Reorienting the British Women Writers’ Conference, Revised: February 2021

The British Women Writers’ Association has announced a new program for their annual conference and issued an apology for the initial CFP:  “We are grateful for the feedback we received on the initial Call for Papers. We apologize for perpetuating the institutional racism which pervades the profession and which this year’s conference seeks to counter. The revised conference announcement aligns more clearly with the goals for this year’s conference. Inclusivity and equity have always been at the core of the BWWA by surfacing the work of underread women writers. This task demands continual reorientations and re-examinations, specifically to combat a history of canon formation that privileges whiteness. We are aiming to stage an inclusive, antiracist virtual conference that practices a conscious engagement with the history of exclusion within the field.”  Speakers will include:

Brigitte Fielder (University of Wisconsin, Madison).

Jessica Marie Johnson (Johns Hopkins)

Marisa J. Fuentes (Rutgers)

Jazzmen Lee-Johnson (2020 Artist Fellow at the RISD Museum)

Ryan Fong (Kalamazoo College)

Hilary Nicholson (Video for Change, Jamaica)

Samantha Pinto (University of Texas at Austin)

On the fourth and final day of the conference, participants will discuss two recently published texts centering Black women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis (2020) and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Marys Seacole (2019)  You can read their full statement and view details about the conference here.