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 90th 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 20th 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