Year: 2024

Susan Morrison has been awarded an Artist Residency courtesy of the Cordts Arts Foundation in Berlin, Germany. This summer, May–July, she will be working on her book about her experiences teaching in East Germany in the 1980s and about the Stasi (secret police) file kept on her. Additionally, the University of Texas Center for European Studies has awarded her a Title VI NRC Faculty Research and Travel Grant to conduct research/interviews in Riga, Latvia in support of her book. You can read more about her residency here: http://www.women-artists-in-residence.berlin/en/artist_residency.htm.

Additionally, Susan has a book under contract with Liverpool University Press entitled Pilgrimage Ecopoetics: Material and Metaphoric Practice from the Middle Ages to the 21st Century. It is forthcoming in 2026.

Michael Ippolito of the Texas State School of Music composed five choir pieces based on five of Cecily Parks’s poems, which the Texas State Chorale, directed by Dr. Joey M. Martin, performed as part of a longer program on Sunday, April 21, at the Performing Arts Center. Cecily also gave a brief reading at the event.

Lecturer Whitney S. May’s “Son of Freedom: Dissident Iranian Rapper Toomaj Salehi” appears as a lead article in PopMatters: https://www.popmatters.com/toomaj-salehi-iranian-rap-feature. Toomaj has been sentenced to death by the Iranian government for criticizing political corruption and supporting the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in his work. His lawyer intends to appeal the sentence within the 20-day legal window; action resources can be found in the article and across platforms under #FreeTooma.

MFA Poetry grad student Cathlin Noonan’s poem “In Which I Imagine Myself as My Great Aunt Helen” appears in the latest issue of Lumina: A Literary Arts Journal: https://www.lumina-journal.com/in-which-i-imagine-myself-as-my-great-au.

Amanda Scott recently had several poems published in The Pinch and Quarter After Eight, and she was also recently featured in Hayden’s Ferry Review’s “Core Memories” interview series: https://haydensferryreview.com/blog/core-memories-amanda-e-scott.

On April 28, 2024, Cyrus Cassells participated in a panel titled “Translation: Expanding Our Horizons” at From the Margins to the Center, a virtual conference hosted by Writers & Books: https://wab.org/event/literary-conference-translation-expanding-our-horizons/.

Lecturer Kale Hensley’s creative nonfiction piece “When the Last Trumpet Sounds, I Will Be in the Mummy Room at the Museum” appears in Issue 34 of Gulf Stream Literary Magazine: https://gulfstreamlitmag.com/2024/04/16/when-the-last-trumpet-sounds-i-will-be-in-the-mummy-room-at-the-museum/.

MFA Fiction alumna Sabah Carrim was interviewed in L’Express, a daily French-language daily newspaper in her native Mauritius, in connection to her “Fading Mehndi” being awarded the 2024 Afritondo Short Story Prize (for best story by an African writer that year): https://lexpress.mu/s/sabah-carrim-une-feministe-peut-etre-une-femme-au-foyer-534109.

On April 25, Robert Tally presented “Mapping and Monsters: Critical Theory in the Teratocene,” the 2024 Babcock Lecture at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York: https://www.hartwick.edu/academics/annual-celebrations-lectures/babcock-lecture/.

For the second year in a row, reports Nancy Wilson, members of the Omega Epsilon Chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the English Honor Society, participated in Bobcat Build.

Eric Leake presented a paper, “The Personal Essay as a Reason for Writing,” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Spokane, Washington.

Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler presented two conference papers this spring: “Between Ramus and Realism: The Significance of Hobbes’s Rhetoric” at the Renaissance Society of America’s conference in March, and “Samson in the Trenches” at the South-Central Renaissance Conference in April.

On April 20, the Department of English put on an impressive display as part of a very successful Bobcat Day, thanks to the amazing work of Katie Kapurch, Shannon Shaw, and Mark Hernandez.

Announcement: Dr. Melody Yunzi Li of the University of Houston will join Rob Tally for a discussion of “Literary Cartographies from the West to the East,” featuring a presentation on Li’s new book, Transpacific Cartographies: Narrating the Contemporary Chinese Diaspora in the United States. The event is at 1:00 PM on Monday, May 6, 2024, in Flowers 113. Please spread the word, come if you can, and let Dr. Tally know if you have any questions.

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Robert Tally at robert.tally@txstate.edu. Or, preferably, you can also submit to the Miscellany Form here: https://www.english.txst.edu/news/Miscellany-Submission.html.

The Department of English congratulates undergrad Abby Myers, winner of the First-Gen Essay Contest Scholarship in the First-Year/Sophomore category! The department’s annual First-Gen celebration took place on Thursday, April 11, 2024. 

Katie Kapurch was interviewed about the history of “Blackbird” covers by Nardos Haile for “What Beyoncé’s Cover of the Beatles’ ‘Blackbird’ Means to Black History and Music: https://www.salon.com/2024/04/08/what-beyoncs-cover-of-the-beatles-blackbird-means-to-black-history-and-music/.

Kate McClancy presented her paper “‘A Chain Reaction That Would Destroy the Entire World’: Blowing Up Patriarchal Capitalism in Barbie and Oppenheimer” at the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in Boston. She also organized and chaired the Comics Arts Conference’s spring meeting at WonderCon in Anaheim.

 Diamond Braxton, MFA Fiction student, was one of the less than 10% accepted into the Tin House Summer Workshop to study under Denne Michele Norris to work on her collection of short stories (https://tinhouse.com/workshop/summer-workshop-2/). In addition, her newest fiction piece “Dreams of the Fam Who Came Before Me” is forthcoming in Foglifter’s 9.1 Spring Issue. (https://foglifterjournal.com/shop/).

 In honor of the cultural critic Fredric Jameson’s 90^th birthday this month, Robert Tally has organized a series of brief essays for the Verso Books blog site. These will feature 25 different critics, each writing on one of Jameson’s books published over the course of his 65-year career. The first, Daniel Hartley’s article on Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961), appeared on April 2, 2024 – available here: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/jameson-at-90 — and entries will be posted every few days over the next month or so. Jameson’s newest book, Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization, will be published in early May.

 Rob also presented a talk, “The Orphaned Bolg: Examining the Orkish Mind,” at The Psychologies of Middle-earth, the 20^th Annual University of Vermont Tolkien Conference, on April 13, 2024.

MFA alumna Sabah Carrim’s review of For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Era of Capitalist Realism by Robert T. Tally Jr. appears in the Modern Language Review, Vol. 119, Part 2 (April 2024).

 Texas State MFA alumnus Nkiacha Atemnkeng has been admitted into three PhD programs: the PhD in Rhetorics, Communication and Information Design at Clemson University, the Writing and Rhetoric PhD program at George Mason University and the PhD in Rhetoric, Writing and Professional Communication at East Carolina University. He is equally an alternate candidate at the PhD in Rhetoric, Scientific and Technical Communication at the University of Minnesota. In addition, Nkiacha’s historical fiction, a short story titled “Killing Achebe” will be the the anchor story for the forthcoming Bakwa 12: History fiction anthology published by Bakwa Books. Also, Nkiacha’s essay “Usain Bolting to Sylt Island” appears in The Lagos Review as part of the Migration and the Writer essay series: https://thelagosreview.ng/usain-bolting-to-sylt-island-nkiacha-atemnkeng/.

 MFA student Naomi Wilson’s poem, “As Mardou,” has been accepted for publication in Black Fire This Time, Volume 2, by Willow Books, a division of Aquarius Press. The book is set for launch in late April, courtesy of University Press of Mississippi.

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

Cyrus Cassells’s ninth book of poems, Is There Room for Another Horse On Your Horse Ranch?, was published on March 15, 2024: https://fourwaybooks.com/site/is-there-room-for-another-horse-on-your-horse-ranch/. Additionally, Cyrus has won the Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translation of a Book published in 2022 and 2023 from the Texas Institute of Letters. Cyrus won for his translation of To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2023). This is Cyrus’s second Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for translation in four years. Finally, Cyrus’s new website, designed by MFA alum Aaron Hand, is now live: https://cyruscassells.com/.

More good news: Cyrus serves as the April 2024 Guest Editor for the Academy of American Poets’ international Poem-a-Day: https://poets.org/poem-day-guest-editors-2024. In that capacity, he has chosen 22 new poems by some of America’s most revered poets to celebrate National Poetry Month. Starting April 1, the site will feature a recorded interview with Cyrus and director Mary Sutton about his process in selecting the poems. Also, a special issue of the University of Gottingen’s New American Studies Journal focusing on brand-new work by contemporary African American poets, curated and introduced by Cyrus, will be published this Spring, taught as a university class, and then be expanded to become a published anthology from University of Gottingen Press.

MFA Poetry candidate Sara Bawany is a recipient of a Summer 2024 Residency Fellowship from The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA): http://www.sundresspublications.com/news/2024/03/sundress-academy-for-the-arts-announces-winners-of-summer-2024-residency-fellowships/.

MFA alumna and genocide studies scholar Dr. Sabah Carrim has organized the Genocide Awareness Symposium at Texas State, which takes place in the Department of Philosophy, Comal Hall, April 1–12, 2024. Marking the 30^th anniversary of the genocide against the Tutsi, this event will see some of the most distinguished professors in Genocide Studies and Prevention from across the US and Canada addressing a range of pertinent issues. More information, including the complete schedule, is available here: https://www.txst.edu/philosophy/dialogue-series/genocide-awareness-symposium.html.

Also, Sabah’s short story “Fading Mehndi” has just been shortlisted in the Afritondo Short Story Prize 2024: https://www.afritondo.com/shortlist-2024.

On March 27, Leah Schwebel presented a talk, “Palm Sunday, Roman Triumphs: A Crossover,” at the New Directions in Medieval Literary Studies conference, sponsored by the Institute for Arts and Humanities and the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

On March 29, Robert Tally presented remotely an invited talk, “Spatial Criticism, Worldly and Otherworldly,” at the İzmir Democracy University in Turkey. The session was moderated by Dr. Selin Şencan, a former visiting scholar in our department.

Cathlin Noonan’s poem, “Do You Have to Pee Before We Go?” came out in the Spring issue of West Trade Review. Her poem “In Which I Imagine Myself as my Great Aunt Helen” is forthcoming in Lumina. 

The Department of English was represented at the 45th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando, Florida, by Graeme Wend-Walker (“New Audiences for Old Ghosts: Tradition and Terror in Horror Stories for Young Thais,” and Andrew Barton (“‘I’m a messed up person’: Painting, Whimsy, and Depression in Chicory: A Colorful Tale”). On a writers panel, Graeme also read his short story, “The Narrator.”

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

Robert Tally’s brief article “Sauron: Weirdly Sexy” appears in the Journal of Tolkien Research: https://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol18/iss2/1/. Also, Rob’s essay “Point-of-View as Cognitive Mapping: The Case of Mrs. Dalloway” has just been published in the American Book Review (available here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/article/921790); the same ABR issue features Rob’s review of Bruce Robbins’s Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/article/921801).

Bryce Jeter’s review of Joe Vallese, ed., It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror was recently published in Science Fiction Film and Television, Volume 17.1 (Spring 2024): 145–148. (Available here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/105/article/922166.)

Elliott Brandsma (English and Art ’13), who is working toward his PhD in Scandinavian Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has received an American Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship to fund his dissertation research in Sweden during the 2024-25 academic year. The fellowship will support his tenure as a visiting researcher in the Department of Literature and the Center for Multidisciplinary Research on Religion and Society (CRS) at Uppsala University. He is currently a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow and guest researcher in the Department of Aesthetics, Art History and Comparative Literature at Södertörns högskola in Huddinge, Sweden. 

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

On February 29, 2024, The University Star featured an article on Denae Dyck and her new book, Biblical Wisdom and the Victorian Literary Imagination. (James Reeves is quoted in the article as well.) Available here:  https://universitystar.com/25305/life-and-arts/associate-professor-to-bridge-literary-and-religious-gap-with-book/.

Associate Professor Cecily Parks’s poem “Hackberry” is featured in You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, a new anthology of previously unpublished poems releasing on April 2, edited by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón and published by Milkweed Editions in association with the Library of Congress.

Ben Reed’s personal essay, “Vicarious Incantation: The Mixtape Love Letter,” will be published in a forthcoming issue of Cream City Review. Additionally, Ben has been awarded the Nontenure Line Faculty Workload Release to develop his essay collection on the beach as a place and site of metaphor in literature, music, and film. He will take this time in Fall 2024.

On February 27, drea brown, along with other faculty from Texas State and from San Marcos High School, was a featured speaker at The Importance of Black Storytelling: Texas State’s African American Read-In in the LBJ Ballroom.

Anthony Edsall will present a talk, “Silvered Rhetoric: Demagoguery, Temporality, and Necropolitics in an Age of School Shootings,” at the Northeast Modern Language Association’s convention in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 9, 2024.

Steph Grossman’s short story “Red on Yellow” was published in Salamander #57: available at https://salamandermag.org/

The Center for the Study of the Southwest has granted MA Literature student Ali Armstrong the opportunity to visit Granbury, Texas, in March, the site of the Mitchell-Truitt Feud, to explore further research associated with her essay “The Eyes of History: Folklore, Oral Storytelling, and Regeneration Through Violence in John Graves’s Goodbye to a River: A Narrative.” Ali plans to conduct local interviews and add to her existing research on the feud done through The Wittliff Collections. She will present her findings at the Texas State Graduate Student Research Conference on Tuesday, April 2. Additionally, Ali’s “The Golden Values: Gendered Strength, Biblical, and Numerical Symbolism in Rossetti and Milton” has been accepted for the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA)’s conference, which will take place in Waco, Texas, in September 2024.

In February, Joshua Bridgwater Hamilton attended AWP and sat for a signing session for his chapbook, Rain Minnows, with the publisher Gnashing Teeth Publishing. At the People’s Literary Festival, he read his own poetry at a panel, “Ethereal Poetry of Sadness, Longing, Beauty, and the Damned.” He also chaired a People’s Literary Festival panel titled “Central Texas Bilingual Poetry: Versos del corazon de Tejas,” featuring Texas State MFA poets Abra Gist, Joe Lozano, and Bianca Pérez. Joshua’s debut full-length poetry collection, Excavator, launches April 28 with Gnashing Teeth Publishing. 

Jay Cruz presented a talk, “Critical Pedagogy as Resistance in Grimms’ Fairy Tales” at the 2024 Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference in Albuquerque, NM.

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

MATC alumna Meghalee Das, who is completing her PhD in Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech University, will become an Assistant Professor in the School of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication at James Madison University beginning Fall Semester 2024.

MFA Fiction student Charmaine Denison-George’s essay, “Impedimenta” was anthologized in Black Diaspora: Tales and Poems from the Sons and Daughters of Africa, edited by Monique Franz (Kinsman Avenue Publishing, 2024). Charmaine’s working-in-progress thesis has also been accepted for workshop with Madeleine Blais at the Eckerd College Writers in Paradise conference (January 2024).

Cathlin Noonan’s poem “That Winter, I Find Your Father’s Arrest Notice in a 1940 Newspaper” was recently published in The Citron Review: https://citronreview.com/2023/12/29/that-winter-i-find-your-fathers-arrest-notice-in-a-1940-newspaper/.

Ben Austin’s short story “Il Faut Ecouter Mac Doe,” has been published in J Journal and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

MFA Poetry candidate Em Fullenwider’s poem “Ode to a Fishman” will be published in the Winter 2024 issue of Reverie Literary Magazine.

Rob Tally’s work was recently featured in a Chinese publication, Jianqing Tuo and Yuan Zhang’s “Existential Predicament and Breakthrough of Literary Space Theory: A Study on Robert T. Tally Jr.’s Theory of Literary Cartography” in Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 43.4 (2024), 82–92: https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol43/iss4/9.

Nithya Sivashankar’s essay titled “‘Tell Pebble All About It’: Displacement and Distancing in Contemporary Picturebooks about Arab Refugees” has been published in the latest issue of Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature. The essay can be accessed here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/918613

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

Happy New Year!  

MFA Poetry student Sara Bawany’s creative nonfiction piece, “What’s in a Name?: On Mislabeling ‘Violence’” has been published in the Infrarrealista Review: https://infrarrealistas.org/whats-in-a-name/. Also, one of Sara’s poems, “Uncles of Palestine,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by her publisher, FlowerSong Press; the poem appears in Sara’s new poetry book Quarter Life Crisis. 

Denae Dyck published “Spiritual Authority for a (Post)Secular Age: Olive Schreiner’s Dreams as Literary Theology.” Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, vol. 5. no. 2, Autumn 2023, pp. 73-88, doi: 10.46911/QBRM1938. Also, at MLA 2024, Denae gave a paper entitled “Celebrating Women’s Voices: Wit, Wisdom, and Editorial Practices in the Women’s Penny Paper” (special session on Celebration and Commemoration in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press). 

Julie McCormick Weng’s book, co-edited with Malcolm Sen, Race in Irish Literature and Culture, was published in January with Cambridge University Press. The book includes her chapter “W. B. Yeats, the Irish Free State, and the Rhetoric of Race Suicide“ alongside her co-authored introduction, “The Racial Imaginaries of Irish Literature and Culture.” In 2023, Weng’s essay “Reading James Joyce in the Wake of the #MeToo Movement” published in Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism (Clemson UP), edited by Katherine Ebury, Bridget English, and Matthew Fogarty. 

Cyrus Cassells’s To The Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu received another strong review recently: https://www.greenlindenpress.com/interviews-and-reviews#/salvador-espriu/; a new hardback collector’s edition of the book was published on November 30. Cyrus has also been selected as one of 12 award-winning poets who will serve as guest editors for the Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day” series in 2024: https://poets.org/twelve-award-winning-poets-serve-guest-editors-poem-day-2024. 

Dr. Ana Stefanovska, who was a visiting scholar in the English Department in 2018, has just published her first book, Lo spazio letterario del neorealismo [The Literary Space of Neorealism] (Padova University Press, 2023): https://www.padovauniversitypress.it/en/publications/9788869383502. 

Cathlin Noonan recently had three poems published in Platform Review: https://www.artsbythepeople.org/platform-review-home/2023/12/1/cathlin-noonan. 

William Jensen’s newest short story “Are We Decent People?” recently appeared in Bull: https://mrbullbull.com/newbull/fiction/are-we-decent-people/. 

MFA alumna Dr. Sabah Carrim presented an invited talk, “The Fundamentals of Genocide Studies and Mass Atrocity Prevention,” at Izmir Democracy University in Turkey, via Zoom. The event was hosted by former Texas State visiting scholar Selin Şencan, who is now a professor of English there. 

MFA Fiction student Hannah Smothers’s short story “Yolo” was published in Five South: https://fivesouth.net/yolo-by-hannah-smothers/. Also, Hannah’s essay “Intruders” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the Ocean State Review. 

Robert Tally’s book The Fiction of Dread: Dystopia, Monstrosity, and Apocalypse (Bloomsbury) has just been published: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/fiction-of-dread-9781501375866/. Rob’s book Representing Middle-earth: Tolkien, Form, and Ideology (McFarland) also appeared recently: https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/representing-middle-earth/. A short book in Turkish, Robert T. Tally Jr. Ile Mekânsallik Üzerine [On Spatiality with Robert T. Tally Jr.], edited, translated, and organized by Emel Aras, is now available: https://hece.com.tr/kategori/Soylesi/Mekansallik_Uzerine.html; Dr. Aras was a visiting scholar in the English Department in 2021–22. Rob has also published two articles recently: “Unmappably Cosmopolitan: Reconfiguring Criticism of World Literature in an Era of Globalization,” Migrating Minds: A Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism 1.1 (Fall 2023): 7–24 (available at: https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/1086508) and, in Chinese, “The Logic of the Situation: Space, Mapping, and the Sense of Place” (translated by Dr. Fang Ying), Journal of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies 34.6 (November 2023): 53–65. Additionally, at the MLA 2024 convention, Rob presented “The Clouds Overhead, the Actual Soil, and the Map: Real-and-Imagined Spaces of Hawthorne’s Literary Cartography” on a panel titled Hawthorne and Space, sponsored by the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society, and he participated in “Celebration and Spatiality: A Geocritical Roundtable.” 

Dr. Fang Ying, Professor of English at Zhejiang Gongshang University and a former visiting scholar in the English Department in 2017, has received a prestigious government award, the second prize of the 22nd Zhejiang Philosophy and Social Sciences Outstanding Achievement Award, for her Chinese translation of Robert Tally’s 2013 book Spatiality. 

MFA alumnus Michael Agugom’s short story “The Happiest People in the World,” published in Desire to Escape by Four Palaces Publishing, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His short story “True Yarn” is due out this year in African Ghost Short Stories, published by Flame Tree Publishing: https://blog.flametreepublishing.com/fantasy-gothic/gothic-fantasy-successful-submissions-african-ghost-0. 

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