Open Calls

-SAMLA 2025. (Proposals Accepted until September 1st, 2025)

• Panel 1: Flannery O’Connor and the Canon(s) of US Literature (Click here for details and full CFP)

  • March 25th, 2025, would have been Flannery O’Connor’s 100th birthday. Given that her mother, Regina Cline O’Connor, lived until the age of 99, Flannery’s readers may be forgiven for speculating about what could have been. Even if O’Connor had lived to 70 (the average US life expectancy when she died in 1964), we would have called the run from Wise Blood (1952) to Everything that Rises Must Converge (1965) her “early period.” Instead, O’Connor died of lupus in 1964. She become among the most celebrated American writers of the 20th Century, winning the only posthumous National Book Award for Fiction ever granted (The Complete Stories in 1972) and attracting scholarly attention from seemingly every corner of the “big tent” of literary studies, not just the Southern specialists and Christian scholars. And still, recent years have brought important questions about O’Connor’s status as a widely anthologized, taught, and studied author. Her fiction remains unchanged, but we just keep learning more about the Georgia writer—bowdlerized letters unearthed, excerpts of a previously unpublished novel released, an Antebellum mansion full of previously unseen O’Connor belongings, and so on. But why, exactly, should we read Flannery O’Connor? Writing on her appears to be continuing unabated, but what does the future hold for Flannery O’Connor scholarship? To the extent that canons—American, Southern, Christian, Religious, Regionalist, Comic, Gothic, Short Story, Grotesque, Great Books—still have salience, where does O’Connor “live” now in American Literature? Why?
    
    Proposals of 250-400 words (and a brief bio) should be sent to Matt Bryant Cheney (matt.bryantcheney@gcsu.edu) by Monday, September 1st, 2025. Earlier statements of interest are strongly encouraged.

• Panel 2: Flannery O’Connor: Open Topics Panel (Click here for details and full CFP)

  • The Flannery O’Connor Society invites abstracts (of no more than 250 words) for open topic presentations at SAMLA 2025. We will accept proposals for a wide variety of topics about and/or related to Flannery O’Connor’s oeuvre.

    Proposals or 250-400 words (and a brief bio) should be sent to Matt Bryant Cheney (matt.bryantcheney@gcsu.edu) by Tuesday, September 2nd, 2025. Earlier statements of interest are strongly encouraged.

-The Flannery O’Connor Review. Click here for details and full CFP.

-2025 Sarah Gordon Award.  (Proposals due September 12, 2025)

• Each entrant must be a graduate student at some time between 1 Apr. and 10 Aug. 2025.

• Articles must be submitted to matt.bryantcheney@gcsu.edu between 1 Apr. and 10 Aug. 2025, and entrants must be

•  All entries will be considered for publication in the Flannery O’Connor Review and must conform to the usual submission guidelines (click here to access)

Interested in listing your CFP here? Or organizing a Flannery O’Connor Society panel at an academic conference? Contact Matt Bryant Cheney (matt.bryantcheney@gcsu.edu) with details, and the society will promote the opportunity.

List of Regular Conferences with O’Connor Society Panels most years:

American Literature Association Annual Conference

Society for the Study of Southern Literature Biennial Conference

South Central Modern Language Association

Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900

South Atlantic Modern Language Association