Featured Speakers

Keith Montesano is the author of the poetry collection Ghost Lights (Dream Horse Press, 2010). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Literary Review, Third Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Blackbird, Mid- American Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. He currently lives with his wife in New York, where he is a PhD Candidate in English and creative writing at Binghamton University.

Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (forthcoming from W.W. Norton), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Award. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Slate, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review Online, FIELD, Indiana Review and Southern Review. Currently, she teaches creative writing at Western Michigan University where she is a doctoral candidate and a King/Chávez/Parks Fellow. She also serves as Poetry Editor for Third Coast and Editor at Large for Loaded Bicycle.

Kent M. Weeks has served as a college administrator and taught undergraduate and graduate students at George Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, while maintaining an active law practice in Nashville, Tennessee. A Fulbright Scholar, Weeks earned a law degree from Duke University and a Ph.D. in political science from Case Western Reserve University. As legal advisor to colleges throughout the US, he focuses on legal and policy issues affecting higher education. He has written several books, published over 60 articles and papers, and currently edits Lex Collegii, a legal newsletter for colleges and universities. His writings focus on academic and student issues such as student civility, ethical behavior of faculty, plagiarism, privacy, alcohol, drug use, hook-up culture, suicide and parental rights. His book, In Search of Civility, has gained a significant audience among college faculty, administrators, and staff.

Remziya Suleyman is a native of Kurdistan who came with her family to the US in 1991 during the first Gulf War. Known for her political activism on immigration issues, interfaith organizing, and her work in the Kurdish community to raise awareness on the Kurdish genocide, she has spoken to diverse audiences on Kurdistan and its people, her own experience as a refugee and a Muslim woman, and on life in her community after September 11. Ms. Suleyman is the Policy Coordinator for the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, and currently serves as the Director of Policy & Administration for the American Center for Outreach, a Tennessee-based non-partisan organization that was established to inform, educate and empower Muslims to become engaged in society by providing the assistance they need to become productive citizens.

Fred Evans is Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator for the Center of Interpretive and Qualitative Research at Duquesne University. He is the author of several books, and has published numerous articles and book chapters on continental thinkers in relation to issues concerning psychology, politics, and technology. He is currently working on a new book, provisionally entitled Citizenship and Public Art: An Essay in Political Esthetics, focusing on Chicago’s Millennium Park and New York’s 9/11/01 memorial, and another book on cosmopolitanism. He also worked for five years at the Lao National Orthopedic Center and other positions in Laos, under the auspices of International Voluntary Services, and taught philosophy for a year at La Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia.

Stephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Professor of Law at Yale and the author of seven acclaimed books of nonfiction, including this year’s First Year Seminar common book, Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy. He has also published five novels, dozens of articles in law reviews, and many op-ed columns in the nation’s leading newspapers, and appears frequently on radio and television.

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