Plenary Panel

Sandra Pinasco E. Head of Research Development at Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya - Lima, Peru. MB in Psychoanalytic Theory, currently studying her PhD in Modern Languages: Research in Linguistics, Literature, Culture and Translation in Universidad de Alcalá, Spain. Her area of research is relational lives and the conformation of the self, and she is currently working with grief memoirs and the possibility of achieving meaning through personal writing for her PhD research. Some published works are “Ambiguous Loss in Grief Memoirs: Meaning Making in Auster and Giralt Torrente Patriographies” and “Lo que no tiene nombre: an approach to grief memoirs”.

Craig Howes has directed the Center for Biographical Research since 1997, co-edited Biography: An International Quarterly since 1994, and taught English at the University of Hawaiʻi since 1980. One of the founders of IABA in 1999, he has managed its listserv, now with over 1,900 subscribers, for twenty-five years.

Julie Rak (FRSC--Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada) holds the Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her latest book is False Summit: Gender in Mountaineering Nonfiction (2021). She has written extensively on nonfiction, including Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (2013) and Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse (2004). With Sonia Boon, Candida Rifkind, and Laurie McNeill she wrote The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada (2022). She holds a SSHRC IDG grant on contemporary journaling as a postdigital practice.

Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle is a Professor of English at The College of New Jersey and Editor of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.