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 that 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
- Convention Theme: One of Ours
- Death / Trauma / Grief
- Deception
- Disability
- Diversity /Equity / Inclusion / Belonging
- Dreams / The Unconscious
- Education / Learning
- Environmentalism / Anthropocene
- 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
- Postcolonialism
- Romance / Love
- Social Class /Classism
- 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.
- Afrofuturism
- Allegory
- Autobiography / Memoir
- Bildungsroman / Coming-of-Age Story
- Children’s Literature
- Confessional Literature
- Digital Media / Technology
- Drama (Comedy)
- Drama (Tragedy)
- Dystopia
- Epistolary Literature
- Fairy Tale
- Fantasy
- Film & Television
- Flash Fiction
- Folklore / Fables / Myth
- Frame Tales
- Gothic
- Graphic Narrative
- Horror
- Lyric Poetry
- Magical Realism
- Metafiction
- Mystery / Detective Fiction
- Narrative Poetry
- Nonfiction
- Picaresque or Episodic
- Realism
- Romance
- Satire
- Science Fiction
- Speculative Fiction / Weird Lit
- 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
- Beams, Claire (Featured Speaker)
- Blake, William
- Borges, Jorge Luis
- Brontë Sisters
- Cather, Willa (Spotlight Author)
- Chaucer, Geoffrey
- Chopin, Kate
- Christie, Agatha
- Dante
- Dickens, Charles
- Dickinson, Emily
- Diaz, Natalie (Common Reader Author)
- Donne, John
- Douglass, Frederick
- Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan
- Eliot, George
- Eliot, T. S.
- Ellison, Ralph
- Faulkner, William
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott
- Frost, Robert
- GarcÃa Márquez, Gabriel
- Green, John
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel
- Hemingway, Ernest
- Homer
- Ibsen, Henrik
- Jackson, Shirley
- James, Henry
- James, Marlon
- Joyce, James
- Kafka, Franz
- Kadohata, Cynthia (Featured Speaker)
- Keats, John
- King, Stephen
- Melville, Herman
- Milton, John
- Morrison, Toni
- Nguyen, Diana (Featured Speaker)
- O’Connor, Flannery
- Okorafor, Nnedi
- Orwell, George
- Patterson, James
- Peynado, Brenda
- Phillips, Carl
- Poe, Edgar Allan
- Rowling, J. K.
- Rushdie, Salman
- Satrapi, Marjane
- Sáenz, Benjamin Alire (Featured Speaker)
- Shakespeare, William
- Shelley, Mary
- Steinbeck, John
- Stone, Nic
- Stowe, Harriet Beecher
- Swift, Jonathan
- Tan, Amy
- Tolkien, J. R. R.
- Trollope, Anthony
- Twain, Mark
- VanderMeer, Jeff
- Vonnegut, Kurt
- Walker, Alice
- Wharton, Edith
- Whitman, Walt
- Wilde, Oscar
- Wilder, Thornton
- Williams, Tennessee
- Williams, Terry Tempest
- Wollstonecraft, Mary
- Woolf, Virginia
- Other Author: African
- Other Author: British
- Other Author: East/South Asian
- Other Author: European
- Other Author: Latin American/Caribbean
- Other Author: North American
- Other Author: Anglophone World
- Other Author: Non-Anglophone World
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