2011 Keynote Speaker

Margaret Whitt

Margaret Whitt taught in the Department of English at the University of Denver from 1981-2008. Most of all, she liked teaching the literature of the American South.  Today she lives there, in a Smoky Mountain gorge in a hamlet outside Asheville, North Carolina.

While at DU, Whitt also directed the First-Year English program for 17 years, among the longest runs in that position in the country. In this position, she worked with more than 200 graduate teaching instructors, helped shaped the curriculum, visited writing classes, organized public readings of student works, devised a research casebook design used across the state, and organized and chaired more than a dozen conferences for writing faculty at Colorado colleges and universities. She is the 2000 recipient of the Colorado Community College Conference on Composition Award for Teaching Excellence in recognition of exemplary teaching of writing, research in writing, and dedication to Colorado's writing students. She is the recipient of the 1990 Driscoll Master Teacher Award, the 1993 Distinguished Teaching Award, and co-recipient of the 2007 United Methodist Scholar Teacher Award. She received the Pioneer Award in 2007 and emceed the Undergraduate Awards Reception for at least a decade.

Whitt was the faculty speaker at every Pioneer Passage ceremony from its start until her departure from DU. She has published books on Flannery O'Connor and Gloria Naylor; edited a civil rights short story anthology; co-authored a composition textbook, The Civil Mind; and written dozens of articles, book chapters, book reviews, and encyclopedia entries. She retired from the University of Denver in the spring of 2009 and now resides in Gerton, North Carolina, where she is a community organizer, writing grants and providing a leadership role in the renovation of the community's historic club house. She continues to tour factories throughout the South-most recently a 900,000-square-foot grocery warehouse that services 202 stores in several southern states.

Current Keynote Speaker | Previous Keynote Speaker

Many thanks to current and past Keynote Speakers for making our conferences memorable experiences.

Previous Keynote Speakers

Robin Morgan

An award-winning poet, novelist, political theorist, feminist activist, journalist, editor, and best-selling author, Robin Morgan has published more than 20 books, including the now-classic anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful (Random House, 1970) and Sisterhood Is Global (Doubleday, l984; updated edition, The Feminist Press, 1996); with the recent Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for A New Millennium (Washington Square Press, Simon & Schuster, 2003). A founder/leader of contemporary US feminism, she has also been a leader in the international women’s movement for 30 years.

An invited speaker at every major university in North America, she has traveled--as organizer, lecturer, journalist--across Europe, to Australia, Brazil, the Caribbean, Central America, China, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Nepal, New Zealand, Pacific Island nations, the Philippines, and South Africa; she has twice (1986 and 1989) spent months in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, West Bank, and Gaza, reporting on the conditions of women.

Her books include the novels Dry Your Smile (Doubleday, l987) and The Mer-Child: A Legend for Children and Other Adults (Feminist Press, 1991); nonfiction Going Too Far (Random House, 1977), The Word of A Woman (Norton, 1992, 2nd ed. 1994), and The Anatomy of Freedom (Norton, 1994). Her work has been translated into 13 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, and Sanskrit. Recent books include Upstairs in the Garden: Selected and New Poems (1994) and A Hot January: Poems 1996-1999 (both Norton), Saturday’s Child: A Memoir (Norton, 2000), and The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism (Norton, 1989—2nd ed. with new Introduction and Afterword, by Washington Square Press, 2001). Her novel on the Inquisition—The Burning Time(Melville House Books, 2006), has been optioned by Ashley Judd for a major motion picture; the UK/Commonwealth edition (Onlywomen's Press) was published in 2008. Her Fighting Words: A Tool Kit for Combating the Religious Right came out in 2006 (Nation Books).

Founder and President of The Sisterhood Is Global Institute, recently co-founder of GlobalSister.org, and co-founder of The Women's Media Center, she serves on the boards of many women’s organizations in the US and abroad. In 1990, as Ms. Editor-in-Chief, she relaunched the magazine as an international, award-winning, ad-free bimonthly, resigning in 1994 to become Consulting Global Editor. A recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Prize (Poetry) and numerous other honors, she lives in New York City.

2009 DU Women's Conference: Opalanga D. Pugh Storyteller
A full time professional storyteller, facilitator and keynote speaker since 1986, this Denver native has traveled from the Rocky Mountain West, sharing and collecting stories, hosting ceremonies, and facilitating workshops in the US, Canada, Europe, West Africa, and the Caribbean.

Opalanga’s formal education includes a B.Sc in Communications from the University of Wisconsin.
She completed her senior year as an exchange student at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, West Africa. Her more extensive informal education
includes studies with traditional Griots in the Gambia, and workshops with Baba Chuck Davis, African
Dance Choreographer, African Shaman Malidoma
and Sobonfu Some; futurist Jean Houston, and motivational speaker Les Brown. She has worked the communication spectrum including public relations, group facilitation, mental health, and outdoor education. Opalanga’s accumulated experiences working in mental health, education, and corporate arenas serve to create culturally rich and educationally sound programs.