For the first time in history, the annual Oklahoma Council of Teachers of English (OKCTE) fall conference will be held at Northwestern Oklahoma State University in Alva on Friday, Oct. 27, from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Student Center Ballroom. Other rooms in the Student Center will be used for breakout sessions.
There are about 80 registered attendees.
The conference will provide presentations, roundtables, and pedagogical workshops, the majority of which center on literacy and English Language Arts pedagogy and practice.
It will offer area teachers and Northwestern faculty members an opportunity to present their research, attend professional development workshops, and network with other teachers and professors from around the state.
The conference’s keynote speaker is Zhenya Yevtushenko, an Oklahoma poet and son of the celebrated Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
At 7 years old, Yevtushenko first performed poetry to a crowd of hundreds at the Polytechnical Museum in Moscow with his father. As an adult, he has pivoted to a literary life. He is a published writer, and translator (Russian/English), with a modest background working in education.
He began translating his father’s work in the mid-2000s. The young Yevtushenko’s first published translation was featured in “The Guardian,” a poem that reacts to the aftermath of the London Subway Bombings. He would continue to perform with his father widely in Russia at St. Petersburg’s Philharmonic Hall, in the United States at the Library of Congress, and in public school classrooms in Tulsa.
He continued to perform with his father and served as one of his English language translators until the poet’s death in 2017. Since then, he has been instrumental in managing his father’s literary estate while sharpening his voice and skills as a writer, translator, performer and organizer. As an organizer, he is co-founder and representative of “Sunday Collective,” a multi-disciplinary group of performers that promotes arts and outreach in Tulsa. He sits on the Living Arts Poetry Committee and is currently curating an event for March 2024. His creative work has been recently published in “The Tulsa Review,” “eMerge Magazine,” “Right Hand Pointing” and “Suburban Witchcraft Magazine.”
OKCTE is an affiliate of the National Council for Teachers of English.
For more information on the conference, contact Lindsey Cherry, program coordinator for English education and instructor of English at Northwestern who is serving as the president of OKCTE, at lmcherry@nwosu.edu or (580) 327-8472.
To learn more about Northwestern’s English program, visit https://www.nwosu.edu/school-of-arts-and-sciences/english-foreign-language-and-humanities/english or contact Dr. Roxie James, chair of the English, Foreign Language and Humanities department, at (580) 327-8474 or rjjames@nwosu.edu.
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