Through citation, we make our intellectual/artistic debts or histories visible. Who do we cite? Who don’t we cite? This panel takes on the socio-political dimensions of the MLA presidential theme of visibility by featuring a practice embedded in literary scholarship but also important for creative writers in forming and performing their artistic lineages. Citing is also sighting. Like scholars (and as scholars), creative writers often draw from a wide variety of archives—academic, popular, and idiosyncratic—not all of which have a deep citational history in the academy. To cite queer theorist Jose Esteban Munoz, many of our affective archives are “ephemeral.” Citation provides a “site” for depositing errant influences and effluvia, and a way of collaborating with previous generations and ancestors. Citation can be a mode of name-dropping and establishing proximity to trendy or important thinkers, but also a mode of making visible the cultural contributions of marginalized voices and communities. Importantly for this panel, citation offers a bridge between critical scholarship and creative writing. Scholars in the field of affect studies such as Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart have used citational practices in collaborative creative writing (The Hundreds, 2019). Eve Sedgwick, Sadiya Hartman, and Christina Sharpe blend creative and critical modes in their scholarly work. With the advent of A.I. technologies (ChatGPT) that automate citational practices, creative writing, and scholarly papers, this panel hopes to rethink citation as an intimate practice with a public dimension. Moreover, by proposing this panel, the MLA Creative Writing Forum hopes to continue breaking down residual critical/creative divides in U.S. academic literary studies with panelists who engage in both creative writing and scholarship, often in the same work. Can we call creative writing a form of scholarship and vice versa? Can we think of the works cited page as a poem or a canticle?

The creative writers on this panel all fashion their archives in diverse and divergent ways, are at different points in their careers, and reside in different regions of North America. Queer BIPOC multimedia poet and Director of Creative Writing at University of California, Santa Cruz, Ronaldo Wilson imagines citation as a shared scene/seen beyond capture drawing on Sadiya Hartman’s scholarship and the songs of Whitney Houston. A former math teacher with a recent Ph.D. from University of Denver’s English and the Literary Arts program, Kelly Krumrie will discuss how her novels and poems interact with scientific and mathematical texts—an archive that many young women are discouraged from exploring. In doing so, Krumrie asks how we cite and access intimidating, technical archives. A Ph.D. candidate researching women’s life writing at University of Toronto, poet Ami Xherro will activate citation from Freud, Derrida, and others theorists, performing generative misreadings that confront and resist ideologies of power. Each speaker will contextualize and perform their work for approximately 15-18 minutes, followed by an open discussion/Q&A led by two members of the MLA Creative Writing Forum, multimedia poet and transnational studies scholar, Vidhu Aggarwal, and poet-scholar Michael Leong. As a moderator, Micheal Leong has particular expertise in this arena with a scholarly book on citational practices in contemporary poetics, Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2020).