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