Month: April 2021

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences has elected Naomi Shihab Nye, Texas State University Professor of Creative Writing, as one of its newest members. She is among 250 people chosen by the American Academy this year and the first ever elected from Texas State.

Becky Jackson’s Self+Culture+Writing: Autoethnography for/as Writing Studies (co-edited with Jackie Grutsch McKinney) is forthcoming this August from Utah State University Press.

Texas State’s Alpha Chi National Honor Society has nominated lecturer Amanda Mixon as one of the Alpha Chi Favorite Professors for 2021.

MA Literature student Luise Noé was awarded the Chancellor’s Graduate Student Award and a teaching assistantship to support five years of study in the PhD in Literature & Cultural Theory Program at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Susan Morrison’s creative nonfiction essay, “Throbbing with Life,” has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review. https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/throbbing-with-life-by-susan-signe-morrison

Debra Monroe’s interview of Cassandra Lane, author of We Are Bridges, appears in Electric Literature.

MATC graduate Jennifer Johnson presented, “Making Digital Room for the Neurodivergent in Classes,” at TEDxTalks. The talk is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOksp3mKBI8

MFA fiction student Ali Riegel was selected as the 2021-22 Clark Writer-in-Residence.

In the editorial for the May 2021 issue of Technical Communication, Miriam Williams interviewed New York Times bestselling author, editor, and cultural critic Dr. Roxane Gay. Dr. Gay, who holds a PhD in Rhetoric and Technical Communication from Michigan Technological University, discussed the importance of technical communication in her work and her vision for the future of the discipline. Technical Communication is available here: https://www.stc.org/techcomm/

Soul Schillaci’s essay, “Walk The (Color) Line: Representations of ‘White Trash’ in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina and U.S. Race/Class Dynamics,” was selected through a blind review process as the best essay of the 2020 Texas State University Writing Center Essay Contest in the Upper-Level category.

Luke Merchant’s essay, “The Structure May Change, but the Heart Stays Stagnant: What the Seventeenth Century Plague and COVID-19 Pandemic Suggests About Us,” was selected through a blind review process as the best essay of the 2020 Texas State University Writing Center Essay Contest in the Sophomore category.

Kiera Kirk’s essay, “Strangers and Self-Esteem,” was selected through a blind review process as the best essay of the 2020 Texas State University Writing Center Essay Contest in the Freshman category.

English major (and Outstanding Senior in English) Briana Gonzalez has been accepted to the University of Colorado’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. Briana will begin studies as an MFA in Poetry student this fall.

Dan Lochman was asked to edit a special issue of Sidney Journal (38.2 [2020]), which has just been released. He contributed to the issue a brief preface and an essay, “‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia is for the body…’ and soul: Energeia and Enaction in Sidney’s Apology and Arcadia.” The topic of the special issue is energeia as the forcible agent of affect and cognition in narratives and in readers of works by Sidney and writers he influenced. The issue includes an article by former MA Literature student Jessie Herrada Nance (now teaching at Portland State University): “‘Making Good in Confusion’: Energeia and Kalendar’s Garden in Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia.”

MARC graduate Lea Colchado has been accepted to the University of Houston’s PhD in Literature, Rhetoric and Composition, and Pedagogy Program. Lea will begin studies in fall 2021 with full financial support for the five-year program. Lea thanked Drs. Geneva Gano, Becky Jackson, and Nancy Wilson “for their continuous guidance, fuerzas, mentorship, and unwavering belief in me.”

Geneva Gano published a dual book review of two recent scholarly biographies in the Cleveland Review of Books. Read “Writing Willa Cather” here: https://www.clereviewofbooks.com/home/melissa-j-homestead-daryl-w-palmer-willa-cacther-review-gano

English major Oscar Montes has been accepted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and will begin studies as an MFA in Poetry student this fall.

MATC graduate Jenny Joy Van De Walle was promoted to Communications Lead for Texas State University’s IT Assistance Center. See advice and updates from Jenny on Texas State’s Division of Information Technology Blog: https://doit.wp.txstate.edu/author/jv1260/

B.A. in English graduate Langston Neuburger has been offered admission to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures Program and a Graduate College Fellowship Award, which covers tuition and includes a stipend.

MA Literature Program Graduate Assistant Amber Avila has been accepted to the Master of Professional Studies in Publishing program at George Washington University with a $5000 entrance scholarship.

English major Maddie Gummer has been accepted to the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College and will begin studies as an MFA in Poetry student this fall.

Rebecca Bell-Metereau presented “Can Movies Save the Planet? Silkwood and Other Eco Warriors” on the “Ecocinemas and Local Interventions” at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference.

MATC graduate Allison Derton was promoted to Senior Technical Writer at Emerson Automation Solutions in Round Rock, Texas.

MA Literature student Austin Winn, who holds a Teaching Assistantship and is soon to graduate, has been accepted by the PhD in Literature program at University of North Texas.

Susan Morrison was recently honored by Texas State University with the title of University Distinguished Professor. This award honors individuals whose performance in teaching, research, and service have been exemplary and recognized at the state, national, and international levels. Dr. Morrison will retain the title for the duration of her service at Texas State. Dr. Morrison has also been nominated for consideration by the Texas State University System (TSUS) Board of Regents for the Regents’ Professor Award.

Susan Morrison’s article, “Insistent, Persistent, Resilient: The Negative Poetics of Patient Griselda,” has just appeared in Medieval Feminist Forum.

Katie Kapurch’s chapter, “The Beatles, Gender, and Sexuality: I Am He as You Are He as You Are Me,” is included in the edited collection, Fandom and the Beatles: The Act You’ve Known for All These Years, published by Oxford University Press (2021). For book details, see https://global.oup.com/academic/product/fandom-and-the-beatles-9780190917869?cc=us&lang=en&

Eric Leake’s chapter, “The Multiple Lives of News Stories: Civic Literacies and Rhetorical Transformations,” has been published in the freely available collection Literacy and Pedagogy in an Age of Misinformation and Disinformation by New City Community Press.

Whitney S. May’s article, “‘Powers of Their Own Which Mere “Modernity” Cannot Kill’: The Doppelgänger and Temporal Modernist Terror in Dracula,” has been published in the latest issue of Gothic Studies.

MARC student Elisa Serrano has been accepted into Penn State University’s PhD program in Curriculum and Instruction and awarded a research assistantship.

MARC student Delaina Bailey has been accepted into Texas Tech University’s PhD program in Technical Communication and Rhetoric.

A German translation of Texas State MFA student Caleb Ozovehe Ajinomoh’s short story “Rites Evasion Maneuvers” appears as “Grieving for Advanced Learners” in the newest issue of Literaturbote. The English version was a finalist for last year’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

MARC graduate Manny Pina has successfully defended his dissertation in Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech University and has been hired as a tenure-track assistant professor at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi.

MARC student Sarah Rose Rosenbaum presented her paper “The Subversive Power of Shapeshifting: Trickster Ecofeminist Rhetorics” as part of the “Embodied, Material Texts” panel at the NeMLA conference.

Three poems by MFA student James Trask appear in the Windward Review and are available here: https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/65332093/windward-review

Texas State was represented at the 42nd International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts – held virtually this year from March 18 to 21 – by Suparno Banerjee (“Disaster and the Environment in 20th Century Indian Science Fiction”), Andrew Barton (“If You’re Not Scared of Death, How Can You Value Life?: Bridge Babies, Timefall Rain, and Eco-Horror in Death Stranding“), and Graeme Wend-Walker (“Children of the Night in a Sunburnt Country: Australian Vampires on Film”). Graeme Wend-Walker also read his short story, “Bangy.”