Congratulations:

The following English faculty were promoted / granted tenure this year: Suparno Banerjee, Joseph Falocco and Scott Mogull were tenured and promoted to Associate Professor; Pinfan Zhu and Octavio Pimentel were promoted to Professor.

 

Teya Rosenberg represented the department and university at the 43rd Annual Children’s Literature Conference in Columbus, OH, June 9-11, 2016. She presented a paper, “The Mythical, the Magical, the Racial: Considering Structure and Genre in American Born Chinese” and began her duties as Vice-President/President-Elect of the Association. Also in attendance and presenting were Texas State English department alumni Beth Pearce, currently visiting assistant professor at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; and Elissa Myers, currently working on her doctorate at CUNY Graduate Center.

 

John Blair’s short story manuscript White Sands was selected by judge Amy Hempel as the one finalist for this year’s AWP Grace Paley Prize. In praising the collection, Hempel wrote “Dusty, venom-soaked lives, relying on motorcycles and trucks to speed them towards fates as welcoming as a cinderblock wall at eighty miles per hour.  The reckless couple who connect some of these stories rely on ‘hard cash, hard-earned’ and, whether hiding or chasing, have a close and uncomfortable relationship with the natural world.  Even ‘love bugs’ arrive as a plague.  Risks are taken throughout, starting with the opening story—a harsh beauty—that sets the tone for a collection of stories as lyrical as they are deadly.” The prize’s winner and finalist will be announced on the AWP website soon and in the September issue of the Writer’s Chronicle.

 

Steve Wilson and MFA poetry student Meg Griffitts took part in a discussion of the Beat Generation sponsored by KUT radio and recorded live for the “Views & Brews” series: http://kutpodcasts.org/views-and-brews/vb-the-beat-generation.

 

Thanks to the following faculty who served on Honor’s thesis committees this past year: Twister Marquiss, Jon Marc Smith, Susan Morrison, Deborah Balzhiser, Anne Winchell, Victoria Smith, Lindy Kosmitis, Elvin Holt, and Stephanie Noll.

 

Recent MARC graduate Edward Santos Garza has published a book review, “Celebrating the Hyphen,” in Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture. Discussing Latinx icons such as Selena and Ritchie Valens, Garza’s review concerns Reclaiming Poch@ Pop: Examining the Rhetoric of Cultural Deficiency, by Cruz Medina: http://enculturation.net/celebrating-the-hyphen [archived].

 

Jo Jarl – one of the first two graduates of the MATC program, in 2001 – has retired after 13 years as a tech writer and editor for IBM and IBM Tivoli.