Join us at PAMLA 2025 for a very special Friday Spotlight Conversation with distinguished scholar and poet Michael Davidson, who will present Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error on Friday, November 21 (1:30–2:40 pm) in Grand Ballroom A (3rd floor). Davidson will discuss mistakes (errors of hearing, speaking, writing, and understanding) and how physical and intellectual differences challenge our understanding of art and poetry.
Michael Davidson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. His scholarship spans modern and contemporary American poetry, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, and deaf studies. His books on poetics include The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century, Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics, and Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics. His work in disability studies includes Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body, Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic, and Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error. Davidson is also the author of seven poetry collections, most recently Bleed Through: New and Selected Poems and Grace.
Don’t miss this opportunity to join a vital conversation on disability, aesthetics, and error in contemporary poetics at PAMLA 2025!
RSVPs requested but not required to attend this exciting Friday Spotlight; please log into pamla.ballastacademic.com and register via the Registration tab so we can better anticipate attendance numbers.