The various intellectual interests of the faculty at UGA, which include Native American
Studies, Jazz, the work of James Baldwin, and Early American Literature, have made it
possible to foster serious conversations about race and aesthetics within the Creative Writing Doctoral Program. This panel will showcase the program’s breadth of disciplinary and aesthetic approaches.
PRESENTERS:
1) LeAnne Howe: “Race and American Indians: A reading.”
Abstract: LeAnne Howe will read from Choctalking on Other Realities, one part tragedy, one
part absurdist fiction, one part marvelous realism, a tribalography on race: "Today, Arabs in
keffiyehs have replace images of Plains Indians fighting the US Cavalry. The fact that Arabs
identify with Indians and not John Wayne isn't surprising. We've both been enemies of the
United States."
Bio: LeAnne Howe (Choctaw) writes fiction, poetry, plays and scholarship that deal with
Native experiences. She’s received American Book Award, Tulsa Library Literary Award, a
2012 USA Artist Ford Fellowship, and Fulbright Scholarship, among others. She’s the
Eidson Distinguished Professor at the University of Georgia, Athens.
2) Ed Pavlic: A Poetry Reading
Abstract: Pavlic will read work from his newest book, Let's Let That Are Not Yet : Inferno
(National Poetry Series, Fence Books, 2015 – Judge, John Keene).
Bio: Professor of English and Creative Writing, ED PAVLIĆ’S newest books are Let's Let
That Are Not Yet : Inferno (National Poetry Series, Fence Books, 2015), Visiting Hours at the
Color Line (National Poetry Series, Milkweed Editions, 2013), But Here Are Small Clear
Refractions (Achebe Center, 2009, Kwani? Trust, 2013) and Winners Have Yet to be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway (U Georgia P, 2008). Others works include Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue (Copper Canyon, 2001), Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture (U Minnesota Press, 2002), and Labors Lost Left Unfinished (UPNE/Sheep Meadow Press, 2006).
Among his current projects are two book-length manuscripts concerning the life and work
of James Baldwin: “‘Who Can Afford to Improvise?’: Black Music and James Baldwin’s
Political Aesthetic,” and “No Time to Rest: James Baldwin’s Life in Letters to His Brother
David.”
3) Magdalena Zurawski, Cultivating Territory: Imaginary and Real Removal in Margaret
Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes
Abstract: In this talk I consider Summer on the Lakes, Margaret Fuller’s travel narrative from
1843, as an example of literary cultivation in the service of American expansionism. Placing
Fuller within the context of the British aesthetic tradition of the picturesque, I read her
extensive citations of Wordsworth within her travel narrative as a transformation and
continuation of the English eighteenth-century aesthetic practice, which enabled a rising
middle-class to “possess” English land through the development of literary and painterly
sensibilities. Fuller’s adoption of the picturesque, I show, enables her own literary cultivation
to mediate an imaginary and subjective possession of formerly Indian land and thus serves as a psychological means of expanding real national territory. I argue that Fuller’s extension of European literary tradition into an American sphere as expressed through the excessive
literary citations within the text aestheticizes her encounters with native Americans and
permits her to imagine her encounters as an expansion of poetic tradition rather than as a
hostile political act. Fuller’s dependence upon Wordsworth’s poetry and German literary
sources in order to mediate her quasi-colonial position in formerly native territories presents
a compelling example of intellectual cultivation in service of New World expansionism.
Bio: Magdalena Zurawski joined UGA's English faculty in the Fall of 2013. Her novel The
Bruise was published in 2008 by FC2/University of Alabama Press. It received both a 2008
Lambda Award and the 2007 Ronald Sukenick-American Book Review Innovative Fiction
Prize. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University and completed her
PhD in American Literature at Duke University in 2013. Litmus Press will be publishing her
poetry collection Companion Animal in the Fall of 2014.
4) Shamala Gallagher, reading form Mooncalf, a fabulist non-fiction essay
Abstract: I will read from my nonfiction manuscript Mooncalf, a lyric address to Caliban that
shifts among creative and critical genres in its search for an understanding of "otherness."
Bio: Shamala Gallagher's poetry has appeared in VOLT, Verse Daily, Copper Nickel,
Timber, The Offending Adam, Word For/Word, Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United
States, and elsewhere. Her chapbook I Learned the Language of Barbs and Sparks No One Spoke is forthcoming from dancing girl press in 2015. She received her BA from Stanford University and her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at UT-Austin, and she is currently a first-year PhD student at the University of Georgia.
5) Gabrielle Fuentes, reading from Settler’s Point
Abstract: My novel in progress, "Settler's Point," examines the insidious divisions of race and class on a religious commune in rural Northern Wisconsin during the Great Depression. Set against the backdrop of the Dust Bowl, Prohibition, and rising KKK violence, "Settler's
Point" explores a community seemingly living outside of racial boundaries and yet founded
on segregation and racial violence.
Bio: Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes is from Madison, Wisconsin. Her work has appeared or is
forthcoming in One Story, Western Humanities Review, Pank, The Collagist, Tweed’s,
NANO Fiction, The Yoke, SpringGun, and elsewhere. She received her BA from Brown
University and her MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is currently a PhD
candidate in the Creative Writing Program at UGA.
