About the Series

The Creative Writers Sessions run concurrently with conference panels and papers and are a supportive and lively venue for presenting creative work.

The Creative Writers Series Committee, recognizing as we do that in the academic environment much creative energy is devoted to the work of teaching and scholarship, we wish to make space for writing is in keeping with the conference theme but also that which expresses feminist ideals in poetry, fiction, non-fiction, dramatic monologue, cross-genre work, and experimental creative writing.

Creative Writing Series #1 (poetry)
Fri, Jun 20 - 9:45am - 11:00am
Location: South / 237

Have You Seen Her?
Olivia Ayes (UMSL)
This poetry sample aims to reveal an often silenced perspective of a young queer, immigrant woman. Through continuous assessment of the hegemonies of influencing cultures and her own failures, the poet presents significant moments of lucidity, which are intangible at best. She desires to move beyond displacement, but seems to locate solace only in imagination.

Breaking Bread with Strange Sisters
Colleen Beth McKee (University of Missouri-St. Louis)
Most of these poems are from a poetry chapbook published by a women's press. The poems center on the pleasures of food and sex, and they subvert dominant cultural narratives about what nourishes the body: The sex is often not heterosexual; food does not always comfort; and in a shifting urban world, women find communities in unexpected ways, breaking bread with the unlikeliest of sisters.

From "Cities of Mathematics and Desire:" a poetry performance
Judith Emlyn Johnson (13th Moon Press)
The theme of "Cities of Mathematics and Desire" is our responsibility for each other and for the ecosphere. My point of departure is the 1988 tragedy in which the population of a village in the Andes first worshipped and then ingested abandoned radioactive medical waste. I then weave together contemporary chaos theory, gallows humor, surreal imagery, nonlinear and cinematic narrative, pop cultural figures such as King Kong, and two global poets (Anna Akhmatova ad Guillaume Apollinaire) to show how this supposedly distant tragedy arose in those patriarchal intellectual and social structures that ignore our mutal embeddedness in each other's lives.

Gender Identity in Everyday Performance
Kimberly Dark (Cal State San Marcos)
These performance poems explore the social construction of gender -- as it is performed in the humorous and challenging everyday. These poems use autoethnography to create a literary, entertaining social analysis.

Love After 911 & other wriiting
Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz
I write poems, fiction, essays, and things I think of as blurts (maybe prose poems). I write the poems and blurts in explosions, under pressure. Almost everything I write explores color, gender, power, resistance, and empire. My leading edge is voice (Brooklyn Jewish). Last year I read two of my poems (“Bodies” and “10 reasons why we need a new war”) in a Washington DC church in preparation for mass anti-war civil disobedience. That’s my idea of wholeness.

Poetic Resistance: Making a Dent in the Hegemonic Armor
Pramila Venkateswaran (Nassau Community College)
Can poetry be a site of resistance? Will poetry change things? Poetry may perhaps not overturn governments, but history shows that it certainly speaks for the voiceless; it has always spoken loudly against all hegemonies. The women in my poems pose unsettling questions about racism, colonization, nuclear proliferation, war, refugee crises, the choice of violence over diplomacy, and at the same time point the way to justice and solidarity that can achieve a gradual shift in the existing order. Ultimately, activist poetry is far more powerful than any bomb and splits open the ironies of oppression.

Creative Writing Series #2 (poetry)
Fri, Jun 20 - 1:30pm - 2:45pm
Location: Legends, South / 237

C. Taylor: one woman, two countries
Capuchina Bianka Taylor (University of Missouri-St. Louis)
The poet, originally from Germany but brought up in the Midwest, is filled with contradictions. Her concerns in her work deal mainly with identity related to being bi-racial in world that lets you circle only one box or "other" and validating African American culture in the literary world. She attempts to erase the "exotic" by normalizing African American culture to the dominant, European American readership prominent in the literary world.

Impossible Body: I sing the body androgynous
Stacey Waite (University of Pittsburgh)
This poetry performance hopes to bring the essential conversations between queer theory and queer lives to the forefront of our collective minds. The poems themselves explore the gendered spaces in which we live (or do not live) while the poet attempts to re-invent the poetry reading itself. The poems are both lyrical and narrative, both subtle song and charged spoken word. This collection of poems re-imagines and re-defines the ways we think about gender as it moves us through the territory of an androgynous life.

Middle East meets Middle West: A woman's struggle with identity, displacement and yearning for the homeland
Rewa Zeinati Choueiri
Originally Lebanese, this poet has moved to the Midwest five years ago. Her poems lament her awayness and explore identity in a world that increasingly marginalizes Arab roots. She celebrates what she remembers as beautiful in her homeland, without being naive about the reality of corrupt governments and false initiations of war. She includes romantic notions of resistence and revolution, as well as her passion for her language, Arabic. She uses Arabic words in some of her poems to emphasize her attachment to land and culture, notions that otherwise would be compromised in another language.

Qualitative Methods
Erika Faith Feigenbaum
In these poems, the author deals with notions of vulnerability at the intersections of experience, examining the impact of sex, class, sexuality, and other areas from varied perspectives. At their core, the poems call attention to often invisible themes within the cultural boundaries of the mainstream, positioning the reader amidst circumstances that problematize the subjects through a feminist lens.

Random Portraits: Place and Identity Through the Lens of a Poor White Girl
Jaime Rebeka Wood
Moving from Oklahoma to Kansas, Louisiana to Colorado, and finally ending up in Missouri, I have spent my life looking at place as a way to redefine myself. Much of my poetry is a collection of "Random Portraits" that illustrates the volatile nature of place and identity.

Creative Writing Series #3 (poetry)
Sat, Jun 21 - 9:45am - 11:00am
Location: North / 202

Heat's Half Life
Agatha Beins (Rutgers University)
In this poetry selection I grapple with chaos, with the ways that bodies--human and otherwise--exceed our grasp and force us to question our realities and our desires. These poems take up various bodies, ask how they fit and do not fit into space, what the impressions they make, and what traces they leave in their absence.

Inside/Outside: Women's Voices
Barbara Wade
This collection of poetry creates a variety of voices to explore the inner lives of women and intersections with others. Through metaphor, imagery, and humor, it touches on important aspects of women's lives, including mother/daughter relations, maintaining independence and spiritedness while aging, self-realization, treatment within the health care system, and dieting fads.

Kinswomen: Poems in Relation
Sheila Hassell Hughes (University of Dayton)
These poems address the struggles of women in my family—with depression, poverty, alcoholism, abortion, teen pregnancy, child abandonment, sexual abuse, adoption and foster care, widowhood, senility, natural disaster, and the death of a child—and their remarkable reservoirs of strength and compassion. As a sister, writer, and feminist I feel compelled to try to respond, to “answer” the call of both their pain and their power as women and to make meaning out of it for my own life and vision. The poems are laments, inquiries, and prayers of sorts – all injected with a degree of resilient humor.

Postcard on Parchment
Christine Stewart-Nunez
Emerging from the intersections of identity, place, and class, these poems from Postcard on Parchment (winner of the 2007 ABZ First Book Prize) focus on the experiences of a young American woman living in Turkey. In form and impulse, the poems take up questions of embodiment: In what ways do culture and gender map themselves on the flesh? Written with attention to representation, the author confronts writing in a culture not her own by drawing attention to the speaker’s subjectivity, complicating the rigidity of key themes, and confronting tensions between lived truth(s) and invented truth(s).

What is spoken is no longer unspeakable
Tema Jon Okun (Ubuntu), Kriti Sharma (Ubuntu), Alexis Pauline Gumbs (Ubuntu), Serena Pauline Sebring (Ubuntu), Emily Chavez (Ubuntu)
An interactive participatory poetry slam based on our experience as a collective of women who live and write our constant reflection about surviving under empire as feminists, women of color, queer sexual deviants, academics, white women, community activists, survivors, young old women. We have deep, angry, joyful, tentative, complex, necessary experience creating space for loving each other into saying what we normally can't. We will facilitate a process involving a writing prompt, time for writing in response to the prompt, deep listening to what has been written, and then talking about it, slowly and thoughtfully.

Your Body is a Borderland
Lauren R. Espinoza (University of Texas Pan-American)
It's 2002 and John Mayer has just released "Your Body is a Borderland." His record career is down the tubes, and he's been dropped from his record label. If only. Instead, he released "Your Body is a Wonderland" and now he's famous. It’s 2007 and “Your Body is a Borderland” is a collection of poems designed to bring forth the idea that the Borderland is a place where pluralities can exist as one. Mexican and American – always separate but never equivalent.

Creative Writing Series #4 (prose)
Sat, Jun 21 - 11:15am - 12:30pm
Location: North / 202

I Am Not My Hair: Political Sheroes in the Crossfire
Stephane NA Dunn
This creative nonfiction piece, a mix of autobiographical notes and intensive cultural critique, interrogates the play of race and gender in popular, media representations of black female political identity. "I Am Not My Hair: Political Sheroes in the Crossfire" engages recent incidents such as the infamous Imus scandal, and the public imagery and personas of Shirley Chisholm and that of recent political sisters like Cynthia McKinney. It ultimately delves into the troubling sexist and racist dynamics implicit in how they have been publicly 'read' and addresses that all important question: What does hair have to do with it all?

Small Town Madness: Women on the Margins
Barbara Horn (Nassau Community College)
Reading from her work in progress (a memoir entitled "Picture This: From [Midwestern] Farm to [East] Village"), this creative non-fiction writer will concentrate on how small town American life, especially in the 1950's and 1960's, was not only dying, it was also "killing" its citizens, particularly the elderly, the infirm, the mentally challenged. Often invisible, usually ignored, and always demeaned, old women and women of color lived in the shadows. The writer, looking back when she was an observant girl, attempts to bring these marginalized females to the forefront.

Vera, from Lunar Eclipse
Genevieve Carminati (Montgomery College)
“Vera” is from a collection-in-progress of short stories about women, called Lunar Eclipse. The story examines the importance of woman-to-woman friendships, even those that we might accept reluctantly, and might believe incorrectly, as the title character does, are more for the benefit of the other woman. Vera, a would-be writer struggling for self-hood and control, turns her frustration and anger against her longtime friend Molly, a painter whose accomplishments and relationships (especially with the staunch Julia) Vera belittles and criticizes. But at Molly's latest exhibit, why is Vera so drawn to the paintings and their creator?