Category Archives: News

Submit for possible inclusion in our guaranteed panel for our affiliation with the ALA

at their conference in May

American Literature Association

36th Annual Conference

May 21-24, 2025

The Westin Copley Place

10 Huntington Avenue

Boston, MA 02116

Theme: Reading Multiethnic Literature as Guidance in Times of Trouble

Abstracts due: Dec. 6

When in Morrison’s Beloved Paul D leans over and says to Sethe, “[W]e got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow,” his words gesture to Sankofa, the Akan symbol which indicates that the past contains the wisdom that we need to move forward. Here and now in US history, this panel applies Sankofa as symbol in literatures of historically excluded populations. MELUS invites individual paper proposals that examine multicultural literatures of the US for what readers may glean as guidance for how to move forward after a time of trauma. Specifically, we are interested in papers that consider how the works of multiethnic creators illustrate the ways in which traumas–historical or contemporary -help to envision better futures.

Please send abstracts of 250 words, a CV, and a short bio to Sherry Johnson at johnsshe@gvsu.edu by December 06.

The MELUS 2025 CFP is now LIVE!
Please visit our Conferences page for more details.

Alyssa A. Hunziker’s Essay “Chinese Exclusion, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonial Refusal in C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold,” MELUS, vol. 47, no. 4, winter 2022, pp. 22-48. Free to access here. (This essay was also awarded an Honorable Mention for the Don D. Walker Prize from the Western Literature Association for best essay in Western North American literary and cultural studies!)

This American Literature Association award is named for the year the ALS was organized, and this year’s theme was “Democracy, Difference, and the Question of Belonging.”

A special issue of the MELUS journal is now available, honoring the legacy of Jean Fagan Yellin.

José A. de la Garza Valenzuela’s Fall 2021 MELUS essay, “‘Necessarily Hidden Truth(s)’: Documenting Queer Migrant Experience in Rigoberto González’s Crossing Vines,” has been awarded the 2022 Crompton-Noll Essay Prize. 

The Queer/Trans (Q/T) Caucus of the American Studies Association and Gay and Lesbian/Queer (GL/Q) Caucus of the Modern Language Association award the annual Crompton-Noll essay prize. The Crompton-Noll Award for best essay in lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and/or queer studies/theory in the modern languages/literatures as well as cultural studies (all broadly construed) pays tribute to Louis Crompton, who passed away in 2009, and Dolores Noll (Kent State University), two early scholar/activists who helped found the Gay and Lesbian Caucus. The award recognizes the important work of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and/or queer studies/theory in the modern languages and the history that has helped make this current work possible.

Katherine Fusco and Lynda C. Olman’s MELUS article, “Techniques of Justice: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits and the Problem of Visualizing the Race,” has been awarded this year’s 1921 Prize in American literature. Here’s a link to the article: https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlab031/6408585
The 1921 Prize in American Literature is awarded by the American Literature Society to the best article of the year in any field of American literature, published in a select group of scholarly journals, including MELUS. Here’s more about the prize: https://americanliteraturesociety.wordpress.com/1921-prize-in-american-literature/. At the link, you can find the list of journals from which submissions are invited, and you’ll see that it’s a rather select list. So this is good news for the journal and society, and also a well-deserved recognition of Fusco and Olman’s excellent scholarship!