The Department of English is proud of the achievements of all its graduate students. Recently, a committee of graduate faculty had the difficult project of selecting this year’s Outstanding Graduate Student in English from a truly exceptional group of nominees. This year’s Outstanding Graduate Student in English, Aaron Hand, has a remarkable record of publication and teaching but also of enriching the education and lives of the disadvantaged and incarcerated through initiatives at the national, state, county, and community levels. Appreciation goes to faculty who nominated or reviewed nominees’ materials in an abbreviated schedule. Aaron’s nomination materials have been forwarded to the College and will be reviewed there for the Outstanding Graduate Student in Liberal Arts award.

Whitney May is a Non-Tenure Line Workload Release Recipient for the 2023-2024 academic year. During this time, Whitney will complete a project on the American circus clown in post-war literature and popular culture. On March 13th, Whitney gave an invited guest lecture for a mass communication course at Delaware County Community College; the talk was on TikTok citizen journalism and the ongoing uprising in Iran.

Rob Tally’s latest book, The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies, is now available.

Poems by Cecily Parks, Kathleen Peirce, and Steve Wilson appear in Little Poems, a new volume in the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series.

Vanessa Couto Johnson’s poem “overtime” appears in issue 3.1 of Concision Poetry Journal.

MFA poetry student Rebecca D. Oxley’s poem “A Short List of Flies” has been accepted for publication for the Spring Issue of EQUINOX: Poetry and Prose.

The Department of English was represented at the 44th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando, Florida, by Suparno Banerjee, who contributed to the panel discussion “Global Methods/Knowledges Toward Rethinking SF/Fantastic Theory,” and Graeme Wend-Walker, who delivered his paper “The End of All Worlds: Young Adulthood’s Ragnarök.” On a writers panel, Graeme also read from his novel-in-progress, Space Mutant Sex Robots in the Anthropocene.

A review of Cyrus Cassells’s The World That the Shooter Left Us was recently published in Salamander.  

MFA fiction student Kayla King’s creative nonfiction piece “The Indictment of Robert Frost” will appear in the upcoming issue of Dublin-based journal Sonder Magazine. The issue will be launched on March 23 in Dublin and is also available for pre-order.

Tune in to the First-Gen Podcast to hear Octavio Pimentel in conversation with first-generation faculty, students, and staff on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3fZuVaNQH0TxvTtCArFnFK

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/…/the-first-gen…/id1671641263

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