For individual submissions, please include a 250-word abstract, your full name, affiliation, contact information and audio/visual requirements. Proposals for panels (three presenters) must include an abstract and all the above information for all presenters. There is no registration fee for presenters or attendees. However, any donations to the Sowell Collection Endowment are appreciated. Funds in this endowment will be used to support the conference and other projects associated with the Collection.
Creative and scholarly papers/panels are acceptable. Creative work should be grounded in community, place, and/or the natural world. Critical/scholarly papers should deal in some way with writers whose work is included in the Sowell Collection, and/or writers whose work follows, expands, or responds to the Sowell Collection’s themes. Sowell always take a broad and welcoming approach to thoughtful and thought-provoking proposals.
Confirmed keynote speakers include:
Dr. Laura Walls
Professor Emerita, English
University of Notre Dame
Professor Walls works in the field of literature and science, with a special concentration on Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and on American Transcendentalism. She is now working on a literary biography of the American writer Barry Lopez – a founding writer of the Sowell Collection - who in profound ways has brought the concerns of the Transcendentalists into the turbulent worlds of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Stephen Graham Jones Society Panel
Members of the official society dedicated to the study and teaching of the genre-bending works of author Stephen Graham Jones will present their recent research.
About The Sowell Collection
Founded in 1999, the Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community and the Natural World seeks to promote and preserve literature that engages with questions of environment and place, the nature of human and non-human communities and the intersection of scientific and spiritual values. The Collection contains the personal papers of some of the country’s most prominent writers on the natural world. Authors in the Sowell Collection have received numerous honors including a National Book Award, a MacArthur Genius Award, Stegner Fellowships, John Burroughs Awards and numerous awards for literary and scientific writing. The collection includes Kim Barnes, Rick Bass, Lisa Couturier, Max Crawford, David James Duncan, Gretel Ehrlich, Paul Hawken, Clyde Jones, Stephen Graham Jones, William Kittredge, Michael Koepf, John Lane, J. Drew Lanham, Barry Lopez, Bill McKibben, Susan Brind Morrow, Gary Paul Nabhan, Howard Norman, Doug Peacock, Andrea Peacock, Robert Michael Pyle, David Quammen, Barbara Ras, Marc Reisner, Pattiann Rogers, Sandra Scofield, Annick Smith, Ro Wauer and Robert Wrigley.
To submit or for additional questions, contact Kristin Loyd.