September 26-28, 2014
Asheville, North Carolina

Thematic Focus: The Writers of Black Mountain College
Hosted and sponsored by Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and the University of North Carolina Asheville

Submission Deadline: June 30, 2014

Click Here to download PDF Application.
Click Here to download Word Doc Application.

Possible topics:
The Black Mountain Review, The Black Mountain Poets, The relationship between literature and the visual arts, the writer’s craft and liberal arts education, literary happenings, the import of the glyph, writing as a political act, chance in literary composition.

In conjunction with the conference, the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center will present the exhibition Dan Rice: A Painter Among the Poets exploring the work of this important, but often overlooked, Abstract Expressionist painter and BMC alumnus.

Papers, performances, multi-media, panel proposals and workshops in all relevant disciplines are welcome. 
Please submit proposals to Brian Butler (bbutler@unca.edu) and 
Alice Sebrell (alice@blackmountaincollege.org) by June 30, 2014. 
Notification will be made by July 15, 2014. The conference will take place in Asheville, NC September 26-28, 2014.

More info: 828-350-8484

Keynote Speaker: Vincent Katz 
Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, critic, and curator. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, two books of translation, and his criticism has been published in numerous books, catalogues, and journals. He was awarded a Rome Prize Fellowship in Literature at the American Academy in Rome for 2001-2002 and has had residencies at the American Academy in Berlin and Yaddo. He was the editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment In Art, published by MIT Press in 2002 and reprinted in 2013 and curated an exhibition on Black Mountain College for the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid in 2002. He is the author of The Complete Elegies Of Sextus Propertius (Princeton, 2004), which won the National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association, and Alcuni Telefonini, a collaboration with painter Francesco Clemente, published in 2008 by Granary Books. He teaches in the MFA Program in Art Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he has created a course entitled “Investigating Interdisciplinarity.” He has lectured extensively on poetry and visual art.

The 6th Annual ReVIEWING Black Mountain College conference will focus on the writers associated with Black Mountain College and their influence on the form and content of poetry, literature and non-fiction. From the groundbreaking ideas of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley in poetry, to the incisive and revealing non-fiction of Francine du Plessix Gray and Michael Rumaker, to the scholarly and thought-provoking work of Suzi Gablik and Charles Perrow, this thematic focus is rich with material. Presentations and performances are not limited to this theme and may address any topic related to Black Mountain College and its legacy.

Featured Speaker: Laura Kuhn 
Laura Kuhn is the Exective Director of The John Cage Trust. The John Cage Trust was established in 1993 as a not-for-profit institution whose mission is to gather together, organize, preserve, disseminate, and generally further the work of the late American composer, John Cage. Its founding trustees were Merce Cunningham, Artistic Director of the Cunningham Dance Company, Anne d’Harnoncourt, Director of the Philadelphia Museum, and David Vaughan, Archivist of the Cunningham Dance Foundation, all long-time Cage friends and associates. Laura Kuhn, who from 1986 to 1992 worked directly with John Cage, serves as both a founding trustee and ongoing Executive Director. In 2008, Anne d’Harnoncourt was replaced by Margarete Roeder, long-time gallerist to both Cage and Cunningham; in 2009, Merce Cunningham was replaced by Melissa Harris, editor-in-chief of Aperture.

The John Cage Trust functions as both a business concern and an archive and repository for Cage’s work. In the latter capacity, it maintains sizeable collections of music, text, and visual art manuscripts. It also houses extensive audio, video, and print libraries, which are continually expanding, as well as a substantial permanent collection of visual art works by John Cage, which are made available for exhibitions worldwide. The Trust is open year-round by appointment to visitors to assist ongoing work involving, in diverse ways, the legacy of John Cage. As Executive Director, Kuhn travels extensively, lecturing on topics relating to Cage’s life and work and conducting performance workshops. In 1998, simultaneous with a performance of the Cage/Cunningham collaboration, Ocean, and the premiere installation of Cage’s Roaratorio at the Belfast Festival at Queen’s, she was even called upon to cook a post-performance macrobiotic meal for some 80 people in its theater cafe! That same year, she delivered a series of lectures at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where Cage’s work, perhaps needless to say, is very little known.

In 2007, the John Cage Trust went into residential placement at Bard College, where Kuhn serves as the first John Cage Professor of Performance Arts. That same year, two commemorative concerts were given: the afore-mentioned Lecture on the Weather, with an all-star cast that included Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, John Ashbery, John Ralston Saul, and others, and “Nexus Live!”, a full evening of percussion works given by the celebrated ensemble. In 2009 the first John Cage Trust sponsored symposium was given with “John Cage at Bard College,” with participation from Cage enthusiasts resident at Bard College. Source: http://johncage.org/about.html