Congratulations:
Rebecca Jackson’s article (written with Jackie Grutsch McKinney and Nicole Caswell), “Writing Center Administration as/and Emotional Labor,” will appear in the fall 2016 issue of Composition Forum. Her article, also written with Jackie Grutsch McKinney and Nicole Caswell, “Metaphors We Work By: New Writing Center Directors’ Labor and Identities” will appear in the collection, WPAs in Transition, to be published by Utah State UP in 2017.
Katie Kapurch’s co-edited collection with Kenneth Womack, New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles: Things We Said Today, is out from Palgrave Macmillan’s Pop Culture, Music and Identity series. The book includes Katie’s chapter “Crying, Waiting, Hoping: The Beatles, Girl Culture, and the Melodramatic Mode”; as well as a chapter co-authored by Katie and Jon Marc Smith, “Blackbird Singing: Paul McCartney’s Romance of Racial Harmony and Post-Racial America.”
Steve Wilson has new poems forthcoming in San Pedro River Review and Beloit Poetry Journal.
MFA fiction student Graham Oliver interviewed the founder of Dallas-based, translation-focused publisher Deep Vellum, Will Evans, for The Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/2016/08/the-rumpus-interview-with-will-evans/ [archived].
MATC alumna Susan Rauch graduated from Texas Tech University with a PhD in Technical Communication & Rhetoric this month. Her dissertation title is ““Rhetoric and Economics of User Attention in e-Health: How Technology Influences Clinicians’ Decision Making in EHR Clinical Documentation.” Susan will begin work as a full-time instructor in Texas Tech University’s English Department this fall.
The first excerpt of Tom Grimes’s new novel appears in the current issue of Narrative: http://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/fall-2016/fiction/dynamics-faith-tom-grimes.
Stephanie Noll’s organization, Old Books for New Teachers, which helps first-year teachers build classroom libraries, was the spotlighted organization at Backyard Story Night on Sunday, August 29. Backyard Story Night is a monthly storytelling event in Austin that collects donations for a different nonprofit each month. An article about the event, with a mention of Stephanie’s work, can be found here: http://orangemag.co/atx/2016/8/29/austinites-share-their-tales-at-backyard-story-night [archived]. Also, thanks to a successful social media fundraising campaign, Stephanie was able to provide Texas State MFA graduate Abby Minde (who now teaches at KIPP Austin Collegiate) with 20 copies of All American Boys, a young adult novel about police brutality. For this project, Stephanie is collaborating with Badgerdog Literary Publishing, Inc., an Austin-area program that places writers in schools. Abby’s students will read All American Boys and then participate in several writing workshops with prompts and activities connected to the text.
English DepartmentMiscellanyAugust 15, 2016
Congratulations:
The Office of Equity and Access has selected Geneva Gano’s proposal, “Emily Hobson Public Lecture and Classroom Visits on ’Lavender/Red: Liberation/Solidarity in the Gay/Lesbian Left’” to receive funding in the amount of $1,100.00. In October, Ms. Hobson will visit Professor Gano’s fall grad class to talk about the Women’s liberation movement and women’s literature, and will also give a public talk.
Susan Morrison’s Grendel’s Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife won the Words on Wings Book Award for young adult fiction, a Literary Classics Top Honors Award 2016: http://www.clcawards.org/2016_Award_Books.html.
MARC graduate student Kristin Milligan, who completed her degree this August, has been hired as the Associate Director of the Learning Center at East Central College in Union, Missouri.
English majors Bianco Beronio, Devin Baumann, Thomas Gresham (who graduated Spring 2016), Michael Salinas, and Julia Whitmore each presented talks on Tolkien at Mythcon 47, the annual meeting of the Mythopoeic Society, held in San Antonio this August. Rob Tally also presented at the convention, discussing “Tolkien’s Red Dragons: Fantasy and Marxist Literary Criticism,” as well as taking part in a roundtable on teaching Tolkien.
Aimee Roundtree’s research on how the autism community uses Twitter for advocacy was accepted for presentation at the Center for Disease Control’s National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing and Media, taking place this August in Atlanta. Her work, “#TweetLikeANeurotyical: Understanding Diagnosis Attitudes and Experiences of the Autism Community Online,” situates hashtags used by the community as a form of linguistic reclamation similar to other minority groups.
William Jensen’s debut novel, Cities of Men, was sold to Turner Publishing. The book should be published in either summer or fall of 2017.
In April 2016, Joe Falocco was invited to deliver a presentation on teaching Shakespeare in the twenty-first century at the Universidad Autonoma de Hidalgo in Pachuca, Mexico as part of the 2016 Festival Internacional del Imagen. He spoke to an audience comprised of hundreds of undergraduates and Festival attendees. While in Pachuca, Joe was also interviewed by a local radio station.
MFA poetry student Meg Griffitts’ poem “How To Return Home” will be featured in the fall issue of Hypertrophic, which comes out in September.
Rob Tally’s essay “The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Middle-earth: Tolkien, Cinema, and Literary Cartography” appears in the collection Topographies of Popular Culture, edited by Maarit Piipponen and Markku Salmela.