The week before Easter, I got to attend the annual Popular Culture Association national conference in Indianapolis. I love this conference. It’s the perfect mix of scholarship and fun, with participants inside and outside of academia. I can attend sessions on poetry and Doctor Who and games studies all in the same place. It’s glorious.

I’m the Area Chair of Poetry Studies & Creative Poetry, so I screen submissions and organize the poetry panels. It takes a chunk of time and doesn’t pay, but I love this work too. It’s a fun puzzle for me to figure out how to arrange the presentations into panels so they will speak to each other in interesting ways, and I love getting to connect with poets and poetry scholars by hosting them at this conference. I’ve met some wonderful people this way over the last four years, from undergraduate students presenting for the first time to well-established poets like Kaveh Akbar. (I was going to insert a photo, but I just took a ton of blurry photos from my crummy old phone, so just imagine a lot of people looking awesome. I’ll bring my good camera next year…)

This year, I got to present in a session called A Field Guide to Grief: Poems. Kira Dunton, Sally McGreevey Hannay, Sarah Ann Winn, and I read poems from our collections that deal with loss (of a friend, of a son, of grandparents). I wasn’t sure people would turn out for grief-based poetry, but the room filled up, and it was one of the best reading experiences I’ve ever had. The audience was audibly and visibly connected with us. I saw people openly crying. The room rang with laughter in the moments when the poets’ dark humor came through. The Q&A time continued with audience members sharing very personally about their own losses and asking about when/how we’d come to write from grief. It was such a special time.

I also had the good fortune to be invited to take a side trip to South Bend on Good Friday to read with Sarah Ann Winn and Emily Capettini. Krista Cox of the Lit Literary Collective was a wonderful host. I loved hearing more of Sarah’s incredible poems from Alma Almanac, and I was so impressed with Emily’s Velma Dinkley flashes and Bloody Mary short story. Bonus features: talking and laughing with Sarah and Emily on the drive, seeing my cousin Toni who’s always lived halfway across the country from me, and eating delicious food with all of these people until the restaurant blasted loud music to make us leave at closing time.

I’m looking forward to the 2019 PCA conference in Washington, D.C.!