the the newsletter of the
Center for the Study of Southern Culture • Spring 2013
the university of mississippi
Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference 2013
“Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas” An impressive response to the call for papers for “Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas” has yielded 12 new sessions featuring nearly three dozen speakers for the conference, which will take place July 21–25, 2013, on the campus of the University of Mississippi. These panelists and round-
tablists will join the four invited keynote speakers and the featured panel of African American poets (both detailed in earlier issues of the Register) to place Faulkner’s life and work in conversation with a distinguished gallery of writers, artists, and intellectual figures from African American and AfroCaribbean culture, including Charles Waddell Chesnutt, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, painter William H. Johnson, Claude McKay, Delta bluesman Charley Patton, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, C.L.R. James, Ralph Ellison, Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, Édouard Glissant, Marie VieuxChauvet, Toni Morrison, Randall Kenan, Suzan-Lori Parks, Edwidge Danticat, Edward P. Jones, Olympia Vernon, Natasha Trethewey, the editors and readers of Ebony magazine, and the writers and characters of the HBO series The Wire. In addition, a roundtable scheduled for the opening afternoon of the conference will reflect on the legacies of the late Noel E. Polk as a teacher, critic, editor, collaborator, and longtime friend of the Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference. Also selected through the call for papers was keynote speaker Tim A. Ryan, associate professor of English at Northern Illinois University and author of Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery since “Gone with the Wind.” Professor Ryan’s keynote address is entitled “‘Go to Jail about This Spoonful’: Narcotic Determinism and Human Agency in ‘That Evening Sun’ and the Delta Blues.” This will be Professor Ryan’s first appearance at Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha. Other speakers who will appear at the conference for the first time include Jacob Agner (University of Mississippi), Natalie Aikens (University of Mississippi), Maia Butler (University of Louisiana, Lafayette), Rebecca Clark (University of California, Berkeley), Eurie Dahn (College of Saint Rose), Phillip Davis (China University of Petroleum), continued on page 13