Call for Submissions:
Poems Celebrating the Life and Works of Mary de Rachewiltz 1925-2026)
Ezra Pound International Conference Poetry Anthology 2027
The editors of the Ezra Pound International Conference Poetry Anthology are gathering poems for an anthology dedicated to Mary de Rachewiltz, to be published in Clemson University Press's Ezra Pound Center for Literature Book Series (John Gery, Series Editor). This volume will serve as a special tribute to Mary as poet, Poundian, teacher, and citizen of the world.
We particularly invite submissions by previous participants and friends of the Ezra Pound International Conference. We seek poems of two types: poetry that is Poundian in form, subject, or tone broadly construed; and poetry inspired by Mary de Rachewiltz's life and work.
While previously unpublished work is preferred, previously published work will also be considered with the permission of the publisher. Poems about Mary de Rachewiltz previously published in journals, anthologies, or other collections, as well as material published in the Ezra Pound Society's Make It New (Mark Byron, Editor) dedicated to Mary, are welcome.
Please upload submissions as a Microsoft Word .doc or .docx in a single document with the following format: Times New Roman, 12-point font, single-spaced (double-spaced between sections), 1-inch margins. Begin each poem on a new page. In a separate first page, include your contact information: name, affiliation, email addresses (personal and work if necessary), and mailing address. The flexible length requirements are 1-6 total pages, not including the contact information page. Upload submissions to Submittable by the deadline: 31 OCTOBER 2026
For any questions, please contact all three editors: Jeff Grieneisen jeffgrieneisen@yahoo.com, Justin Kishbaugh jkishbaugh@rwu.edu, and Rhett Forman jrforman@gmail.com.
“Imaginaries and Insurgencies: Speculative Visions in Multiethnic Culture”
Hosted by the MELUS Ad Hoc Conference Committee
Venue: Isleta Resort & Casino, Pueblo of Isleta, New Mexico
Conference Dates: Thursday, April 8 – Sunday, April 11, 2027
Optional welcome activities will take place Wednesday evening, April 7. The conference concludes Sunday morning, April 11.
CONFERENCE THEME
Multiethnic writers and artists have long wielded imagination as a tool of liberation, using speculative fiction, magical realism, graphic narrative, experimental form, and visionary thinking to refuse the limits of the real and imagine radically different worlds. MELUS invites scholars to explore how multiethnic cultures use speculative and insurgent forms to interrogate identity, challenge power, and dream futures beyond the constraints of the present. We welcome submissions on science fiction, fantasy, utopian thought, multimedia experimentation, and all forms of creative world-building that center multiethnic voices and visions.
The speculative has never been an escape from history for writers of color and Indigenous writers. It has been a method for holding two things at once: an accounting of what was done, and a working model of what might be done instead. The slave ship becomes a spacecraft, the reservation becomes a colony under occupation, the border becomes a membrane between worlds. These are not metaphors laid over the record; they are instruments for reading it. At a moment when curricula are being narrowed, archives defunded, and whole literatures legislated out of classrooms, the capacity to imagine otherwise is not ornament. It is infrastructure.
The 2027 conference invites work that takes that capacity seriously as craft, as theory, and as politics. We are interested in the formal machinery of speculation as much as its content — how a novel builds a world, how a poem holds a future in its line breaks, how a comic renders a cosmology in six panels. We welcome criticism, creative work, pedagogy, and the kinds of writing that refuse to stay on one side of that line.
CONFERENCE CONTEXT & LOCATION
Albuquerque sits where the Rio Grande corridor, the Camino Real, and Route 66 cross, a city shaped by Pueblo, Nuevomexicano, Diné, Black, and immigrant communities whose histories do not resolve into a single American story. It is a center for film and television production, for Native and Chicanx arts, and for a science and technology sector whose origins in the weapons laboratories of the high desert make the speculative genres feel less like invention than reportage. It is, in short, a place where the questions this conference asks are already being lived.
MELUS 2027 convenes at Isleta Resort & Casino, on the lands of the Pueblo of Isleta just south of Albuquerque. New Mexico has never hosted a MELUS conference, and this will be the first time the annual meeting gathers on Pueblo land. That setting is not incidental to the theme. As Deondre Smiles notes in “The Settler Logics of (Outer) Space,” the vocabulary of exploration and speculative fiction — words such as “frontier,” phrases such as “first contact” — resonates very differently when read against Indigenous knowledge and history. Thinking through Indigenous responses to placemaking and futurity expands our understanding of world and identity beyond the colonial gaze.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
We invite individual paper, panel, and roundtable proposals that examine multiethnic American literature and culture — novels, short fiction, poetry, drama, comics, film, television, games, sound, and performance — and that engage themes including:
● Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurisms, Latine futurism, and Asian American and Arab American speculative traditions
● Speculative form as political method: utopia, dystopia, and the refusal of realism
● Magical realism, the fantastic, and the marvelous real
● Science fiction, fantasy, and horror in multiethnic traditions
● Graphic narrative, comics, and visual world-building
● Tradition and technology in multiethnic literature
● Identity and climate futures: cli-fi, extraction, sustainability
● Colonial, postcolonial, decolonial, and anticolonial approaches
● Placemaking, land, and the politics of setting
● Reclamation, repatriation, and the archive
● Indigenous knowledge, futurity, and the settler logics of space
● Borderlands speculation and the literatures of the U.S. Southwest
● Speculative approaches to migration, borders, and citizenship
● Language, translation, and invented or recovered tongues
● AI, algorithmic culture, and multiethnic narrative
● Game studies, interactive fiction, and participatory world-building
● Speculative film, television, and streaming
● Music, sound, and sonic futurism
● Performance, embodiment, and speculative staging
● Speculative poetics
● Pedagogies of the speculative; teaching under censorship and book bans
● The future of ethnic studies and the humanities
● Period and genre histories of multiethnic speculative writing
● Creative work: speculative fiction, poetry, and hybrid forms
SUBMISSION FORMATS
We welcome:
● Individual paper proposals (250-word abstract)
● Full panel proposals (3–4 papers, 500-word panel description plus individual abstracts)
● Roundtable discussions (4–6 participants, 500-word description)
● Creative readings (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, performance)
● Alternative formats (workshops, screenings, performances, digital exhibits)
● Lightning talks (5-minute presentations as part of a curated session)
● Poster presentations (especially encouraged for graduate students)
MELUS is committed to building inclusive and accessible scholarly spaces, and we especially encourage submissions from graduate students, contingent faculty, independent scholars, artists, and community organizers. Limited travel and hotel grants will be available to support participation from historically underrepresented groups and those with financial need.
CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS
Anticipated special events:
● Welcome reception at Isleta Resort & Casino
● A session developed in consultation with Pueblo of Isleta cultural staff
● A reading and panel organized with colleagues at the University of New Mexico
● Publishing roundtable with editors from academic and trade presses
● Professionalization workshop for graduate students and contingent faculty
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: TBD
IMPORTANT DATES
● Submission Deadline: Friday, November 20, 2026
● Notification of Acceptance: Friday, January 15, 2027
● Early Registration Deadline: Friday, February 5, 2027
● Conference Dates: April 8–11, 2027
SUBMISSION & CONTACT INFORMATION
Questions? Contact: Sherry Johnson at <johnsshe@gvsu.edu>
MELUS (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) is dedicated to the scholarly study of the multi-ethnic literatures of the United States. Since its founding in 1973, MELUS has advocated for the recognition, study, and teaching of multiethnic literature, creating spaces for critical conversation across disciplines, methodologies, and perspectives.
“Imaginaries and Insurgencies: Speculative Visions in Multiethnic Culture”
Hosted by the MELUS Ad Hoc Conference Committee
Venue: Isleta Resort & Casino, Pueblo of Isleta, New Mexico
Conference Dates: Thursday, April 8 – Sunday, April 11, 2027
Optional welcome activities will take place Wednesday evening, April 7. The conference concludes Sunday morning, April 11.
CONFERENCE THEME
Multiethnic writers and artists have long wielded imagination as a tool of liberation, using speculative fiction, magical realism, graphic narrative, experimental form, and visionary thinking to refuse the limits of the real and imagine radically different worlds. MELUS invites scholars to explore how multiethnic cultures use speculative and insurgent forms to interrogate identity, challenge power, and dream futures beyond the constraints of the present. We welcome submissions on science fiction, fantasy, utopian thought, multimedia experimentation, and all forms of creative world-building that center multiethnic voices and visions.
The speculative has never been an escape from history for writers of color and Indigenous writers. It has been a method for holding two things at once: an accounting of what was done, and a working model of what might be done instead. The slave ship becomes a spacecraft, the reservation becomes a colony under occupation, the border becomes a membrane between worlds. These are not metaphors laid over the record; they are instruments for reading it. At a moment when curricula are being narrowed, archives defunded, and whole literatures legislated out of classrooms, the capacity to imagine otherwise is not ornament. It is infrastructure.
The 2027 conference invites work that takes that capacity seriously as craft, as theory, and as politics. We are interested in the formal machinery of speculation as much as its content — how a novel builds a world, how a poem holds a future in its line breaks, how a comic renders a cosmology in six panels. We welcome criticism, creative work, pedagogy, and the kinds of writing that refuse to stay on one side of that line.
CONFERENCE CONTEXT & LOCATION
Albuquerque sits where the Rio Grande corridor, the Camino Real, and Route 66 cross, a city shaped by Pueblo, Nuevomexicano, Diné, Black, and immigrant communities whose histories do not resolve into a single American story. It is a center for film and television production, for Native and Chicanx arts, and for a science and technology sector whose origins in the weapons laboratories of the high desert make the speculative genres feel less like invention than reportage. It is, in short, a place where the questions this conference asks are already being lived.
MELUS 2027 convenes at Isleta Resort & Casino, on the lands of the Pueblo of Isleta just south of Albuquerque. New Mexico has never hosted a MELUS conference, and this will be the first time the annual meeting gathers on Pueblo land. That setting is not incidental to the theme. As Deondre Smiles notes in “The Settler Logics of (Outer) Space,” the vocabulary of exploration and speculative fiction — words such as “frontier,” phrases such as “first contact” — resonates very differently when read against Indigenous knowledge and history. Thinking through Indigenous responses to placemaking and futurity expands our understanding of world and identity beyond the colonial gaze.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
We invite individual paper, panel, and roundtable proposals that examine multiethnic American literature and culture — novels, short fiction, poetry, drama, comics, film, television, games, sound, and performance — and that engage themes including:
● Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurisms, Latine futurism, and Asian American and Arab American speculative traditions
● Speculative form as political method: utopia, dystopia, and the refusal of realism
● Magical realism, the fantastic, and the marvelous real
● Science fiction, fantasy, and horror in multiethnic traditions
● Graphic narrative, comics, and visual world-building
● Tradition and technology in multiethnic literature
● Identity and climate futures: cli-fi, extraction, sustainability
● Colonial, postcolonial, decolonial, and anticolonial approaches
● Placemaking, land, and the politics of setting
● Reclamation, repatriation, and the archive
● Indigenous knowledge, futurity, and the settler logics of space
● Borderlands speculation and the literatures of the U.S. Southwest
● Speculative approaches to migration, borders, and citizenship
● Language, translation, and invented or recovered tongues
● AI, algorithmic culture, and multiethnic narrative
● Game studies, interactive fiction, and participatory world-building
● Speculative film, television, and streaming
● Music, sound, and sonic futurism
● Performance, embodiment, and speculative staging
● Speculative poetics
● Pedagogies of the speculative; teaching under censorship and book bans
● The future of ethnic studies and the humanities
● Period and genre histories of multiethnic speculative writing
● Creative work: speculative fiction, poetry, and hybrid forms
SUBMISSION FORMATS
We welcome:
● Individual paper proposals (250-word abstract)
● Full panel proposals (3–4 papers, 500-word panel description plus individual abstracts)
● Roundtable discussions (4–6 participants, 500-word description)
● Creative readings (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, performance)
● Alternative formats (workshops, screenings, performances, digital exhibits)
● Lightning talks (5-minute presentations as part of a curated session)
● Poster presentations (especially encouraged for graduate students)
MELUS is committed to building inclusive and accessible scholarly spaces, and we especially encourage submissions from graduate students, contingent faculty, independent scholars, artists, and community organizers. Limited travel and hotel grants will be available to support participation from historically underrepresented groups and those with financial need.
CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS
Anticipated special events:
● Welcome reception at Isleta Resort & Casino
● A session developed in consultation with Pueblo of Isleta cultural staff
● A reading and panel organized with colleagues at the University of New Mexico
● Publishing roundtable with editors from academic and trade presses
● Professionalization workshop for graduate students and contingent faculty
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: TBD
IMPORTANT DATES
● Submission Deadline: Friday, November 20, 2026
● Notification of Acceptance: Friday, January 15, 2027
● Early Registration Deadline: Friday, February 5, 2027
● Conference Dates: April 8–11, 2027
SUBMISSION & CONTACT INFORMATION
Questions? Contact: Sherry Johnson at <johnsshe@gvsu.edu>
MELUS (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) is dedicated to the scholarly study of the multi-ethnic literatures of the United States. Since its founding in 1973, MELUS has advocated for the recognition, study, and teaching of multiethnic literature, creating spaces for critical conversation across disciplines, methodologies, and perspectives.
Process:
- Candidates must be current members of the IASA.
- Nominators submit materials to Submittable.
- No self-nominations will be accepted.
- Nominators submit the nomination form presenting the candidate and explaining the individual’s qualifications.
- Nominators submit three letters of support in addition to their own explanation of candidate qualifications housed on the nomination form.
- Nominators submit a current curriculum vitae of the nominee, to be obtained directly from the nominee with the nominee’s consent. While containing the typical information, the CV should also clearly indicate the following,
- Service to the IASA (type and years), highlighted in yellow.
- The number of years the candidate has been a member of the IASA, highlighted in yellow.
- Participation in or presence at IASA conferences, highlighted in yellow.
Timeline:
• Applications may be submitted year-round to Submittable. Submissions will not be valid for the current year if submitted after August 15.
• Nominations are received by the awards committee chair, Alessia Martini (almartin@sewanee.edu)
• Judges (three board members and two at-large members) will review all nominations in September and will make a selection at that time.
• Award will be announced/presented at the annual November conference.
Criteria: • Successful nominees will have made a real and substantial contribution to the Italian American Studies Association or the greater Italian American community through publishing, activism, committee work, recruiting, fundraising, public relations or other such significant activity. • Current officers and board members are eligible to be candidates for the award. • Past winners are not eligible for nominations for three years following the year in which they won. • Annual winners will receive a plaque from the IASA, conference registration paid for that year, and will be interviewed by Diasporic Italy.
IASA ANNUAL MEMORIAL FELLOWSHIP AWARD FOR GRADUATE THESES
DESCRIPTION IASA awards this annual memorial fellowship to the author of the year’s outstanding doctoral dissertation or masters thesis proposal or project in Italian American and Italian Diaspora Studies. We welcome for consideration all approaches to these fields of study. Although the dissertation or thesis may be written in English or Italian, all application materials must be in English.
ELIGIBILITY Graduate students whose work focuses on Italian American or Italian Diaspora Studies, including but not limited to history, language, film, literature, social sciences, the arts, ethnic racial identity, etc. are eligible to apply. Applicants must be members of IASA.
Applicants with recently completed projects must include proof of defense/completion within the calendar year before the award deadline (September 7, 2026). Applicants with projects-in-progress must, instead, include proof of project/proposal approval by their department chair or advisor.
Graduate students who do not win in a given year, but continue to work on their dissertation or thesis in the following year, are welcome to apply a second time.
Graduate students applying for the annual conference travel grants are contemporaneously eligible for the Memorial Fellowship Prize.
Decisions will be based on the following: • qualifications (academic standing and pertinent subject matter); • quality and significance of the project (research questions and methodology, articulation of problems, concepts and approach, originality of content and research); • evidence of steady, timely progress on the project; and • potential impact of the project on related fields of study and Italian American and Italian Diaspora Studies in general.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: 1. Application materials must be in English (the project itself may be written in English or Italian)
2. Please upload the following documents in .docx or pdf format to Submittable: https://italianamericanstudies.submittable.com/submit/141067/iasa-memorial-fellowship-1-000 ● Cover letter: In 150 words or less, briefly describe your dissertation or thesis project and your progress toward completion. ● Project description: In three double-spaced pages or less (standard 12-point font with 1-inch margins), describe the dissertation project or M.A. thesis that has either been recently completed or is currently in-progress. Clearly state the title and scope of your project. Clearly explain the significance of your research and how it contributes to the advancement of knowledge in the field of Italian American and/or Italian Diaspora Studies. ● Curriculum vitae: Document should include your current mailing address, e-mail address, and telephone number and focus on publications, courses, professional activities, and awards. Maximum length not to exceed two pages. ● Unofficial transcripts: Proof of good standing, scanned as PDF, preferably. ● Two letters of reference: One letter should come from an academic advisor, thesis committee member, and/or dissertation director, and directly address the relevance of your project to the furthering of Italian American / Italian Diaspora Studies. Both letters must be in English.
3. Please provide recommenders with necessary information about your application, project, deadlines, etc. in a timely fashion.
4. Recommenders must upload their letters directly by themselves in .docx or .pdf format to Submittable: https://italianamericanstudies.submittable.com/forms/reference/
For any questions about the application process, please contact the Chair of the Fellowship/Award Committee, Dr. Alessia Martini almartin@sewanee.edu DEADLINE: September 7, 2026
Late or incomplete applications will not be considered. The fellowship recipient will be notified via e-mail and will also be announced at the annual IASA conference. Attendance and participation in the conference are strongly encouraged. Funds will be awarded at or after the conference.
Benvenuto. Thank you for your interest in joining the Italian American Studies Association. There has never been a more important time to join IASA. Your IASA membership will benefit your career as well as your profession. Benefits of membership include access to the IASA members' database (visible to all registered members only) and access to free PDF versions of AIHA proceedings on our website.
We are pleased to offer the student membership dues rate. Please complete the student verification form (https://www.italianamericanstudies.net/cpages/membership) in order for your registration to be processed. Please note, that your registration is not complete until this form is received by IASA (ryancm@indiana.edu) and confirmation of your student status is emailed back to you. You can fill out the form and upload it here in submittable, so that the process for your student membership can begin.
Again, thank you for your interest and devotion to the interdisciplinary study of the culture, history, literature, sociology, demography, folklore, and politics of Italians in America.