Led in a Word I Got There: 21st-Century Women’s Experimental Poetics
Description
This panel invites proposals that explore the transnational field of experimental women’s poetry in the 21st century. We are especially interested in papers that explore the legacy of Alice Notley and her circle. With the recent passing of Notley in May 2025, this is a vital moment to reflect on her profound impact on poetic practice and to examine how her spirit of formal innovation, feminist commitment, and radical imagination continues to resonate in contemporary poetics both in the US and abroad.
From the New York School’s downtown ferment and the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, through Notley’s transformative Paris years, to the current global network of women poets reshaping what the poem can do, this panel seeks to chart the wide, unruly, and generative terrain of feminist experimental poetry writing. We welcome papers that engage with poetic form, transgression, collectivity, resistance, performance, and the politics of language—as well as works that consider how poetry confronts contemporary urgencies, including war, ecological collapse, gender violence, racial injustice, and the technological and digital conditions of writing.
Key Areas of Interest Include (but are not limited to):
- Alice Notley’s influence on contemporary women’s poetics
- Reassessing the role of the second and third generations of the New York School and St Mark’s Poetry Project and their long-term impact on feminist and experimental poetics.
- Notley’s collaborations and affinities: Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, Maureen Owen, Eileen Myles, Susie Timmons
- Global continuities and divergences with Notley’s poetics
- The role of translation, exile, and multilingualism in women’s writing
- Cross-cultural feminist poetics and literary resistance
- Poetry and performance
- The digital poem and networked text
- The resurgence of seriality, epic & fragment
- Intersectional feminist, queer, and decolonial poetics
Notable poets to consider include (in no particular order, not limited to):
Lisa Robertson, Erin Mouré, Denise Riley, Maggie O’Sullivan, Caroline Bergvall, Vahni Capildeo, Michèle Métail, Anne Portugal, Cecilia Vicuña, Marília Garcia, Chus Pato, Miriam Reyes, Iman Mersal, Koleka Putuma, Warsan Shire, Meena Kandasamy, Sawako Nakayasu, Tsveta Sofronieva, Bhanu Kapil, Solmaz Sharif, Layli Long Soldier, Myung Mi Kim, Daniela Catrileo, Krystyna Dąbrowska, and more.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
E. Sánchez-Pardo teaches English and Critical Theory at U. Complutense, Madrid. She is the author of Cultures of the Death Drive. Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia (2003), and co-author of Ophelia's Legacy (2001). She has recently coedited L'Écriture Désirante: Marguerite Duras (2016) Women Poets and Myth in the 20th and 21st centuries. On Sappho's Website (2018), Poéticas Comparadas de Mujeres (2021), and Myth and Environmentalism: Arts of Resilience for A Damaged Planet (2023).
Speaker Bio
Christopher Winks is Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at Queens College/CUNY. He has published essays, reviews, and translations from French and Spanish in many journals and edited collections. Recent translations include Labyrinth: Selected Poetry and Prose of Lorenzo García Vega (2025: Station Hill) and Lila Zemborain's Soft Matter (Quantum Prose: 2023). He is currently working on a translation of the collected poems of Haitian surrealist Magloire Saint-Aude.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Michelle Gil-Montero has translated several books of contemporary Latin American poetry, hybrid-genre work, and criticism. Her recent translations include Berlin Interlude (Black Square Editions,) and Exilium (Ugly Duckling Presse) by Argentine writer María Negroni. Her work has been supported by the NEA, Howard Foundation, PEN, and Fulbright. At Saint Vincent College, she directs the Minor in Literary Translation and is the founding editor of Eulalia Books.
Speaker Bio
ERÍN MOURE is a poet and translator with 19 books of poetry, essays, articles on translation, and two memoirs, who is translator or co-translator of 33 books, mostly poetry, from French, Galician, Portunhol, Portuguese, Spanish, and Ukrainian into English, and from Galician and English into French. Recent translations include Chus Pato’s The Face of the Quartzes (2021) and Chantal Neveu’s you (2024). She holds two honorary doctorates, from U Brandon in Canada and U Vigo in Spain.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Jeannine M. Pitas is a teacher, scholar, writer, and Spanish-English literary translator living in Pittsburgh. She has authored two poetry collection and translated or co-translated twelve books by Latin American writers, most notably Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio (1932-2004). She teaches at Saint Vincent College and serves as an editor at Eulalia Books, a small press dedicated to publishing poets' first books to appear in English.
Speaker Bio
Elise Finielz is a Lecturer of French Language in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University, where she earned her Ph.D. in Literature. Her research focuses on women writers from the Francophone Caribbean, how they gained access to the literary field and contributed to postcolonial and decolonial thinking. She recently wrote an essay on the work of Simone and André Schwarz-Bart (to be published) and translated Placeholder, a play by Catherine Bisset (2025).
Speaker Bio
Jennifer O’Connor is a PhD student in the Graduate Program in Social & Political Thought at York University, where she is also pursuing a Graduate Diploma in Comparative Literature. Recently, her work has been published in the Literary Review of Canada and Esse, and she has held residencies with the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and the Feminist Art Collective.