ACCUTE is thrilled to announce our confirmed plenary speakers for ACCUTE 2026
Jordan Abel – “Dad Era: Indigenous Knowledge Transmission Through Poetry”
Jordan Abel is a queer Nisga’a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of The Place of Scraps, Un/inhabited, Injun, NISHGA, and Empty Spaces. Abel has won many awards for his work, including the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Award, and his latest book of poetry is titled Dad Era (Coach House Books 2026). Abel is a Professor at the University of Alberta where he teaches Indigenous Literatures, Research-Creation, and Creative Writing.
Michael A. Bucknor – “(De)colonial Hauntings and the Black Sonic Fantastic: Riffing Off Dub Poetry”
Michael A. Bucknor is Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Global Studies and Decolonial Practice at the University of Alberta. Formerly, he was Chair of the Department of Literatures in English, Public Orator at the Mona Campus (University of the West Indies), and Chair of the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS). Awarded the 2018 and 2020 UWI Principal’s Award for Best Research Article, he also received the 2019 Institute of Jamaica’s Gold Musgrave Medal for Eminence in the field of Literature. He currently serves on the editorial boards of several journals and is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of West Indian Literature. He carries out research on the African Diaspora, Austin Clarke, Caribbean-Canadian writing, Black Canadian cultural production, postcolonial literatures and theory, masculinities, sexualities, and popular culture. Widely published, his most recent publication is “‘Leaving Traces’: Decolonial Hauntings and Affective Ecologies,” (Co-authored with Aon Abideen) JWIL (April 2025), and the monograph, Olive Senior, in The Caribbean Biography Series, UWI Press is forthcoming in 2026.
Marcie Frank – “Genre, Situation, Rule: Some Concepts for Literary History?”
Marcie Frank is Professor of English at ConcordIa University. She has published books on gender, theatre, and the development of literary criticism in 17th-century England, Gore Vidal’s career as a public intellectual, and most recently, The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen (Bucknell UP, 2020). Recent essays include “Point of View and Embodiment Revisited” in Eighteenth-century Fiction and “Situation: A Narrative Concept” in Critical Inquiry (Summer 2024), which she co-authored with Kevin Pask and Ned Schantz. The former is part of her current project about narrative point of view in the eighteenth-century novel and the novel of today; the latter emanates from SSHRC-funded team research into the narrative concept of situation. The plenary talk for ACCUTE 2026 builds on the work of the Situation team and takes it into some directions that members may neither recognize nor approve.
