1A—Poetry Session I, MUC 211/211A
- Stephanie Marcellus
- Charlene Pierce
- Angela Sievers
- Becky Zavada
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: 5 May, 2025
Organization: Vermillion Writing and Literature Conference at University of South Dakota
Contact Email: [email protected].
Conference Schedule & Registration
Keynote & Featured Presenters
Randilynn Boucher-Giago, Zitkána Duta Wiŋ, is Isaŋti/Sisíthuŋwaŋ Dakota and Diné. She carries the roles of a mother, wife, educator, artist, and relative to her communities. She has experience as a Lakota/Dakota Language Multi Immersion (3-5) Teacher, Curriculum Director and Edu Administrator. She received her Bachelor of Science from Arizona State University. She received her M.Ed. from the University of Minnesota-Duluth. She is the Wikoskalaka Yuwitapi (Young Women’s Gathering) Healing Camp Coordinator. In 2018, she was named an Artist-In-Residence by the Minnesota Historical Society. She attended the Sisseton Wahpeton College’s Voices of our Ancestors Program. With extensive experience in immersion education(LBL, SCL), museum studies, arts education, and language and culture revitalization, Randilynn mobilizes and enhances Indigenous pedagogy across Native communities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
