Bios on some of our session leaders, speakers & readers!

This schedule is still being finalized and may change!

Friday April 4th afternoon & evening:
3pm-8:30pm Registration table at Hansen Student Center
4pm Brock Clarke's Master Class in Hansen's conference room
5pm- Dinner at Tommy's (IWU restaurant in the downstairs of Hansen)
7pm Brock Clarke's Keynote reading in Hansen
8:30pm Slam! with featured poet Alvin Lau! (Also in Hansen!)

Saturday, April 5th
9am Chelsey Minnis' master class in the Cartwright room of the Memorial Center
10am Shanna Compton, Danielle Pafunda and Jennifer L. Knox are reading in the Henning room of the Memorial Center
11:45am lunch provided in the Davidson room of the Memorial Center

1pm sessions--
--Andrea Riley, "Moaning in Resistance: Writing about the Undead": The workshop will discuss the potentials of collage and response writing and how it is a useful strategy in estranging language. The group will talk about the political and social issues in Romero's zombie films. We will then write as we watch a zombie film. Held in the Henning room of the Memorial center
--“Sing Goddamm:” The Music of Poetry and the Poetry of Music -Dan Smart
This session focuses on the aural aspects of poetry and its connections to and place in the musical world. We will explore certain texts and musical recordings that seem to blur the line between “words” and “music” and examine fascinating possibilities that arise when we look beyond such confines as “connotation” and “denotation” and instead endeavor to treat words as pure music. Moving far beyond the typical “musical” use for poetry as mere rhyming couplets, we will discuss ideas such as word color, rhythmic feel and intensity, alliteration, and dynamics as we explore the ways in which we can inject a little music into our poetry . . . and maybe even a little poetry into our music. In the Cartwright room of the Memorial Center

2pm sessions--
--"Writing with/in Restraint: The Lincoln Women's Prison Writing Project." Panelists: Joe Amadon, Andrew Farnsworth, Tim Lantz and Andra Riley.
--"So you're thinking about grad school: think harder." IWU Alumni Emily Kingery and Cathy Gilbert wax poetic on the wonders of graduate school. This discussion will include a brief reading by both poets, followed by tales of personal experiences in the world of higher education. Emily and Cathy will attempt to cover the following:
- Going to Grad School for the Right Reasons
- The Gap Year(s)
- Getting the Most out of your Grad School experience
- MA? MFA? PhD? Which one do you choose?
- To TA or not to TA, that is the question
Their brief presentation will be followed by a Q & A session. Feel free to come riddled with confusion, optimism, pessimism, or questions.

3pm session--
--Ekprasis: Image, Poetry, Writing the Punctum: In Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, he uses the term punctum to describe the parts of visual representations (primarily photographs) that puncture the desire of the viewer, that aspect of the image that suggests both the object’s death and its mechanical reality. An ekphrasis is a poem about a visual image. The challenge of the ekphrasis is to honor the reality of the image and press on the desires that make images meaningful. In this workshop we’ll look at a series of images and theorize as a group how they (as art, as process, as materiality) inspire desire. Well discuss how each experimental writing practices can expand our understanding of image. Then we’ll write a series of open-form poems that respond to these pieces.

4:30pm Chelsey Minnis keynote reading
5:30pm Dinner
7:00pm Tributaries Spring Issue & Euphemism co-release reading!