Special Panels
Creating Place in the Twenty-First Century
A special creative writing panel featuring some top Louisiana writers.
The significance of place has long served as a preoccupation for many writers of fiction and poetry. However as time, politics, and sentiment continue to redraw boundaries, creative writers must respond to the changes. Panelists in this session will address the following questions: in this early part of the twenty-first century, do designations such as “North and South” still inform creative work being produced? Are ideas about “regional writing” antiquated, or are they still alive and animated? Does writing from a particular “place” create exclusion for the writer or the reader, or does this open an invitation for exploration of an area or region?
Presenters:
Thomas Beller, Assistant Professor, Tulane University, is the author of three books, Seduction Theory: Stories, The Sleep-Over Artist: A Novel, and How To Be a Man: Essays (all from W.W. Norton). The Sleep-Over Artist was a New York Times Notable Book and LA Times Best Book of 2000. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Southwest Review, Ploughshares, Elle, The Southwest Review, and Best American Short Stories, among other magazines, and has been read on NPR’s This American Life, and Selected Shorts. He is editor of Open City Magazine, creator of the website, mrbellersneighborhood.com, and contributes regularly to Travel and Leisure Magazine, Slate.com, and the New York Times.
Christopher Chambers, Associate Professor, Loyola of New Orleans was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and has since lived in North Carolina, Michigan, Minnesota, Florida, Alabama, Texas, and Louisiana. After receiving a degree in English at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls, he worked as a carpenter, a bartender, a dockworker, and a lifeguard. He has taught martial arts in Minneapolis, high school in south Florida, and writing in Alabama. He received an MFA degree from the University of Alabama, where he was editor of the Black Warrior Review. He has written for television and film, and has published fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and book reviews in The Gettysburg Review, Ninth Letter, Quarterly West, Carolina Quarterly, Indiana Review, Exquisite Corpse, CopperNickel, Louisiana Literature, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Georgetown Review, Notre Dame Review, Washington Square, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Lit, BOMB Magazine, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere. His work has received four Pushcart Prize nominations, and has been anthologized in French Quarter Fiction and Best American Mystery Stories 2003, among others. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for creative writing in 2008. He is editor of New Orleans Review.
Daniel T. Smith joined the faculty of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2009 to teach creative writing and American literature. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati after earning his M.F.A. from the University of Washington. His short fiction has appeared in The New Orleans Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Seattle Review, The Laurel Review, among others.
Publishing North and South
This special panel includes editors and an agent who will discuss academic and creative publishing today, as well as answering questions from the audience.
Presenters:
Jeff Gerecke is a former associate of the JCA and Gina Maccoby literary agencies who now operates his own agency, the G Agency, LLC in New York. He has served as Ernest J. Gaines’s literary agent for more than twenty years and also represents a number of other leading authors such as Dennis Burges, Peter King, Elena Santangelo, Kenneth Ackerman, and the National Society of Film Critics. His publishing background includes an editorial position at the University of California Press, and because of his work there he is interested in projects from academic writers and scholars that might appeal to non-academic readers.
Jeanne Leiby is the editor and director of The Southern Review and an associate professor in the Department of English at Louisiana State University. Her publications include the story collection Downriver (winner of the 2006 Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman), and short stories in publications such as Fiction, Indiana Review, New Orleans Review, Chattahoochee Review, Seattle Review, Witness, and Alaska Quarterly Review.
Margaret D. Bauer is the editor of The North Carolina Literary Review and Professor of English at East Carolina University. Her publications include Understanding Tim Gautreaux, The Fiction of Ellen Gilchrist, and William Faulkner's Legacy: What Shadow, What Stain, What Mark.
Reggie Scott Young, the panel moderator, is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and an Advisor to the university’s Ernest J. Gaines Center. He compiled and edited Mozart and Leadbelly: Stories and Essays by Ernest J. Gaines with Marcia Gaudet, and also This Louisiana Thing that Drives Me: The Legacy of Ernest J. Gaines with Gaudet and Wiley Cash.
Technology and Pedagogy
A special panel on teaching methods, technology, and copyright law, featuring talks on French immersion, teaching copyright law, and opportunities for humanists in the digital humanities.
Presenters:
John Laudun is Associate Professor of English at UL-Lafayette. He has published widely on folklore and literature, including being one of fifty scholars from around the world to be asked to deposit materials with the EVIA Digital Archive. Paper publications include African American Review, the Encyclopedia of World Folklore and Folklife, the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, as well as forthcoming publications in Journal of American Folklore, and the Journal of Folklore Research. He was the principal investigator for the Louisiana Digital Humanities Lab and he currently acts as the university's liaison for digital humanities.
Anna Howell received a B.A. in Foreign Languages and Cultures from Washington State University in 2008. She is currently pursuing an M.A. in French at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and plans to graduate in May 2011.
Clancy Ratliff is an assistant professor and Director of First-Year Writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her interests include copyright and intellectual property, writing pedagogy, and feminist rhetorics. She has recently published work in Women’s Studies Quarterly; JAC: Rhetoric, Writing, Culture, Politics; Computers and Composition; and Computers and Composition Online.
