drea brown was invited to present at the Texas Humanities sponsored event Poetic Legacies: Interpreting New Texts from Writers Inspired by Phillis Wheatley Peters, held at Texas Christian University in September 2023. They presented on two panels “Phillis Wheatley in the Classroom: A Roundtable Discussion” and “Creative Reflections on Phillis Wheatley” at the Phillis Wheatley Festival at Jackson State University in November 2023. drea’s poem “karintha at dusk noon and midnight” was featured as part of Cane: A New Critical Edition & Oracular Card Deck edited by Diane Exavier, Carlos Sirah, Anne de Marcken, published by The 3rd Thing Press, in October 2023. Their essay in verse “How Strangely Changed: Phillis Wheatley in Niobean Myth & Memory” is published in Niobes: Antiquity, Modernity, Critical Theory, edited by Mario Telò and Andrew Benjamin, forthcoming in February 2024 from The Ohio State University Press. 

Katie Kapurch and Jon Marc Smith’s book BLACKBIRD, with a foreword by Cyrus Cassells, was published on November 14. The Penn State UP book is about Black musicians’ influences on and responses to the Beatles and is supported by a major award that Katie Kapurch received from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

MFA Poetry Candidate Sara Bawany’s poem, “Uncles of Palestine,” was nominated for a  Pushcart Prize by  FlowerSong Press. The poem was published in Sara Bawany’s new book, Quarter Life Crisis. 

Chris Dayley, Meghalee Das (MATC alum and Texas Tech Doctoral Candidate), Isidore Kafui Dorpenyo (George Mason University), Aimee Kendall Roundtree, and Miriam F. Williams’s article, “Evaluating Immigrants’ Perceptions of U.S. Banks’ Diversity and Inclusion Claims/Initiatives,” will be published in the next guest-edited special issue of Technical Communication. This IRB-approved study included text-mining, content analysis, thematic analysis, and interviews with U.S. immigrants from the Global South. 

Jennifer duBois’s most recent novel, The Last Language, received a rave review from The Washington Post.  

MFA Fiction Candidate D.R. Garrett’s short story, “The Color of Love” has been published in the Fall 2023 issue of the bi-annual print literary journal Awakenings Review.   

Rob Tally’s “Orcs and Revolution” appears as part of a special feature, “Nine Tolkien Scholars Responded to Charles W. Mill’s ‘The Wretched of Middle-earth: An Orkish Manifesto,'” in the current issue of Mythlore. Bianca L. Beronio, an English Department graduate and current M.A. student at Texas A&M-Commerce, also contributed to the forum, with “The Power of Fantasy: Exploring Racism in Middle-earth.” In addition, Rob’s brief article “Marxism and Spatiality” appears in the new issue of the American Book Review 44.3 (Fall 2023). And an Italian edition of Rob Tally’s 2013 book Spatiality has been published as Spazialità, translated by Eleonora Rao, Debora A. Sarnelli, and Ana Stefanofska (Milan: Mimesis Edizione, 2023); Ana Stefanovska, who was a visiting scholar at Texas State in 2018, also wrote a “Postfazione” for this volume. 

Cyrus Cassells’s collaborative poem with Brian Turner, “Corsair,” was the Poem-a-Day selection for the Academy of American Poets on November 29. 

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Miriam Williams at mfw@txstate.edu. You can also submit to the Miscellany Form here: https://www.english.txst.edu/news/Miscellany-Submission.html