UND Today

University of North Dakota’s Official News Source

UND Writers Conference explores ‘The Working Classes’

At this year’s virtual Writers Conference, guest authors and artists comment on the many dimensions of the working class

On Oct. 15, as part of the UND Writers Conference, authors (clockwise from top left) Roy G. Guzmán, Laila Lalami and Dwayne Betts participated in a “Class and Place” panel, moderated by Paul Worley, an associate professor at Western Carolina University.  Zoom screenshot.

What or who is the working class in the U.S.?

As with many other facets of society, there are the typical stereotypes or preconceptions: rural families farming the dusty earth; urban workers crammed in factories; kids growing up in trailer parks.

Crystal Alberts, associate professor of English at the University of North Dakota, hails from a working-class family. “My family is probably what many people think of when they think of the working class: White, rural, working hard just to get by,” she said. “But, here’s the thing: just short of half of the working class isn’t White, depending on which study you look at, and that will tip to be ‘majority-minority’ very soon.”

This fact is the focal point of the 51st edition of the UND Writers Conference, which is taking place virtually this fall semester under the banner of “The Working Classes.”

Alberts organizes the Writers Conference, picking the themes of each annual conference months – years even – in advance. In this case, she settled on the topic in 2018, when she read about Blackwell’s Island, a thin stretch of land in the middle of the East River, which separates Manhattan from Brooklyn. In the mid-19th century, the island housed many of New York’s poor residents.

The interpretation of poverty as “the only crime that society cannot forgive,” Alberts said, citing journalist Junius Henri Browne, courses through modern times with policies such as President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” and the development of opportunity zones. Always a part of the country’s civil discourse, the experiences of poverty – and the working class that lives them – also galvanize scores of artists, from painters to writers.

“The 51st Annual UND Writers Conference features authors and artists whose work comments on or depicts the wide range of people who make up ‘The Working Classes,’ whether from Appalachia, the middle of the country or beyond,” Alberts said. “By inviting authors from diverse backgrounds, the UND Writers Conference hopes to facilitate conversations about socio-economic status and its intersections with race, national origin, ethnicity, sexuality, geography, and politics that are sometimes silenced or ignored by the grand national narrative of ‘the working class.’”

This year’s conference was originally scheduled for late March, when the coronavirus pandemic broke out and shuttered in-person classes and events on campus and across the nation. Alberts adjusted the format, shifting the event to a semester-long occasion with panels, readings and discussions taking place via Zoom.

The lineup of authors includes:

  • Roy G. Guzmán, a Honduran-American poet living in Minneapolis.
  • Matt Young, a writer, teacher and veteran, whose first book “Eat the Apple” received wide-spread acclaim
  • Laila Lalami, a well-known Moroccan-American author
  • Jenny Zhang, a short-story author, whose first collection, “Sour Heart,” won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
  • Dwayne Betts, an attorney and an essayist, whose piece “Getting Out” in The New York Times Magazine earned a National Magazine Award
  • Richard Tsong-Taatarii, documentary photographer on staff at the Minneapolis Star Tribune

The class and space of artists

On Oct. 15, Lalami, Betts and Guzmán participated in a panel titled “Class and Place” and moderated by Paul Worley, an associate professor of global literature at Western Carolina University. On Zoom, the three authors discussed the role of artists in today’s world, characterized by a global pandemic and racial tensions in the U.S.

“This is a time when artists go to work,” Lalami said.

While she commented that artists in the U.S. often inhabit a separate class, one that steers away from politics, Guzmán said that in Honduras, “the artist is a healer and, because language is in the heart of policy making, they are still influencing the aura of the policy making.”

In politics, especially when it pertains to hot-button topics, language often assumes the form of slogans. Just recently, calls to “Defund the Police” and reminders that “Black Lives Matter” have seized the nation’s attention and spurred civil action. But artists do not express themselves in slogans, said Betts.

“Wait a minute, politics in the English language,” he said. “Are we being really accurate in what we’re saying? And really, when we say ‘Defund the Police,’ we mean 17 different things.

“Most of the things that become slogans get discussed in a way that no artists will talk about. That’s why I want artists to provide answers, because they never will provide slogans as answers.”

Yet, in order to offer those answers, artists often need to transition into cultures and dimensions that are foreign to them as individuals. Navigating those transformations unlocks the multifaceted “class and space” of artists.

“With really complicated things, [the ability to fully explain them] to people takes account of expertise that maybe as an artist I don’t have,” said Betts. “But if we were working in concert with others, we could have it. But, I do just want to say the burden is on us. And, it’s on students. It’s on young writers to say, ‘How do I get involved in spaces other than the one in which I live in.’”

The Writers Conference continues with following events:

  • 29 (tonight) at 7pm: Presentation by Richard Tsong-Taatarii
  • 5 at 7pm: Reading by Roy G. Guzmán
  • 19 at 7pm: Reading by Matt Young

Register for the virtual events at the Conference’s Zoom page.

Moreover, the Writers Conference is co-sponsoring a special lecture series with Humanities North Dakota. As part of the series, on Nov. 12, author Sarah Smarsh, who participated in the Writers Conference in 2019, will talk about her new book on Dolly Parton, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs.