ALA 2018 - SAN FRANCISCO

2018 marks the last time the American Literature Association will meet in San Francisco for the foreseeable future.  Our next meetings will be in Boston, San Diego and Chicago.  So it was one more trip to City Lights Books and Brandy Ho's Hunan restaurant in North Beach before leaping into the round-the-clock conference sessions. Next year, Legal Seafood!

Hairong Chen is visiting Cal State LA this year while writing her dissertation, and we caught up with each other during the conference.

Things started off for me with two sessions I chaired, the first panels of the African American Literature and Culture Society, and the Amiri Baraka Society.

Following the second session of the Baraka Society, we retired to the lobby to lay plans for the siege of Boston. Along the way we recruited poet/scholar Kimberly Andrews, graduate of Penn State and Yale, enlisting her in our cause.

My dear colleague from Wuhan, Lianggong Luo, made his first ALA presentation, on the poem "Cubes," by Langston Hughes. Lianggong is the Dean of Foreign Languages at Central China Normal University.

Left, Scott Benson, one of my grad students from San Jose State days, who has done work on Beat writers, especially Michael McClure; Right, Penn State PhD Greg Pierrot, current president of the African American Literature and Culture Society AND the Amiri Baraka Society. His new book will be out from Georgia soon.

On Saturday, things reached a culmination with two sessions involving Lyn Hejinian, both organized by Laura Hinton. The first was a study of Sight, the book written in collaboration with Leslie Scalapino and published with Rod Smith's Aerial/Edge Editions.