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
Benjamin Percy is the author of seven novels -- most recently, Sky Vault (William Morrow) -- three story collections, including Suicide Woods -- and a book of essays titled Thrill Me that is widely taught in creative writing classrooms.
He co-wrote the feature film Summering with director James Ponsoldt. Produced by Sony's Stage 6 and Bleeker Street, it debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2022. He is also currently writing an adaptation of Urban Cowboy for Paramount Plus with James Ponsoldt attached to direct. He has sold scripts to Starz, FOX, and Paramount Pictures.
He wrote two seasons of the audio drama -- Wolverine -- produced by Marvel and Stitcher. The first season, "Wolverine: The Long Night," was listed as one of the top 15 podcasts of the year by Apple and won the iHeartRadio Award for Best Scripted Podcast.
His latest audio drama -- Old Man Starlord -- is produced by Marvel and SiriusXM/Pandora and stars Chris Elliot, Timothy Busfield, Vanessa Williams, and Danny Glover.
He writes Wolverine, X-Force, and Ghost Rider for Marvel Comics. He has also written for DC Comics and Dynamite Entertainment and is known for his celebrated runs on Green Arrow, Teen Titans, Nightwing, and James Bond.
His fiction and nonfiction have been published in Esquire (where he is a contributing editor), GQ, Time, Men's Journal, Outside, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Ploughshares, Tin House, McSweeney's, and the Paris Review.
His other honors include the Whiting Award, an NEA fellowship, the Whiting Award, the Plimpton Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories, 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, and Best American Comics.
He has lectured at Harvard and taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
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.
Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of tether (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition, and In the Carnival of Breathing (BLP, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition. She is also the editor of the forthcoming anthology, In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (BLP, 2024). She’s the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, fellowships and scholarships to the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize, chosen by Dana Levin, and the 2021 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, selected by Natalie Diaz. Recent prose and poetry appears or is forthcoming in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Barrelhouse, Black Warrior Review, Brevity, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, and The Massachusetts Review. She is an Associate Professor of Poetry and Creative Nonfiction in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the Chapbook Series Editor at Black Lawrence Press.
Steven Wingate is the author of the novels The Leave-Takers (2021) and Of Fathers and Fire (2019), both part of the Flyover Fiction Series from the University of Nebraska Press. His short story collection Wifeshopping (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008) was selected by Amy Hempel as winner of the 2007 Bakeless Prize in Fiction from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His experimental work includes the prose poem collection Thirty-One Octets (CW Books, 2014) and the digital interactive memoir daddylabyrinth, which premiered at the Art/Science Museum of Singapore in 2014. He has taught at the University of Colorado, the College of the Holy Cross, and South Dakota State University, where he is currently professor of English and coordinator or creative writing.
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.
