​56th Annual UND Writers Conference: Makers and Machines

In the twenty-first century, the rapid transformation of technology has opened artistry and craftwork to new generations of writers, artists, sculptors, and creators. In the last few decades, the maker movement has modeled this through fairs and makerspaces, which platform working creators, amateurs and hobbyists. YouTube channels and TikTok feeds allow anyone with a smartphone to watch projects unfold. Basements and boardrooms, kitchen tables and community centers — with access to tech like 3D printers and portable computing and AI, anywhere can be a makerspace.

That’s true for storytellers and poets, craftspeople who have always found ways to blend artforms through setting words to music or images or sculptures — and more! Indeed, the maker spirit has always been an intrinsic part of the literary arts. The Greek word techne gives us the terms technology and technique — a very clear overlap of tools and craftsmanship. The modern maker mindset in the literary arts has a number of precedents, from the printers of broadsheets in the early modern era and to the underground literary movements that ran zines off Xerox machines in the 1970s and ’80s. Always, though, the intention is to make art that takes risks, art that dares to explore and probe this world.

This is what this year’s UND Writers Conference, “Makers & Machines” will explore: how writers and artists make use of old and new technologies alike, with the aim of crafting work that reaches — and speaks for — their communities. The 56th Annual UND Writers Conference, “Makers & Machines,” will run from Wednesday, March 19, through Friday, March 21. Each day of the conference will feature a panel discussion and readings featuring our invited authors and artists. In the spirit of our invited authors and artists, we also want to kindle creativity and practice the maker mindset with others in our community. As such, this year’s Writers Conference will also include community craft sessions, open mics, museum tours and even a printmaking workshop.

Conference events will be held in-person in UND’s Memorial Union. The noon panels and author readings will also be livestreamed via Zoom. You can register for the Zoom livestreams and check out the entire schedule on the Writers Conference website, https://undwritersconference.org. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram (@UNDWritersConference) for more updates.

–Patrick Thomas Henry is the Director of the UND Writers Conference and author of the short story collection “Practice for Becoming a Ghost” (Susquehanna University Press, 2024).

Lisa Ko

Lisa Ko is a critically acclaimed Asian American writer and novelist born in New York City and raised in New Jersey. Known for her exquisite and perceptive writings, Ko started writing at the young age of five and began sharing some of her writing with others while in high school. She then went on to major in English at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

After college, Ko moved to New York City and worked for various print magazines. While she continued to write personally in her online diary, she also took writing classes after work, including courses at the famous Asian American Writer’s Workshop. Ko later moved to San Francisco and was a founding member of Hyphen magazine. She continued her education and attended San Jose State University, receiving her master’s degree in Library and Information Science in 2005. Ko went back to school again in New York and received her MFA from the City College of New York in 2012, working multiple jobs at a time to attend classes at night.

Ko’s published works include, among others, essays, short stories, and two highly respected novels, “The Leavers” and “Memory Piece.” Published in the spring of 2017, her debut novel “The Leavers”was a finalist for the National Book Award. Like much of Ko’s work, this novel speaks from and on marginalized experiences. Bringing light to the trials of being an immigrant in America, “The Leavers” focuses on the story of an undocumented Chinese immigrant who ends up being arrested and detained for a year and a half while traveling to a job she secured — all while her son, who was born in the United States, remains in America. “The Leavers” has won the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, New York City Book Awards Hornblower Award for First Book and has been shortlisted for several other awards. Her latest novel, “Memory Piece,” was a 2024 TIME magazine must-read book and one of NPR’s 2024 best fiction reads of the year.

Read more on her website, lisa-ko.com/.

–Jameson Kay Olson Buckau is an MA candidate in English at the University of North Dakota.

Kristen Radtke

Kristen Radtke is an author and illustrator based out of Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program.

The first of her two nonfiction graphic novels, “Imagine Wanting Only This,” was published in 2017. The graphic memoir paints an image of Radtke’s experiences with grief, love and loss through the exploration of abandoned cities, uncovered memories and generational health. Through her examination of lost histories and identities, Radtke asks her readers to consider what they will leave behind when they join the inevitable beauty in destruction, death and wistful memory.

Radtke’s second nonfiction graphic novel, “Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness,” was published in 2021. In a deep dive into social media, gender, art and violence, Radtke explores the shame behind the American loneliness epidemic, the dangers of isolation and the importance of vulnerability in connection.

Radtke has been the creative director at The Verge since 2023 and served as art director and associate creative director in 2021 and 2022, respectively. Her work at The Verge combines journalism and essay with interactive storytelling through vibrant, evocative art. Her own comics play with hue, shadow and linework to confront the world as she interacts with it. Radtke’s deliberate use of color as a tool paints a unique, intimate relationship between the art, artist and viewer.

Radtke’s writing and graphic art has appeared in several publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Vogue, Vanity Fair, TriQuarterly, and Black Warrior Review. Her work has been nominated for several awards, including a PEN/Jean Stein Award, an Eisner Award, the Kirkus Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Metal. She has won ASME design and American Illustration awards and grants from the Whiting Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts and Robert B. Silvers Foundation.

View her work at kristenradtke.com/, or on her Instagram, @kristenradtke_.

–Caitlin Scheresky is a senior majoring in English at UND, where she is also the managing editor of Floodwall, UND’s student-run literary magazine.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

The work of Lillian-Yvonne Bertram spans the collaborative efforts of human creatives and machines, as well as tackling issues of race and gender. In “Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text,” Bertram co-edits a curation of seven decades of tests generated by computer algorithms showing that such work goes back farther than today’s software systems. In “A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content,” which won the 2023 Diagram/New Michigan chapbook contest, they used and tuned the large language model GPT-3 to generate the text. Winner of the 2020 Poetry Society of America’s Anna Rabinowitz prize for interdisciplinary and venturesome work, “Travesty Generator” takes and mixes computer code, turning it into thought provoking poetry.

Bertram also won the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award for “But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise,” a book of poetry that looks at the intersection of science and person, of place and time. Other publications by Bertram include “Cutthroat Glamours,” “Negative Money,” “Personal Science” and “A slice of the cake made of air.” They also won a 2017 Harvard University Woodberry Poetry Room Creative Grant and a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship.

Bertram earned their Ph.D. from the University of Utah and also holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Currently, they are the Director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland, where they are also an Associate Professor of English.

Read more about Bertram on their website, lillianyvonnebertram.com.

–Robert Moore, Jr. is the lab supervisor for the UND Department of Physics & Astrophysics. He is also pursuing a certificate in writing, editing and publishing.

Eugene Lim

Eugene Lim’s 2021 novel, “Search History,” begins with an epigraph by Fran Lebowitz: “To me, a book is the closest thing there is to a human being.” It is perhaps an odd way to start “Search History,” a novel where the character Frank Exit, who appears to be dead, reappears in a reincarnated form . . . as a dog.

Frank, as reincarnated dog, sparks a series of interlaced stories, including meditations on art, fathers, underemployment, and grief. This digressive strategy of employing multiple pockets of interwoven prose, in another writer’s hands, might feel disorderly and overly discursive.

But where Lim is experimental in structure, his prose is exact, tender and intimate. The feeling of reading a Eugene Lim novel, then, is something resembling being lost in a funhouse but with very accurate mirrors. Lim’s 2017 novel, the equally experimental “Dear Cyborgs,” follows the dissolution of a friendship between two boys who love comics. Between the narrative of these boys, superheroes ponder the vagaries of human existence. Such narrative threads should in no way knot into each other so smoothly and so entertainingly, but with Lim they always beautifully do.

Lim’s debut novel, “Fog and Car,” reissued by Coffee House Press in 2024, follows the aftermath of a divorced couple whose souls are exchanged. It’s a totally impossible premise that, like all of Lim’s writing, somehow makes you want to read more and more. Weird, dreamy, searching, dark, compassionate, revelatory — it may sound odd, but Eugene Lim’s writing is one of the closest things there is to how it feels to be human today.

You can read more about Lim’s work on his website, eugenelim.com.

–Casey Fuller is a PhD candidate in English at UND.

Kenzie Allen

Some histories are housed in our lands, others carried in our voices, bodies, archives and memories across real or imagined spaces, places and landscapes. In her poetic world, Kenzie Allen knits histories, memories and language with images, to translate and give meanings to the unseen, unspoken and the complexities of belonging.

Born in Texas and a first-generation descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, Allen is a cross-disciplinary poet who specializes in creative writing and Indigenous literatures. She is an assistant professor of English at York University, and her research centers on documentary and visual poetics, literary cartography and the enactment of Indigenous sovereignties through creative works.

Allen is the author of “Cloud Missives” (Tin House, 2024), long-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a collection of poems that capture healing and love, while introducing readers to a profound poetic voice. In an interview with The Rumpus, Allen invites readers to reflect more profoundly on the essence of survival. There, Allen asserts that, “there are poems I can’t read aloud without my throat threatening to close up, lines that make my hands shake as I write them…. Some ideas pull us along stumbling, some have us chasing them down.”

Her poems are multimodal and available in Poetry Magazine, The Iowa Review, Narrative Magazine, Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, the “Best New Poets” anthology and other venues. A finalist for the 2022 National Poetry Series, Allen is the recipient of a 92NY Discovery/Joan Leiman Jacobson Poetry Prize, a James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets from Poetry Northwest and the 49th Parallel Award in poetry from Bellingham Review. She has to her name broadside prizes from Littoral Press and Sundress Publications, grants from Ontario Arts Council and fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Aspen Summer Words and Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po). Allen is an active member of multiple associations: High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology, Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) and the Centre for Indigenous Knowledge and Language at York University.

Learn more on Allen’s website: kenzieallen.co.

–Damilola Olobaniyi is a PhD candidate in English at UND.

KT Duffy

In this year’s UND Writers Conference, one artist stands out as a maverick in bringing forth the demise of binary systems. KT Duffy’s artistic journey is a testament to the transformative power of technology and identity in contemporary art. Starting their life out in Chicago’s southwest side, Duffy has evolved into a pioneering new media artist, designer, and curator, currently serving as an assistant professor in Art, Technology, and Culture at the University of Oklahoma.

As a neurodivergent and nonbinary individual, Duffy’s perspective complements their artistic practice, in which conventional modalities of learning and making crumble. This unique viewpoint fosters a future where no entity is confined to a singular “reality” or substance. Duffy’s sculptural, experiential works are borne from polycoded-based processes and digital fabrication. The process beckons one to question what are the entities that expand boundaries between the digital and physical planes. Their work is thematically driven by chaos, catastrophe and creation and is therefore fitting for this year’s “Maker and Machines” theme.

Reflecting on their work, Duffy states, “Nothing living in that collapse will become the outcome, but we must trust that we did the work to make this undoing of everything come to fruition.” Their works serve as a call to accountability, challenging viewers to envision new planes of existence. In a wacky sense of camaraderie, it’s worth mentioning that one of Duffy’s installations has the catchy title of "I want to watch you watch it burn.” Join us at this year’s UND Writers Conference to experience KT Duffy’s innovative fusion of art and technology and bear witness to how they expound their vision of new realities out of the digital ether.

Learn more about Duffy on their website, ktduffyprojects.com/.

–Nicholas Baldwin was born in New York. He is a PhD student in English at UND.