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.