FEATURED SPEAKERS

  For our opening night, we will have Dr. Antonio Byrd as our plenary speaker. Dr. Byrd is an associate professor at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, where he teaches courses in Black literacies, professional and technical communication, multimodal writing and rhetorics, digital rhetoric, and composition. He serves as co-chair for MLA Task Force on GenAI Initiatives Standing and was a member of the CCCC Special Committee on GenAI. His work has appeared in College Composition and Communication, Literacy in Composition Studies, Technical Communication Quarterly, and Writer: Craft and Context.  Dr. Byrd is an affiliate faculty for UMKC's Center for Digital and Public Humanities. His work in digital and public humanities focuses on community engaged scholarship and digital literacy by connecting UMKC students with community partners and industry professionals for real world application of digital writing. 

  For our closing afternoon at the All-Conference Luncheon, we will have Dr. Treasure Shields Redmond. A native of Meridian, Mississippi, Dr. Redmond is a poet, novelist, conjure woman, master educator, community arts organizer, and culture keeper. Rooted in the traditions of Hoodoo and the Black South, her work bridges sound, performance, spiritual practice, and radical criticism. She is the co-founder of Fannie Lou Hamer House, a migratory artist residency, and the founder of The Community Archive, a nonprofit organization where she teaches communities how to collect, preserve, and honor their elders’ oral histories. Dr. Redmond is the author of chop: a collection of kwansabas for fannie lou hamer (a kwansaba is a 49-word poetic form that contains seven lines with no more than seven words in each line, and each word is less than seven letters). She is an assistant professor of Creative Writing and African American Literature at Southern Illinois University / Edwardsville.