Miscellany – January 22, 2020

The National Book Critics Circle Award announced a special lifetime achievement award to recognize Naomi Shihab Nye, The Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement, which is given to a person or institution — a writer, publisher, critic, or editor, among others — who has, over time, made significant contributions to book culture. The awards ceremony in New York is March 12.

MA Literature graduate and Lecturer Whitney Shylee May presented two papers at the recent meeting of the Modern Language Association, held in Seattle: “‘It Was Only Because I Was Radically Both’: Fin De Siècle Doppelgängers and the New British Cosmopolitanism”; and “‘Many Books, Many Poes’: Pop-Culture Authorship and the Cult of Edgar Allan Poe.”

Lecturer and MFA poetry graduate Vanessa Couto Johnson has a poem in the Dialogist, accompanied by a recording of her reading the poem: https://dialogist.org/poetry/2019-week-50-vanessa-couto-johnson She also has a poem in Everything in Aspic‘s debut issue, which can be read here: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d5883acff86bf0001f42ae9/t/5df6f6dd460f77349dcd341d/1576466151495/Everything+in+Aspic+%231.pdf

MFA poetry student Anthony Bradley’s essay, “My Accent Makes Me Beautiful,” appears in the latest issue of Coachella Review: http://thecoachellareview.com/wordpress/archives-2/nonfiction/my-accent-makes-me-beautiful/

“associative thinking,” by MFA poetry graduate and Lecturer Melanie Robinson, was published online by The Boiler Journalhttps://theboilerjournal.com/2020/01/07/melanie-kristeen/

Rob Tally’s article “Said, Marxism, and Spatiality: Wars of Position in Oppositional Criticism” appears in ariel: A Review of International English Literature, in a special issue (belatedly) commemorating the 40th anniversary of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Rob’s interview with Professors Liyuan Zhu and Yang Lu of Fudan University in Shanghai has just been published in the Chinese journal Academic Research. His English responses were translated into Chinese by Dr. Fang Ying, who was a visiting scholar in the English Department here last year. The title, in English, is “Spatial Theory and Geographical Criticism: A Dialogue between Zhu Luyuan, Lu Yang, and Robert Tally.”

The D.H. Lawrence Society of North America awarded MFA fiction student Mary-Pat Hayton a partial Fellowship to attend the 15th D.H. Lawrence International Conference in Taos, New Mexico, July 12 -17, where she will present.

MFA poetry graduate Danielle Zaccagnino’s book of hybrid essays and experimental poems Suppose Muscle, Suppose Night, Suppose This is forthcoming from Mason Jar Press in August 2020.

Steve Wilson took part in a poetry reading at Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston on January 18, in support of the anthology Enchantment of the Ordinary, which includes Steve’s work.

Debra Monroe was interviewed about creating her teaching anthology—and about the genre itself and about pedagogical aims—in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. https://www.assayjournal.com/debra-monroe.html?fbclid=IwAR1N9OKDUhWMhxsYQQOGmEHgacRHWZy96AiAfqA0UWQs0W_12SfJxvu4F-s