The keynote speaker for the 1st annual English conference for UPRM graduate and undergraduate students of English, Dr. Maisha Tulivu Fisher, will afford conference participants the opportunity to engage with a contemporary, published scholar in the field of language and literacy studies in English. Dr. Fisher is a faculty member at Emory University, was recently a recipient of the American Educational Research Association’s Teaching and Teaching Education Division’s 2008 Early Career Research Award, and has published a number of articles on spoken word poetry and its promising possibilities for classroom teaching. These include, most recently, Black Literate Lives: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (2008), published by Routledge, “Catching Butterflies” (2008) in the journal English Education, and “Every City has Soldiers’: The Role of Intergenerational Relationships in Participatory Literacy Communities” (2007) in the journal Research in the Teaching of English. Please feel free to link to and review any of these articles, including the February 2008 Emory Report article “Harnessing the Power of Poetry”, by Elizabeth Elkins, on Dr. Fisher and Joe Ubiles’ work with the Power Writers, aka The Rebel Poets. Order forms for purchasing Dr. Fisher’s Black Literate Lives at a discounted price from Routledge will be available in the English Department office for those who may be interested in incorporating it as a course text or in recommending it to their students.