On March 31, 2023, three undergraduate students presented at the National Undergraduate Literature Conference held annually at Weber State University. Kyler Tolman, Jay Paine, and Sariah Gibby formed a panel entitled “Speculative Nonfiction: When What Didn’t Happen is More True Than What Did.” These three students were in Professor Jennifer Sinor’s Fall 2022 advanced creative nonfiction course that focused on writing speculative nonfiction. Their presentations included readings from their essays as well as an exploration of how the speculative creates a portal that affords a nonfiction writer a new way of seeing. Two of the three essays won first and second place in USU’s Creative Writing Contest this spring, and all three students placed in that contest as well. One of the audience members, Syrena Finnell, said they chose to come to the panel because the title drew them in. At the end, Syrena said the conversation “made me curious about getting more into speculative nonfiction.”

The conference also included a reading by Nobel Laureate Louis Gluck and the USU students had the opportunity to meet the poet and have their books signed by her.