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.