On October 20, Cecily Parks will deliver the Walter Harding Lecture at the State University of New York at Geneseo. Her talk is titled “When I was Thoreau at Night: A Poem’s Pathways to a Life.” The lecture is named for an important scholar of Henry David Thoreau; past lecturers include Bill McKibben, William Cronon, and Megan Marshall.

Whitney S. May’s edited collection Encountering Pennywise: Critical Perspectives on Stephen King’s IT has been published by the University Press of Mississippi. The collection has been nominated for the PCA/ACA’s award for Best Edited Collection in Popular and American Culture. Shannon Shaw’s chapter “Send in the Clowns: Pennywise and the Monstrousness of Colonialism” also appears in the collection.

Rob Tally’s latest books include J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’: Realizing History Through Fantasy, part of the Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon book series, and Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora, co-edited with Melody Yunzi Li. In addition to their co-authored Introduction, “Remapping the Homeland,” the volume also includes an essay by Rob, “This Space Which Is Not One: Diaspora, Topophrenia, and the World System.” (Melody Li, a professor at the University of Houston, was a visiting speaker here in November 2019.) Learn more about the publications here:

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-11266-9

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-10157-1

Miles Wilson’s fifth book and second novel, McKenzie Rising: An American Frolic, has just been published by the University of Nevada Press. https://conta.cc/3dzY6WF

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Miriam Williams at mfw@txstate.edu.