28th ASU Writers Conference in Honor of Elmer Kelton
March 6 - 7, 2025
The 2025 conference will commemorate the 28th ASU Writers Conference in Honor of Elmer Kelton. Our two-day conference is one of the few in the state that requires no registration or attendance fees for presenters and guests.
Featured Writer: Jenny Browne
We are pleased to announce this year’s featured writer is critically acclaimed poet Jenny Browne.
Browne is a professor of English and creative writing at Trinity University in San Antonio. She is the author of five books of poetry and two chapbooks, including “Fellow Travelers: New and Selected Poems” (TCU Press 2021) and “I Am Trying to Love the Whole World,” forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2026. She is also the editor of “Texas, Being: A State of Poems” (Maverick Press 2024).
A former James Michener Fellow at the University of Texas, Browne has received the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and two U.S./U.K. Fullbright Fellowships to the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Browne’s poems and essays have appeared widely, most recently in American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Oxford American, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Magazine, The Nation and The New York Times. She served concurrent terms as the 2016-18 City of San Antonio Poet Laureate and the 2017 State of Texas Poet Laureate. In 2023, she was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.
The ASU Writers Conference brings award-winning authors from all genres to campus to share their works and their creativity with the ASU community and the public. Featured speakers have included renowned authors, such as Manuel Muñoz, Brandon Hobson, Naomi Shihab Nye, Craig Johnson, Leslie Marmon Silko, Art Spiegelman and Tim O’Brien.
9:30-10:30 a.m.
Keynote Presentation: A Conversation with Jenny Browne
Nick Almeida is a doctoral candidate in English literature and creative writing at the University of Houston. His stories and essays have been published by:
The Kenyon Review
Pleiades
CRAFT
The Southeast Review
American Literary Review
Mid-American Review
And more
He is currently querying his first story collection and completing a novel. He is a native Pennsylvanian and graduate of Penn State University, where he earned degrees in English (B.A.), Film/Video Production (B.A.), and English Literature (M.A.). In 2017, he graduated from the Michener Center with an M.F.A. in Fiction and a secondary focus in Screenwriting. During his time in Austin, he served as Editor-in-Chief of “Bat City Review.” Nick’s chapbook of stories, “Masterplans,” was selected by judge Steve Almond as grand prize winner of “The Masters Review’s” inaugural Chapbook Contest in fiction and is available now.
Megan J. Arlett was born in the UK, grew up in Spain, and now lives in New Mexico. The recipient of two Academy of American Poets Prizes and the Phoebe Nonfiction Prize, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in:
Best New Poets 2019
Best New British and Irish Poets
Gulf Coast
The Kenyon Review
New England Review
Prairie Schooner
The Sun
Virginia Quarterly Review
Her first book, “The Garden Party,” is forthcoming with Northwestern University Press.
Emma Aylor is the author of “Close Red Water (2023),” winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in:
New England Review
AGNI
Poetry Northwest
The Yale Review
And elsewhere
She has received support from the National Park Service’s artist-in-residence program, the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where she was awarded the Reynolds Poetry Fellowship. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Washington and is completing her Ph.D. at Texas Tech University.
Matthew W. Baker currently lives in Dallas where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Texas at Dallas. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of “Undoing the Hide’s Taut Musculature (FLP 2019),” and other work appears in:
Muzzle Magazine
The Southern Review
The Atlanta Review
Booth Journal
And more
Caleb Berg is a writer and educator from Richmond, Calif. His work has appeared in “Emerge Literary Journal” and “Chinquapin Literary Magazine.” He currently lives in Houston.
Rebecca Bernard is the author of the story collection “Our Sister Who Will Not Die (Mad Creek Books, 2022).” Her fiction has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in:
Oxford American
Alaska Quarterly Review
The Cincinnati Review
Southern Indiana Review
She is an Assistant Professor of English at East Carolina University, and she serves as a fiction editor for “The Boiler” and the “North Carolina Literary Review.”
Caleb Braun earned a M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Washington and a Ph.D. in English at Texas Tech University. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Bethany College. His poems have appeared in:
Best New Poets 2022
The Gettysburg Review, Blackbird
The Cincinnati Review
Gulf Coast
32 Poems
And others
Melissa Cundieff is the author of the poetry collection, “Darling Nova (Autumn House Press, 2018),” as well as two manuscripts-in-progress, “We Came to See What We Saw” (poetry) and “Original Reflection” (essays). Her poems and essays have been published in:
The Atlantic
Adroit Journal
Beloit Poetry Journal
Among others
Melissa teaches at Harvard University and lives in Massachusetts.
Ross Feeler is a writer and teacher living in Central Texas. His work has appeared in:
Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading
Craft Magazine’s First Chapters Compilation
The Common
The Masters Review
New South
The Potomac Review
Story|Houston
Hypertext
Pembroke Review
And others
The Key West Literary Seminar honored his novel-in-progress with the Marianne Russo Award. He teaches literature, composition, and creative writing at Texas State University.
Kim Horner is a Ph.D. in literature student at the University of Texas at Dallas. She earned a M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Arkansas at Monticello and an M.A. in Literature from UT Dallas.
She is the author of a memoir, “Probably Someday Cancer: Genetic Risk and Preventative Mastectomy” (University of North Texas Press, 2019), and her work has appeared in publications that include Seventeen and The Texas Observer.
She is working on a creative dissertation that includes documentary poetry based on her experiences as a newspaper reporter who wrote extensively about homelessness in Dallas.
Robin Johnson completed her Ph.D. in English Literature with Creative Writing at the University of Texas at San Antonio in December 2024. She won the Wendy Barker Creative Writing Award five times during her Ph.D. program and has published for ESCARP, 101words and the Pecan Grove Review.
Her research work focuses on facilitating poetry circles with women with a history of substance use disorder. She was born and raised in San Antonio and currently teaches creative writing and literature at the University of the Incarnate Word and the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Nathan Klayman is a graduate student at the University of Texas at Dallas, pursuing a Master of Arts in literature. A fan of both mythology and science fiction, Nathan often dreamed of robots and powerful deities; failing to become either, he opted to write instead and is currently working on his second anthology of weird Texas fiction.
Kelan Nee is a poet, writer, educator and carpenter from Massachusetts. His debut collection, “Felling,” was published in May of 2024 and was winner of the 2023 Vassar Miller prize. His poems have been published in:
Poetry, the Adroit Journal
32 Poems
And others
His nonfiction has been featured in The Paris Review. Nee has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Poetry Foundation,The Adroit Journal, the Academy of American Poets and the Inprint Foundation in the form of awards and scholarships. He lives in Houston, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in poetry and critical poetics. He is the Editor-in-Chief ofGulf Coast Journal.
Matthew Pitt grew up in St. Louis and now operates out of Fort Worth as an Associate Professor of English at TCU. His novella, “The Be-Everything! Brothers,” is forthcoming this fall, with a novel, “Tear Here,” to follow in 2026. His prior books are the story collections “These Are Our Demands” (Midwest Book Award winner) and “Attention Please Now” (Autumn House Prize winner).
Matt’s works have won several honors, awards, and pats and appear in such publications as:
BOMB
EPOCH
Story
Michigan Quarterly Review
Oxford American
Colorado Review
Cincinnati Review
The Southern Review
Conjunctions
Kathleen Reeves teaches at Austin Community College and Texas State University. She has published articles in:
Arizona Quarterly
Feminist Theory
Bookslut
Full-Stop
Oversound
She is working on a novel. Kathleen received a B.A. in English from Yale University, an M.A. in Humanities from New York University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington.
Mathew Weitman’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in:
The Georgia Review
Copper Nickel
Virginia Quarterly Review
And elsewhere
He is the winner of the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, AWP Kurt Brown Award and Inprint Verlaine Prize in Poetry, and he has received additional support from UCROSS, MacDowell and Millay Arts. Currently, he is a Ph.D. student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, where he is an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow and poetry editor for Gulf Coast.
The conference is held every year in honor of the late Elmer Kelton, who wrote more than 40 books, including “The Time it Never Rained,” “The Man Who Rode Midnight” and “The Good Old Boys.” He was a seven-time winner of the Western Writers of America’s (WWA) Spur Award, and the WWA named him the “all-time best Western author.” Additionally, local and regional writers are invited to showcase their works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and prose. The event is hosted by the Natalie Zan Ryan Department of English and Modern Languages and sponsored by the university with support from the ASU Alumni Association, the College of Arts and Humanities, and Guy and Eva Choate.
Donate
Help support and enhance the Writers Conference in Honor of Elmer Kelton with a tax-deductible gift to its endowment.
For more information, contact the Office of Development at 325-942-2116 or development@angelo.edu.
