Attending both the 2017 AWP Conference and the 2017 NonfictioNOW conference were invaluable to my university career and work on this campus—as a teacher, writer, mentor, and literary citizen. In addition to having the chance to hear lectures on craft and technique from masters in the field, they were both opportunities to renew professional connections, to establish new relationships with fellow writers, and to discover literary publications that are changing the field. Most important for the development of my teaching, attending the craft and pedagogy panels were particularly useful to my pedagogy. First, at AWP, I attended several panels on literary journalism, which helped inform my growth as both a practitioner of this form and as a teacher of the genre in my English 425 classes. Specifically, a panel on “The Imaginative Essay,” with Ander Monson, Rebecca McClanahan, Lia Purpura, and Lauret Savoy. I found the panelists’ meditations on the intersection of the lyric essay with the research elements of literary journalism, in particular, quite valuable. I also attended a panel with Jen Percy, Jose Orduna, Kerry Howley, Chris Arnold, and Alexandria Lesnevich, entitled “The New New New Journalism.” As the title implies, the panelists discussed the legacy of New Journalism and the ways in which the subsequent generations of writers who have come after the original New Journalists in the 1970s (e.g., Joan Didion, Gay Talese, and Tom Wolfe) and the New New journalists in the 1990s (e.g., Susan Orlean and John Krakauer) are further evolving the form, specifically as it pertains to the intersection of memoir and journalism. Again, this was a marvelously instructive panel to attend, especially because I teach Jen Percy’s work. So I was excited to hear her discuss her process. I’ll also now be able to subsequently share her insights with my students. Additionally, I attended a panel entitled “Mining the Dark Vein: Writing Appalachia,” whose panelists included Denton Loving, Carter Sickels, Jill McCorkle, and Amy Clark. I did so because many of the themes in Appalachian literature intersect with those of the Rust Belt. And, in fact, some have argued that the coal belt of this region should be included in this designation, as the industry was integral to the steel and auto industries in the north. Most important for me, however, was the panelists’ discussion about how class plays into this literature, particularly as it pertains to the teaching and reading of these texts, as this topic is fundamental to the literature of the English 317 course that I teach. Finally, I attended a panel entitled “Girls Who Run the World: Readings of Women in Apocalypse.” Authors Claire Vaye Watkins, Sandra Newman, Alexander Lumens, and Lucy Corin each discussed the role and significance of female protagonists in their apocalyptic fiction. As well as how notions of gender are simultaneously reinforced and subverted in surprising ways in this genre. Needless to say, this was very useful for my English 362 apocalypse course. Likewise, during the NonfictioNOW conference, I attended several panels and lectures. For the sake of economy, I will mention two here that were directly related to my continued development of my Immersion Writing course (English 425). The first panel was entitled “Documenting Disaster and its Aftermath,” which included writers Beth Alvarado, Poupeh Missaghi, Lisa M. O’Neil, Aisha Sabatani Sloan, and Arianne Zwartjes. This panel raised important questions about documentary writing that will not only affect my own work, but which I also intend to include in the unit on literary journalism in my English 425 class. For example:

• How does one write about people who are still experiencing trauma? • How do changing socio-political contexts affect the writing process?
• Who has the right to tell another person’s story?
• How do you represent your presence when you’re writing someone else’s trauma?

These will be important questions to address with my students, both in how we read work of this genre and how they might wrestle with ethical questions related to representation in their own writing. Another panel I attended, “The Enhanced Memoir,” featured Sarah Hepola, Emily Rapp Black, Kim Brooks, and Deanna Fei. This conversation was beneficial for my continued development of my English 425 class, as well, insofar as I teach a unit on immersion memoir in this course. Unlike a traditional memoir, which involves the writer looking back on an event, immersion memoir also involves the writer engaging in some element in the here-and-now, such as incorporating research to add another layer or element to the investigation of the self. The authors on this panel similarly discussed how outside research, interviews, and alternative forms to the memoir could “enhance” or influence the genre in productive ways. In addition to these two panels and several others, I also attended a lecture by famed Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgard, whose six-volume autobiographical novel, "My Struggle," has redefined auto-fiction. This work has challenged many of the ways in which we think about the separation between fiction and nonfiction, and it was useful to hear his thoughts about the purposes of each genre (a distinction he finds limiting, needless to say) and his larger discussion on “prose” (regardless of genre categorizations) as an art form. Finally, I presented my own work on a panel entitled “Standing Apart, Being Involved: Writing the Foreign and Unfamiliar.” Joining me on this panel were Natalie Bakopoulos (Wayne State University), Joanna Eleftheriou (University of Houston), V.V. Ganeshananthan (University of Minnesota), and Philip Graham (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), all of whom teach courses on creative nonfiction at their home institutions. The subject of our panel was discussing the intricacies of writing nonfiction in and about foreign places, including issues related to privilege, bias, codes of ethics, and blurred boundaries, all of which are directly related to the subjects I teach in my classes on Creative Nonfiction (English 325) and Immersion Writing (English 425) in the Department of English. More than 100 fellow writers and teachers were in attendance at our panel, and numerous individuals approach me after to introduce themselves, share contact information, and offer recommendations and ideas for further readings and exploration. It was a very productive and successful event.