2012 Conference Theme

    The 2012 MCEA Conference will be held on October 26 and will feature Professor Patricia Clark, GVSU’s  Poet-in-Residence, as the keynote speaker. This year’s theme will be Survival. Literature is full of desperate struggles for survival, sometimes with successful results, sometimes not. To survive, our students strive to pass classes, meet deadlines, fund their education, and make good career choices.  As teachers, we worry about the elimination of programs, our health benefits, and even our jobs.  What efforts to survive do we/others recognize and how are these efforts seen in all areas of English studies?

  Patricia Clark is a professor in the Writing Department and also the poet-in-residence at Grand Valley State University in Michigan Her poetry has appeared in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Slate, New England Review, North American Review, Pennsylvania Review, Black Warrior Review, and Seattle Review. She is the recipient of a Creative Artist Grant from ArtServe Michigan for 2003.

    Her book of poems North of Wondering won the first book competition sponsored by Women in Literature, Inc. Patricia has also co-edited an anthology of contemporary women writers called Worlds in Our Words, published by Blair Press/Prentice Hall. In 1997 her poem “The Only Body” won Mississippi Review’s Poetry Prize. She has been a scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a resident at The MacDowell Colony, at Ragdale, and at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

    MCEA Call for Papers 2012.pdf