This weekend ten contemporary women authors will visit the College for a writers' conference titled, "Books and Other Acts: Contemporary Women Writers and Social Change."
Dorothy Allison, Toni Cade Bambara, Esther Broner, Cherrie Moraga, Grace Paley, Dolores Prida, Ninotchka Rosca, Leslie Marmon Silko, Meredith Tax and Paule Marshall will all be on campus this week discussing their work.
The writers plan to read from their works and initiate debates on "the questions facing women writers today," according to a press release.
"The conference focuses on the very heart of a liberal arts education: How do the books we read help us understand, face or change the problems in our increasingly polarized society?" Diana Taylor, Spanish and comparative literature professor.
"I feel that since the 1960s, women writers in the United States have been at the forefront of this inquiry," Taylor said.
Taylor is also the coordinator of the Institute for Women and Social Change, an organization formed by Dartmouth faculty to address the role of women in current social issues.
The Institute is sponsoring the conference that will examine "the relationship between women's political commitments and their artistic practice," the release stated.
Women's Resource Center Director Giavanna Munafo said the conference is important especially "for a campus like this one, with its outstanding academic and intellectual climate, to recognize that creative action and political action can be fruitfully aligned."
In the introduction of her book "Long Walks and Intimate Talks," Paley raises many of the issues that will be discussed at the conference.
"We hoped that our work would, by its happiness and sadness, demonstrate against militarists, racists, earth poisoners, women haters, all those destroyers of our days," Paley wrote. "One common purpose would be to celebrate the day, which is its own reason for peace, to praise and offer to its inherent beauty and reality our work as daily movement people and artists."
In her novel "Skin", Allison also captures the spirit of the conference.
"Some of us have no choice, I am always telling my students. Some of us have to write in order to make sense of the world," she wrote. "Writing is still revolutionary, writing is still about changing the world. Each of my students who tells the truth about their life becomes part of that process."
Inspired by the Institute for Women and Social Change's fall retreat, the conference represents months of fundraising and organization on the part of Institute members Paley, Taylor, French and Italian Literature Professor Marianne Hirsch and Women's Resource Center Director Giavanna Munafo .
According to VOX, the four main organizers invited "leading voices of American literature" to Dartmouth to create a "snapshot" of multiculturalism.
The conference begins tomorrow with an open reception for
Allison and Moraga at the Women's Resource Center.
At 8 p.m. tomorrow night, Bambara and Allison will read their works in Cook Auditorium.
Allison, Silko and Tax will lead the first roundtable discussion titled "Writing and/as Social Action," Saturday morning from 9:30 to 11 a.m.
Prida, Rosca and Tax will read from their works from 1 to 4 p.m. in Cook on Saturday. The second roundtable discussion, "The Politics of Literary Language," headed by Marshall, Paley and Prida will take place immediately after the readings.
Marshall, Broner and Moraga will read from their works Saturday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. in Cook.
"Changing Community," the third roundtable discussion led by Broner, Moraga, Prida and Bamabara, will kick off the final day of the conference at 10 a.m. Sunday morning in Cook.
The conference will conclude Sunday afternoon with readings by Silko and Paley from 2 to 4 p.m. in Cook.
Next spring the Institute for Women and Social Change will sponsor a conference titled "Gender and Poverty" to be followed by a "Gender and Violence" in the fall of 1996, according to VOX.
Additional reporting by Nicole Mallement.
