Month: May 2021

Cyrus Cassells has been named the 2021 Texas Poet Laureate by the Texas State Legislature. The appointees for 2021 were selected by a legislative-appointed committee for the exceptional quality of their work and for their outstanding commitment to the arts in Texas. The 2021 appointees were formally announced through senate resolutions at the capitol on May 18th.

Aimee Roundtree is the recipient of the Mariel M. Muir Excellence in Mentoring Award for 2021. These awards are given annually to one faculty member and one staff member who demonstrate an exceptional commitment to assisting less experienced individuals in becoming more proficient in their professional activities.

The Texas State University System Board of Regents unanimously approved the motions to rename two residence halls on the San Marcos campus and name two unnamed streets on the Round Rock Campus after distinguished members of the Texas State family who are from the Black and Hispanic/Latinx communities. These recommendations include naming one of the unnamed roads on the Round Rock Campus Elvin Holt Drive, after Dr. Elvin Holt, the first Black professor in the Department of English, for his work in multicultural curriculum development.

Steve Wilson’s poems “Saraca Inima Me” and “Hello” appear in A Tether to This World: Stories & Poems About Recovery, from Main Street Rag Publishing. Steve will be one of four featured readers at the virtual book launch taking place via Zoom this evening. See details about tonight’s event here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfMI5NUMdFOa0TULRhJGdowl94FLmKHlw6-V3_eYCC70Ogyhw/viewform?fbzx=649879616519473957&fbclid=IwAR38K_XKFkUczqyOtwttxHV9Dm_xm3sJVbbj4RYyDHmohiyL8j5tHAtL288

Suparno Banerjee’s “An Introduction to Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008),” co-authored with Kevin C. Kyzer, was recently published in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Suparno’s review of Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s Final Frontiers: Science Fiction and Techno-Science in Non-Aligned India was published in Science Fiction Studies. 

Alan Schaefer recently presented “Fantasy, Dystopia, and Detective Instinct: Jess Franco’s Diabolical Dr. Z and Attack of the Robots” at Utopia & Dystopia: Conference on the Fantastic in Media Entertainment. His piece “‘I hear voices, like Joan of Arc’: Eddie Constantine’s Sixties Super-Spy Sendoffs” will appear on the Imagining the Impossible research blog.

John Blair has been named the winner of the 2021 Robert Frost Poetry Prize by the Robert Frost Foundation for his poem “IN THE TIN FACTORY.”

“The Spatial Imagination in the Humanities,” a virtual conference organized by Rob Tally as part of the NEH Distinguished Teaching Professorship in the Humanities project, will take place on May 20-21, 2021. The conference has been co-organized with the College of Liberal Arts, with MATC student Rachel Spradling and Dr. Aimee Roundtree. All students and faculty are welcome. Please register here: https://sc2021.wp.txstate.edu/registration-page/

Another Troy, the poetry book Susan Morrison edited (2020) of her mother’s verse, won the Gold Medal for the 2021 Human Relations Indie Book Awards in the category of Wisdom Poetry and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award.

Eric Leake’s chapter “The Empathy Framework and Social Inclusion” was published in the Handbook of Social Inclusion (Springer).

MFA graduate Tomás Q. Morín’s new poem “New Year’s Eve” appears in The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/magazine/poem-new-years-eve.html 

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

On May 11, Graeme Wend-Walker was the guest on KZSM’s “Bookmarked” with Priscilla Vance Leder, where he discussed his upcoming book on Russell Hoban.

Rob Tally was the keynote speaker for “Spatial Modernities: Mapping the Physical and Psychological World,” a symposium of the Centre for Modern Studies Postgraduate Forum, University of York, UK, on May 14, 2021. His talk was titled “The Utopia of the Mirror: Modern Reflections, Postmodern Spaces.” Rob Tally will give an invited talk, “Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Spatial Literary Studies,” at Ovidius University at Constanta, Romania, on May 24, 2021, via Zoom.