In celebration of its tenth year, Belladonna will join with The CUNY Graduate Center’s Women’s Studies Certificate Program, Center for Research on Women and Society, Center for Humanities, Poetics Group, and English Department to present a conference aimed at advancing and broadcasting the life of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetics and Activism Today. The conference will take place at the CUNY Graduate Center on September 24 and 25, 2009.

Our goals for this conference are the following:
1)    To support the study of the Feminist Avant-Garde
2)    To encourage collaboration between radical feminist artists/thinkers/activists.
3)    To provide a space to think about relevant activism in these times, in this place.

We at Belladonna are particularly interested in what’s immediate, present and happening now. We would like this call to encourage conversations and new designs for work between genres, into activist communities, and among academic and non-academic discourse. We are looking for evolving modes of knowing and acting and resisting.

Papers and presentations might focus on (but are not limited to) the following topics:

Collaborations between poets and artists, poets and dancers, poetry theater, poets and scientists (or science), between teachers and students, between poets and community activists.

Critical consideration of women writers who for whatever reason have not yet received it–we welcome non-traditional and cross-genre approaches. Race, Gender, Class: Working within and across affinities.
AgitProp that incorporates poetic thinking and expression.
Calls for Action. Organizing sessions.

Send panel proposals and/or paper abstracts (350 words maximum, or send a dvd of performance/visual /sound work) to belladonnaseries@gmail.com by  January 15, 2009.  As we proceed a web page will become available at belladonnaseries.org.

** Founded as a reading series at a women’s radical bookstore in 1999, Belladonna  is a feminist avant-garde event (Belladonna Series) and publication project (Belladonna Books) that promotes the work of women writers who are adventurous, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, unpredictable, dangerous with language (to the death machinery). In its nine year history, Belladonna* has featured over 150 experimental and hybrid writers. The curators promote work that is explicitly innovative, connects with other art forms, and is political/critical in content.

* deadly nightshade, a cardiac and respiratory stimulant, having purplish-red flowers and black berries.