October 2-4, 2026
Hyatt Regency, Rochester, New York

The Creative Writing Studies Organization is holding our in-person fall conference in collaboration with the Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York. Holding on-site conferences allows us to strengthen the felt benefits of in-person gatherings while maintaining community across borders and time zones during alternate-year virtual conferences.

This year, the 11th Annual CWSC seeks proposals that feel their way through the affective landscape of Creative Writing Studies.

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In Our Feels: The Emotional Landscape of Creative Writing Studies

“How come we can’t be together and think together in a way that feels good, the way it should feel good?”

– Fred Moten in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (117) cited in Emilio Carrero’s 2025 CWSC talk “The Creative Writer’s Unpayable Debts”

In this call, we invite writer-scholars to gut check creative writing practices in publishing, classrooms, and the academy. We posit that writers and academics should draw on instinct to inform theory and praxis – especially now given the heavy emotional burden of our current climate. Whether framed through Moten’s observation that “everybody is pissed off all the time,” Cherríe Moraga’s theory in the flesh, or Dion Million’s practice of felt theory, what matters now is human feeling.

In Our Feels: The Emotional Landscape of CWS will share, through embodied knowledge, what’s feeling good, what’s feeling bad, and why. We’ve invited presenters to trouble and explore the emotional dimensions of creative writing studies—how feelings shape, guide, complicate, or resist thoughts and actions. These presentations and workshopsvalue emotional intelligence as scholarly intelligence, but also research the ways that emotions shape program structures, mentoring, accessibility, publishing, and the identities we inhabit as writers and teachers.

Together, we will interrogate how emotions circulate in classrooms, workshops, mentoring relationships, publishing ecosystems, and creative communities, as well as how emotional knowledge is produced, resisted, regulated, or valued in creative writing studies. The CWSC provides space for both critical analysis and reflective, experimental, and embodied modes of inquiry.

Proposals will engage with ideas such as:

* Joy, Play, and Affect: How can creative writing instructors leverage positive emotional affect to encourage creative output? What can the psychology of play teach fields housed in the academy?

* Embracing Empathy: How do classroom practices make room for empathy across structures of power? How can the act of creative writing be an empathetic and connective practice? In what ways are creative works the site of empathetic feeling?

* Emotional Labor of Educators and Editors: How do we manage the emotional labor of reading vulnerable student work, slush piles riddled with microaggressions, and vehement denials of AI usage?

* AI and Emotional Distance: Do large language models distance writers from the emotional burden of process – for better or for worse – and, if so, what are the ramifications of this distancing?

* The Writer’s Workshop: Many scholars have explored the racialized, cultural, and gendered violence of traditional workshop methods (Chavez, Salesses, Nguyen) as well as the harms enacted by codified institutional practices (Watkins, Diaz). How do we make space for everyone’s feelings when those in power (“the mainly white room”) so often weaponize their own?

* The Politics of Emotion in Creative Writing Studies: How do we tell stories about the lineage of pain, exclusion, defensiveness, competition, and jealousy in our field? What about stories of mutual celebration, unconditional positive regard, radical acceptance, and love? How do these emotions reflect and shape our politics and policies?

Creative writing is an emotional practice—taught, learned, and produced through affective experiences. Yet within creative writing studies and the academy, emotion is too often treated as incidental, intuitive, or private, rather than the subject of sustained inquiry. We hope that a collective expression of feeling – a vibe check, if you will – can guide our field and our communities toward more sustainable, liberatory practices.

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Please remember to renew your membership, if needed, prior to registering.