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.