DEI Symposium

About

The Anaphora Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Symposium is a 5-day program designed to provide the platform for writers, teachers, educators, and other creative professionals to exchange ideas, expand on existing pedagogy, and develop new modes of teaching in the creative classroom, with the objective of disrupting content structures and practices that have overlooked traditionally underrepresented and marginalized groups. The program hopes to empower teaching professionals in creative writing to develop alternative and more inclusive methods of teaching, and provide them with the tools necessary to infuse anti-racist practices throughout different curriculums.

Dates, Fees & Sessions

The theme of the symposium for 2023 is: Equity in the Classroom.

The program will run on October 30 - November 3, 2023, and it will be held virtually. Cost of attendance is $1,800 per person/per institution; the early bird registration fee is now $1,500. The symposium includes: talks and conversations with experienced professionals in the filed; case studies of successfully implemented inclusive curriculums; cultivating alternative modes of craft; sessions on designing more inclusive workshops; creating infrastructures to support writers of color; consultations on how to build comprehensive and strategic plans to infuse DEI initiatives in the creative writing classroom, and more. With this program, Anaphora is hoping to carve out a space where meaningful, informative, and lasting conversations can take place; where teachers, writers, program directors and other creative professionals can come together and ask questions, exchange ideas, and devise plans to build better, more inclusive curriculums, and equip them with some tools necessary to continue to support their program’s faculty, staff, and peers active efforts to diversify the creative classroom.

Registration for the symposium is now open! Availability is limited, so please register early. Early bird registration period runs until September 30, 2023; program fees must be paid in full prior to the beginning of the symposium.

If you have any questions, please check out the symposium’s FAQ page, or contact us.

Speakers

Chris Abani

Chris Abani’s books of fiction include The Secret History of Las Vegas, Song For Night, The Virgin of Flames, Becoming Abigail, Graceland, and Masters of the Board. His poetry collections are Sanctificum, There Are No Names for Red, Feed Me The Sun: Collected Long Poems, Hands Washing Water, Dog Woman, Daphne’s Lot, and Kalakuta Republic. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the Hurston Wright Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, among many honors. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, Romanian, Hebrew, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Portuguese, Dutch, Bosnian, and Serbian. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Board of Trustees Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University.

Bridgette Bianca

bridgette bianca is a poet and professor from South Central Los Angeles. She received her Bachelor of Arts in English from Howard University and her Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Otis College of Art & Design. Her first book of poetry, be/trouble, was released by Writ Large in 2020. When she is not sharing her poetry, she hosts two online series, Young, Black, and Tenure-Track where she documents her experiences in higher education and We Be Readin! Wednesdays where she discusses her romance reading obsession. Recently, she joined forces with poet, artist, and activist GusTavo Guerra Vasquez to form the literary curating team South Central Spits Fire.

Cynthia Guardado

Cynthia Guardado /sIHn-thee-uh Gwarr-Dah-Doe/ (she/her/hers) is a Salvadoran-American poet and a tenured Professor of English at Fullerton College. Her parents, Anselmo & Margoth, immigrated from El Salvador to Los Angeles, California, in the early 1980’s. She earned her Bachelors from the University of California, Santa Cruz.  She received her Masters of Fine Arts from California State University, Fresno with an emphasis in poetry, Guardado is the Editor-in-Chief of LiveWire an online literary magazine at Fullerton College, was the Event Producer for Lambda Literary’s 2020 LitFest, and is a social justice activist in the community.  She is the author of two collections of poetry, Cenizas from the Camino del Sol series at University of Arizona Press (2022) and ENDEAVOR from World Stage Press (2017). She is also the author of the craft chap Memories We Never Had: Writing in a Postcolonial Existence published by Sundress Publications (2023) which is available to all as a free digital download. Her poems have also appeared in Poetry Magazine, ITWOW: In the Words of Women International Anthology, Huizache, Bozalta Journal, The Acentos Review, The Packinghouse Review, The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States, and The Normal School. Guardado also translated and transcribed interviews with journalist and Cuban exile, Normando Hernandez Gonzalez which were published in The Madrid Conversations (New Orleans Press 2013). She was also the winner of Concurso Binacional De Poesía Pellicer-Frost 2017 (México). Her manuscript Cenizas was a finalist for the National Poetry Series (2019).

David Campos

David Campos is the son of Mexican immigrants, a CantoMundo Fellow, the author of Furious Dusk (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), and the  American Quasar (Red Hen, 2021). His work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and The Normal School. He's the winner of the 2014 Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, and the Annual Prairie Schooner Strousse Award for the best group of poems in Prairie Schooner. He teaches English at Fresno City College. He lives in Clovis, California. He graduated with a B.A. in English – Education from CSU Fresno and an M.F.A in Creative Writing and Writing for Performing Arts from UC Riverside. He’s is a tenured instructor of English at Fresno City College where he has served since 2016 as a representative on Academic Senate, the managing editor of The Fresno City College Review: A Publication of Student Writing, Art, and Photography, a club advisor, and the coordinator for the PUENTE program. He’s presented at multiple conferences on equitable practices in the classroom.