The keynote speaker for the conference will be Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Professor English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, whose research focuses on Asian-American and post-colonial cultural productions and ethnic and feminist writing. Professor Lim will give a midday keynote address.

The conference will be held from 8:00am to 5:00pm. Throughout the day, CSU graduate students will be presenting papers on a wide variety of subjects in the fields of literary and cultural studies. The cost of attendance is $35 and includes continental breakfast, lunch, and a copy of the proceedings.  Extra copies of the proceedings are available for $12 each.

About the Speaker
Shirley Geok-lin Lim was born in Malacca, Malaysia, came over to the United States as a Fulbright and Wien International Scholar in 1969, and completed her Ph.D. in British and American Literature at Brandeis University in 1973. 

in Academe; and three special issues of journals, Ariel (2001) on microstates, Tulsa Studies, on transnational feminism, and Studies in the Literary Imagination, on contemporary Asian American literature. Her work has appeared in journals such as New Literary History, Feminist Studies, Signs, MELUS, ARIEL, New Literatures Review, World Englishes, and American Studies International. She edited/co-edited Asian American Literature; Tilting the Continent: An Anthology of South-east Asian American Writing; and The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology which received the 1990 American Book Award.

Among her honors, Lim has received the UCSB Faculty Research Lecture Award (2002) and the Chair Professorship of English at the University of Hong Kong (1999 to 2001), as well as the University of Western Australia Distinguished Lecturer award, Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer award, and the J. T. Stewart Hedgebrook award. She has served as chair of Women’s Studies and is currently professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Lim is also recognized as a creative writer. Her first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula (1980), received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has also published four volumes of poetry: No Man's Grove (1985); Modern Secrets (1989); Monsoon History (1994), which is a retrospective selection of her work; and What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say (1998). Bill Moyers featured Lim for a PBS special on American poetry, "Fooling with Words" in 1999, and again on the program "Now" in February 2002. She is also the author of three books of short stories and a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces (1996), which received the 1997 American Book Award for non-fiction. Her first novel, Joss and Gold (Feminist Press, 2001), has been welcomed by Rey Chow as an "elegantly crafted tale [that] places Lim among the most imaginative and dexterous storytellers writing in the English language today." Her second novel, Sister Swing, appeared in March 2006, and her children’s novel. Princess Shawl, will be out in March 2008.

For more information, call the Cal State L.A. English Department at (323) 343-4140.