MISCELLANY – APRIL 15, 2024

The Department of English congratulates undergrad Abby Myers, winner of the First-Gen Essay Contest Scholarship in the First-Year/Sophomore category! The department’s annual First-Gen celebration took place on Thursday, April 11, 2024. 

Katie Kapurch was interviewed about the history of “Blackbird” covers by Nardos Haile for “What Beyoncé’s Cover of the Beatles’ ‘Blackbird’ Means to Black History and Music: https://www.salon.com/2024/04/08/what-beyoncs-cover-of-the-beatles-blackbird-means-to-black-history-and-music/.

Kate McClancy presented her paper “‘A Chain Reaction That Would Destroy the Entire World’: Blowing Up Patriarchal Capitalism in Barbie and Oppenheimer” at the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in Boston. She also organized and chaired the Comics Arts Conference’s spring meeting at WonderCon in Anaheim.

 Diamond Braxton, MFA Fiction student, was one of the less than 10% accepted into the Tin House Summer Workshop to study under Denne Michele Norris to work on her collection of short stories (https://tinhouse.com/workshop/summer-workshop-2/). In addition, her newest fiction piece “Dreams of the Fam Who Came Before Me” is forthcoming in Foglifter’s 9.1 Spring Issue. (https://foglifterjournal.com/shop/).

 In honor of the cultural critic Fredric Jameson’s 90th birthday this month, Robert Tally has organized a series of brief essays for the Verso Books blog site. These will feature 25 different critics, each writing on one of Jameson’s books published over the course of his 65-year career. The first, Daniel Hartley’s article on Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961), appeared on April 2, 2024 – available here: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/jameson-at-90 — and entries will be posted every few days over the next month or so. Jameson’s newest book, Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization, will be published in early May.

 Rob also presented a talk, “The Orphaned Bolg: Examining the Orkish Mind,” at The Psychologies of Middle-earth, the 20th Annual University of Vermont Tolkien Conference, on April 13, 2024.

MFA alumna Sabah Carrim’s review of For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Era of Capitalist Realism by Robert T. Tally Jr. appears in the Modern Language Review, Vol. 119, Part 2 (April 2024).

 Texas State MFA alumnus Nkiacha Atemnkeng has been admitted into three PhD programs: the PhD in Rhetorics, Communication and Information Design at Clemson University, the Writing and Rhetoric PhD program at George Mason University and the PhD in Rhetoric, Writing and Professional Communication at East Carolina University. He is equally an alternate candidate at the PhD in Rhetoric, Scientific and Technical Communication at the University of Minnesota. In addition, Nkiacha’s historical fiction, a short story titled “Killing Achebe” will be the the anchor story for the forthcoming Bakwa 12: History fiction anthology published by Bakwa Books. Also, Nkiacha’s essay “Usain Bolting to Sylt Island” appears in The Lagos Review as part of the Migration and the Writer essay series: https://thelagosreview.ng/usain-bolting-to-sylt-island-nkiacha-atemnkeng/.

 MFA student Naomi Wilson’s poem, “As Mardou,” has been accepted for publication in Black Fire This Time, Volume 2, by Willow Books, a division of Aquarius Press. The book is set for launch in late April, courtesy of University Press of Mississippi.

 Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Robert Tally at robert.tally@txstate.edu. You can also submit to the Miscellany Form here: https://www.english.txst.edu/news/Miscellany-Submission.html  

Miscellany – April 1, 2024

Cyrus Cassells’s ninth book of poems, Is There Room for Another Horse On Your Horse Ranch?, was published on March 15, 2024: https://fourwaybooks.com/site/is-there-room-for-another-horse-on-your-horse-ranch/. Additionally, Cyrus has won the Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translation of a Book published in 2022 and 2023 from the Texas Institute of Letters. Cyrus won for his translation of To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2023). This is Cyrus’s second Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for translation in four years. Finally, Cyrus’s new website, designed by MFA alum Aaron Hand, is now live: https://cyruscassells.com/.

More good news: Cyrus serves as the April 2024 Guest Editor for the Academy of American Poets’ international Poem-a-Day: https://poets.org/poem-day-guest-editors-2024. In that capacity, he has chosen 22 new poems by some of America’s most revered poets to celebrate National Poetry Month. Starting April 1, the site will feature a recorded interview with Cyrus and director Mary Sutton about his process in selecting the poems. Also, a special issue of the University of Gottingen’s New American Studies Journal focusing on brand-new work by contemporary African American poets, curated and introduced by Cyrus, will be published this Spring, taught as a university class, and then be expanded to become a published anthology from University of Gottingen Press.

MFA Poetry candidate Sara Bawany is a recipient of a Summer 2024 Residency Fellowship from The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA): http://www.sundresspublications.com/news/2024/03/sundress-academy-for-the-arts-announces-winners-of-summer-2024-residency-fellowships/.

MFA alumna and genocide studies scholar Dr. Sabah Carrim has organized the Genocide Awareness Symposium at Texas State, which takes place in the Department of Philosophy, Comal Hall, April 1–12, 2024. Marking the 30th anniversary of the genocide against the Tutsi, this event will see some of the most distinguished professors in Genocide Studies and Prevention from across the US and Canada addressing a range of pertinent issues. More information, including the complete schedule, is available here: https://www.txst.edu/philosophy/dialogue-series/genocide-awareness-symposium.html.

Also, Sabah’s short story “Fading Mehndi” has just been shortlisted in the Afritondo Short Story Prize 2024: https://www.afritondo.com/shortlist-2024.

On March 27, Leah Schwebel presented a talk, “Palm Sunday, Roman Triumphs: A Crossover,” at the New Directions in Medieval Literary Studies conference, sponsored by the Institute for Arts and Humanities and the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

On March 29, Robert Tally presented remotely an invited talk, “Spatial Criticism, Worldly and Otherworldly,” at the İzmir Democracy University in Turkey. The session was moderated by Dr. Selin Şencan, a former visiting scholar in our department.

Cathlin Noonan’s poem, “Do You Have to Pee Before We Go?” came out in the Spring issue of West Trade Review. Her poem “In Which I Imagine Myself as my Great Aunt Helen” is forthcoming in Lumina. 

The Department of English was represented at the 45th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando, Florida, by Graeme Wend-Walker (“New Audiences for Old Ghosts: Tradition and Terror in Horror Stories for Young Thais,” and Andrew Barton (“‘I’m a messed up person’: Painting, Whimsy, and Depression in Chicory: A Colorful Tale”). On a writers panel, Graeme also read his short story, “The Narrator.”

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Robert Tally at robert.tally@txstate.edu. You can also submit to the Miscellany Form here: https://www.english.txst.edu/news/Miscellany-Submission.html 

Miscellany – March 17, 2024

Robert Tally’s brief article “Sauron: Weirdly Sexy” appears in the Journal of Tolkien Researchhttps://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol18/iss2/1/. Also, Rob’s essay “Point-of-View as Cognitive Mapping: The Case of Mrs. Dalloway” has just been published in the American Book Review (available here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/article/921790); the same ABR issue features Rob’s review of Bruce Robbins’s Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/article/921801).

Bryce Jeter’s review of Joe Vallese, ed., It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror was recently published in Science Fiction Film and Television, Volume 17.1 (Spring 2024): 145–148. (Available here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/105/article/922166.)

Elliott Brandsma (English and Art ’13), who is working toward his PhD in Scandinavian Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has received an American Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship to fund his dissertation research in Sweden during the 2024-25 academic year. The fellowship will support his tenure as a visiting researcher in the Department of Literature and the Center for Multidisciplinary Research on Religion and Society (CRS) at Uppsala University. He is currently a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow and guest researcher in the Department of Aesthetics, Art History and Comparative Literature at Södertörns högskola in Huddinge, Sweden. 

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Robert Tally at robert.tally@txstate.edu. You can also submit to the Miscellany Form here: https://www.english.txst.edu/news/Miscellany-Submission.html  

MISCELLANY – MARCH 1, 2024

On February 29, 2024, The University Star featured an article on Denae Dyck and her new book, Biblical Wisdom and the Victorian Literary Imagination. (James Reeves is quoted in the article as well.) Available here:  https://universitystar.com/25305/life-and-arts/associate-professor-to-bridge-literary-and-religious-gap-with-book/.

Associate Professor Cecily Parks’s poem “Hackberry” is featured in You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, a new anthology of previously unpublished poems releasing on April 2, edited by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón and published by Milkweed Editions in association with the Library of Congress.

Ben Reed’s personal essay, “Vicarious Incantation: The Mixtape Love Letter,” will be published in a forthcoming issue of Cream City Review. Additionally, Ben has been awarded the Nontenure Line Faculty Workload Release to develop his essay collection on the beach as a place and site of metaphor in literature, music, and film. He will take this time in Fall 2024.

On February 27, drea brown, along with other faculty from Texas State and from San Marcos High School, was a featured speaker at The Importance of Black Storytelling: Texas State’s African American Read-In in the LBJ Ballroom.

Anthony Edsall will present a talk, “Silvered Rhetoric: Demagoguery, Temporality, and Necropolitics in an Age of School Shootings,” at the Northeast Modern Language Association’s convention in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 9, 2024.

Steph Grossman’s short story “Red on Yellow” was published in Salamander #57: available at https://salamandermag.org/

The Center for the Study of the Southwest has granted MA Literature student Ali Armstrong the opportunity to visit Granbury, Texas, in March, the site of the Mitchell-Truitt Feud, to explore further research associated with her essay “The Eyes of History: Folklore, Oral Storytelling, and Regeneration Through Violence in John Graves’s Goodbye to a River: A Narrative.” Ali plans to conduct local interviews and add to her existing research on the feud done through The Wittliff Collections. She will present her findings at the Texas State Graduate Student Research Conference on Tuesday, April 2. Additionally, Ali’s “The Golden Values: Gendered Strength, Biblical, and Numerical Symbolism in Rossetti and Milton” has been accepted for the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA)’s conference, which will take place in Waco, Texas, in September 2024.

In February, Joshua Bridgwater Hamilton attended AWP and sat for a signing session for his chapbook, Rain Minnows, with the publisher Gnashing Teeth Publishing. At the People’s Literary Festival, he read his own poetry at a panel, “Ethereal Poetry of Sadness, Longing, Beauty, and the Damned.” He also chaired a People’s Literary Festival panel titled “Central Texas Bilingual Poetry: Versos del corazon de Tejas,” featuring Texas State MFA poets Abra GistJoe Lozano, and Bianca PérezJoshua’s debut full-length poetry collection, Excavator, launches April 28 with Gnashing Teeth Publishing. 

Jay Cruz presented a talk, “Critical Pedagogy as Resistance in Grimms’ Fairy Tales” at the 2024 Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference in Albuquerque, NM.

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Robert Tally at robert.tally@txstate.edu. You can also submit to the Miscellany Form here: https://www.english.txst.edu/news/Miscellany-Submission.html  

MISCELLANY – FEBRUARY 1, 2024

MATC alumna Meghalee Das, who is completing her PhD in Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech University, will become an Assistant Professor in the School of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication at James Madison University beginning Fall Semester 2024.

MFA Fiction student Charmaine Denison-George’s essay, “Impedimenta” was anthologized in Black Diaspora: Tales and Poems from the Sons and Daughters of Africa, edited by Monique Franz (Kinsman Avenue Publishing, 2024). Charmaine’s working-in-progress thesis has also been accepted for workshop with Madeleine Blais at the Eckerd College Writers in Paradise conference (January 2024).

Cathlin Noonan’s poem “That Winter, I Find Your Father’s Arrest Notice in a 1940 Newspaper” was recently published in The Citron Reviewhttps://citronreview.com/2023/12/29/that-winter-i-find-your-fathers-arrest-notice-in-a-1940-newspaper/.

Ben Austin’s short story “Il Faut Ecouter Mac Doe,” has been published in J Journal and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

MFA Poetry candidate Em Fullenwider’s poem “Ode to a Fishman” will be published in the Winter 2024 issue of Reverie Literary Magazine.

Rob Tally’s work was recently featured in a Chinese publication, Jianqing Tuo and Yuan Zhang’s “Existential Predicament and Breakthrough of Literary Space Theory: A Study on Robert T. Tally Jr.’s Theory of Literary Cartography” in Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 43.4 (2024), 82–92: https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol43/iss4/9.

Nithya Sivashankar’s essay titled “‘Tell Pebble All About It’: Displacement and Distancing in Contemporary Picturebooks about Arab Refugees” has been published in the latest issue of Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature. The essay can be accessed here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/918613

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Robert Tally at robert.tally@txstate.edu. You can also submit to the Miscellany Form here: https://www.english.txst.edu/news/Miscellany-Submission.html 

MISCELLANY – JANUARY 15, 2024

Happy New Year!  

MFA Poetry student Sara Bawany’s creative nonfiction piece, “What’s in a Name?: On Mislabeling ‘Violence’” has been published in the Infrarrealista Reviewhttps://infrarrealistas.org/whats-in-a-name/. Also, one of Sara’s poems, “Uncles of Palestine,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by her publisher, FlowerSong Press; the poem appears in Sara’s new poetry book Quarter Life Crisis. 

Denae Dyck published “Spiritual Authority for a (Post)Secular Age: Olive Schreiner’s Dreams as Literary Theology.” Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, vol. 5. no. 2, Autumn 2023, pp. 73-88, doi: 10.46911/QBRM1938. Also, at MLA 2024, Denae gave a paper entitled “Celebrating Women’s Voices: Wit, Wisdom, and Editorial Practices in the Women’s Penny Paper” (special session on Celebration and Commemoration in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press). 

Julie McCormick Weng’s book, co-edited with Malcolm Sen, Race in Irish Literature and Culture, was published in January with Cambridge University Press. The book includes her chapter “W. B. Yeats, the Irish Free State, and the Rhetoric of Race Suicide“ alongside her co-authored introduction, “The Racial Imaginaries of Irish Literature and Culture.” In 2023, Weng’s essay “Reading James Joyce in the Wake of the #MeToo Movement” published in Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism (Clemson UP), edited by Katherine Ebury, Bridget English, and Matthew Fogarty. 

Cyrus Cassells’s To The Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu received another strong review recently: https://www.greenlindenpress.com/interviews-and-reviews#/salvador-espriu/; a new hardback collector’s edition of the book was published on November 30. Cyrus has also been selected as one of 12 award-winning poets who will serve as guest editors for the Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day” series in 2024: https://poets.org/twelve-award-winning-poets-serve-guest-editors-poem-day-2024. 

Dr. Ana Stefanovska, who was a visiting scholar in the English Department in 2018, has just published her first book, Lo spazio letterario del neorealismo [The Literary Space of Neorealism] (Padova University Press, 2023): https://www.padovauniversitypress.it/en/publications/9788869383502

Cathlin Noonan recently had three poems published in Platform Reviewhttps://www.artsbythepeople.org/platform-review-home/2023/12/1/cathlin-noonan

William Jensen’s newest short story “Are We Decent People?” recently appeared in Bullhttps://mrbullbull.com/newbull/fiction/are-we-decent-people/

MFA alumna Dr. Sabah Carrim presented an invited talk, “The Fundamentals of Genocide Studies and Mass Atrocity Prevention,” at Izmir Democracy University in Turkey, via Zoom. The event was hosted by former Texas State visiting scholar Selin Şencan, who is now a professor of English there. 

MFA Fiction student Hannah Smothers’s short story “Yolo” was published in Five Southhttps://fivesouth.net/yolo-by-hannah-smothers/. Also, Hannah’s essay “Intruders” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the Ocean State Review

Robert Tally’s book The Fiction of Dread: Dystopia, Monstrosity, and Apocalypse (Bloomsbury) has just been published: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/fiction-of-dread-9781501375866/. Rob’s book Representing Middle-earth: Tolkien, Form, and Ideology (McFarland) also appeared recently: https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/representing-middle-earth/. A short book in Turkish, Robert T. Tally Jr. Ile Mekânsallik Üzerine [On Spatiality with Robert T. Tally Jr.], edited, translated, and organized by Emel Aras, is now available: https://hece.com.tr/kategori/Soylesi/Mekansallik_Uzerine.html; Dr. Aras was a visiting scholar in the English Department in 2021–22. Rob has also published two articles recently: “Unmappably Cosmopolitan: Reconfiguring Criticism of World Literature in an Era of Globalization,” Migrating Minds: A Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism 1.1 (Fall 2023): 7–24 (available at: https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/1086508) and, in Chinese, “The Logic of the Situation: Space, Mapping, and the Sense of Place” (translated by Dr. Fang Ying), Journal of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies 34.6 (November 2023): 53–65. Additionally, at the MLA 2024 convention, Rob presented “The Clouds Overhead, the Actual Soil, and the Map: Real-and-Imagined Spaces of Hawthorne’s Literary Cartography” on a panel titled Hawthorne and Space, sponsored by the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society, and he participated in “Celebration and Spatiality: A Geocritical Roundtable.” 

Dr. Fang Ying, Professor of English at Zhejiang Gongshang University and a former visiting scholar in the English Department in 2017, has received a prestigious government award, the second prize of the 22nd Zhejiang Philosophy and Social Sciences Outstanding Achievement Award, for her Chinese translation of Robert Tally’s 2013 book Spatiality

MFA alumnus Michael Agugom’s short story “The Happiest People in the World,” published in Desire to Escape by Four Palaces Publishing, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His short story “True Yarn” is due out this year in African Ghost Short Stories, published by Flame Tree Publishing: https://blog.flametreepublishing.com/fantasy-gothic/gothic-fantasy-successful-submissions-african-ghost-0

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Rob Tally at robert.tally@txstate.edu. You can also submit to the Miscellany Form here: https://www.english.txst.edu/news/Miscellany-Submission.html  

Jennifer Jackson duBois

Jennifer Jackson duBois is a novelist from Massuchesetts; she has been with Texas State since 2013, and an Associate Professor of English since 2015 when she won the Alpha Chi Favorite Professor Award. DuBois teaches creative writing at the undergraduate level, as well as MFA fiction workshops and literature seminars. She has been awarded several honors including the Williston Northampton Alumni Trailblazer Award in 2017, the Texas State Presidential Distinction Award in 2019, and the College of Liberal Arts Achievement Award for Excellence in Scholarly/Creative Activity in 2020. 

Before she came to Texas State, duBois received a BA from Tufts University, an MFA from the University of Iowa, and was a Stanford University Stegner Fellow. duBois served as a tutor, instructor, and lecturer during her MFA program and Stanford fellowship; additionally, she was selected to teach a competitive undergraduate fiction workshop at the University of Iowa, as well as receiving a competitive teaching-writing fellowship the year before.

As early as 2008, duBois’s work began hitting the wide world of publications, her short stories and essays being featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Playboy, Salon, Lapham’s Quarterly, American Short Fiction, The Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, The South Carolina Review, The Florida Review, and The Northwest Review, to name a few. In 2012, duBois presented her debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes“loosely based on Garry Kasparov” and set against the sociopolitical upheaval and transition of Russia over the past three decades. This debut won critical acclaim earning her the California Book Award for First Fiction, Northern California Book Award for Fiction, Whiting Writers’ Award, and the National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award; the book was also a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction. Her next book, Cartwheel“borrowed themes from the Amanda Knox case” and earned the Housatonic Book Award for fiction as well as making it as a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award. Her third novel, The Spectatorswas inspired by the backstory of a “beloved progressive politician before he became the king of trash TV.” The Spectators won recognition from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation as well as a grant and recognition from the National Endowment for the Arts; the book was also published in Spain as Los EspectadoresHer most recent novel, The Last Language, was published in 2023 and “actually began with a set of philosophy of language questions” tinged with “the desire to write a love story with a serious intellectual plot.” This latest novel has received positive reviews from Kirkus (starred review)Publisher’s Weekly, and Shelf Awareness.

A fifth novel is in the works, “but it feels like there’s a core question still missing from this novel idea” – and questions are vital to duBois’s works that are “not trying to persuade a reader of a set of answers as much as interest them in a set of questions.” Through techniques of “Secrets, Suspense, and Revelation” (one of her original Problems Seminars) as well as narrative strategies (like conflicting or unreliable narrators), duBois engages with controversial issues of politics and ethics that captures the complexity of a complicated world. The characters and settings in her novels are all uniquely distinct, dealing with different shades of disability, identity, scandal, and crime that insist the reader “sit with their own conclusions, but also with the infallibility of those conclusions … [to] consider the possibility their own interpretation was wrong, and what it would mean in the moral universe of the book if they were.” Each novel draws from real-life events that “sparked or engaged with some deeper question” that duBois found baffling: “how do you proceed in the face of a lost cause? How fundamentally can a person change over the course of a lifetime? And how is it that reasonably intelligent, well-intentioned people can look at the exact same set of events and come away with wildly divergent, yet similarly confident, interpretations?” 

The importance of considering these sorts of questions is reflected in the original courses created by duBois which explore various Problems in Language and Literature such as narrative structure, ethics and politics in fiction, and the first-person novel. Over the course of her career in English studies and the many theses she has advised and supervised, duBois seeks- to model “intellectual curiosity and openness – the idea that diversity of literature is a gift, that no work of art is for everyone but any work of art might be for anyone.”

MISCELLANY – DECEMBER 1, 2023

drea brown was invited to present at the Texas Humanities sponsored event Poetic Legacies: Interpreting New Texts from Writers Inspired by Phillis Wheatley Peters, held at Texas Christian University in September 2023. They presented on two panels “Phillis Wheatley in the Classroom: A Roundtable Discussion” and “Creative Reflections on Phillis Wheatley” at the Phillis Wheatley Festival at Jackson State University in November 2023. drea’s poem “karintha at dusk noon and midnight” was featured as part of Cane: A New Critical Edition & Oracular Card Deck edited by Diane Exavier, Carlos Sirah, Anne de Marcken, published by The 3rd Thing Press, in October 2023. Their essay in verse “How Strangely Changed: Phillis Wheatley in Niobean Myth & Memory” is published in Niobes: Antiquity, Modernity, Critical Theory, edited by Mario Telò and Andrew Benjamin, forthcoming in February 2024 from The Ohio State University Press. 

Katie Kapurch and Jon Marc Smith’s book BLACKBIRD, with a foreword by Cyrus Cassells, was published on November 14. The Penn State UP book is about Black musicians’ influences on and responses to the Beatles and is supported by a major award that Katie Kapurch received from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

MFA Poetry Candidate Sara Bawany’s poem, “Uncles of Palestine,” was nominated for a  Pushcart Prize by  FlowerSong Press. The poem was published in Sara Bawany’s new book, Quarter Life Crisis

Chris Dayley, Meghalee Das (MATC alum and Texas Tech Doctoral Candidate), Isidore Kafui Dorpenyo (George Mason University), Aimee Kendall Roundtree, and Miriam F. Williams’s article, “Evaluating Immigrants’ Perceptions of U.S. Banks’ Diversity and Inclusion Claims/Initiatives,” will be published in the next guest-edited special issue of Technical Communication. This IRB-approved study included text-mining, content analysis, thematic analysis, and interviews with U.S. immigrants from the Global South. 

Jennifer duBois’s most recent novel, The Last Language, received a rave review from The Washington Post.  

MFA Fiction Candidate D.R. Garrett’s short story, “The Color of Love” has been published in the Fall 2023 issue of the bi-annual print literary journal Awakenings Review.   

Rob Tally’s “Orcs and Revolution” appears as part of a special feature, “Nine Tolkien Scholars Responded to Charles W. Mill’s ‘The Wretched of Middle-earth: An Orkish Manifesto,'” in the current issue of Mythlore. Bianca L. Beronio, an English Department graduate and current M.A. student at Texas A&M-Commerce, also contributed to the forum, with “The Power of Fantasy: Exploring Racism in Middle-earth.” In addition, Rob’s brief article “Marxism and Spatiality” appears in the new issue of the American Book Review 44.3 (Fall 2023). And an Italian edition of Rob Tally’s 2013 book Spatiality has been published as Spazialità, translated by Eleonora Rao, Debora A. Sarnelli, and Ana Stefanofska (Milan: Mimesis Edizione, 2023); Ana Stefanovska, who was a visiting scholar at Texas State in 2018, also wrote a “Postfazione” for this volume. 

Cyrus Cassells’s collaborative poem with Brian Turner, “Corsair,” was the Poem-a-Day selection for the Academy of American Poets on November 29. 

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Miriam Williams at mfw@txstate.edu. You can also submit to the Miscellany Form here: https://www.english.txst.edu/news/Miscellany-Submission.html  

Miscellany – November 1, 2023 

Jon Marc Smith’s novel, Make Them Cry (Ecco 2020, co-authored with Smith Henderson), was translated into French and published by Belfond Noir as Fais-les Pleurer in Spring 2023.  

 John Blair’s seventh book, The Shape of Things to Come—Poems, which chronicles in verse the beginnings of the atomic age, has been published by Gival Press and is now available on Amazon, Barnesandnoble.com, and Givalpress.com

Debra Monroe’s essay “Last Home,” which first appeared in Air / Light magazine, has been cited as Notable in Houghton Mifflin’s annual anthology Best American Essays 2023

Cyrus Cassells’s The World That the Shooter Left Us was recently named a poetry finalist in this year’s Housatonic Book Awards

 Whitney May’s essay, “Gol o Bolbol Go Viral: Iranian Protest Songs in the Age of Social Media,” appears on PopMattersOn October 30th, Whitney May gave an invited address at SUNY Old Westbury’s annual horror conference. This talk was over Pennywise’s literary origins and the future of insurgent clowning at political protests. 

Third year MFA poetry student Cathlin Noonan’s poem “On Marriage: A Fasting” will appear in SWWIM Every Day on November 8, 2023. 

Rob Tally gave three conference presentations recently. Rob was the keynote speaker for Mapping Spaces and (the) US, a conference sponsored by the Romanian Association for American Studies and Romanian–U.S. Fulbright Commission at Ovidius University, Constanţa, Romania; his presentation, “Unmappable America: Space, Cosmopolitanism, and the Crisis of Representation,” was delivered remotely. Rob presented “Great Goblins: The Representation of the Orc in The Hobbit at the online Northeast Popular Culture Association conference. And Rob presented “‘I’m as Mad as Hell, and I’m Not Going to Take This Anymore’: Anger, Critique, and the Culture Wars” at the annual conference of the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts (SCLA) in Philadelphia (the theme of the conference was “Anger”). Also, as of October 7, 2023, Rob is now the President of the SCLA, which will hold its 2024 conference in Austin. 

Two of MFA graduate Melissa McEver Huckabay’s poems appeared in literary journals in October: “The Worried Woman Odes” in Thimble Literary Magazine and “Elegy for a Promise Ring” in Sweet: A Literary Confection. 

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Miriam Williams at mfw@txstate.edu. You can also submit to the Miscellany Form here: https://www.english.txst.edu/news/Miscellany-Submission.html  

Reyes Ramirez

Reyes Ramirez (he/him) is a first-generation Houstonian of Salvadoran and Mexican descent, a rich cultural heritage that features prominently in his equally diverse corpus of published poetry, short stories, creative nonfiction, art criticism, and reviews. Reyes received his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from the University of Houston where he studied political science, creative writing, and phronesis. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University with a focus on fiction and cognates in film and literature. During his program at Texas State, Reyes was a writing center consultant, co-editor for Front Porch Journal, an IA  for survey literature courses, and a TA for college writing courses I-II.

After graduating from Texas State, Reyes took his MFA back to his hometown where he has lent his expertise towards enriching his community through his involvement with a nonprofit organization that brings art education to children, a nonprofit experimental and progressive art studio and gallery, and a nonprofit organization focused on empowering artists and connecting communities. 

“Houston is important to my work because it is so easy to pack any amount of the absurd and the serious together here. It is one of the largest and most diverse cities in America that is blue in a red state that must contend with its past and present as a metropolis in the South, the Borderlands, the Gulf Coast, etc. … The possibilities for mixing languages, stories, and histories are endless here.”

Crafting stories and poetry from a unique blend of histories both real and imagined is certainly a strong suit for Reyes who has a page’s worth of grants, honors, fellowships and awards under his belt to include being a finalist for the New York Public Library’s 2023 Young Lions Fiction Award for his collection of short stories in The Book of Wanderers. While most finalists were represented by Big 5 publishers and/or agents, Reyes was representing an independent university press from Arizona, “which is all to say that the Young Lions Fiction Award put my book in conversation with some incredibly talented people.” His newest book, El Rey of Gold Teeth, is a debut collection of poetry that navigates the relationship between form and language through subversion, marginalized voices, and rerouted histories: “If my first book, The Book of Wanderers, plays with genre and the architecture of a narrative and/or story using my languages, then El Rey of Gold Teeth plays with those languages at the atomic level.”

While Reyes is primarily a writer, he finds considerable inspiration from his work in editing, curating, organizing, and teaching: “those practices force me to put my writing in conversation with communities, histories, and reality. What use is my writing if it cannot be understood by the communities I want to speak with, who I want to grow with from my adventures in language?” Reyes has taught creative writing at the grade school level; he has been a faculty tutor and workshop instructor; he has been involved on many editorial teams; and he has assisted or directed in the curation and organization of several visual and performance art projects. One of his projects includes an ongoing virtual exhibition The Houston Artist Speaks Through Grids for which he was recognized as a 2021 Interchange Artist Grant Fellow.

Reyes is currently working on a collection of personal essays that explore “a grander consciousness” through pop culture, disasters, nationhood, and more; moreover, there is a novel set in Houston in the works!

– Kandi Pomeroy, MARC Student