DEI Symposium

Please note: We are re-evaluating the DEI Symposium in 2022; new dates will be announced early 2023.

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 program will run December 1 - 5, 2021, and will be held virtually. Cost of attendance is $1,800 per person/per institution; 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 October 30, 2021 (with the final deadline on November 7, 2021); program fees must be paid in full prior to the beginning of the symposium.

Note: the early bird registration deadline has been extended to November 5, 2021 (with the final deadline on November 10, 2021.)

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.

Felicia Rose Chavez

Felicia Rose Chavez is an award-winning educator with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Iowa. She is author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom and co-editor of The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT with Willie Perdomo and Jose Olivarez. Felicia’s teaching career began in Chicago, where she served as Program Director to Young Chicago Authors and founded GirlSpeak, a feminist webzine for high school students. She went on to teach writing at the University of New Mexico, where she was distinguished as the Most Innovative Instructor of the Year, the University of Iowa, where she was distinguished as the Outstanding Instructor of the Year, and Colorado College, where she received the Theodore Roosevelt Collins Outstanding Faculty Award. Her creative scholarship earned her a Ronald E. McNair Fellowship, a University of Iowa Graduate Dean’s Fellowship, a Riley Scholar Fellowship, and a Hadley Creatives Fellowship.  Originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, she currently serves as Creativity and Innovation Scholar-in-Residence at Colorado College. 

Matthew Salesses

Matthew Salesses is the author of the novel The Hundred-Year Flood (Little A, 2015), an Amazon Bestseller, Best Book of September, and Kindle First pick; an Adoptive Families Best Book of 2015; a Millions Most Anticipated of 2015; a Thought Catalog Essential Contemporary Book by an Asian American Writer; and a Best Book of the season at Buzzfeed, Refinery29, and Gawker, among others. Three new books are forthcoming: Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear: A Novel (Little A, 2020); Craft in the Real World (Catapult Books, 2021); and Own Story: Essays (Little A, 2021). His previous books and chapbooks include I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying (Civil Coping Mechanisms), Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity (Thought Catalog Books), and The Last Repatriate (Nouvella). He earned a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Emerson College. He has edited fiction for The Good Men Project, Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, and Redivider. He has read and lectured widely at conferences and universities and on TV and radio, including PBS, NPR, Al Jazeera America, various MFA programs, and the Tin House, Kundiman, Writers @ Work, and Boldface writing conferences.

Matthew Shenoda

Matthew Shenoda is a writer, professor, university administrator, and author and editor of several books. His poems and essays have appeared in a variety of newspapers, journals, radio programs and anthologies. His debut collection of poems, Somewhere Else (Coffee House Press), was named one of 2005's debut books of the year by Poets & Writers Magazine and was winner of a 2006 American Book Award. He is also the author of Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone (BOA Editions Ltd.), editor of Duppy Conqueror: New & Selected Poems by Kwame Dawes, and most recently author of Tahrir Suite: Poems (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press), winner of the 2015 Arab American Book Award and with Kwame Dawes editor of Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2017). Shenoda teaches in the fields of ethnic studies and creative writing and has held faculty and administrative positions at various institutions. He has served as the assistant provost for equity and diversity at CalArts and dean of academic diversity, equity and inclusion at Columbia College Chicago. He currently serves as the Vice President and Associate Provost for Social Equity & Inclusion at Rhode Island School of Design.

Paisley Rekdal

Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; a hybrid-genre photo-text entitled Intimate; and six books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos; Six Girls Without Pant; The Invention of the Kaleidoscope; Animal Eye, winner of the UNT Rilke Prize; and Imaginary Vessels, which was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Prize, and Nightingale. Her book, The Broken Country, won the 2016 AWP Nonfiction Prize, and her newest work of nonfiction, Appropriate: A Provocation, was published by W.W. Norton in 2021. Her work has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Foundation, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship Trust and various state arts councils. Her poetry has been included in multiple editions of The Best American Poetry series, and she was guest editor for Best American Poetry 2020. She is Utah’s poet laureate.