Select one keyword from each of the following four groups. Your selection of keywords will help us build panels that best reflect your creative or critical work and assemble the most interested and invested audiences.

Keyword Group: Theme
Please select the theme most important to your work.

Addiction / Mental Health
Alienation
America / American Values
Animals / Animal Rights
Apocalypse / End Times / Eschatology
Authenticity
Birth / Rebirth
Body Image / Beauty / Ugliness
Capitalism / Industry
Career / Work
Carnival(esque)
Change / Transformation
Childhood / Adolescence
Common Reader: The Book of Unknown Americans
Convention Theme: Seeking Freedom
Death / Trauma / Grief
Deception
Disability
Diversity
Dreams / The Unconscious
Education / Learning
Family / Relations
Friendship / Enmity
Gender / Gender Equality
Holocaust / Genocide
Humor / Satire
Identity / Ethnicity
Imperialism / Colonization
LGBTQIA+
Liminal Moments / Liminal Spaces
Loneliness / Abandonment
Nationality / Patriotism
Pedagogy
Romance / Love
Social Class
Symbols / Fetishized Objects / Iconography
Theology / Theism / Atheism
Utopia / Dystopia
Virtues / Vices
Voyages / Questing
War / Veterans
Other

Keyword Group: Genre
If yours is a creative submission, you should select the genre of your submitted work. If, however, you have written a critical essay, you should select the genre of the primary text or work you discuss. Select “other” only if no other genre category approximates the genre of the work you have studied.

Allegory
Autobiography / Memoir
Bildungsroman / Coming-of-Age Story
Children’s Literature
Confessional Literature
Digital Media / Technology
Drama (Comedy)
Drama (Tragedy)
Epistolary Literature
Fairy Tales
Fantasy
Film & Television
Flash Fiction
Folklore / Fables / Myth
Frame Tales
Gothic
Graphic Novel
Horror
Lyric Poetry
Magical Realism
Marriage Plot
Metafiction
Music or Song Lyrics
Mystery / Detective Fiction
Narrative Poetry
Non-Fiction
Picaresque or Episodic Fiction
Realism
Romance
Satire
Science Fiction
Speculative Fiction
Stream of Consciousness
Travelogues
Utopia / Dystopia
Young Adult Literature
Other

Keyword Group: Author
If yours is a creative submission, you should either select “other” or select an author who has inspired your creative work. If, however, you have written a critical essay, you should select the author of the primary text or work you discuss if they are included in the list. Choose “other” if they are not on the list and supply their name(s).

Allende, Isabel
Angelou, Maya
Atwood, Margaret
Austen, Jane
Baldwin, James
Bechdel, Alison
Bergman, Megan Mayhew
Blake, William
Brontë Sisters
Chaucer, Geoffrey
Chopin, Kate
Dickens, Charles
Dickinson, Emily
Donne, John
Douglass, Frederick
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan
Eliot, George
Eliot, T. S.
Ellison, Ralph
Faulkner, William
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Frost, Robert
García Márquez, Gabriel
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Hemingway, Ernest
Henríquez, Cristina (Common Reader author)
Homer
Ibsen, Henrik
Jackson, Shirley
James, Henry
James, Marlon
Joyce, James
Kafka, Franz
Keats, John
Melville, Herman
Milton, John
Morrison, Toni
O’Connor, Flannery
Orwell, George
Poe, Edgar Allan
Rowling, J. K.
Rushdie, Salman
Satrapi, Marjane
Shakespeare, William
Shelley, Mary
Steinbeck, John
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Swift, Jonathan
Tan, Amy
Tolkien, J. R. R.
Trollope, Anthony
Twain, Mark
VanderMeer, Jeff
Vonnegut, Kurt
Wharton, Edith
Whitman, Walt
Wilde, Oscar
Wilder, Thornton
Williams, Tennessee
Wollstonecraft, Mary
Woolf, Virginia
Other

Keyword Group: Critical Methodology
If yours is a creative submission, you may either select “other” or a critical methodology that illuminates your text. If, however, you have written a critical essay, you should select the critical methodology you have followed in your analysis.

Archetypal / Mythic Criticism
Biographical Criticism
Cultural Studies
Deconstruction / Post-Structuralism
Dialogic Criticism (Bakhtin)
Disability Studies
Ecocriticism / Ecofeminism
Feminist Criticism
Gender Studies
Linguistics / Grammar
Marxist Criticism
New Criticism / Formalism / Close Reading
New Historicism
Political Criticism
Postcolonialism
Psychoanalytic / Psychological Criticism
Queer Theory / LGBTQIA+ Theory
Reader-Response Criticism / Reception Theory
Structuralism / Semiotics
Trauma Theory
Other