Alice Munro: Life, History, Boundaries, Legacy. Wednesday, June 18, 2025 - 1:30 - 3:30 pm

The chair of the plenary is Clark Baise; Maurice A. Lee will serve as the monitor and will introduce the plenary and the participants; the participants are Evelyn Conlon, Taylor Marie Graham, Darene Madott, Michael Mirolla, Tim Struthers, and Billie Travalini.

Clark Blaise is a Canadian-American author of twenty books, and co-editor of seven more; ten of them short story collections, three of them novels, and seven non-fiction works ranging through literary criticism, travel, memoir, biography, investigative journalism and most recently The Cruelest Gift (2016), a medical-memoir of his family’s struggle with inherited diseases. He served as Director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and founded the graduate writing program at Concordia University in Montreal, now Canada’s largest. He has taught at McGill and Concordia, Columbia, Skidmore, Emory, Cal-Berkeley, Iowa, NYU and Sarah Lawrence. He holds three honorary degrees (Denison University, his alma mater, McGill and Concordia), and has lectured in thirty countries. He is an officer in the Order of Canada, and he holds a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the Board Chair of the Society for the Study of the Short Story, the parent organization of the conference

Maurice A. Lee is a Professor of English, an academic advisor, and a former Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Central Arkansas (UCA), positions he held until his recent retirement. As a graduate student, he assisted the late Dr. Darwin Turner in establishing the second African American Studies program in the United States at the University of Wisconsin in 1969, with the first one being at San Francisco State University, under the leadership of Dr. Nathan Hare. Continuing similar efforts, he helped to develop the Women’s Studies Program at Temple University, and assisted in developing the African American Studies Programs at Haverford, Vassar, and Bard Colleges, between the years 1971-1985. Final effort in this regard was the development of the Gender Studies program At UCA in 2000. He has been the Director of the International Conference on the Short Story in English since 1994, under the direction of his mentor, the late Dr. Mary Rohrberger, one of the founders of the Society for the Study of the Short Story, the parent organization of the conference. He has written and published short stories, edited books on short stories, and written, produced and published both scholarly texts and articles on the genre. His hobbies are gardening, classical music and jazz, and reading.

TAYLOR MARIE GRAHAM is an award-winning playwright, librettist, director, theatre scholar, and educator who lives in Cambridge, Ontario / Haldimand Tract. She has an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in theatre from the University of Guelph. She works as a sessional theatre professor at universities in Southwestern Ontario and is the Interim Community Engagement Officer at the International Institute in Critical Studies in Improvisation. Taylor has published in Canadian Theatre Review, Intermission Magazine, Routledge’s Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, The Conversation, and Canadian Literature. Critics have described her plays and operas as “arresting and funny” (The Slotkin Letter), “uncommonly cool” (Mooney on Theatre), “charmingly twisted” (Toronto Star), “powerful, and courageous” (OnStage), “meaningful to audiences of all ages” (Intermission), “darkly evocative” (Istvan Reviews), “psychological, theological, and ornithological” (Our Theatre Voice), “intriguingly oddball” (Broadway World), “skillfully blends dramatic and musical tones” (NOW), “magical” (OntarioStage), “searingly written” (Bill Mandel), and “profound, beautifully crafted” (StageDoor). Her play Post Alice, inspired by four short stories by Alice Munro, was produced at a local venue in Stratford, Ontario in July/August of 2021, then restaged at The Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story in Blyth, Ontario in June 2024. Her 2024 book Cottage Radio & Other Plays, including Post Alice, is published by Talonbooks.  In addition, Taylor has written an essay for the new, third volume of essays about Munro scheduled for publication by Guernica Editions under the editorship of J.R. (Tim) Struthers. Learn more about her at <www.taylormariegraham.com>.