This conference is organized around experimental writing and its many, varying communities including performance art collaborations, small press publishing and editorial projects, virtual and digital work, academic affiliations, and intersecting aesthetic, social and political identities and representations. The goal of this conference is to embrace the productive and generative connotations of these two terms as innovative acts and encounters that are always in the process of both venturing to do something previously untried, and questioning and testing the very boundaries and mores, however contingent, established by those attempts. Of particular interest is how writing communities might be changing historically in the early twenty-first century, and how writers theorize and make use (or not) of various conceptualizations and practices of community. What do such formations include and leave out? What are the conditions of possibility for a community to emerge? From where does one emerge? How are writing communities that share an often contested collective vision themselves experimental formations for attempting new modes of relation, affiliation and creation? This conference is organized around experimental writing and its many, varying communities including performance art collaborations, small press publishing and editorial projects, virtual and digital work, academic affiliations, and intersecting aesthetic, social and political identities and representations. The goal of this conference is to embrace the productive and generative connotations of these two terms as innovative acts and encounters that are always in the process of both venturing to do something previously untried, and questioning and testing the very boundaries and mores, however contingent, established by those attempts. Of particular interest is how writing communities might be changing historically in the early twenty-first century, and how writers theorize and make use (or not) of various conceptualizations and practices of community. What do such formations include and leave out? What are the conditions of possibility for a community to emerge? From where does one emerge? How are writing communities that share an often contested collective vision themselves experimental formations for attempting new modes of relation, affiliation and creation? (Conference website: http://ucsccommunitypoetryconf.tumblr.com/)

Friday

9:00-9:30am Opening Comments

9:30-10:45am Panel
3 papers, one respondent

11:00am-12:15pm Panel
3 papers, one respondent

12:15-1:15pm Lunch / Collaborative Writing Tables

1:15-2:30pm Roundtable
4 presenters

2:45-4:00pm Panel
3 papers, one respondent

4:30-6:30pm Dinner

7:00pm Poetry Reading at the Felix Kulpa Gallery

Saturday

9:00-10:15am Panel
3 papers, one respondent

10:30-11:45 Panel
3 papers, one respondent

11:45am-1:00pm Lunch / Reading

1:00-2:15pm Roundtable
4 presenters

2:30-4:00pm Panel
3 papers, one respondent

4:00-6:15pm Dinner

6:30pm Poetry Reading at the Felix Kulpa Gallery