Sara Ramírez was recently appointed to the Chicana and Chicano Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Executive Committee for the Modern Language Association. Sara will serve on the committee for five years.

MFA fiction student Diamond Braxton was recently nominated for Best Microfiction for her story “A Piece of You,” which appeared in Stanchion, and was also nominated for Best of the Net 2022 for her piece “Sugar Rush,” featured in The Hellebore.

Leah Schwebel’s forthcoming book Tropes of Engagement: Chaucer’s Italian Poetics is now under contract with the University of Toronto Press. Leah’s piece “Chaucer and the Fantasy of Retroactive Consent” was published in the most recent issue of Studies in the Age of Chaucer.

Cyrus Cassells was recently interviewed for The Academy of American Poets.

MA Literature student Ali Armstrong’s poem “Ode to the Sky” appears in the latest issue of Literature Today.

MFA fiction graduate Caleb Ajinomoh has been awarded a MacDowell Fellowship.

Susan Morrison’s interview, “Story into Theory, Theory into Story: A Conversation on Braided Scholarship,” with Catriona Sandilands was published in Climate Changes Global Perspectives (Series: Challenges of Modernity) edited by Lena Pfeifer, Molina Klingler, and Hannah Nelson-Teutsch.

Vanessa Couto Johnson’s second full-length poetry book pH of Au was published on January 3rd. Additionally, Vanessa had six poems published in journals in December 2022: “Ginger(ly) braid” in Rough Cut; “there, a pet’s ick, lowing” and “i.e., b-tter” in The Broken City; “chatoyancy and release” in Vagabond City Lit ; “I’m all dewclaws” in The Shore; and “that’s pseudorandom” in Bombfire.

MFA poetry candidate Cathlin Noonan’s poem “Cirrhosis” will be published in Pidgeonholes on February 10th. Cathlin will present a sequence of poetry titled, “Scrying a Sequence: Transnational Irish Poetry from the Southwest,” at the 44th annual Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA) conference, taking place in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in February.

MFA fiction student Michael Ndubuisi Agugom’s poem “A Walk with My Father in ’29” is out in the UK, published by the Goatshed Press in their anthology, Goatshed One. Also, Michael’s short fiction “The Happiest People in the World” is coming out soon in Four Palaces Publishing’s anthology, Desire to Escape.

Several members of the English Department gave talks at the 2023 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in San Francisco, Jan. 5-8. Simon Lee presented “Addressing Stigma: Demonized Locales in Pat Barker’s Fiction”; Ruben Zecena presented “Dreaming the Impossible: Exploring Queer Migrant Melancholia in I Carry You With Me (2020)”; and Rob Tally gave two talks, “‘The Arm that Wields a Pick or Drives a Spike’: Melville and Marxist Literary Criticism” and “On Poe’s Late Style: Versatility and Transgression in the 1849 Tales.”

Whitney May’s essay “The Way the Cookie Doubles: Cripping the Cyber-Gothic of Black Mirror’s AI Tech” and Rob Tally’s “The Utopia of the Mirror: Angst, the Uncanny, and the Postmodern Mise-en-abyme” both appear in Humanity in a Black Mirror: Essays on Posthuman Fantasies in a Technological Near Future, edited by Jacob Blevins and Zahi Zalloua (McFarland 2023).

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Miriam Williams at mfw@txstate.edu.