CFP for 2025 SSAWW Conference
“Understanding Histories, Imagining Futures: 25 Years of SSAWW”
November 6-9, 2025 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Marriott Old City
Workshop Description: Proposing Trade Editions
This is a guaranteed special-session workshop that will meet twice at the SSAWW Conference in Philadelphia Nov 6-9, 2025.
Given Modern Library’s new Torchbearers series, Penguin’s African American Classics series, and the New York Review Books feminist reissues, trade publishers have demonstrated interest in recovering texts by female-identified, queer, and non-white writers to reach both classrooms and the general reading public. These editions have different demands than scholarly editions, which present the text for academic audiences. In this closed workshop, which will meet for two sessions over the course of the conference, participants will pre-circulate an introduction draft situating a text of their choosing for a public audience. In the first session, the group, led by Fisher and Zibrak, will workshop the pre-circulated introductions. In the second, we’ll discuss how to create a proposal for a trade edition, with a mind to each participant’s goals and project.
To Apply:
Send a one-page CV and 300-word abstract summarizing the text you propose to recover and why you think it might appeal to present-day readers to azibrak@uwyo.edu and laura.fisher@torontomu.ca with “SSAWW Workshop” in the subject line by Feb 24, 2025. We are eager to hear from potential workshop participants who are affiliated or non-affiliated with a university, established or emerging scholars, contingent faculty and/or graduate students.
Workshop Leaders:
Laura Fisher is Associate Professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her monograph, Reading for Reform: The Social Life of Literature in the Progressive Era, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2019. She is also the editor of the Norton Library edition of The Awakening by Kate Chopin (2022).
Arielle Zibrak is Professor of English at the University of Wyoming. She is the author of Avidly Reads: Guilty Pleasures (New York University Press, 2021) and Writing Against Reform: Aesthetic Realism in the Progressive Era (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023) and the editor of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Twelve Stories by American Women Writers (Penguin Classics, 2025).