The MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics hosts the annual Fall Convergence, Thursday, September 30-Saturday, October 2. 

This year’s theme, Memory and Memorial, invites us to consider where and how memories are made: written into our very DNA, constructed and imposed by power systems, and collectively authored with others, whose memories may converge or diverge from our own.

Memory is fallible, even as it anchors our sense of self. In pairing memory and memorial, we seek to explore how writers and artists draw on memory in creative acts of resistance that constitute new kinds of memorial to acknowledge both individual and communal loss. Rather than using writing and performance to retrieve and document stored memory, these modes can be investigative, dialogic, permeable, and circular.

Drawing on public and private documents, individual memory, and collaboration, these artists situate memory with respect to the body and to lived experience, revealing each memory as a kind of memorial, and each memorial as a contested site where meanings may proliferate and new possibilities for future-building might arise.

Prageeta Sharma's recent poetry collection is Grief Sequence out from Wave Books. She is the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence, an interdisciplinary conference on race, creative writing, and artistic and aesthetic practices. She is a recipient of the 2010 Howard Foundation Award and a finalist for the 2020 Four Quartets Prize. She taught in the creative writing program at the University of Montana and is now at Pomona College where she is the Henry G. Lee '37 Professor of English.

View program details

Register for Thursday night's event via Zoom