Vermillion Writing and Literature Conference
The Vermillion Writing and Literature Conference is a national literary conference held at the University of South Dakota.
Boundaries: Preserving and Creating Space
Date: October 9 - October 11, 2025
Deadline for Submissions: March 15, 2025
Organization: Vermillion Writing and Literature Conference at University of South Dakota
Contact Email: [email protected].
Call for Papers
How does your creative work and/or scholarship engage with boundaries? Which boundaries mark its edges? How extensive are its stakes? What limits—aesthetic, geographical, social, political, ethical—does your work challenge, secure, or redraw? What spaces do you seek to preserve? What spaces need creating—and for whom? And how porous will their boundaries be? Join us 9-11 October 2025 for the second biennial Vermillion Writing and Literature Conference at University of South Dakota (Vermillion, SD). The 2025 theme, “Boundaries: Preserving and Creating Space,” encourages creative and/or scholarly submissions that engage with questions like those above (by no means exhaustive) from a variety of perspectives (a few listed below). We look forward to readings, presentations, and discussions that test boundaries while also remaining open to what boundaries might be necessary—even if they haven’t yet been drawn. We invite proposals for creative and/or scholarly panels, roundtables, or workshops as well as individual submissions engaging with the exploration of our conference theme. Possible areas of focus and approaches include, but are not limited to:
- Indigenous and Native American literature, history, and culture;
- Hybrid texts, blurred genres, autotheory, and/or other experimental forms;
- Teaching literature, creative writing, etc.;
- Discourses of marginalization, including race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, or ability;
- Women, gender, and/or sexuality;
- Representations of disability or mental illness in literature and/or popular culture;
- Postcolonial literature and/or theory;
- Western American literature, history, and culture;
- Media studies or pop culture studies;
- The relationship between specific boundaries/spaces and forms of identity;
- Writing’s ability to question/challenge spatial aspects of gender, race, or ability;
- Relationships between what texts represent and what they do
Deadline for Submissions: 15 March,2025
Please send to: [email protected].
Submission Guidelines:
Scholarly Proposals: If you intend to present scholarly work, please submit a 250-word abstract, along with a 50-word biographical note, by 15 MARCH 2025. While scholarship that explicitly engages with the conference theme is especially welcome, we will gladly consider all types of scholarly work—even if it is only tangentially related to the theme.
Creative Proposals: If you intend to present creative work, please provide 5 pages (maximum) of creative work along with a 50-word biographical note, by 15 MARCH 2025. While creative work that explicitly or implicitly engages with the conference theme is especially welcome, we will gladly consider all types of creative work on any theme and in any style for readings at the conference’s creative writing panels.
Panel/Roundtable Proposals: We welcome proposals for scholarly and/or creative panels (3-4 presenters) or roundtables (5-6 presenters). These proposals should include 50-word biographical notes for all presenters and a 400-word (maximum) description of the session and its papers.
Note:Individual panel/roundtable proposals may include both scholarly and creative work.
For More Information, write to: [email protected].
Conference Schedule
Keynote & Featured Readers
Born into a family of tree workers, bohemians, poets, and smalltime sort-of hustlers, Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, collaborator, and "master of mixing genres." She grew up in earshot of the Pacific ocean, and now lives in Providence. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral lineages. She has published twelve books, most recently Your Kingdom, and translated three others, including Exchanges on Light by Jacques Roubaud. More info at: https://www.elenisikelianos.com.
Born in Singapore in 1968 to American parents, Laird Hunt is the author of nine novels, including the 2021 National Book Award finalist Zorrie. A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, the Bridge Prize and a finalist for both the Pen/Faulkner and the Prix Femina Étranger. Hunt’s reviews and essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Beast, the Guardian, the Irish Times and the Los Angeles Times, and his fiction and translations have appeared in many literary journals, including Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, Bomb and Zoetrope, in the United States and abroad. A former United Nations press officer who was largely raised in rural Indiana, he now lives in Providence where he teaches in Brown University’s Literary Arts Program and spends his days with his wife, the poet Eleni Sikelianos, their daughter, Eva, and two cats.
Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies at Arizona State University, studies Diné life-seeking moments as a means for imagining and creating alternatives to settler colonial domination. He held the Henry Roe Cloud Dissertation Fellowship at Yale University. His research areas include Indigenous stories, decolonization, settler colonialism, and Indigenous futurity and imagination. In 2023, he was awarded an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship to complete his first book Bundle: Life, Stories, and Hope Across Diné Worlds. Clark co-edited the volume From the Skin: Defending Indigenous Nation with Theory and Praxis, available through the University of Arizona Press. He is Kinłichíi’nii, born for Tséníjikiní, Mą’ii Deeshgiizhinii are his maternal grandfathers, and Tábąąhá are his paternal grandfathers.
Taylor Brorby is the author of Boys and Oil: Growing up gay in a fractured land, Crude: Poems, Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience, and co-editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. His work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Book Critics Circle, the MacDowell Colony, the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Mesa Refuge, Blue Mountain Center, and the North Dakota Humanities Council.
Taylor’s work has appeared in The Huffington Post, Orion Magazine, The Arkansas International, Southern Humanities Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and has appeared in numerous anthologies. He is a contributing editor at North American Review and serves on the editorial boards of Terrain.org and Hub City Press. Taylor regularly speaks around the country on issues related to extractive economies, queerness, disability, and climate change. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama.
Plan Your Visit to Vermillion
To learn more about the city of Vermillion and the accommodations available to you, visit the Vermillion Area Chamber and Development Company website.
