UCMLA Conference

Speaker: Dr. Leece Lee-Oliver (Blackfeet/Choctaw), professor and director of Fresno State's American Indian Studies program

Moderator: Prof. Melanie Kachadoorian, lecturer, Department of English

Presenters: 

• Alexandria Bibler (Creative Writing) – Keeping Alive the Memories of a Dead Past in Brynn Saito’s Under a Future Sky
• Kinsley Esposito (Literature) – Indigenous Presence in the Present: History, Erasure, and Survival in Tommy Orange’s There There
• Mia Ognibene (Literature) –  The Use of Structure to Force Reader Bias Confrontation in Mona Susan Power’s The Grass Dancer
• Malia Williamson (Literature) – An Exploration of Accessibility and Perspectives Through the Work of The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday

Moderator: Hope Vang, graduate student, M.A. English (Literature)

Presenters: 

• Arianna Miranda Tapia (Literature) – Predefined Chicana Identities in Erika Sánchez’s I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter
• Visas Vongnarith (Literature) – Lateral Violence in A Cup of Water Under My Bed
• Deborah Mechele Bento (MFA Creative Writing - Creative Nonfiction) – From “Soul-less” to Solís: bell hooks’ “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness” and the Illumination of Cultural Erasure
• Dani Conklin (Creative Writing) – Girl Power: A Look at Chihiro’s Spiritual Journey in Spirited Away

Moderator: Joshua Sagouspe, graduate student, M.A. English (Literature)

Presenters:

• Yeiri Farias-Manzo (Creative Writing) – Impoverished Black Women as Distractions for Wealthy Men: A Marxist and Intersectional Feminist Analysis of “Peach Cobbler” by Deesha Philyaw
• Paloma Vital (English Studies) – Labor and Ethics: An Analysis of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away
• Kinsley Esposito (Literature) – Restoring the Sacred Hoop: Matriarchal Memory and Balance in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine

Moderator: Mariah Gabler, graduate student, M.A. English (Literature)

Lunch on your own

Presenters:

• Soreath Hok (MFA Creative Writing - Creative Nonfiction)
• Freddie Rosas (M.A. English - Literature)
• Joshua Sagouspe (M.A. English - Literature)
• Isabella de la Torre (MFA Creative Writing - Poetry)
• Hope Vang (M.A. English - Literature)

Moderator: Dr. Sean A. Gordon, assistant professor, Department of English

Presenters: 

• Angie Johnson (Literature and minor in Deaf Studies) – Reimagining the Lesbian Vampire: Jewelle Gomez’s Black Feminist Perspective on Carmilla in “Caramelle”
• Noah Christopher Reed Miranda (Literature and History) – Stories About the White Age: A Queer of Color Critique of Mónica Ojeda’s “White Horror” in Mandíbula
• Wendy Abrego-Miranda (M.A. English - Literature) and Christopher Gutierrez (M.A. English -Rhetoric and Writing Studies) – r/absorbingthedespair: Examining Climate Despair in Multi-Ethnic Reddit Users Through Online Discussion Forums

Moderator: Freddie Rosas, graduate student, M.A. English (Literature)

Conferences such as this provide a way for scholars to exchange ideas and present their research. The conference offers you an opportunity to participate in scholarly conversation.

You will have the experience of writing an abstract, writing or revising a paper, reading or presenting your work in a panel with other scholars, and answering and posing questions. This is very valuable experience for anyone who plans to teach, engage in literary research, or go to graduate school. It is also good general experience in presenting information in a public forum.

The presence of many diverse voices also strengthens the conference.

This year's conference will be held on campus on Friday, March 13, 2025. Sessions will be inside the University Business Center.

Academic conferences serve multiple purposes.

You share your ideas with a scholarly community and benefit from their feedback. You attend panels on authors or themes that interest you and learn from the perspectives of the panelists. Professional conference papers often lead to full-length articles appropriate for publication.

This conference aims to mentor undergraduates in the process of presenting their research, to involve graduate students as event organizers, and to foreground the field of multiethnic literatures of the Americas.

This conference welcomes presentations that critically engage “texts” in a variety of formats.

While literature certainly includes traditional forms (fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and drama), cultural studies expands this definition to include other artifacts that prompt related critical reflections. Presentations on film, television, art, music, and other popular forms are welcome.

The term includes North, South, and Central America, as well as the Caribbean.

Yes. However, we ask that you present your paper in English.

Yes, if the writer’s whiteness is relevant to your analysis of the text, or if the work demonstrates a significant engagement with race or ethnicity.

An abstract is a summary of your complete argument. We ask that you keep your abstract limited to 250 words. Check out our sample abstract.

The conference is intended for current undergraduates (from any department) and students who graduated within the past year. Students enrolled in Open University courses may submit abstracts as well. 

Yes. The UCMLA committee offers the following opportunities.

Workshop on writing abstracts:

4 to 5 PM on Friday, January 24, 2025 inside the Fresno State Library media viewing room (LIB 3126).

Faculty and graduate students will be available to provide advice and guidelines for writing abstracts, to answer questions, and to provide examples.

Early submission of drafts of abstracts:

If you submit a draft of your abstract by email by Monday, Jan. 6, 2025, you will receive feedback by email and will have time to revise and polish your abstract by the Jan. 27 deadline.

How to Present / What to Expect workshop:

4 to 5 PM on Friday, Feb. 28 on Zoom. [join the session with Dr. Sean A. Gordon] 

Previous UCMLA presenters will hold an informal chat to answer any of your last-minute questions about what to expect the day of the conference: how to deliver your paper, materials to prepare, what to wear, how to field questions, what their experience was like, helpful tips, how to deal with nerves, etc. It’s an open forum! Bring your questions.

The abstract is due Jan. 26, 2026. Please email it to us as a Word document or PDF file and paste it in the body of an email. If you have already submitted an abstract for feedback, please resubmit your revised version or a new abstract by this deadline.

The conference organizing committee will select from among the submissions and group the chosen abstracts into appropriate panels.

Check out our sample abstract to help guide you.

Absolutely. If the abstract is accepted, be sure to revise your paper to meet the criteria of the conference. 

If your abstract is accepted, you will receive an email from the conference organizers by mid-February.

You will probably have until the day of the conference to prepare your paper. However, panel chairs sometimes ask panelists to submit their papers a few days earlier so that they can formulate their own remarks about the panel as a whole. Be prepared.  

Your paper should be 6-7 pages long, or whatever you can read coherently in 12-14 minutes. It is vital that you rehearse your reading ahead of time and respect the time limit because otherwise the chair or moderator of your panel will have to cut you off abruptly.

Yes. What matters is not the number of sources consulted but how meaningfully your paper engages with them.

The conference program committee groups individual papers into panels based on general thematic connections. There are usually three or four presenters per panel.

Each panel has a moderator who introduces the panelists and invites them to come up, one by one, to present their papers. A Q&A follows, in which the moderator facilitates questions from the audience and the panelists respond.

There is usually a short break between panels.

Yes, most presenters at English conferences just read their papers. Occasionally, a presenter will speak to the audience or combine speaking with reading

You may also incorporate audio-visual material if you wish. In that case, let the organizers know of your technological needs in advance.

• Rehearse your paper in advance and be sure to time yourself.
• Stand up when you present. Your voice will project better and you will have more presence.
• Use the microphone if available.
• Project your voice and enunciate every word.
• Read slowly and clearly. Don't speed through your paper breathlessly.
• Look up from time to time and make eye contact with the audience.
• When you make eye contact, keep your finger on the page so as not to lose your place.
• Introduce quotations with the word "quote," and signal the end of the quotation with "unquote" or "end quote."
• End your presentation by looking up and saying "thank you."

Please do! We encourage everyone, including the community, to attend. The audience is also welcome to ask questions about the papers during each panel’s Q&A.

No. Your conference program will give you the panel titles and names of panelists, and you may choose which ones to attend. It is courteous to sit through a complete panel (usually 3 or 4 papers) and make your exit during the break between panels. 

Feel free to bring a snack with you and eat it at any time while you are in the audience. Depending upon funds, we hope to be able to provide some refreshments.  The idea is that you get a chance to mingle with presenters and attendees in a relaxed setting.

Yes! This conference is enriched by the presence and support of the English Department’s graduate students.

Once we have selected abstracts and placed them in appropriate panels, we will invite graduate students to serve as moderators. So let us know if you are interested. But just to have our graduate students in the audience, engaged with the presentations, makes the conference a more stimulating experience for all.

A moderator’s basic responsibility is to introduce the panel at the beginning and facilitate questions from the audience after all panelists have presented.

Most moderators ask for brief bios of their panelists ahead of time. Some also ask their panelists for their papers in advance so that they can read them, draw connections among them, and ask questions of the panelists to spark discussion.

Organizing committee: Freddie Rosas, Jasmine Kaur, Joseph LeForge, Joshua Sagouspe, Isabella De La Torre, Hope Vang, Dr. Sean A. Gordon, Dr. Melanie Hernandez, Prof. Melanie Kachadoorian, Dr. Samina Najmi, Dr. René Rodríguez-Astacio

Keynote speakers: Talia Lakshmi Kolluri and lawrence-minh bùi davis

Conference program

Organizing committee: Luis Granados Torres, Dr. Melanie Hernandez, Prof. Melanie Kachadoorian, Jasmine Kaur, Joseph LeForge, Alvaro Lozano, Dr. Samina Najmi, Dr. René Rodríguez-Astacio

Keynote speakers: Sandra Cisneros and Jesse Alemán

Conference program

Organizing committee: Luis Granados Torres, Dr. Melanie Hernandez, Prof. Melanie Kachadoorian, Jasmine Kaur, Joseph LeForge, Alvaro Lozano, Dr. Samina Najmi, Ashley Rivera-Garcia, Dr. René Rodríguez-Astacio, Prof. Hector Tapía III

Keynote speakers: Shadab Zeest Hashmi and LeiLani Nishime

Conference program

Organizing committee: Mia De La Cerda, Dr. Melanie Hernandez, Prof. Melanie Kachadoorian, Alvaro Lozano, Dr. Samina Najmi, Dr. René Rodríguez-Astacio, Graciela Sierra-Moreno

Keynote speakers: Amparo Ortiz and Rajini Srikanth

Conference program

Organizing committee: Dr. William Arce, Noel Castillón, Dr. Melanie Hernandez, Alvaro Lozano, Dr. Samina Najmi, Delaney R. Whitebird Olmo, Graciela Sierra-Moreno, Hector Tapía III

Keynote speakers: Gerald Vizenor and Monica De La Torre

Conference program

Organizing committee: Dr. William Arce, Elizabeth Bolaños, Prof. Joseph Cassara, Esmeralda Gamez, Nou Her, Dr. Chris Henson, Dr. Melanie Hernandez, Dr. Samina Najmi, Delaney R. Whitebird Olmo, Michael Ramirez, Ernesto Reyes, Hector Tapía III

Keynote speakers: Erika L. Sánchez and Ishmael Reed

Conference program

10th anniversary alumni panel: Neama Alamri, Leila Alamri-Kassim, Erin L. Álvarez, Carrie Ayala, Jeremiah Henry, Cody Hoover, Lena Mahmoud, Zoyer Zyndel

Organizing committee: Dr. William Arce, Shanell Contreras, Bryce Downing, Esmeralda Gamez, Angel Garduno, Michaella Gonzalez, Dr. Chris Henson, Dr. Melanie Hernandez, Dr. Samina Najmi, Tara Williams

Keynote spakers: Maxine Hong Kingston and Elda María Román

Conference program

Organizing committee: Dr. William Arce, Shanell Contreras, Bryce Downing, Esmeralda Gamez, Dr. Chris Henson, Dr. Melanie Hernandez, Christina Legler, Dr. Samina Najmi, Guadalupe Remigio Ortega, Tara Williams

Keynote speakers: Reyna Grande and Gary Y. Okihiro

Conference program

Organizing committee: Dr. William Arce, Mireyda Barraza Martinez, Jazmin Flores, Dr. Chris Henson, Dr. Melanie Hernandez, Dr. Samina Najmi, Guadalupe Remigio Ortega, Tara Williams

Keynote speakers: Wendy Rose and Arturo Arias

Conference program

Organizing committee: Dr. William Arce, Mireyda Barraza Martinez, Emily Beals, Jazmin Flores, Dr. Chris Henson, Gloria Hernandez, Dr. Melanie Hernandez, Kyle Hoover, Dr. Samina Najmi, Guadalupe Remigio Ortega, Tara Williams

Keynote speakers: Saïd Sayrafiezadeh and Michele Elam

Conference program

Organizing committee: Eryn Baldrica-Guy, Emily Beals, Jeremiah Henry, Dr. Chris Henson, Gloria Hernandez, Kyle Hoover, Prof. Randa Jarrar, Prof. Samina Najmi

Keynote speakers: Manuel Muñoz and Marilyn Chin

Conference program 

Organizing committee: Dr. Chris Henson, Cody Hoover, Dr. Samina Najmi, Shane Wood, Lena Zaghmouri

Keynote speaker: Roxane Gay

Conference program

Organizing committee: Prof. Randa Jarrar, Dr. Samina Najmi, Lena Zaghmouri

Keynote speakers: Samiya Bashir and Patricia Engel

Conference program

Organizing committee: Prof. Alex Espinoza, Gilliann Hensley, Dr. Analola Santana, Lena Zaghmouri

Keynote speakers: Hayan Charara and Jorge Huerta

Conference program

Organizing committee: Erin L. Álvarez, Prof. Alex Espinoza, Miriam Fernandez, Dr. Kathleen Godfrey, Cynthia Guardado, Maryam Jamali Ashtiani, Dr. Samina Najmi, Mario Rosado, Dr. Analola Santana, Dr. Bo Wang

Keynote speaker: Cherríe Moraga

Conference program

Organizing committee: Prof. Alex Espinoza, Maryam Jamali Ashtiani, Dr. Samina Najmi, Mario Rosado, Dr. Analola Santana 

Conference program