25th ASU Writers Conference in Honor of Elmer Kelton
March 3-4, 2022
The 2022 conference will commemorate the 25th Angelo State University’s Writers Conference in Honor of Elmer Kelton. Our two-day conference is one of the few in the state that requires no registration or attendance fees for presenters and guests. This year’s celebration of writers will also be commemorated with the publication of a conference proceedings that will include selected conference presentations, winning entries from the area high school contest, and an interview with Naomi Shihab Nye.
Featured Writer: Naomi Shihab Nye
We are pleased to announce this year’s featured writer is acclaimed poet, fiction writer and children’s literature author Naomi Shihab Nye.
Nye’s 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East was a 2002 National Book Award finalist. The Tiny Journalist (2019) won Best Poetry Book from both the Texas Institute of Letters and the Writers League of Texas and was named a Best Poetry Book by the Washington Post (2019).
Her work has been featured on National Public Radio’s A Prairie Home Companion and PBS poetry specials. Her most recent poetry collection Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems (2020) features some of her most celebrated poems as well as some of her new poetry.
Nye has also authored several books of poetry and works of fiction for children. She was named Young People’s Poet Laureate 2019-2021 by the Poetry Foundation and is the winner of two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards.
The two-day conference will also include free and public presentations by some of the best writers from Texas and beyond. These presentations will be scheduled in the afternoon of Thursday, March 3, and the morning of Friday, March 4.
12-1:50 p.m. - Closing Luncheon for Presenters: Special Panel Celebrating 25 Years of Honoring Elmer Kelton with John Wegner (Host), Mary Ellen Hartje, Chris Ellery and Terry Dalrymple. Nasworthy Suite, Houston Harte University Center
Presenters’ Biographies
Alan Berecka, a recent Pushcart Nominee, is a librarian at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi. He is the author of 5 full-length books of poetry, with poems also appearing in the Concho River Review, The Christian Century, and The Texas Review. In 2017, he was named the first poet laureate of Corpus Christi, serving in that capacity until 2019.
Margaret Emma Brandl is Assistant Professor of English at Austin College in Sherman, Texas, where she is also the sponsor of the undergraduate literary magazine Suspension. She earned her Ph.D. at Texas Tech University and her MFA at Notre Dame. Her novella Tuscaloosa (Or, In April, Harpies) is from Bridge Eight Press. Her other writing has appeared in journals such as Gulf Coast, The Cincinnati Review, Yalobusha Review, Pithead Chapel, The Boiler, and CHEAP POP.
Robin Carstensen directs the creative writing program at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, where she also serves as faculty advisor for The Windward Review, a Literary Journal of the South Texas Coastal Bend. She is also co-founding senior editor of the Switchgrass Review: a Journal of Health and Transformation. She has poems published in BorderSenses, Southern Humanities Review, Tishman Review, Voices de La Luna, Demeter Press’s anthology, Borderlands and Crossroads: Writing the Motherland, Fiolet and Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry, and many more.
Chip Dameron is a professor emeritus of English at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and lives in Georgetown. He is the author of eleven collections of poetry and a travel journal. His poems, as well as his essays on contemporary writers, have appeared in numerous publications in the U.S. and abroad. His most recent book is Relatively Speaking: Poems of Person and Place, which combines a collection of his poems with a collection by poet Betsy Joseph, his sister. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he also was a writer in residence for four months at the Dobie Paisano ranch.
Andrew Geyer currently serves as English Department Chair at the University of South Carolina Aiken and Fiction Editor at Concho River Review. His latest book is the story cycle Lesser Mountains. Geyer’s other individually authored books are Dixie Fish, a novel; Siren Songs from the Heart of Austin, a story cycle; Meeting the Dead, a novel; and Whispers in Dust and Bone, a story cycle that won the silver medal for short fiction in the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Awards and a Spur Award for short fiction. He is the co-author, with Jerry Craven and Terry Dalrymple, of the hybrid story cycle Dancing on Barbed Wire.
Tiffany Isaacs teaches writing at the University of North Texas where she is a doctoral student. She is an assistant fiction editor at Narrative Magazine. Her writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Environmental Writers’ Conference. Her fiction and essays appear or are forthcoming in River Teeth, the Santa Monica Review, and World Literature Today. She received her MFA from Florida State University where she served as the Assistant Fiction Editor at the South East Review and holds a BA in philosophy from Brown University.
Betsy Joseph, a retired English professor, lives in Dallas and has poems that have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies. Her poetry collection, Only So Many Autumns, was published by Lamar University Literary Press in 2019. Lamar is also publishing her forthcoming book, Relatively Speaking: Poems of Person and Place, a collaborative collection of poetry with her brother and poet Chip Dameron. In addition, she and her husband, photographer Bruce Jordan, have produced two books, Benches and Lighthouses, which pair her haiku with his black and white photography.
Sarah K. Lenz teaches composition, creative writing, and literature at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas, where she lives with her husband, son, and three cats. She is an essayist and literary arts educator. Her nonfiction has appeared in Crazyhorse, Colorado Review, The Fourth River, Entropy, Crab Orchard Review, PenDust Radio, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Georgia College. She is the founder of the Writers’ Studio of Corpus Christi, a community-based literary arts education center.
Dylan Lopez is an English/Creative Writing student at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. He is the Managing Editor of the Windward Review, and his poetry has appeared in Corpus Christi Writers, Trinity University’s High Noon, and King’s Open All Night.
Kat Moore is an ABD Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Texas. She has essays in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Image, Hotel America, Passages North, Diagram, The Rumpus, Entropy, Hippocampus, Whiskey Island, Salt Hill, and others. Her fiction can be found in Cheap Pop Lit, Hobart, and Craft. An essay of hers appears in the anthology Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives on Illness, Disability, and Medicine. She was a 2021 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Scholar.
Nathanael O’Reilly is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Arlington. An Irish-Australian poet, his books include Boulevard, (Un)belonging, Preparations for Departure, Distance, and Suburban Exile. His poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies published in fourteen countries, including Beir Bua Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, The Elevation Review, In Parentheses: New Modernisms, and Mascara Literary Review. He is the poetry editor for Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature.
Sebastián Hasani Páramo is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Austin College in Sherman, Texas. He is a CantoMundo Fellow and a former Dobie Paisano Fellow. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, Southern Indiana Review, Southeast Review, The Cortland Review, Bennington Review, New South, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is the founding editor of The Boiler and poetry editor for Deep Vellum Press.
Juan Manuel Pérez, a Mexican-American poet of indigenous descent and a Poet Laureate for Corpus Christi, Texas (2019-2020), is the author of several books of poetry including the Elgin Nominated, Space in Pieces and Screw the Wall! and Other Brown People Poems. The award-winning poet, history teacher, and Pushcart Nominee, is also a member of the Poetry Society of Texas, the Horror Writers Association, the Science Fiction Poetry Association, the Horror Authors Guild, the Baseball Bards, and the Military Writers Society of America.
Matthew Pitt is Associate Professor and Director of English Undergraduate Studies at TCU. His books are These Are Our Demands (Engine Books), a Midwest Book Award winner; and Attention Please Now, winner of the Autumn House Prize. His stories appear individually in Best New American Voices, Epoch, New Letters, BOMB, Oxford American, Cincinnati Review, Conjunctions, and The Southern Review, and are cited in several “Best of” volumes. He also serves as Editor of descant and Contributing Editor for West Branch.
Carol Coffee Reposa is the 2018 Texas Poet Laureate and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Her poems, reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlanta Review, The Evansville Review, The Texas Observer, Southwestern American Literature, The Valparaiso Review, and other journals and anthologies. She is also the author of five books of poetry—At the Border: Winter Lights, The Green Room, Facts of Life, Underground Musicians, and New and Selected Poems 2018.
Questions? Contact Us!
For questions or inquiries, please contact Dr. Laurence Musgrove, the Writers Conference Chair, at lmusgrove@angelo.edu.
Help support and enhance the Writers Conference in Honor of Elmer Kelton with a tax-deductible gift to its endowment. For more information, contact the Office of Development at 325-942-2116 or development@angelo.edu.
