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.