Arts-Based Community Development Convening
Transforming Post-Industrial Cities through Art and Innovation
April 12 through 14, 2012 - St. Louis

Mary Stewart Atwell

Springfield, Missouri

Polly Atwell Pic

Mary Stewart (Polly) Atwell is a writer, critic, and author of the novel Wild Girls (Scribner, 2013). Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories and Best New American Voices.  Atwell was born in Roanoke, Virginia in 1978 and went to Interlochen, a boarding school in Michigan. She received her MA in Literature at University of Virginia and an MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis. She teaches at Missouri State University.

Presentation(s):

Re-Thinking The Rural Arts

Day 2 / Apr, 13 @ 10:30 am
Lower Level : Room C

Rural America is undergoing a period of dramatic cultural and demographic change. Its people are poised to take agency over their own narrative, as new media is allowing for the open and decentralized sharing of stories – from next door to across the continent. In concert with this, interest in sustainable and local food systems has leant a visibility, and a cultural and economic force, to a rural landscape often relegated to distorting pastoral clichés.

These dynamic possibilities offer a moving and multi-layered metaphor for the kinds of work to be created in rural America, as artists and community members are working across disciplines to re-think and re-imagine rural America – and to make connections to their partners in urban and international locales.

This panel presents the work of four dynamic artists and community leaders who are offering a new vision for the role of the arts in rural America. By connecting across disciplines and across geographic regions, these practitioners are examples of how serious aesthetic work can also function as an engine for social change and community development.

Polly Atwell: writer, critic, and author of the novel Wild Girls (Scribner, 2013); Matthew Fluharty (moderator): poet, editor, and founder of The Art of the Rural; Brian Frink: artist, professor, and founder of Rural America Contemporary Artists; Rachel Reynolds Luster: musician, folklorist, and founder of HomeCorps; Richard Saxton: artist, professor, and founder of the M12 art collective