DePaul Spring English Conference 2023
A celebration of creativity and the written word, May 12 2023
What is the Spring English Conference, Anway?
glad you asked-->
it is an annual chance for all students in the English Department (undergraduate and graduate) to share their work and discuss their creative and analytical processes.
The focus of the day is to generate conversation and community within our department.
Read on for the poetry, fiction, literary analysis, and genre bending work FEatured in this year's conference.
Professor Francesca Royster
keynote address
Prof. Royster's Bio
Francesca T. Royster received her PhD from University of California, Berkeley in English Literature in 1995. At DePaul, she is a Professor of English, and teaches courses on African American Literature, Queer Writers of Color, and Writing About Music.
She’s written scholarly work on Shakespeare, Black Lesbian Country music fans, Prince, and Fela Kuti on Broadway among other topics. Her books include Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon (Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (University of Michigan Press, 2013), Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions (University of Texas Press, 2022), and Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance (Abrams/ Overlook Press, 2023).
Her newest book in process is Listening for My Mother: Travels in Music from Chicago to Bahia, a combination of memoir, travel writing and cultural history about mourning and healing in Women's Music in the Black Diaspora
She’s lives in Chicago with her partner Annie, her daughter Cecelia and two pups.
DePaul Publishing Institute
Comprised of five nationally recognized publishing efforts in Depaul university's english department, the publishing institute enhances a curriculum that provides students with hands-on training in book and magazine publishing. Check us out here
Round 1
Panelists
Professor Miles Harvey
Professor Barrie Jean Borich
Professor Richard Jones
Mallory Boring
Alexandria Wachal
Allison Dulabaum
moderated by Eliana Herman
Misogyny in Literature
moderated by
Prof June Chung
June Hee Chung is Associate Professor of late-19th and early-20th Century American Literature at DePaul University. Her work centers on the intersections of commercial practices, technology, and cosmopolitanism in the arts. She has published essays on Henry James and economic history for American Literature and Oxford UP, and her monograph "Henry James and the Media Arts of Modernity: Commercial Cosmopolitanism" was published by Routledge Press in 2019. Chung is completing a book on American Orientalism and decorative material culture in early-20th century women’s fiction.
2
click to read!
Maria Dorado
Maria is a second-year graduate student in the Literature and Publishing MA program and will be graduating this June. After graduation, Maria hopes to explore more opportunities in either Writing Center or editorial work. Part of Maria’s writing process includes writing a terrible first draft and revising, revising, revising.
Grace Brown
Grace Brown is from Falmouth, Maine. I am a senior majoring in English Literature with a minor in Anthropology. I am a firm believer in reverse outlining, and I like to make multiple drafts of my writing before my end product.
Macrina Forest
Macrina Forest is a senior majoring in English. She is especially interested in exploring the treatment of women throughout literary history, as well as in museum and newspaper archives. For literary criticism, one important step early in her writing process is to create an outline of quotations from across multiple sources, along with any other notes, before regrouping them into various categories and narrowing them down to decide on possible main ideas and a thesis statement.
Panelists
2
Creative Collections
moderated by
Prof Michele Morano
Michele Morano holds a PhD in English and an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa. She is the author of the travel memoir "Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain and the memoir-in-essays Like Love" (one of ten books long-listed for the 2021 PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay). Her short work has appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Best American Essays, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Ninth Letter, and WaveForm: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women. Dr. Morano teaches undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops in nonfiction and fiction writing, along with literature courses focused on memoir and travel writing
2
click to read!
Nic Job
Nic Job is a student of the world, and spends as much time as they can traveling and observing. Cultures, places, people, and themself. They are a human who likes humans, and all of their beautiful, tangled-up, ordinariness. They like to write micro and high fantasy, and are trying to find a way to make those two get along.
Emily Mayo
Emily Mayo is a Cuban American woman navigating early adulthood through the pursuit of life’s sazón (as long as it's Goya brand)! Emily works as the Poetry Section Editor of Crook and Folly, the institution's Arts and Literature Magazine. The writing of this Miami native reflects on identity and heritage, tackling the upsetting, unsettling, and taboo with humor and wit.
Panelists
2
Janet Leu
Twilight Swan
Janet Leu is a Chinese-American writer, noise artist, and cat mom living in Chicago. She started writing poetry as a teenager in the 90s, switched to fiction, then returned to poetry during her first year as a student at DePaul’s Masters in Writing and Publishing program. It didn’t take long for her to notice that most of her poems were about sex, death, and ballet, and she ran with it. Her poems are mostly produced at night in starts and fits, then revised over and over. In addition to poetry, she is an adult ballet dancer obsessed with murderous ghost queens. She can regularly be found howling into microphones at art spaces, dive bars, and basements throughout the city.
Michael Dean
Michael Dean is a poet based in Chicago. They are an M.F.A. candidate in Creative Writing and Publishing at DePaul University. They serve as Assistant Editor for Another Chicago Magazine and have work forthcoming or published in Hooligan Magazine and Poetry East. In their free time, Michael enjoys watching Lake Michigan at night and collecting new words.
Panelists
2
Evolution of Technology/Internet's Impact on Culture
moderated by
Prof Marcy Dinius
Professor Marcy J. Dinius specializes in nineteenth-century US and African American literature and visual and material culture and is the author of The Textual Effects of David Walker's Appeal: Print-Based Activism Against Slavery, Racism, and Discrimination, 1829-1851 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) and The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Cultures in the Age of the Daguerreotype (Penn Press, 2012). She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University and taught at Northwestern, Penn, and the University of Delaware before joining DePaul's faculty in 2011.
2
click to read!
Ava O'Malley
Ava O’Malley is a Cleveland-born writer living in Chicago, IL. O’Malley graduated with a double bachelor’s degree in journalism and Spanish from DePaul University in June 2022, and is continuing on as a Master’s in Writing and Publishing student at the same university. Her writing, which spans creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry and reporting, often focuses on queer identity, spirituality, and memory.
Eden Powers
Eden Powers is a senior at DePaul pursuing a major in English with a concentration on literary studies, as well minors in history and psychology. Working as a peer writing tutor at DePaul's Writing Center has completely changed the way I think about my own writing. I've come to value the process of revision, which has made the process of starting much easier. Rather than being paralyzed trying to find the perfect words on my first attempt, I'm a lot more productive when I let myself make mistakes.
2
Panelists
Intertextual Respones across Literature
moderated by
Prof Francesca Royster
Francesca T. Royster received her PhD from University of California, Berkeley in English Literature in 1995. At DePaul she teaches courses on African American Literature, Queer Writers of Color and Writing About Music. She’s written scholarly work on Shakespeare, Black Lesbian Country music fans, Prince, and Fela Kuti on Broadway among other topics. Her books include Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon (Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (University of Michigan Press, 2013), Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions (University of Texas Press, 2022), and Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance (Abrams/ Overlook Press, 2023).
Her newest book in process is Listening for My Mother: Travels in Music from Chicago to Bahia, a combination of memoir, travel writing and cultural history about mourning and healing in Women's Music in the Black Diaspora.
3
click to read!
Sam Arroyo
My name is Sam Arroyo and I go by she/her pronouns. I am English major with a minor in Latino and Latin American studies, and this is my final quarter at DePaul. I wrote this paper a year ago and worked on it for ten weeks! My writing process consisted of a lot of outlines and a lot of convincing myself to actually sit down and write.
2
click to read!
Genesis Castello
Genesis Castello is a junior at DePaul and is studying English with a concentration in creative writing, and is minoring in Women’s and Gender Studies. She is an aspiring author and has an interest in writing horror and, just as often, writing about her love for her home in Puerto Rico. She is also heavily against editing until all of her thoughts are down on paper.
Grace Raymond is a double major in English and Psychology. After undergraduate, Grace hopes to earn a doctorate. Outside of school, she is an active volunteer at several organizations. In her writing, Grace takes inspiration from the everyday and the fantastical and can often be found writing a thought down in class or on the L.
Grace Raymond
2
Characterization and Setting in Fiction
moderated by
Prof Miles Harvey
Miles Harvey is a professor of English and the director of the DePaul Publishing Institute. His latest book, The King of Confidence, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice selection and was long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.
2
Audrey Leib
click to read!
Audrey Leib is a double major in Journalism and English with a concentration in creative writing. Originally from Ohio, Audrey has always had a passion for writing.Her fiction stories are based on real events that have happened to either her or her loved ones. Her first drafts are mostly action, brief dialogue, and location, constantly reminding herself to just get the words on the page. After making first round edits, she sleeps on her decisions, and continues to make edits over multiple days. She also writes poems to cope with the world around her. To see her journalism work, go to www.audleib.wordpress.com
Georgia Wood
A fun fact about my writing process was that I wrote it the day of the Mariner's wildcard game in October of 2022, which indeed, was their first playoff appearance in the last 20 years.
Lexi Singleton
Lexi Singleton is a writer interested in various topics from folklore and fairytales to neurodivergence and mental health. Her writing process usually involves tea, wine, and two very talkative cats.
2
Poetry
moderated by
Prof Tara Betts
Tara Betts is the author of the poetry collections Refuse to Disappear, Break the Habit, and Arc & Hue. In addition to her work as a teaching artist and mentor for young poets, she has taught at Rutgers University, University of Illinois-Chicago, DePaul University, Northwestern University, and at Stateville Prison via Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project. She served as the Inaugural Poet for The People Practitioner Fellow at University of Chicago. Tara is also the Poetry Editor at The Langston Hughes Review and founder of the nonprofit organization The Whirlwind Learning Center on Chicago’s South Side.
2
Meghan Malachi
"Where Does Your Love Come From" and "Safety Harbor, 2020"
click to read!
Emily Mayo
Allie Dulabaum
Meghan B. Malachi is a writer and tutor from the Bronx, NY. She is a 2021 Pushcart nominee and the winner of the 2022 Spoon River Poetry Review Editor's Prize Contest. Her first chapbook, The Autodidact, was published in December 2020 by Ethel Zine & Micro Press. She is working towards an MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing at DePaul University. Her writing process usually begins by listening to and drawing inspiration from Solange, SZA, and Usher.
Emily Mayo is a Cuban American woman navigating early adulthood through the pursuit of life’s sazón (as long as it's Goya brand)! Emily works as the Poetry Section Editor of Crook and Folly, the institution's Arts and Literature Magazine. The writing of this Miami native reflects on identity and heritage, tackling the upsetting, unsettling, and taboo with humor and wit.
Allie Dulabaum is a poet from Elgin, Illinois, who reflects on social and personal identity cultivated through urban landscape & history. She is an undergraduate senior studying Creative Writing & Sociology and works as an undergraduate Editor & Editorial Assistant for DePaul Blue Book: Best American High School Writing. Allie's poetry debut can be found in the 43rd edition of DePaul University’s Arts & Literature Magazine, Crook & Folly.
2
Photos!
Thank you!
for being a part of this year's conference
website by e. herman