Deadline: February 15, 2025
Contact: Kristin Loyd, Director of the Sowell Family Collection
Email: kristin.d.loyd@ttu.edu

The Sowell Collection at the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library of Texas Tech University is hosting a hybrid conference (virtual and face-to-face sessions) in Lubbock, TX, April 10-12, 2025.

We accept both creative and scholarly papers/panels. Creative work should be grounded in community, place, and/or the natural world. Critical/scholarly papers should deal in some way with writers whose work is included in the Sowell Collection, and/or writers whose work follows, expands, or responds to the Sowell Collection’s themes. We always take a very broad (and we hope welcoming) approach to thoughtful and thought-provoking proposals.

Founded in 1999, the Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community and the Natural World seeks to promote and preserve literature that engages with questions of environment and place, the nature of human and non-human communities, and the intersection of scientific and spiritual values. The Collection contains the personal papers of some of the country’s most prominent writers on the natural world. Authors in the Sowell Collection have received numerous honors including a National Book Award, a MacArthur Genius Award, Stegner Fellowships, John Burroughs Awards, and numerous awards for literary and scientific writing. The collection includes Kim Barnes, Rick Bass, Lisa Couturier, Max Crawford, David James Duncan, Gretel Ehrlich, Paul Hawken, Clyde Jones, Stephen Graham Jones, William Kittredge, Michael Koepf, John Lane, J. Drew Lanham, Barry Lopez, Bill McKibben, Susan Brind Morrow, Gary Paul Nabhan, Howard Norman, Susan Brind Morrow, Doug Peacock, Andrea Peacock, Robert Michael Pyle, David Quammen, Barbara Ras, Marc Reisner, Pattiann Rogers, Sandra Scofield, Annick Smith, Ro Wauer, and Robert Wrigley.

Posted on September 4, 2024