2025 CONFERENCE SPEAKERS

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LORENE CARY is an author, memoirist, and playwright. Among her works are Black Ice, about her experiences as one of the first African-American students at the exclusive St. Paul's School in New Hampshire, and the play _My General Tubman_. The play takes place in the abolitionist era and present day in the Philadelphia prison system. Cary portrays Tubman in a mythical manner--she has the power to travel through time. In the present, she meets a man incarcerated in Philadelphia for a minor crime. The play draws a clear connection between the legacy of slavery and the current prison system.  Cary adapted her caretaking memoir Ladysitting: My Year with Nana at the End of Her Century into a play. Both works explore the life and last year of Nana – a fiercely strong and independent woman, who now needs the care of others. In Ladysitting, Cary examines the ruptures, the love, and the forgiveness that defines family through stories of five generations and bears witness to her Nana’s remarkable 101 years.

DANIEL ERNST is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, TX. He researches and teaches courses in rhetoric, writing, grammar, and generative AI. Ernst holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, where he studied automated language technologies, AI, educational assessment, technical communication, and rhetoric. His research focuses on education, AI, literacy research, and public policy. He has been featured on NPR’s Academic Minute on the topic of artificial versus human intelligence.

AHMED BADR is an Iraqi-American author, poet, and social entrepreneur working at the intersection of creativity, displacement, and youth empowerment. Ahmed’s work seeks to combine poetry, archival collections, and multi-media to explore the complexities of migration, identity, and self-expression, with a focus on reframing and reclaiming the power of tragedy. He is the Director of the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship and Assistant Professor of the Practice in Public Policy at Wesleyan University. In addition, Ahmed is the host of Virginia Public Media's (VPM) Regional Murrow award-winning Resettled podcast, and the co-host of the World Bank's #Youth4Climate Live Series. 

Artress Bethany White is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. Her third poetry collection, A Black Doe in the Anthropocene: Poems, is forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky in spring 2025 and chronicles her family's history of enslavement in America. She is the recipient of the Trio Award for her poetry collection My Afmerica: Poems (Trio House Press, 2019) and is co-editor of the anthology Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Re-imagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters (Pangyrus, 2023), which writer Camille Dungy refers to as "a blessing and a balm." Artress's recent work also appears in the anthologies Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters, and Poems for and About One Mr. Komunyakaa and Why I Wrote This Poem: 62 Poets on Creativity and Craft (McFarland, 2023). She has received scholarships and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Tupelo Press MASS MoCA. At present, Artress is associate professor of English at East Stroudsburg University.