Our 2025 PAMLA Conference was held at the InterContinental San Francisco from Thursday, November 20 through Sunday, November 23, 2025!
The 122nd Annual PAMLA Conference brought together scholars, writers, artists, students, and members of the wider literary and cultural community for four days of scholarship, creative work, conversation, and community in San Francisco. The conference theme, “Memory and Oblivion,” provided a point of connection across dozens of sessions and special events exploring literature, culture, history, memory, forgetting, and the ways in which the past continues to shape the present.
The conference featured a very special keynote address by acclaimed novelist and poet Maxine Hong Kingston, who presented “Memory and/or Oblivion,” reflecting on the power of literature to preserve what has been erased and to give form to memory and spiritual experience.
Our special programming also included Thursday Spotlights with historian and cultural critic Dennis McNally, who discussed the transformation of the Bohemian and Beat movements into the counterculture of the 1960s, and acclaimed poet, novelist, painter, and professor Clarence Major, who presented a reading from his 2025 collection Four Days in Algeria followed by a creative conversation.
The PAMLA Forum: Contemporary Literary Palimpsests brought the conference theme into conversation with contemporary literature and culture, featuring presentations by Iliana Cuellar, Michael P. Moreno, and Thomas Leitch on memory, rewriting, intertextuality, cultural history, and collective forgetting. The conference’s plenary address, “Arts of the Border: Memory, Metamorphosis, and Migration,” was delivered by Debarati Sanyal of UC Berkeley and explored visual representations of migration, borders, and the histories embedded within contemporary cultural life.
PAMLA 2025 also featured an especially rich program of poetry and creative writing. Michael Davidson presented Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error, exploring the relationship between mistakes, physical and intellectual difference, disability, and contemporary poetics. A lively Haiku Party brought together Maxine Hong Kingston, Marilyn Chin, and Chun Yu for readings, call-and-response haiku, and conversation with the audience.
The conference also celebrated the poetry of the Bay Area and beyond with special readings featuring poets including Rae Armantrout, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Laura Moriarty, C. S. Giscombe, Jean Day, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Juliana Spahr, Alan Bernheimer, Maxine Chernoff, and Maw Shein Win. These events complemented a broad program of creative writing workshops, poetry and prose sessions, memoir and creative nonfiction, and other literary programming throughout the conference.
We are grateful to all of our speakers, presenters, presiding officers, chairs, volunteers, attendees, and university and community partners who helped make PAMLA 2025 a memorable gathering in San Francisco. The conference brought together an extraordinary range of scholarship and creative work while continuing PAMLA’s tradition of fostering a welcoming and stimulating community for the humanities and arts.