The Elizabeth Bishop Society seeks proposals for its two sponsored panels at the annual ALA Conference in San Francisco this May 26-29, 2016. Descriptions of the sessions appear below; applicants are welcome to apply to either or to both panels by sending a proposed title for a 20-minute paper, an abstract of about 300 words, and a short biographical note to Angus Cleghorn (angus.cleghorn@senecacollege.ca) and to Heather Treseler (htreseler@worcester.edu) by January 15, 2016.

Elizabeth Bishop, Class, and Race
New scholarship about Bishop’s engagement with class and race in her poems, prose, letters, and archival documents suggests that the poet’s attitudes were complex and polyvalent. This panel invites proposals focused on Bishop’s aesthetic depictions of racial identities and class differences in any of her “three” geographies—Canada, the United States, and Brazil—during any one phase (or across) her career, adding to the substantial work in this area by Steven Gould Axelrod, Kirstin Hotelling Zona, and Renée Curry, among others.

Elizabeth Bishop’s Poems and Everyday Media
Bishop’s poetry frequently employs conceits from “everyday” media to include newspapers, songs, broadcasts, postcards, travelogues, nursery rhymes, and diaries. This panel will focus on Bishop’s use of “para-literary” conventions in her published and posthumously published poetry, her evolving reflections on poetics and incorporative practices, and the poet’s license to borrow from popular tropes and contemporary media. Proposals about Bishop’s incorporative aesthetic vis-à-vis those of her peers are also welcome.