Thursday, October 1, 2020
7:00-9:00 pm EDT
Kickoff Reading:
Friday, October 2, 2020
9:30-11:00 am EDT
Panel A
In the Beginning(s):
Cross-cultural, International, Contrapuntal:
1:00-2:30 pm EDT
Panel A
Early-to-Mid 20th Century Sounds:
Influence, Confluence, Exchange:
3:30-5:00 pm EDT
Panel A
Constraint and Embodiment:
Short and Long of It:
7:00-9:00 pm EDT
Keynote Event:
Saturday, October 3, 2020
9:30-11:00 am EDT
Panel A
At/As Home:
Queering the Sonnet/Querying Queer:
1:00-2:30 pm EDT
Panel A
Code and Close Reading:
Innovation, Intimacy, Affect:
3:30-5:00 pm EDT
Panel A
Inverted, Grotesque, Apocalyptic, Fantastical:
Dialect, Dialectics, and Discourse:
7:00-9:00 pm EDT
Keynote Event:
7:00-9:00 pm EDT
Kickoff Reading:
- Featured Poets: Henri Cole, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Joyelle McSweeney, and Kazim Ali
- Wanda Coleman Tribute by Terrance Hayes
Friday, October 2, 2020
9:30-11:00 am EDT
Panel A
In the Beginning(s):
- "The Rising Poems of America: Nationalistic Origins of the American Sonnet," Benjamin Crawford
- "Origins of Rupture: Ralph Waldo Emerson's 'Woods, A Prose Sonnet,'" John James
- "Anne Bradstreet and the Prehistory of the American Sonnet," Roger Wei-chen Liu
- "The Sonnet in British North American Printed Matter Before 1800," Heather H. Yeung
- Moderated by William Camponovo
Cross-cultural, International, Contrapuntal:
- "A Plummy Sonnet by Mani Leyb," Jordan Finkin
- "Claude McKay’s Lonely Planet," Walt Hunter
- "Dissident Sonnets: The Contrapuntal Formalisms of McDougall and Jess," Marlo Starr
- "Cross-Cultural Sonnets in Henri Cole’s Middle Earth," Yuki Tanaka
- Moderated by Deirdre Danklin
1:00-2:30 pm EDT
Panel A
Early-to-Mid 20th Century Sounds:
- "John Wheelwright, Radio, and the Sonnet’s New Deal," Matthew Kilbane
- "Modern Sonnet and the Plain Style," Melih Levi
- "Two Cathedrals: Wallace Stevens and George Santayana's Sonnet Exchange," Kelly MacPhail
- "Time for feminism: Sylvia Plath's conceptions of gender and time," Maximillien Vis
- "Anthony Hecht’s Barren Places: 'The Feast of Stephen' and the American Sonnet," David Yezzi
- Moderated by Mary Jo Salter
Influence, Confluence, Exchange:
- "'That time of year' for Toomer and Shakespeare," Jennifer Clarvoe
- "Henri Cole’s Sonnet Sequences," Richie Hofmann
- “From the me to the you”: Margaret Walker’s Interpersonal Politics," Ariel Martino
- "The Sonnet as Conversation: Experiments in Collaboration," Simone Muench and Jackie K. White
- "Radical Sonnets in African-American Literature," Jennifer Ryan-Bryant
- Moderated by Armen Davoudian
3:30-5:00 pm EDT
Panel A
Constraint and Embodiment:
- "Jones Very’s Sonnet Manuscripts: Prayer and the Embodiment of Form," Clark Davis
- "Deafing the Sonnet: "John Donne as Adaptive Device," Meg Day
- "Playset: The Sonnet as Enabling Constraint," Anna Maria Hong
- "Sonnets and/as Boxes: Considering the Structural Possibilities of Ken Taylor’s Self-Portrait as Joseph Cornell," Nate Mickelson
- Moderated by Shangrila Willy
Short and Long of It:
- "'This resonant, strange, vaulting roof': Contemporary Sonnets Beyond Iambic Pentameter," Anna Lena Phillips Bell
- "Standing in One Place to Move: Repetition as Disruption and Expansion of the Sonnet," Rebecca Morgan Frank
- "Kay Ryan’s Eerie Frivolity," Diana Leca
- "'You Cannot Rest': Bidart, Lowell, Bishop and the Sonnet," Meg Tyler
- "Partial Visibility: Short-Lined Sonnets," Lesley Wheeler
- Moderated by Samuel Cheney
7:00-9:00 pm EDT
Keynote Event:
- Keynote Speaker: Jahan Ramazani: "Self-Metaphorizing 'American' Sonnets"
- Featured Poets: Tacey M. Atsitty, Philip Metres, and Kiki Petrosino
Saturday, October 3, 2020
9:30-11:00 am EDT
Panel A
At/As Home:
- "The Appalachian Sonnet: Maggie Anderson and her Poetic Labor," Jodie Childers
- "Broken Homes and Broken Hearts: The Desolation of the American Sonnet," Stephen Regan
- "'But could a dream send up:' Confinement and Escape in Gwendolyn Brooks's Domestic Sonnets," Tess Taylor
- "Windows, Vistas, and Interiors in the Sonnets of Tuckerman and Millay," Jeff Westover
- Moderated by James Arthur
Queering the Sonnet/Querying Queer:
- "Subverting the Tradition in The Tradition: Jericho Brown’s Reconceptualization of the Sonnet," Michael Dumanis
- "Can a sonnet be Queer? On the Tension Between Queering Form, Essentialism and Normativity," Anthony Moll
- "Audre Lorde's Sonnet Primal Scene," Lisa Moore
- "The Sonnet As: Neuroqueerness in the American Sonnet," Nathan Spoon
- "The Queer Sonnet in America," Brian Teare
- Moderated by Gabriella Fee
1:00-2:30 pm EDT
Panel A
Code and Close Reading:
- "Meter and Gender Politics in the American Meta-Sonnet," Annie Finch
- "The Resistant Strain: Notes on the Nonnet," Kevin McFadden
- "On Shapes and Echoes That Are Never Done: A Sonnet’s Emergence of Fighting Forms," Mark Olival-Bartley
- "Strange Voltas," Michael Theune
- "African-American Esoteric Sonnets: An Interruption of Afro-Modernism," Jon Woodson
- Moderated by Jane Lewty
Innovation, Intimacy, Affect:
- "Eulogizing a Generation in Elizabeth Alexander’s 'When,'” Abdul Ali
- "The Territorial Imagination: Black Arts and the Sonnet," Timo Müller
- "Helene Johnson’s African (and) American Sonnets," Eleanor Wakefield
- "‘Don’t Call Us Dead’: Marilyn Nelson, Danez Smith, and the Contemporary Sonnet-Ballad," L. Lamar Wilson
- Moderated by Jalen Eutsey
3:30-5:00 pm EDT
Panel A
Inverted, Grotesque, Apocalyptic, Fantastical:
- "‘Silence Is One Part of Speech’: Apocalypse in the American Sonnet from Poe to Dungy," Eleanor Boudreau
- "Pulp Sonnets: American Fantasy and Escape," Stephanie Childress
- "E.E. Cummings: The Iconic Meta-Sonnet and the Cultural Emblem of the American 'Eye/i,'" Gillian Huang-Tiller
- "'Flowers Flung to the Offal-Heap': Sensuous Waste in the Sonnets of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman," Zoë Pollak
- Moderated by Beth Caruso
Dialect, Dialectics, and Discourse:
- "Subversive Protest in Paul Laurence Dunbar and Claude McKay’s Sonnets," Donna Denizé and Amanda Mehsima Licato
- "Analogous Indirect Messages of Opportunity: Claude McKay’s Outcry Adjoining Countee Cullen’s Inquiry," Karyn L Hixson
- "Wrestling with the Language: Dialect and Form in Paul Laurence Dunbar," Hollis Robbins
- ["“The Negro’s Tragedy…Binds Me Like a Heavy Iron Chain”: Claude McKay’s Reinvention of the Sonnet Form as Space for Sociopolitical Discourse and Ideological Critique," Christopher Allen Varlack] canceled
- Moderated by Helena Chung
7:00-9:00 pm EDT
Keynote Event:
- Keynote Speaker: Carl Phillips: “Whose Sonnet? A Transgression”
- Featured Poets: Shane McCrae, Diane Seuss, and Patricia Smith