Dr. Sara A. Ramírez’s “Making (Sense of) Place: Sandra Cisneros’s Literary Arts Activism in the Midwest,” appears in the latest issue of American Studies 62.4 (Winter 2023), a special issue titled Unsettling Global Midwests: Placekeepings. https://journals.ku.edu/amsj/article/view/18556.
Ben Reed’s “Negotiating a Curse of Influence,” a review of Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories by Steve Almond, appears in the current issue of The Porter House Review: https://porterhousereview.org/articles/negotiating-the-curse-of-influence-a-review-of-steve-almonds-truth-is-the-arrow-mercy-is-the-bow-a-diy-manual-for-the-construction-of-stories/.
“Historicizing the Present,” on Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Robert Tally’s contribution to Verso’s Jameson at 90 blog series (which he also co-organized with Sebastian Budgen) is now available: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/historicizing-the-present.
Rob also served as respondent for “Two Scholars, Same Neighborhood, Divergent Readings: Rereading Toni Morrison through Spatial Literary Studies,” featuring Herman Beavers (author of Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison) and Marilyn Sanders Mobley (author of Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing), sponsored by the Toni Morrison Society, at the American Literature Association conference in Chicago, May 25, 2024.
MA Literature graduate Anna Marie Elliott was recently featured in a Texas State Newsroom story, “Father and daughter awarded graduate degrees at Spring 2024 Commencement”: https://news.txst.edu/student-experience/2024/father-daughter-awarded-graduate-degrees.html.
In addition to receiving a 2024–25 American Scandinavian Fellowship, College of Liberal Arts alum Elliott Brandsma (B.A. English and Art, 2013) has been awarded summer and academic year fellowships through the U.S. Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Area Studies program. He has also been awarded a $2,000 scholarship from the Finlandia National Foundation in recognition of his Finnish language studies, his academic achievements, and his contributions to the study of Finland.
MFA Creative Writing grad student, James Wade, was a featured author at the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association’s Spring Conference, as well as the Texas Library Association’s annual conference, both in San Antonio. https://www.mountainsplains.org/springcon-2024-keynote. James was also a finalist for the Austin Chronicle’s “Best Fiction Writer in Austin”: https://vote.austinchronicle.com/arts-and-entertainment/fiction-writer.
MFA Poetry student Cathlin Noonan’s poem “Haunting the Archive” was published in the latest issue of Meridian: https://readmeridian.org/m/view/48/#page=86.
Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or, preferably, you can also submit to the Miscellany Form here: https://www.english.txst.edu/news/Miscellany-Submission.html.