On Saturday, March 24th, 2001, the English Department of William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey (20 miles from NYC), will host a writer's conference, "Regional Writing and Literature"--a day of participatory workshops, panel sessions, lectures, and readings in critical and creative writing. We welcome participation from creative writers, professional writers, editors, secondary-level educators, scholars in all disciplines, and both graduate and undergraduate students. Workshops conducted by WPUNJ faculty will be offered in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, publishing, literature, and other areas. We are also honored to present keynote speakers Dr. Ira Shor and Judith Ortiz Cofer.

Tentative schedule, subject to change: 9:00-9:30 Breakfast and Orientation in the Atrium; 9:30-10:45 Reading by Judith Ortiz Cofer in the Atrium;11:00-12:30 First Round of Workshops in Hunziker Wing (Non-Fiction, with Judith Ortiz Cofer; Fiction, with John Parras; Caribbean Literature, with June Roberts; Poetry, with Timothy Liu; Critical Writing/Reading, with Joan Lesikin; Editing, with Alice Deakins)); 12:30-1:30 Lunch in the Atrium; 1:30-3:00 Second Round of Workshops in Hunziker Wing (A talk with Ira Shor; Women's Literature, with Arlene Scala; Poetry, with Ousseynou Traore; Publishing, with Amy Holman; Children's Literature, with Lisa Makman); 3:15-4:00 Open Microphone, Atrium Auditorium; 4:00-4:15 Tea and Snack in the Atrium

Judith Ortiz Cofer, a native of Puerto Rico, is a widely published poet, novelist, and essayist who has received numerous literary awards, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her book The Latin Deli received the Anisfield Wolf Award, and An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio won the first Pura Belpre Award and was named a Best Book of the Year1995-96 by the American Library Association. She is also the author of The Line of the Sun, a novel; a collection of personal essays and poems, Silent Dancing, awarded a PEN/Martha Albrand Special Citation in non-fiction; and two poetry collections, Terms of Survival and Reaching for the Mainland. Her newest title is The Year of Our Revolution: New and Selected Poetry and Prose.

Ira Shor is Distinguished Visiting Professor at William Paterson University, on leave from his position as Professor in the Ph.D. Program in English at the City University of New York. He has published 9 books on education and numerous articles. His most recent books are a 3-volume set on critical pedagogy in honor of the late Paulo Freire, the noted Brazilian educator who was his friend, mentor, and co-author. The volumes are entitled Critical Literacy in Action for college language arts) and Education is Politics (Vol 1, k-12, and Vol. 2, Post-secondary Across the Curriculum). Shor also wrote Empowering Education (1992) and When Students Have Power (1996), two foundational texts in the field of critical teaching and writing. His lecture for the conference is titled: "Writing Our Invisible Identities: Discovering Class in Ourselves and in Society" In this talk, Prof. Shor will examine the denial and dismissal of class identity in American life and how that affects our ability to see, teach, and write about social class. He will offer some ways of understanding social class and how it affects our identities and destinies. Shor will also explore how class identity has been denied in American life and propose some means for recovering useful notions of class for writers, teachers, and citizens.