International Conference on Literary Juvenilia

Co-Chairs:

• Sara R. Danger, Professor of English, Valparaiso University
• Emily Gowen, Assistant Director of Studies and a Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University

Youth Writers and Their Worlds aims to create an interdisciplinary space for scholars to reflect on the vibrancy and complexity of writing by young people. We invite proposals for individual papers (20 minutes in length) and/or full panels of three speakers and a chair on any aspect of youth writing. While all topics related to youth authorship are welcome, we particularly encourage submissions engaging with our conference theme. Possible topics and panel themes might include (but are not limited
to):

• Children in Print – How do child-authored texts circulate, and how are they framed by adult editors, institutions, or markets? How are these works read in their own time—and in ours?
• Writing on the Margins – What do diaries, letters, zines, schoolwork, and other under-studied forms reveal about youth creativity and the boundaries of literary value?
• Beyond Biography – How can we read child authors on their own terms, rather than as precursors of their adult selves or as mere curiosities?
• Recollections and Self-Making – How do memoirs, autobiographies, and other retrospective works engage with or reframe childhood creativity and early writing?
• Defining and Contesting Childhood – In what ways do child writers reflect, reinforce, or resist adult definitions of what it means to be a child?
• Visual Cultures of Childhood – How do drawings, scrapbooks, annotated books, and other hybrid or visual forms shape the imaginative worlds of child authors?

Keynote Speaker: Karen Sánchez-Eppler, L. Stanton Williams 1941 Professor of American Studies and English at Amherst College.

Featured Panels:

• Panel on publishing in Juvenilia studies, chaired by Prof. Laurie Langbauer, UNC Chapel Hill
• Featured Panel: Youth Writing and the Archive Andrea Immel, Curator of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University, and Laura Wasowicz, Curator of Children’s Literature, American Antiquarian Society. Panelists will discuss ground-breaking digital and print initiatives to expand archives of writing by and about young people.