Year: 2020

Cyrus Cassells is a finalist for Texas Poet Laureate. This designation is the highest designation that the Texas Legislature gives in the arts.

Steve Wilson’s poem “The Soft Shell Turtle” was featured on Anchor.FM’s December 5th broadcast of “The Sunday Poems with Ken Hada.” Steve’s poem appears in Elegies and Odes: Eco-Poetry from the Gulf Coast, which was the focus of the December 5th show. You can listen to the poem at the 13:30 minute-mark on this link: https://anchor.fm/ken-hada/episodes/Episode-115-Elegies–Odes-Eco-Poetry-from-the-Texas-Gulf-Coast-endcn4/a-a41ph9m?fbclid=IwAR1WzN_RYXzgdvIhTGsIYjZ9TXs9B55TzQcOP5IYZ2yi67-y8g-Ai8HlkoM

Katie Kapurch has been awarded a 2021 Research Enhancement Program Grant, which will support her ongoing research about Black music and the Beatles, specifically in relation to Billy Preston. On a related note, Dr. Kapurch and Jon Marc Smith recently published “Blackbird Fly: Paul McCartney’s Legend, Billy Preston’s Gospel, and Lead Belly’s Blues.” The article appears in a special issue on the White Album of the journal Interdisciplinary Literary Studies (Penn State UP) and can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.5325/intelitestud.22.1-2.0005 

Kathryn Ledbetter’s essay titled “Edmund Yates and Women Writers of the World” appears in the latest issue of Women’s Writing. Her essay is part of a special issue on “Women and Labour in the Nineteenth Century,” guest edited by Lisa Surridge and Mary Elizabeth Leighton. 

MFA Fiction student Nkiacha Atemnkeng’s essay, “‘Try again next time’: My three visa rejections,” which was published in The Guardian, has been featured as an editor’s pick in the online platform for best essays, Longreads. The essay was also produced recently on The Guardian’s Audio Long Reads: https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2020/nov/30/try-again-next-time-my-three-visa-rejections-podcast . Nkiacha’s music essay, “The Sound of The Lion King,” which he wrote in Amanda Scott’s Editing the Professional Publication course, has been published by Porter House Review: https://porterhousereview.org/articles/the-sound-of-the-lion-king/

MATC graduate Meghalee Das won 1st Prize in Texas Tech University Graduate School’s 2020 Arts & Humanities Graduate Student Research Conference in the area of Digital Communications for her presentation, “Examining the Zoom Home Page as an Artifact of Global Technical Communication.”  Meghalee is currently enrolled in Texas Tech’s PhD in Technical Communication & Rhetoric Program. 

John Blair’s poem “Burning” is the 2020 winner of the Briar Cliff Review Poetry Prize and will be published early next year.  His short story “Flagstaff” is a current finalist for the Saturday Evening Post’s Great American Fiction award (the winner will be announced in January) and will be published in the Post’s annual fiction anthology.

Chris Margrave’s short film, “Thou Shall Not,” which he co-wrote and co-produced, recently won Best Film at the 48 Hour Film Project competition held in Austin, Texas.  The short narrative film—which also earned awards for Best Directing, Best Editing, Best Actress, and Best Costume—will screen at the 2021 Filmapalooza Film Festival in Washington, D.C.

Pinfan Zhu’s article “Well-received Chinese Rhetorical Strategies as Identified in the Public Speeches and Reports of Chinese Leaders” was published in the Journal of Media and Communication Studies. https://academicjournals.org/journal/JMCS/article-abstract/5B8FED865476

Hannah Barton, an English graduate who is now a graduate student at the University of Glasgow, reviewed a book-event sponsored by the British journal U.S. Studies Online featuring Rob Tally on his book, Topophrenia and J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary cartography. Her review can be found here:  https://usso.uk/what-do-maps-mean-to-you/

“On Political Formalism,” Rob Tally’s review of Anna Kornbluh’s The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space, appears in the current issue of symploke: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/symploke.28.1-2.0501?seq=1

MARC student Ana B. Freeman’s piece “The Science Teacher’s Daughter” was published in Electric Literature: https://electricliterature.com/the-science-teachers-daughter-by-ana-b-freeman/

Suparno Banerjee’s book Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybriditywas recently published by University of Wales Press. His review of Glyn Morgan and C. Palmer-Patel’sSideways in Time: Critical Essays on Alternate History Fiction(2019), “Examining Alternate Histories,” appears in Science Fiction Studies. He also presented a paper “Indian Science Fiction and the Politics of Eutopia” at South West Conference for Asian Studies, Virtual Conference, October 23-24, 2020, which was originally scheduled to take place at Texas State University.

Geneva M. Gano presented the keynote address at the Brandeis Novel Symposium on Willa Cather’s 1925 novel, The Professor’s House. Her talk was titled, “Adventurers in the Land of Enchantment: Ashtrays, Old Pots, and ‘Something Else.’”

Jon Marc Smith was recently interviewed about his novel Make Them Cry, co-written with Smith Henderson. The interview appears in The Big Thrill: https://www.thebigthrill.org/2020/10/debut-spotlight-smith-henderson-and-jon-marc-smith/

Susan Morrison’s article, “Slow Practice as Ethical Aesthetics: The Ecocritical Strategy of Patience in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale,” has just appeared in the Special Issue: 2020 Ecocriticism: In Europe and Beyond; 10^th Year Anniversary Issue. Ecozon@ (2020): https://ecozona.eu/article/view/3453

Eric Leake’s co-authored chapter “The Stylized Portrayal of the Writing Life in Spike Jonze’s Her” was published in Style and the Future of Composition Studies (Utah State University Press).

M.A. Literature graduate Sirsha Nandi presented “Beyond Binary: Violence of the Spaces in between in Arundhati Roy‘s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” at South West Conference for Asian Studies. Sirsha is pursuing a PhD in English at Texas A&M.

 Recent English graduate Anika Adams accepted a virtual editorial internship position with Harlequin Enterprises publishing company, a division of Harper Collins. Out of 1,745 applicants, six interns were selected. Anika was one of the two applicants selected from the United States.

Cyrus Cassells has been nominated as a candidate for Texas State Artist-Poet Laureate. This designation is the highest designation that the Texas Legislature gives in the arts.

English major Paloma Quevedo’s article “Turning Food Into Home Remedies Is My Love Language” was recently published in Bon Appétit Magazine: https://www.bonappetit.com/story/turning-food-into-home-remedies

Paloma credits Dan Price’s technical writing class for giving her the confidence to submit the piece. She is currently working on another article for Bon Appétit.

MFA Fiction student Nkiacha Atemnkeng’s article, “‘Try again next time’: My Three Visa Rejections,” is featured in The Guardian.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/29/try-again-next-time-my-three-visa-rejections?fbclid=IwAR1TouauYBNoAIUcyx6ggliQc-kBaQ0xrFY_Hq1Ik6vbMs-BNXtPR3jc7OI

Susan Signe Morrison’s article, “What it was like voting as an American in Germany right before the Berlin Wall fell,” has just appeared in The Local.de, Germany’s News in English. “In a time when US absentee ballot signatures are being questioned, author Susan Signe Morrison remembers the 1988 election and a vexed incident of signature recognition.” It can be found here: https://www.thelocal.de/20201029/what-it-was-like-voting-as-an-american-in-germany-right-before-the-berlin-wall-fell?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter. Contact Susan for a copy of the article if you cannot access it. Her article, “‘[A]n Exterior Air of Pilgrimage’: The Resilience of Pilgrimage Ecopoetics and Slow Travel from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road,” was recently published in Humanities: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/9/4/117

Graeme Wend-Walker’s “Children of the Night in a Sunburnt Country: Aristocrats and Outback Vampires” is lead chapter in a new volume from McFarland, Vampire Films Around the World: Essays on the Cinematic Undead of Sixteen Cultures.

Steve Wilson’s poetry appears in the new collection, Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast, out this week from Lamar University Literary Press.

Eric Leake attended a virtual discussion with students at Hunter College, where his article “Empathizer-in-Chief: The Promotion and Performance of Empathy in the Speeches of Barack Obama” was selected as the common reading for first-year writing courses this semester.

Allan Chavkin’s “Saul Bellow and Chicago” is forthcoming in 2021 in the print version of Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. It is currently available online here: https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_175-1

Miriam Williams has accepted an invitation to serve on The Ohio State University’s Department of Engineering Education Advisory Board. In October, she participated in a virtual panel discussion at the University of Houston-Downtown’s Biannual Forum on Plain English. In November, she will participate in a virtual panel discussion on plain language at the National Communication Association’s 106th Annual Convention.

MFA Fiction student Taylor Kirby’s poem “Synonym” was recently published in Pidgeonholes: http://pidgeonholes.com/2020/10/synonym/

Retired Professor Paul Cohen has recently published “Weatherman: Bob Dylan and the Wind” in Isis. He also published “The Latest Event in the History of the Novel” and “Theodora’s Complaint: Portraiture and Iconoclasm in Recent Fiction,” both in The Fortnightly Review. See here: https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2020/07/latest-event-history-novel/ and https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2020/10/portraiture-iconoclasm-fiction-new/

Rob Tally’s essay “Boundless Mystification” appears in South Atlantic Quarterly in a special issue devoted to Ideology. https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-abstract/119/4/779/166841/Boundless-Mystification?redirectedFrom=fulltext

His new edited book, Spatial Literary Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space, Geography, and the Imagination, has just been published by Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Spatial-Literary-Studies-Interdisciplinary-Approaches-to-Space-Geography/Jr/p/book/9780367520106

Vanessa Couto Johnson’s two poems (“aw|ry” and “habi|tit|tat”) appear in the current issue of Everything in Aspic. https://everythinginaspic.com/issues

Allan Chavkin’s entry “Saul Bellow” was published in Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature. www.oxfordbibliographies.com

MFA Poetry student Bianca Perez’s poetry series “The Good Fruit” was awarded Honorable Mention in Poetry in the 2021 San Miguel Writers’ Contest. See announcement here: https://sanmiguelwritersconference.org/2021-writers-contest-winners/

Geneva Gano participated in a roundtable discussion on “Teaching the History of the American West with Graphic Novels and Comics” at the annual Western History Association’s conference this month.  Her article “The Poetry of Ecological Witness: Robinson Jeffers and Camille T. Dungy” was published in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment. https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article/doi/10.1093/isle/isaa088/5918080?guestAccessKey=9c785cfd-4274-43f6-ba79-f57955178bd3

Sean Rose’s story “Dancer” was published in the most recent issue of Southern Humanities Review.  http://www.southernhumanitiesreview.com/533-sean-rose-dancer.html

Jon Marc Smith and co-author Smith Henderson’s article “Ten American Masterpieces That Are Actually Crime Fiction” appears in CrimeReads. https://crimereads.com/ten-american-masterpieces-that-are-actually-crime-fiction/

MFA poetry student Nour Al Ghraowi’s new piece, “How I Entered a Pandemic while Healing a War’s Wounds,” was recently published in Porter House Review. https://porterhousereview.org/articles/%E2%80%AFhow-i-entered-a-pandemic-while-healing-from-a-wars-wounds/

Miriam Williams has been appointed Editor-in-Chief of Technical Communication, the journal of the Society for Technical Communication (STC). Technical Communicationpublishes quantitative and qualitative research and serves technical communicators in academia and industry. Her appointment begins January 2021. See STC announcement here: https://www.stc.org/notebook/2020/09/21/meet-the-new-editor-of-technical-communication/

Allan Chavkin’s “Bucharest and Chicago: A Tale of Two Cities in Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December” is available online in Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_261-1

Susan Morrison was interviewed for “What Did People Use Before Toilet Paper Was Invented?” in Life’s Little Mysteries series for Live Science. (Sept 20, 2020). https://www.livescience.com/toilet-paper-history.html

Rob Talley presented a keynote address titled, “The Logic of the Situation,” at the Mapping Space, Mapping Time, Mapping Texts conference. The virtual conference was jointly sponsored by the Chronotopic Cartographies project of Lancaster University and the British Library in London.

In an essay in Rogue Women Writers, Jon Marc Smith and co-author Smith Henderson discuss the process of creating the protagonist for their novel, Make Them Cry. https://www.roguewomenwriters.com/2020/09/smith-henderson-and-jon-marc-smith-go.html

MATC graduate Gayle Davidson has accepted a Usability Experience (UX) Writer position at Thomson Reuters in Austin, Texas.

MFA fiction student Ben McCormick’s new piece,“White Hugs: On Waiting for a Lisa Murkowski Vote,” was published in Entropy.

https://entropymag.org/white-hugs-on-waiting-for-a-lisa-murkowski-vote/

Chris Dayley and Aimee Roundtree will present on the 2020 Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication’s plenary panel, “Administering Programs in a Time of Crisis.” The virtual conference will be held on October 2nd.

CrimeReads named Jon Marc Smith’s book Make Them Cry (co-written with Smith Henderson) one of its 12 books to read in September. The book was also reviewed on September 15^th in the Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-09-15/make-them-cry-jon-marc-smith-and-smith-henderson-profile 

Allan Chavkin’s article, “A Family in Crisis: A Family Systems Theory Approach to Arthur Miller’s ‘I Don’t Need You Any More,’” was recently published in The Arthur Miller Journal.

Two poems by Steve Wilson will appear in A Tether to This World: Mental Health Recovery Stories, an anthology of prose and poetry to be published by Main Street Rag Publishing next spring.

Amanda Scott was interviewed about the importance of revisions to the 2020 U.S. Census form in Popular Science. https://www.popsci.com/story/science/2020-census-impacts-online/

Nancy Wilson has received a grant from the Texas Faculty Association to purchase books supporting her development of a First-Year English course focused on service learning. The books will eventually become a part of the First-Year English Resources Library housed in Flowers Hall.

Susan Morrison edited the World War II poetry of her mother, Joan Wehlen Morrison. The volume has just been published as Another Troy by Finishing Line Press. More information is here: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/another-troy-by-joan-wehlen-morrison-edited-by-susan-signe-morrison/?fbclid=IwAR3BKtSjt2gTJYf9nJsg1H4qf_Q4klTCtWiUsSWI9tUXHil0ijRPt1DYXmI

MFA poetry graduate Meg E. Griffitts’ manuscript Hallucinating a Homestead was chosen by Traci Brimhall as the 2020 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize winner.

MATC graduate Kimberly Jeske has accepted the Director of Product Content position at Cloudflare in Austin, Texas.

James Bryant Reeves’ Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century: A Literary History of Atheismwas published on July 9, 2020 by Cambridge University Press. The book focuses on depictions of atheists and atheism throughout the Enlightenment era, arguing that imaginative, literary reactions against atheism helped sustain various forms of religious belief throughout the period. His recent article “Antislavery Literature and the Decline of Hell” was published in Eighteenth-Century Studies.

MATC graduate Michael Trice’s co-edited book Platforms, Protests, and the Challenge of Networked Democracy was published on July 8, 2020 by Palgrave MacMillan. Michael is a lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication Program.

An interview by Jon Marc Smith and Smith Henderson about their upcoming novel, Make Them Cry,was published in CrimeReads. See full interview: https://crimereads.com/what-does-it-take-for-two-people-to-actually-write-a-novel-together/

Susan Morrison’s article “Marie de France’s Saint Patrick’s Purgatory as Dynamic Diptych” was published in Le Cygne: Journal of the International Marie de France Society. Her essay “The Body: Unstable, Gendered, Theorized” appears in A Cultural History of Comedy in the Middle Ages, edited by Martha Bayless.

Recent B.A. in English graduate Cole Plunkett was awarded a scholarship to attend the MFA in Creative Writing Program at The New School in New York City.

MFA poetry student James Trask’s poem “Springtime and Single Again” was awarded Second Honorable Mention for the 15th Mudfish Poetry Prize. This year’s contest was judged by Erica Jong. This poem and three other poems by James (“Things That Can Kill You,” “The Stories,” and “A Smear of Red”) were selected for publication in the forthcoming issue of Mudfish. “A Smear of Red” previously won both 2nd prize in this year’s San Antonio Writer’s Guild Annual Writing Contest and 2nd prize for this year’s Austin Poetry Society Award. James was also a finalist for last year’s 14th Mudfish Poetry Prize.

Dr. Luan Brunson Haynes, professor (1967-2008) and Chair of the Department of English (1972-83), has published Ktimene, an historical novel set in ancient Greece. Those who know Luan know of her deep love for Greece the place, its history, and its literature. Her novel presents the epic of Odysseus through the eyes and experiences of a woman, Ktimene. As per the official description: “The narrative of Odysseus and his adventures—the Odyssey—has been a staple of ancient storytelling for millennia, but now the account of his sailing the Mediterranean has a new version: a woman has sneaked on board, in disguise. Not just any woman, but his own sister. Based on research in Greece and other locations, Luan Brunson Haynes has given us more than a glimpse of the primitive world. She has written a lively and entertaining tale of the fearless and beautiful Ktimene and her family. Come along on her far-flung journeys as this Grecian princess learns from her various roles—wife, mother, trader, hostage, heiress, protector, storyteller, ruler—and watches her children grow up to travel the known world and beyond. Through the twists and turns of fate, Ktimene is indeed the founder of civilizations.” Contact Teya Rosenberg (tr11@txstate.edu) for more information.

Please submit all announcements to the English Department’s Miscellany Submission Form found here: https://www.english.txstate.edu/news/Miscellany-Submission.html

Cyrus Cassells’ poem, “Like Christ Overturning the Moneylenders’ Tables,” in praise of journalists, appeared recently in On The Seawall: http://www.ronslate.com/like-christ-overturning-the-moneylenders-tables/. Cyrus was also awarded the Civitella Ranieri Writing Fellowship, which consists of a residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy during the 2021, 2022, or 2023 season. Cyrus was awarded this residency through a highly competitive jury process that resulted in the selection of just 30 candidates from a pool of over 165. The Fellowship will provide Cyrus with six weeks to concentrate on his work in the company of other Fellows from around the world, and includes round-trip transportation to the Center’s 15th-century castle in Umbria, Italy, as well as a private space for living and working.

Rob Tally’s article “Spatial Literary Studies” appears in Literary Geographies: https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.literarygeographies.net%2Findex.php%2FLitGeogs%2Farticle%2Fview%2F215&data=02%7C01%7Csw13%40txstate.edu%7Cf58f93bca4654225ad1608d81142f62d%7Cb19c134a14c94d4caf65c420f94c8cbb%7C0%7C0%7C637278326575416307&sdata=bEdLizqIi%2F3OmRWe8dqeQwP4KwPTwikN3IsoYj8w1Qc%3D&reserved=0. His essay “Sea Narratives as Nautical Charts: On the Literary Cartography of Oceanic Spaces” appears in the Chinese journal Foreign Literature Studies; it is an extended version of the keynote speech he gave at Ningbo University last November.

Anthony Bradley’s essay “My Mother’s Guide to Video” appears in Gayly Dreadful: https://www.gaylydreadful.com/blog/pride-2020-my-mothers-guide-to-to-video.

An essay by Miriam Williams and Natasha Jones (Michigan State University), “The Just Use of Imagination: A Call to Action,” which is a response to recent events, was published by both the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing https://attw.org/publications/the-just-use-of-imagination-a-call-to-action/  and the Spark: 4C4Equality Journal(https://teacher-scholar-activist.org/) in June.

Two essays by MFA fiction student Nkiacha Atemnkeng have been accepted for publication by the South African literary magazine, The Johannesburg Review of Books.

Chase Vanderslice, an MA Literature student starting Fall 2020, has received a Texas State Graduate Merit Fellowship, a fellowship for incoming students of the highest caliber. Chase graduated from the University of Alabama with a BA in English in December 2019 and is interested in pursuing studies in Medieval literature.

Two poems by Steve Wilson, “What Isn’t There” and “Violently sundered,” will appear in Never Forgotten: 100 Poets Remember 9/11, coming out this fall.

Make Them Cry, the upcoming novel by Jon Marc Smith and his co-writer Smith Henderson, received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/smith-henderson/make-them-cry/

Rebecca Bell-Metereau and Steve Wilson have been elected to six-year terms as two of only four At-Large Members of the Board of Directors for the Texas Faculty Association.

MFA poetry graduate A.R. Rogers’ poem “Interior Decorating” was short-listed for the River Heron ReviewPoetry Prize.