Session A (8:00-9:30 Thursday)

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Indigenous Women Speak

Chair: P. Jane Hafen, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

P. Jane Hafen, University of Nevada, Las Vegas: “Native Matters in the Academy: Looking for Apaches”

Gwen W. Griffin, Minnesota State University, Mankato: “Reclaiming Breath in Susan Power’s Roofwalker”

Domino Renee Perez, University of Texas at Austin: “Native Theory, Native Text: Nahualli and I Lak’ech or Indigenous Doubling in Rudolfo Anaya’s Albuquerque”

Joann Quiñones-Perdomo, Minnesota State University, Mankato: “The West as Civil Rights Frontier in African American Literature”

Recovering Regional Chicano/a Literature

Chair: Jesse Alemán, University of New Mexico

Lillian Gorman, University of New Mexico: “Expressions of Ambivalence: The Implications of Statehood in Nuevomexicano Narrative”

Tonya Troske, University of New Mexico: “The Inventive Racialization of Billy the Kid”

Emily Beenen, University of New Mexico: “Critical Race Theory and the Limits of Chicano/a Literary History”

Michelle P. Baca, University of New Mexico: “Epic History, Novelistic Discourse: Fray Angelico Chavez’s Regional Narrative, La Conquistadora”

On Texas, Local Heroes, and the “Nature” of the Place

Chair: Walter Isle, Rice University

Tom Bailey, Western Michigan University: “Houston in John Forsythe’s Local Hero”

Terrell Dixon, University of Houston: “Donald Barthelme and the ‘Nature’ of Houston”

Walter Isle, Rice University: “Dave Galloway, Big Bend Desert Survivalist”

Lisa Slappey, Rice University: “Violence and Cultural Change in John Graves’s Goodbye to a River”

WAY South, WAY West: Writing from Aotearoa/New Zealand and Antarctica

Chair: Judy Nolte Temple

Chadwick Allen, Ohio State University: “Kia Hoki ki te Whenua: Potiki and the New Mäori Frontier”

Leslie Roberts, Canterbury University, New Zealand: “Remembering Out Loud: De-icing Antarctic Oral Tradition”

Judy Nolte Temple, University of Arizona: “Negotiating Difference: 19th Century Missionary Women’s Potrayals of Self and ‘Others’”

Global Environmentalism and the Forging of New Epistemologies

Chair: Vanessa Hall, Purdue University

Joshua Dolezal, University of Nebraska-Lincoln: “The New Ceremony of Consilience: Science and Storytelling According to Leslie Marmon Silko and Stephen Jay Gould”

Leigh Holmes, Cameron University: “Knowledge and Globalism in Gretel Ehrlich’s Islands, Universe, Home”

Vanessa Hall, Purdue University: “‘As If A Story Would Guide Us’: Aesthetic and Narrative Strategies of Resistance in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms”

Sarah Wald, Brown University: “What the Palm Trees Are For: Linking Ecology, Eco-Criticism and Post-Positivist Realism in Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange and Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus”

Studies in the New West

Chair: Melody Graulich, Utah State University

Stacy Coyle, “The New Decadent West: Annie Proulx and ‘The Governors of Wyoming’”

Jenny Emery Davidson, University of Utah: “Landscapes in Limbo: Region and Religion in the West’s Changing Wilderness”

Elizabeth Wright, Pennsylvania State University, Hazelton: “‘A Happy Landscape’: Transnational Migration in Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters”

Melody Graulich, Utah State University: “‘I’m just a lonesome Korean cowgirl’: Adoption and National Identity”

Creative Reading – Memory and Memoir

Chair: Sue Maher, University of Nebraska, Omaha

Laurie Clements Lambeth, University of Houston: “Fluid on the Brain”

Jackie Pugh Kogan, California State University, Northridge: “What Exists Before Memory: A Narrative in Five Generations”

Carmen Pearson, University of Arizona: “Resurrecting the Unremembered”