The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, now in its 52nd year, was recently held (February 17–22, 2025). This esteemed event launched with two days of virtual panels, followed by three days of in-person sessions in Louisville, Kentucky.
This year’s conference features a distinguished lineup of authors and scholars, including:
David Grundy: Author of A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets, Grundy is a British Academy Fellow at the University of Warwick. He is currently working on two manuscripts: Survival Music: Free Jazz Then and Now and Never by Itself Alone: Queer Poetry in Boston and San Francisco, 1943-Present.
Lauri Scheyer: A Xiaoxiang Scholars Program Distinguished Professor and founding Director of the British and American Poetry Research Center at Hunan Normal University in China. Her notable works include A History of African American Poetry and Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry.
David Grundy and Lauri Scheyer are co-editors of Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton. Scheyer also edited A. B. Spellman’s Between the Night and Its Music: New and Selected Poems, pictured below.
Ed Roberson: Author of eleven poetry collections, including Asked What Has Changed and Closet Pronunciation and To See the Earth at the End of the World. Roberson is a recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award and the Lila Wallace Writers’ Award.
erica lewis: Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, lewis’s publications include the box set trilogy: mahogany (Wesleyan), daryl hall is my boyfriend, and mary wants to be a superwoman. Other books include the precipice of jupiter, camera obscura, and murmur in the inventory.
Evie Shockley: A poet and literary scholar, Shockley’s poetry collections include suddenly we (finalist for a National Book Award, semiautomatic (winner of a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award), and the new black (winner of a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award). She serves as the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University.
Sessions featuring some of these esteemed individuals included:
Ed Roberson led a session titled “Working Outside the Map: MPH as ‘Recovered Poem'” in Section B.
David Grundy participated in “UmbraHeads: Orbiting the Umbra Galaxy.”
The AALCS Panel included a a presentation on “Harmony Holiday, erica lewis, and the Black Chaos of ‘Millennial Style.'”
David Grundy chaired sessions on “At the Intersection of Poetry and Everyday Life” and “Never By Itself Alone: How Poetry Remade Gay Life.”
A roundtable event titled “The Hero Project: As iZ by Tyrone Williams,” to honor the late Tyrone Williams, featured Lauri Scheyer and Evie Shockley, among others.