Michelle Kells: Keynote Speaker at 4th Annual Albuquerque Cultural Conference

The fourth annual Albuquerque Cultural Conference: “Cultural Survival in Difficult Times” meets August 26-28, 2011 in Albuquerque.

A poetry reading, “To Have or Have Not” opens the conference at the Outpost Performance Space, 210 Yale Blvd SE, Friday night, August 26, from 7-10 pm. Readers include local poets Hakim Bellamy, Carlos Contreras, Lisa Gill, Jessica Helen Lopez, Mary Oishi, Margaret Randall, and Jason Yurcic, joined by award-winning national poets Cherrie Moraga, Sasha Pimentel Chacon, and others.

Weekend panels Saturday and Sunday, August 27 and 28, from 9am-5:30pm at the Harwood Art Center, 1114 7th St NW, will provide a forum where panelists including local and national community activists and organizers, artists, scholars, and past and present UNM students and faculty, will discuss education, the arts, and historical and social trauma with an actively participating audience. Performance and its influence on community and activism is a major focus of the conference.

Michelle Hall Kells will deliver the keynote dinner address, “What’s Writing Got to Do with It? Citizen Wisdom, Civil Rights Activism, and 21st Century Civic Literacy,” on Saturday, August 27 at 5:30. Dr. Kells is Associate Professor in the Rhetoric and Writing program at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in civil rights rhetoric, sociolinguistics, and composition/literacy studies. She is the author of Hector P. Garcia: Everyday Rhetoric and Mexican American Civil Rights and co-editor of Attending to the Margins: Writing, Researching, and Teaching on the Front Lines with Valerie Balester and Latino/a Discourses: On Language, Identity, and Literacy with Valerie Balester and Victor Villanueva. Dr. Kells is the founder of the UNM Writing Across Communities initiative. She is widely known for her work as an activist and advocate for civil rights.