Day: November 19, 2019

Please send future Miscellany items to your new/former Associate Chair, Steve Wilson, sw13@txstate.edu. Thank you!

Texas State alumna Terri Leclerq has received the prestigious 2018 Golden Pen Award, a national honor that goes to an outstanding writer about law. Terri’s most recent book, Prison Grievances (2013), is a graphic novel that is to help those in prison develop effective petitions and navigate grievances. As an award winner, she joins distinguished justices, academics, and writers such as Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times. Terri is a prior recipient of the Liberal Arts Distinguished Alumni Award and a founding member of the department’s Donor and Alumni Advisory Council. She received a BS in Education (English/Journalism) at Texas State in 1968 and an MA in English in 1970.

Congratulations to Professor John Blair, who has been named by President Trauth a University Distinguished Professor, one of Texas State’s most coveted faculty honors. This follows a number of other awards for his creative work, including most recently the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Wilda Herne Prize for Fiction, and the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry. As a University Distinguished Professor, Dr. Blair will receive a one-time $5,000 cash award, a commemorative medallion, and recognition during the fall convocation. Dr. Trauth is also nominating him for consideration by The Texas State University System (TSUS) Board of Regents for the Regents’ Professor Award, and will submit his portfolio to The TSUS office.

Professor Dan Lochman’s article “Textual Memory and the Problem of Coherence in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene” is just out in a special issue on Narrative and the Biocultural Turn (ed. Vittorio Gallese and Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski), in Costellazioni: Rivista de lingue e letterature (Volume 2, Number 5, [2018]: 147-80). At the end of March, he read the paper “Arthur’s Memory: Spontaneity and Deliberation in The Faerie Queene” at the New Orleans meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, where he also co-organized three panels on early modern cognition and affect.

Lecturer Daniel Keltner’s first novel Into That Good Night comes out June 5th. The book launch and reading is at Book People in Austin: https://www.facebook.com/events/1790494951254528/

Two poems by Professor Roger Jones have been published in Southern Poetry Anthology VIII: “The Bee Tree” and “Bait.” https://www.amazon.com/Southern-Poetry-Anthology-VIII-Texas/dp/1680030639

The Graduate Programs of the Department of English are pleased to announce the recipients of 2018 Graduate College Scholarships. We are very proud of the current and incoming graduate students who were successful in a competitive field of applicants. Please congratulate these fine folks who are in your classes or working with you and be ready to welcome and congratulate the incoming students who will join us this coming summer and fall.

Assistant Professor Geneva Gano has been named the Jesse H. and Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Southwestern Studies for 2018-2021. Liberal Arts Council noted that the proposal will make significant contributions to the work of the Center for the Study of the Southwest and will bring prestige and visibility to the Center. Dr. Gano will continue to teach courses in English but will devote part of her time to activities related to the Center and her research.

Retired Professor Priscilla Leder has a new hobby as a radio personality. She has started a two-hour show titled Bookmarked on the San Marcos community radio station KZSM.org. from 4-6 on Tuesdays. The station is only on-line now but eventually will be on the air. Priscilla co-hosts with Deborah Carter of the San Marcos Public Library, and their show includes reviews, interviews, and of course local news of interest to readers. Graeme Wend-Walker recently joined the show for a discussion about young adult literature. You can check out their Facebook page to learn more about the show.

Professor Robert T. Tally, Jr. will be a keynote speaker at an event called “Granfalloon: A Kurt Vonnegut Convergence,” sponsored by the Indiana University Arts & Humanities Council, to be held May 10-12 in Bloomington, Indiana. His talk is titled “Kurt Vonnegut, American: Granfalloonery and National Identity.” In other news, Rob’s essay “The Space of the Novel” appears in The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, edited Eric Bulson (Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 152–167).

Senior Lecturer Alan Schaefer presented a paper entitled “Draining Her Desire: Jess Franco’s Las Vampiras” at the Pop Culture Association National Conference in Indianapolis last month as part of the Vampire in Literature, Film, and Culture subject area.

Senior Lecturer Tomás Morin has accepted a position at Drew University as an Advanced Assistant Professor of Poetry and will be the Co-Director of the Creative Writing Emphasis. The LA Review of Books recently reviewed his book Patient Zero: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/second-acts-a-second-look-at-second-books-of-poetry-gabriel-fried-and-tomas-q-morin/#!

Humanities Texas has awarded $1,000 to the Children’s Literature Association for their annual meeting to be held at the Sheraton Gunter in San Antonio on June 28-30. Congratulations to the conference chair, Professor Marilynn Olson.

Lecturer Ben Reed’s paper “Technologies of Instant Amnesia” will be republished as a chapter in vol. 256 of Layman Poupard’s Short Story Criticism, edited by Lawrence Trudeau, which will focus on the short fiction of Kurt Vonnegut. Ben recently presented a paper on Breakfast of Champions at the annual NeMLA Convention in Pittsburgh. While there, Ben read an original short story titled “Angle & Distance,” which was inspired by the work of the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, and informed by that author’s visit to Texas State in October 2013. Finally, earlier this semester, Ben designed and led a six-week writing workshop for veterans facilitated through VSA, the State Organization on Arts and Disability, and funded by DVNF, the Disabled Veterans National Foundation. He looks forward to doing so again later this year.

Professor Pinfan Zhu presented his paper, “Well-Received Rhetorical Strategies as Demonstrated in the Speeches and Reports by Chinese Leaders” at the Annual International Conference of the International Organization of Social Science and Research on March 20. He was also recently invited to be on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Media and Communication Studies and currently serves as a member on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine by Hunan University, China.

The online journal Two Hawks Quarterly features a poem by Professor Steve Wilson, “Violently Sundered.” http://twohawksquarterly.com/2017/05/30/violently-sundered-steve-wilson/

MATC alumna Dr. Lonie McMichael recently founded Technodaptability, a company that trains clients to adapt to new technologies. On May 16th, Lonie will host a Society of Technical Communication (STC) webinar titled “What is Technological Adaptability?” The webinar is free to STC members at (https://www.stc.org/event/what-is-technological-adaptability/). Her book, Technological Adaptability: Learning Technology Quickly, is forthcoming.

MATC alumna Amber Rigney accepted a position as Chief Publishing Officer at Paxen Publishing in Melbourne, Florida. Amber provides strategic direction and leadership of Paxen Publishing’s library as well as the newly acquired Steck-Vaughn adult education library and SkillsTutor. She also manages content development of print and digital adult education products.

Lecturer Kamron Mehrinfar has been nominated as an Alpha Chi Favorite Professor for 2018.

Assistant Professor Cecily Parks’s poem “Girlhood” appears in the April 30 issue of The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/girlhood. In other news, Professor Parks has been named one of the Alpha Chi Favorite Professors for 2018.

Susan Morrison won Sigma Tau Delta’s Outstanding Professor Award, 2017-2018. Additionally, the book she edited of her mother’s diaries, Home Front Girl: A Diary of Love, Literature, and Growing Up in Wartime America, has just been released as a paperback by Chicago Review Press.

Professor Robert Tally’s essay “The Space of the Novel” appears in The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, edited Eric Bulson (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 152–167.

William Jensen’s story “All Ye Faithful” has been accepted for publication in Manzano Mountain Review.

MATC student Sarah Holdgrafer was recently promoted to Manager of the Self-Service & Content Team at ShipStation in Austin, Texas. Sarah and her team are responsible for all user-facing help documentation and internal support training.

Lecturer Autumn Hayes’s poem “On Them” has been accepted for publication in the summer issue of Storm Cellar, and her essay, “Black Panther’s Courageous Take On Basic Truths,” is now available in the April edition of The Washington Spectator.

MATC alumna Brooke Turner was recently recognized by Austin Woman magazine as a 2018 Woman’s Way Business Awards Finalist for Product Innovation. She is co-founder and CMO of Kwaddle, an Austin-based company described as “an online platform that provides access to high quality, out-of-school education and enrichment programs to help children thrive and reach their fullest potential.”

Lecturer Ashton Kamburoff was awarded a writing residency through the Vermont Studio Center. Four of his poems – “The Story,” “Capablanca & My Father,” “Water & Glycol,” and “22° Halo,” are forthcoming in the September issue of Softblow.

Emeritus Professor Miles Wilson will be reading from his latest book, Westwork: New and Selected Stories of the American West, at BookPeople in Austin on Tuesday, May 1 at 7:00 p.m. and at The Twig Book Shop in San Antonio on Tuesday, May 15 at 5:00 p.m.

Professor Cyrus Cassells was Chair of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry this year. He and his co-jurors David Baker (who served on this year’s Pulitzer jury) and Monica Youn (who also served as the chair of the National Book Award in Poetry) read close to a hundred books. In a ceremony at USC on Friday, Cyrus presented the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry to Patricia Smith and wrote the citation for her book Incendiary Art: “In her most powerful, impassioned, and masterly book to date, Patricia Smith bears witness to the harrowing legacy of Emmett Till and to ongoing crises of chronic bigotry and brutality with unerring craft and crusading urgency. The intrepid, at-the-ready poems of Incendiary Art address African American forbearance and sorrow with a phoenix-like prowess and grace, reaffirming Patricia Smith’s stature as one of America’s most indispensable poets.” Patricia’s book was also named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize last Monday and has also won the NAACP award and the Kingsley Tufts Award.

In other news for Professor Cassells, his manuscript, Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas will be published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press in a bi-lingual Catalan/English edition in the spring of 2019

As Discipline Representative for Rhetoric, Professor Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler organized four panels for the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in New Orleans. She was also part of the RSA Executive Council and delivered a paper titled “The Politics of Invention: Milton’s Turn to Logic.” In April, Elizabeth presented a paper at the annual South Central Renaissance Conference in Atlanta, “Revision as Invention: Ramus, Milton, and ‘A Masque.’”

Senior Lecturer Chris Margrave will be presenting his paper “Time is a Necessary Illusion: Climate Change, Abstract Minimalism, and Buddhist Perspectives of Impermanence” at the Temporal Belongings Conference taking place this June in Edinburgh, Scotland.

English Department Awards Day will be on Thursday, April 19 at 3:30 pm. A reception will follow. This is an opportunity to celebrate our department. Students, donors, retirees, alumni, and faculty will be there. DON’T MISS IT!

Congratulations!

Associate Professor Graeme Wend-Walker’s short story “Dirkwood Dane Stays Ahead of the Game” appears in the current issue of Dissections: The Journal of Contemporary Horror. http://www.simegen.com/writers/dissections/

Professor Aimee Kendall Roundtree’s article “Dialogic of Social Media in Healthcare Settings: Text Mining the Rules, Attitudes, and Behaviors of Health Organizations and the Public” appears in the current issue of the American Communication Journal.

Assistant Professor Kate McClancy presented her paper “Desperate Housewives: Murdering Gendered Nostalgia in Lady Killer” at SCMS in Toronto, and at the Comics Arts Conference at WonderCon she participated on a round table on “What Is a Superhero?” and moderated a spotlight panel featuring John Jennings on race and horror in comics.

On March 13, Associate Professor Scott Mogull chaired the session “Critical Discourse Analysis of Technical Communications in Capitalist Medicine” at the 21^st annual conference of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing in Kansas City, KS. Other panel participants were Dr. Susan Popham of Indiana University Southeast, Dr. Ron Lunsford of University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Dr. Christopher Lunsford (M.D.) of University of Virginia. The participants presented research on health care communications in industry.

Professor Kathleen Peirce’s latest book, Vault, is a finalist for the Four Quartets Prize from The Poetry Society of America and the T. S. Eliot Foundation. The winner will be announced in New York on April 14th. Here’s a link to the press release:
http://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/blog/fourquartetsprize/

Distinguished Professor Emeritus Miles Wilson’s fourth book, Woodswork: New and Selected Stories of the American West, is forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press.

Lecturer Ray Stockstad has been accepted to Baylor University’s Ph.D. program for Literature. He will be studying British Literature (medieval). He has also been appointed a Teacher of Record.

Senior Lecturer Flore Chevaillier received an Alkek Library Research Grant to purchase books for her research/creative work. Volumes include works of experimental literature, affirmative politics, as well as literary theory on innovative modes of writing.

Flore has also been invited to participate in the 2018 Multicultural Curriculum Transformation Institute on May 21-25, hosted by the Center for Diversity and Gender Studies. The facilitators will be guest scholars and Texas State faculty with expertise in multicultural curriculum transformation. They will share ideas for implementing multicultural content and multicultural perspectives related to multicultural content, teaching strategies, classroom dynamics, and assessment. There will be many opportunities for networking.

Flore is also hosting Fulbright Scholar, Guojing Yang, from China on our campus April 3-5. He is currently working on a research project on postmodern poetics at the Department of English, UC Berkeley. He will make a presentation in Flore’s class on April 5 on W. H. Auden that you are welcome to attend. She would also like to invite you to join them for dinner on Tuesday April 3 in San Marcos. If you are interested please email Flore for more information. Guojing Yang will be at Colson Whitehead’s reading on April 4. If you see him there or in Flowers Hall, feel free to stop by and chat.

Professors Mark Busby, Paul Cohen, and Nancy Grayson from the Department of English have all been approved to be designated as Distinguished Professor Emeriti and will be recognized at the annual fall convocation on August 24.

On March 8 Mark Busby moderated a discussion in the Wittliff Galleries of “THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD.” The authors are PEN USA-winning authors Steve Davis (the Wittliff’s literary curator, B.A. and M.A. in English from Texas State) and Bill Minutaglio. About the book: This rollicking, real-life account follows the misadventures of Dr. Timothy Leary, the ex-Harvard professor and famed LSD guru, who broke out of a California prison in 1970 with the help of the radical Weather Underground and fled to Algeria to seek refuge with the Black Panthers. Leary’s high-profile escape led an increasingly obsessed President Nixon on a careening global manhunt during the Watergate years.

Senior Lecturer William Jensen’s story “Witness to Everything” will appear in the next issue of Tinge Magazine.

Three poems by Assistant Professor Cecily Parks appear in Conjunctions Online: http://www.conjunctions.com/online/article/cecily-parks-03-13-2018

English Department nominees for Presidential Awards in Teaching, Scholarship, and Service have been selected to be Liberal Arts candidates for the award. Congratulations to Geneva Gano (Teaching), John Blair (Scholarship), Katie Kapurch (Scholarship), Deb Balzhiser (Service), and Keri Fitzgerald (Service).

This month the Southern Illinois University Press will publish The Gospel According to Wild Indigo, the latest poetry book from Professor Cyrus Cassells. He will be hosting a reading at the Wittliff Gallery on Tuesday, April 17th, at 5:00 pm to celebrate the launch of his new book.

Professor Susan Morrison was selected as February professor of the month by SLAC (Student Learning Assistance Center). Susan has also been invited to participate as a visiting scholar on a periodic basis at Rice University (2018-20) as a member of “Waste: Histories and Futures,” an Interdisciplinary Seminar.

In May, Lecturer Ryan Lopez will present an excerpt from his fiction at a graduate student research conference at the University of British Columbia, In the Shadows: Illuminating Monstrosity in Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture. His piece is called Borderlands.

Texas State was well represented at the 39th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in March in Orlando, Florida. Presenters included Andrew Barton (“At the Threshold: Spatial Liminality in The Lord of the Rings”), Caroline Kidd (“Odysseus is a Nobody: Modern Epic Retelling in Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book”), Levi Herrera (“‘Totems of a Discarnate History’: Disruptions of Liminal Space in B. Catling’s The Vorrh”), Suparno Banerjee (“Non-conquering Explorers: Space Travel in Indian Science Fiction”), and Graeme Wend-Walker (“‘The World is So Much Worse Than I Ever Imagined’: Shame, Surprise, and Awakening to Privilege in The Black Witch”).

Lecturer Rachel Gray’s story “All Women” appeared in the Hobart Literary Journal in March.

Lecturer Ashton Kamburoff’s essay, “Cleaning House: Poetry and Revision” is forthcoming in Far Villages: Welcome Essays for New and Beginner Poets, published by Black Lawrence Press.

Associate Professor Deb Balzhiser and Lecturer Amanda Scott from the English Department, and Assistant Professor of Curriculum Instruction Charise Pimentel, recently presented a panel titled “Matters of Form: Questions of Race, Identity, Design, and the U.S. Census” at the annual Association of Teachers of Technical Writing conference in Kansas City, Kansas.

“Fairy Tales for Truth and Justice,” an exhibit by recent MFA graduate Sarah Rafael Garcia, is currently on view in Brazos Hall. A closing reception will be held on April 10. http://www.txstate.edu/cssw/news-events/events/fairy-tales.html

Professor Kathryn Ledbetter was awarded an Alkek Library Online Resource Grant in the amount of $20,000 for Part IV of the Gale/Cengage British Library Newspapers digital database. After the award was announced, Gale offered the library a special price to allow them to purchase all five parts of the database, as well as other digital resources. Kitty also won a Curran Fellowship in the amount of $5,000 from the Research Society of Victorian Periodicals to support research for her project, “Edmund Yates, Gossip, and Personal Journalism.” In other news, Ledbetter’s chapter titled “Text and Media Replication during the US-Mexican War, 1846-1848,” will appear in a book published this month by Edinburgh University Press, Replication in the Long Nineteenth-Century: Re-makings and Reproductions, edited by Linda K Hughes and Julie Codell (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Replication-Long-Nineteenth-Century-Reproductions/dp/1474424848)

Congratulations!

Associate Professor Graeme Wend-Walker’s article “‘Thinking Eases the Pain’: Lois Lowry’s Son and the Giver Quartet’s Resistance to Secular Puritanism” appears in the current issue of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly.

Assistant Professor Kate McClancy’s article “Winter Soldiers and Sunshine Patriots: World War II and the Cold War in Captain America” just came out in ImageTexT. She is also organizing the Comics Arts Conference spring meeting, where she will be featuring a panel from four Texas State grad students and recent grads: Andrew Barton, Michael Gonzales, Sean Mardell, and Lillian Martinez.

Professor Mark Busby’s novel Fort Benning Blues was featured on the Huffington Post in an article titled “24 Books That Will Help You Understand America” by Claire Fallon. Also featured were William Faulkner’s Light in August, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Annie Proulx’s Close Range, and Philipp Meyer’s American Rust in this “literary road trip through the nation’s heartland.” https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/a-literary-road-trip-through-america_us_59948091e4b0d0d2cc839bc3?ncid=engmodushpmg00000003

Former lecturer and MFA graduate Ram Hinojosa’s short story “Day is Done” will be published in the Spring/Summer 2018 issue of Salamander magazine.

Teaching Assistant Sean Rachel Mardell is presenting a paper, “The Liminality and Whiteness of Frank Castle in The Punisher (2014)” at the Comic Arts Conference held at WonderCon in Anaheim, CA on March 23rd.

Professor Robert T. Tally’s essay, “In the Deserts of Cartography: Building, Mapping, Dwelling” appears in The Map and the Territory: Exploring the Foundations of Science, Thought, and Reality, edited by Shyam Wuppuluri and Francisco Antonio Doria (Springer, 2018).

Professor Steve Wilson’s latest book of poetry, Lose to Find, is now available for pre-order from Finishing Line press, https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/lose-to-find-by-steve-wilson/

Events

On Thursday, March 1 at 7 pm, MFA alum Michael Noll will be launching his fantastic new book, The Writer’s Field Guide, and discussing the project with Bret Anthony Johnston at BookPeople in Austin. As BookPeople puts it, the book, “offers a refreshing approach to the craft of fiction writing. It takes a single page from forty contemporary novels and short stories, identifies techniques used by the writers, and presents approachable exercises and prompts that allow anyone to put those techniques to immediate use in their own work. Encompassing everything from micro (how to “write pretty”) to macro (how to “move through time space”), and even how to put all together on page one, this is a field guide for anyone who wants to start writing now.” Noll will sign copies after the discussion. BookPeople is located at 603 N. Lamar Blvd, Austin, TX 78703.

Assistant Professor Katie Kapurch is the faculty sponsor for a multimedia talk from Dr. Walter Everett (Professor of Music Theory at the University of Michigan) titled “High Art Born of Deep Crisis: The Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever.” The event is sponsored by the Therese Kayser Lindsey Literary Series, College of Liberal Arts, College of Fine Arts and Communication, the Department of English, the Department of History, the School of Music, and the Center for Texas Music History.

The English Department Graduate Office will hold a coffee and snacks drop-in for graduate students and faculty from 5-6:30 pm on Wednesday March 7 and Thursday March 24.

Fulbright Scholar Dr. Geetanjali Joshi (India) will present “Allen Ginsberg and Hinduism” on March 26 from 3:30-4:50 at the Alkek Teaching Theater. Dr. Joshi is currently a Fulbright Scholar at Portland State University. To reserve a seat, please contact Steve Wilson at sw13@txstate.edu. Space is limited. RSVP by March 24. This presentation is conducted through the Fulbright Scholar Program’s Outreach Lecturing Fund (OLF)). OLF enables Visiting Scholars to share their research interests, speak about their home country, and exchange ideas with U.S. students, faculty, and community organizations. Through these lectures, universities forge relationships with the Fulbright Scholar Program, Visiting Scholars, and the Visiting Scholar’s home and host institutions. Other activities for Dr. Joshi will include presentations on the Beats and Hinduism in Professor Steve Wilson’s undergraduate class on Women and the Beat Generation and on Allen Ginsberg and Hinduism for Drs. John Blair and Kate McClancy’s “Masterpieces of American Literature to 1865” classes.

Congratulations!

Professor Mark Busby’s article, “The Slave Narrative from Frederick Douglass to William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner to Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation,” appears in the Texas College English Association’s 2017 Scholarship and Creativity Journal. Mark also attended the Texas/Southwest Popular Culture Association meeting in Albuquerque, NM, February 8-11 and read new poems and poems from his 2017 book Through Our Years.

Professor Robert T. Tally will give an invited talk titled “The Geocritical Moment” on February 16 at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. During Spring Break, Rob will be giving another invited talk titled “Topophrenic Reading: Literary Criticism after the Spatial Turn” at the University of Lund, Sweden.

A poem by Assistant Professor Cecily Parks titled “What If The Luminous” appears on the wall of the Texas State Galleries as part of the exhibit Glen Rose Formation, by Grammy-nominated artist Stuart Hyatt. The exhibit will be on view until March 4. Her poem is inspired by Mary McGrath Curry, who discovered the Cave Without a Name in Boerne, TX. A concert in the Cave Without a Name on Saturday, March 3 at 7 pm will feature audio recordings of Mary McGrath Curry reading the poem. https://txstgalleries.org/

Lecturer Ross Feeler’s short story, “The Noise of Departure,” will appear in the Potomac Review this fall. Ross also presented a paper entitled “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Die: Memory as Narrative in Hemingway’s ‘Snows of Kilimanjaro’ and Silko’s ‘Lullaby’” at the Southwest Popular/American Culture conference in Albuquerque last weekend.

Coming Soon:

Teaching Assistant Wade Martin will host and emcee a poetry reading at the San Marcos Farmer’s Market at 120 E. San Antonio Street on February 24 from 10:30 am to 11:30 pm. The reading will feature Wade, Autumn Hayes, Kevin Adams, Faylita Hicks, and Elizabeth Bayou-Grace. Elizabeth and Cassandra Belle will also do a song swap. A.R. Rogers will write individualized spontaneous poems on manual typewriters after the reading.

On February 27 from noon-1 in the Open Theatre (2^nd floor of Alkek Library), Wade Martin and Liz King will host “Lunch Poems @ Alkek.” The reading will feature James Thompson, Claudia Cardona, Dallas Klein, A.R. Rogers, and Katie Kistler. Undergraduate students will also read. For more information: http://guides.library.txstate.edu/lunchpoems.

On Thursday, March 1 at 7 pm, MFA alum Michael Noll will be launching his fantastic new book, The Writer’s Field Guide, and discussing the project with Bret Anthony Johnston at BookPeople in Austin. As BookPeople puts it, the book, “offers a refreshing approach to the craft of fiction writing. It takes a single page from forty contemporary novels and short stories, identifies techniques used by the writers, and presents approachable exercises and prompts that allow anyone to put those techniques to immediate use in their own work. Encompassing everything from micro (how to “write pretty”) to macro (how to “move through time space”), and even how to put all together on page one, this is a field guide for anyone who wants to start writing now.” Noll will sign copies after the discussion. BookPeople is located at 603 N. Lamar Blvd, Austin, TX 78703.

Congratulations!

Teaching Assistant Sandra Sidi’s short story, “Yesterday We Were Unbroken” was named an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s 2017 Emerging Writer Contest.

Assistant Professor Kathleen McClancy presented a paper titled “Sea Slugs and Atom Bombs: Genetic and Ideological Manipulation in BioShock” at MLA on a panel she organized.

MFA graduate and former lecturer Elizabeth Threadgill’s poetry chapbook will be published by Finishing Line Press, which is now available for preorder:

https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/tangled-in-the-light-by-elizabeth-threadgill/

Lecturer Amanda North’s poem, “Pruning The Garden,” will be published in the Spring 2018 issue of the Columbia Poetry Review.

Lecturer Ashton Kamburoff’s poem “Observations” is forthcoming in Crab Creek Review.

Coming Soon:

Filming for the English Department’s promotional video will begin soon. The Video Committee has been busy making plans since September, and we look forward to an attractive, interesting representation of the Texas State English Department by April.

The deadline for applications for Undergraduate and Graduate Student Awards is Monday, February 12, at 5 pm.

The deadline for the 2018 issue of the student magazine, Persona, is also February 12. The 2017 issue is currently in the works and will be released soon. Persona has expanded its offerings beyond literature to include submissions of artwork, such as paintings and drawings, screenplays, or even a comic style work. If you have any questions, contact personatexasstategmail.com visit their website (personalitmag.com) or Facebook page.

Faculty are asked to encourage their students to apply for English Department scholarships. Qualifications, types of scholarships, and an application form are available on the English Department Web site, at the “Student Resources” link. The deadline is March 1, 2018: http://www.english.txstate.edu/studentres/scholarships.htm

Congratulations!

Lecturer Amanda Scott was awarded the Best US 1100 Instructor/Peer Mentor Duo Award by Texas State’s PACE Mentoring program. Her creative nonfiction piece, “Me Matas, Te Mato,” is also forthcoming in The Common.

Professor Steve Wilson‘s fourth collection of poetry, Lose to Find, will be published in 2018.

Lecturer Ashton Kamburoff’s essay “What Was Carried: Luck, Talismans, and Charms in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried,” was accepted for the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature conference at Michigan State University in May.

Professor Kitty Ledbetter was awarded a Research Enhancement Program grant for her project, “Edmund Hodgson Yates: A Flâneur in Victorian Print Culture.” She will be conducting research in Los Angeles and Brisbane, Australia this summer for a book project about British Victorian journalist Yates, who is credited for popularizing celebrity journalism.

Professor Rob Tally survived the blizzard of the MLA in New York, where he organized and chaired a round table session on “Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism at 25,” on behalf the Forum on Literary Criticism (of which Tally currently serves as chair of the executive committee). He also delivered a presentation titled “[S]he was everywhere; not ‘here, here, here’: Point of View and Cognitive Mapping in Mrs. Dalloway” as part of a panel devoted to “Woolf’s Spaces,” sponsored by the International Virginia Woolf Society.

A poem by Assistant Professor Cecily Parks, “Texas Natives,” appears in the most recent issue of Harvard Review. http://www.harvardreview.org/q=authors/cecily-parks

Lecturer Heather Lefebvre will be reading her short story, “We Welcome All Sorts,” at the Far West Pop Culture Association conference in Las Vegas in February.

Senior Lecturer Flore Chevaillier was awarded an Outreach Lecturing Fund to bring Fulbright Scholar Guojing Yang (from China) to our campus in April. He will make presentations in her class and in Honors classes on W. H. Auden’s work in relation to the poet¹s trip to China in 1938.

Assistant Professor Eric Leake’s chapter “Empathy as Research Methodology” has been published in the Handbook of Research Methods in Health Social Sciences by Springer.

Coming Soon:

Please be sure to welcome nine candidates who will be in the English Department during the next three weeks. They are interviewing for faculty positions in Chicano/Chicanx, Literature (Chair, Vicki Smith), British Literature of the Long 18^th Century (Chair, Kitty Ledbetter), and British Literature of the 20^th/21^st Centuries (Chair, Rob Tally). Hiring committees very much appreciate your input. Please share your impressions with the committee chairs. Take advantage of opportunities to get acquainted with the candidates, observe their teaching, and learn about their research.

Filming for the English Department’s promotional video will begin sometime in February. The Video Committee has been busy making plans since September, and we look forward to an attractive, interesting representation of the Texas State English Department by April.

The deadline for applications for Undergraduate and Graduate Student Awards is Monday, February 12, at 5 pm.

The deadline for the 2018 issue of the student magazine, Persona, is also February 12. The 2017 issue is currently in the works and will be released soon. Persona has expanded its offerings beyond literature to include submissions of artwork, such as paintings and drawings, screenplays, or even a comic style work. If you have any questions, contact personatexasstate@gmail.com visit their website (personalitmag.com) or Facebook page.

Faculty are asked to encourage their students to apply for English Department scholarships. Qualifications, types of scholarships, and an application form are available on the English Department Web site, at the “Student Resources” link. The deadline is March 1, 2018:
http://www.english.txstate.edu/studentres/scholarships.htm

Coming Soon

The next Graduate Student Drop-in happens on Thursday, December 7 from 5-6:30 pm. Stop into the Graduate Office, FH 361, for coffee, tea, refreshments, and conversation before evening classes begin.

The English Department’s annual holiday party begins at 11 am on Thursday, December 7. Bring a dish and join us!

Faculty are asked to encourage their students to apply for English Department scholarships. Qualifications, types of scholarships, and an application form are available on the English Department Web site at the “Student Resources” link. The deadline is March 1, 2018.

Congratulations!

Assistant Professor Jennifer duBois was awarded a FY 2018 Creative Writing Fellowship for $25,000 by the National Endowment for the Arts: https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/FY18-Creative-Writing-Fellowship-Recipients-Nov16-2017.pdf

Lecturer Whitney May’s article, “The Influence of Place on Identity in Poe’s ‘Morella’ and ‘William Wilson’” appears in the autumn edition of The Edgar Allan Poe Review, the official organ of the Poe Studies Association. Publication in this journal is very competitive; our colleague and prolific scholar Rob Tally admits that even he has been rejected and assures us that Whitney’s article publication is a “terrific accomplishment, especially for someone without a PhD.”

An interview of Professor Debra Monroe appears in the December issue of the leading publication for creative writers, The Writer’s Chronicle. Debra discusses her career as a writer of fiction and nonfiction, as well as her frequent individual interactions with student writers in the Texas State MFA program and her mentoring of their careers long after they complete their degrees.

A book by Professor Rebecca Jackson and her co-authors, Jackie Grutsch-McKinney and Nicole Caswell, won the 2017 International Writing Centers Association (IWCA) Best Book Award. The book is titled The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors.

Professor Susan Morrison was interviewed by the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators in Austin.

Texas State alumna Dorothy Lawrenson writes from Edinburgh to tell us that her paper, written for Susan Morrison’s Beowulf class, has been accepted for the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds. The paper is titled “What does Hrothgar ‘Read’ on the Giants’ Sword-Hilt?”

Professor Cyrus Cassells has been nominated as one of the Alpha Chi’s Favorite Professors for 2017.

Lecturer Ashton Kamburoff’s poem “Revising the Hexes” was selected by Kaveh Akbar as a finalist for the 2017 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. It will appear in the print edition of the journal in February, 2018. His poem “How to Eat a Lemon” is forthcoming in Vinyl Poetry.

Professor Robert T. Tally, Jr. recently published a brief, peer-reviewed article, “Fredric Jameson and the Controversy over ‘Third-World Literature in the Age of Multinational Capitalism,’” in Global South Studies, a digital scholarship project affiliated with the journal The Global South. Dr. Tally also recently published two book reviews. His “Periodizing Utopia,” a review of Phillip E. Wegner’s Shockwaves of Possibility: Essays in Science Fiction, Globalization, and Utopia, appears in Extrapolation 57.3 (2017), and his review of Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Moaz Azaryahu’s Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet, appears in Poetics Today 37.4 (2017).

Instructor Stephen Harmon’s painting, No Name #1, has been accepted into the Small Wonders exhibition at the Maryland Federation of Art’s Circle Gallery in Annapolis, MD.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sigma Tau Delta has a book sale every first Monday and third Tuesday of the month from 9-3 in FH 108. Pick up a Sigma Tau Delta T-shirt while you’re there: a perfect stocking stuffer!

Faculty are asked to encourage their students to apply for English Department scholarships. Qualifications, types of scholarships, and an application form are available on the English Department Web site, at the “Student Resources” link. The deadline is March 1, 2018: http://www.english.txstate.edu/studentres/scholarships.html

In Graduate College news, a workshop for prospective applicants for the Celebrity Classic Scholarship and/or the Graduate College Scholarship will be held on November 29 from 5-5:30. For more information: http://signup.txstate.edu/sessions/3539-grad-college-shop-talk-webinar-tips-for-graduate-college-scholarship-applications

Coming Soon!

The next Graduate Student Drop-in happens on Thursday, December 7 from 5-6:30 pm. Stop into the Graduate Office, FH 361, for coffee, tea, refreshments, and conversation before evening classes begin.

Novelist and essayist Rivka Galchen will discuss the process of editing novels and essays with Willing Davidson, an editor at the New Yorker. The event at the Katherine Anne Porter House in Kyle is at 6:30 on Friday, December 1.

Congratulations!

Professor Rebecca Bell-Metereau recently chaired a panel titled Gender Identity and Performance at the 2017 Film and History Conference in Madison, WI. The conference theme was Representing Home: The Real and Imagined Spaces of Belonging. Rebecca also delivered a paper entitled “Transparent vs. Documentary Life.”

A book by Professor Rebecca Jackson and her co-authors, Jackie Grutsch-McKinney and Nicole Caswell, has been nominated for the 2018 College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Research Impact Award, the 2017 International Writing Centers Association (IWCA) Best Book Award, and the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) 2016 Best Book Award. The book is titled The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors.

Senior Lecturer Susan Hanson recently presented the essay “Diving Jacob’s Well” at the Literature and Ecology Colloquium at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa.

MARC student and TA Emily Rybarski presented her paper, “Intergenerational Contact: Writing for and about our Elderly,” at the Conference on Community Writing: Engaging Networks and Ecologies recently held in Boulder, CO.

Professor Steve Wilson reports that the Study Abroad program next summer in Ireland is now full. Thanks for your participation!

In a completely different kind of study abroad, on November 8 Professor Wilson discussed the Beat Generation and Jack Kerouac via Skype with an “American Novel of the 20th Century” class at the American University of Kuwait.

Lecturer Daniel Keltner recently published an article on a blog site about “5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Selling a First Book.” Here’s his take on the topic: http://blog.janicehardy.com/2017/10/5-things-i-wish-i-knew-before-selling.htm

Lecturer Stephen Harmon’s painting, Red Smeared, has been accepted for the upcoming “Small Works” exhibit at the Limner Gallery at 123 Warren Street, Hudson, NY. The show will run from December 1-30. Works from this show, including his piece, can be seen here: http://www.slowart.com/limner/current/upcoming.htm. Stephen’s paintings, Yellow Abstraction and White and Pink on Brown, were finalists in Fusion Art’s 3rd Annual Colorful Abstractions International Online Juried Art Exhibition. The show is for November 2017. Works from the show, including his pieces, can be seen here: https://fusionartps.com/3rd-annual-colorful-abstractions-art-exhibition-2017/.

A poem by Assistant Professor Cecily Parks titled “Harvest” will appear in the December issue of The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/145450/harvest

Alumni News

MATC alumna Kim Jeske was recently promoted from Senior Technical Writer to Group Manager at National Instruments in Austin, Texas. Her team is responsible for documenting the Semiconductor Test System (STS). In August, she celebrated five years at National Instruments.

Former English major and 2013 Texas State graduate Brandon Caro is featured in a recent issue of the University Star.

MATC alumna Marcia Garnet was recently promoted to Senior Technical Writer at Polycom, Inc. in Austin, Texas. Marcia writes user, administrator, developer, deployment, and installation documentation for Polycom audio, video, and solution products.

Announcing:

A very few spots are still open for the English Department’s Texas State in Ireland program. If you’re still thinking about how wonderful it would be to spend five weeks in Cork and contemplate mythology from the heights of the beautiful Irish coastline, contact Steve Wilson at sw13@txstate.edu for more information or to set up an application interview.

MATC Graduate Assistant Dyllan Scott and his wife Adele welcomed baby girl Robyn Abigail at 12:57 am, Friday, October 13. Robyn was 7 lb 13 oz, and joins brother Landyn, 3, and sister Madelyn, 1.

Please join Kathleen Peirce, Lisa Olstein, and Cecily Parks at Malvern Books (613 West 29th Street, Austin) for the launch of Kathleen’s Vault. Friday, November 3, 7pm.

Authors Jim Shepard and John Freeman will discuss the fiction and poetry of Denis Johnson at the Katherine Anne Porter House on Friday, November 3 at 6:30 pm.

Senior Lecturer Flore Chevaillier will be conducting the next Professionalizing Workshop on November 6 from 5-6 pm in FH 376. The topic will be on writing statements of purpose. For more information, contact Flore at fc@txstate.edu

The university Graduate College has a couple of important events coming up this month for grad students. On Monday, November 6, the Graduate College will present a webinar from noon-1 pm on “Formatting your Thesis/Dissertation.” http://signup.txstate.edu/sessions/3302-grad-college-shop-talk-webinar-formatting-your-thesis-dissertation-q-a. On November 29, a workshop for prospective applicants for the Celebrity Classic Scholarship and/or the Graduate College Scholarship will be held. For more information: http://signup.txstate.edu/sessions/3539-grad-college-shop-talk-webinar-tips-for-graduate-college-scholarship-applications

A forum titled “Re-writing El Otro Lado/La Frontera: The New Latino Americanism” will be presented by the Department of Modern Languages and the Department of English on November 8 from 5:30-7:30 in FH 230. The forum will feature authors and scholars Dr. José Palacios, Dr. Francisco Laguna Correa, and Dr. Carlos Abreu in a discussion of distinct narrative projects deployed by new Latinxs and Chicanxs writers to problematize their transnational experiences in the face of growing political hostilities towards Latin American immigrant communities in the United States.

The next Graduate Student Drop-In at the English Department’s graduate office (FH 361) will be on Monday, November 13 from 5-6:30 pm. Stop in for coffee, tea, refreshments, and conversation.

Sigma Tau Delta has a book sale every first Monday and third Tuesday of the month from 9-3 in FH 108. And, they will have their new T-shirts on sale. Very nice!

Faculty are asked to encourage their students to apply for English Department scholarships. Qualifications, types of scholarships, and an application form are available on the English Department Web site, at the “Student Resources” link. The deadline is March 1, 2018: http://www.english.txstate.edu/studentres/scholarships.html

Congratulations!

Max Petri, an International Studies student who took Libby Allison’s MATC “Rhetoric of Risk and Emergency Communication” course in fall 2016, developed a presentation from his course paper that was accepted at the Ninth International Research Conference for Graduate Students, November 8 at the LBJ Student Center. His paper, “Ebola in Liberia: A Narrative of the Communication Failures and Successes,” grew out of his time in the US Army where he developed a friendship and maintained correspondence with a Liberian Army officer who was in Liberia during the Ebola epidemic.

A profile of Professor Robert T. Tally and his work in spatial literary studies is scheduled to appear in this month’s issue of Texas Monthly.

Professor Rebecca Bell-Metereau was interviewed earlier this fall for a documentary by filmmaker Alexandre Phillipe, whose latest film 78/52, a feature-length exploration of Alfred Hitchcock’s shower scene in Psycho, will soon be released by IFC Midnight. In other news, Bell-Metereau’s book, Unbound Bodies, was reviewed in the New Review of Film and Television Studies (15:4, 395-399).

Lecturer Amanda North was one of ten Texas State University faculty or staff to be nominated for the Student Foundation’s Annual Foundations of Excellence award. A reception for faculty and staff awardees allowed members of Student Foundation to honor faculty and staff who have made a significant impact on their lives while students at Texas State.

Two poems by Lecturer Ashton Kamburoff, “Falsetto, Meaning False” and “Portrait as Streetlights Bloom,” are forthcoming in the winter issue of Rust+Moth. Also, her poem “Tagging Up” is forthcoming in a new anthology entitled “5 Years of Baseball Writing” which will be released through Cobalt Review in 2018.

In October, Coordinator of Graduate Programs and Senior Lecturer Flore Chevaillier participated in the “Philosophy Mixed” podcast series presented by the Texas State Philosophy Department, and KTSW. The podcast is about the correlations between narrative, corporeality, and textual materiality, which Flore examined in her first book, The Body of Writing: an Erotics of Contemporary American Fiction (The Ohio State University Press, 2013). Her recent book, Divergent Trajectories: Interviews with Innovative Fiction Writers (The Ohio State University Press, 2017), addresses how the manipulation of the materials of fiction—the page, the frames, the media, and the authoring tools that make books—call attention to the body of books.