Seeking papers that elaborate Williams’s relationship to California and West Coast culture, broadly defined or focused on various Los Angeles poetry scenes, Williams’s reading tours, engagement with Hollywood, or relations to western modernism.
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William Carlos Williams and Failure: MLA Toronto 8–12 January 2026
Join us in Toronto for our 2026 MLA session “William Carlos Williams and Failure.” How did William Carlos Williams understand “failure”? Proposals on unfinished works, works Williams understood as failures, the opportunities he saw in failure, or how poets/critics have evaluated his work and his place in literary history.
Continue readingCFP for MLA 2026 Toronto: William Carlos Williams and Failure
How did William Carlos Williams understand “failure”? Proposals on unfinished works, works Williams understood as failures, the opportunities he saw in failure, or how poets/critics have evaluated his work and his place in literary history.
Continue readingMLA 2025 (New Orleans): 100 Years of In the American Grain
Join us in New Orleans for our 2025 MLA session “William Carlos Williams and the Question of ‘America’: 100 Years of In the American Grain” featuring presentations by Stephen Hahn, Florian Gargaillo, and Zachary Tavlin.
Continue readingMLA 2025 (New Orleans): 100 Years of In the American Grain and Williams and Jazz
The William Carlos Williams Society is sponsoring two sessions at the 2025 MLA convention in New Orleans (9–12 January): William Carlos Williams and the Question of ‘America’: 100 Years of In the American Grain” and “William Carlos Williams and Jazz.”
Continue readingMLA 2024 (Philadelphia) William Carlos Williams, Paterson, and the Environmental Humanities
Join us in Philadelphia for our 2024 MLA session “William Carlos Williams, Paterson, and the Environmental Humanities”
Continue readingMLA 2023 (San Francisco)
A celebration and critical assessment at the 100th anniversary of the publication of William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All.
Continue readingMLA 2022 Multilingual Williams
William Carlos Williams—including but not limited to his multilingual home and upbringing, his experiences living in Germany and France, his recognition of the need for knowledge of foreign languages, his readings of poetry and/or prose in translation, and his translations from Spanish, French, Greek, and Chinese.
Continue readingMLA 2021 William Carlos Williams Thinking
A session dedicated to exploring William Carlos Williams’s thinking about the nature, function and operation of the mind. What would it mean to read Williams without privileging familiar terms and categories like imagism, objectivism or, more provocatively, the ordinary things which have so often anchored critical treatments of his work?
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