Month: April 2024

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