and Inclusion
Outliers: Women's Voices of Place and Displacement
“Whether we go or stay…we should turn our faces outward from this place,” writes poet Irene McKinney in her homage to Hazel Dickens. What does it mean to go, to stay, to turn our faces toward a remembered and evolving Appalachia that encompasses urban communities, small towns, and rural areas? As our geographic boundaries change, how do our personal, political, and spiritual questions impact our artistic choices? This group of women writers, whose work emanates from the local and has gained a national stage, will examine evolving concepts of female identity, inclusion and exclusion, race, location and dislocation, expectation, and desire, engaging with diverse communities and encouraging others to write their own lives in artful ways. They will read from their recent nonfiction and discuss the form's flexibility and possibilities from short essay to full-length memoir.
