Author: cah312

Announcing:

Sigma Tau Delta has a book sale every first Monday and third Tuesday of the month from 9-3 in FH 108. And, they will have their new T-shirts on sale. Very nice!

Persona, the Texas State University student literary periodical that has published since 1963, is looking for students interested in serving in editorial positions – Managing Editor, Poetry Editor, Fiction Editor – and other possible staff positions, for the 2017-2018 issue. Please contact Roger Jones (RJ03@txstate.edu) by Wednesday October 18^th if you are interested in serving in one of these positions.

The Children’s Literature Association’s annual conference will be in San Antonio June 28-30, 2018. The conference theme is “Refreshing Waters/Turbulent Waters,” and proposals for papers are due October 15. The call for papers and portal for submitting proposals can be found on the ChLA website: http://www.childlitassn.org/2018. For more information, contact conference chair, Marilynn Olson, mo03@txstate.edu.

Interested in spending the summer in Ireland? Join the English Department’s Texas State in Ireland program for five weeks in Cork. Contact Steve Wilson at sw13@txstate.edu for more information or to set up an application interview. The program’s 15 spots usually fill by mid-November.

Broadview Press representative Dave Caulfield took time from his busy schedule on campus to visit Teya Rosenberg’s Canadian Literature course on Thursday October 5. He read Al Purdy’s poem “At the Quinte Hotel,” gave students some background on Purdy, talked about his own enthusiasm for Canadian poets and poetry, and discussed how being an English major connects with his work for Broadview. He also answered a wide range of questions about Canada and about publishing. Thanks to Dave and to the students of English 3393 for asking great questions.

Professor Robert T. Tally announces the results of a recent flurry of scholarly activity. Here are a few things to be watching for:

• A profile of Tally and his work in spatial literary studies is scheduled to appear in Texas Monthly, hopefully in the November issue;
• His latest edited collection of essays, https://www.routledge.com/Teaching-Space-Place-and-Literature/Tally-Jr/p/book/9781138047037, comes out on November 9 and will feature an essay by Assistant Professor Geneva Gano;
• He will be the keynote speaker for the Korean Society of East-West Comparative Literature’s 2017 conference at Dongguk University, Seoul, on November 11-12, 2017. His talk is titled “The Aesthetics of Distance: World Literature after the Digital Turn.”

Senior Lecturer Keri Fitzgerald and two graduate students from the MA in Rhetoric and Composition program, Arun Raman and Rachel Elliott, will be leading a round-table discussion on the role of writing centers in confronting hate and discrimination on college campuses at the International Writing Center Association Conference on November 19 in Chicago, IL. Their session is titled, ““Complicating the Center: Confronting Hate and Discrimination.”

Congratulations!

Recent MFA graduate Michaela Hansen is the winner of the short fiction prize awarded by American Short Fiction for her story, “The Devil in the Barn.” Michaela’s work has been published in McNeese Review, and is forthcoming from Fourth Genre. Michaela worked as Managing Editor for the English Department’s literary publication, Front Porch Journal. http://americanshortfiction.org/2017/10/09/2017-american-short-fiction-prize-winners/

Professor Robert T. Tally’s essay “Of Other American Spaces: The Alterity of the Urban in the U.S. National Imaginary” appears in Space Oddities: Difference and Identity in the American City, edited by Stephan L. Brandt and Michael Fuchs (Wien & Münster: LIT Verlag, 2017), 27–45. He also has another article, “Three Rings for the Elven Kings: Trilogizing Tolkien in Print and Film,” which appears in the new issue of Mythlore 131 (Fall/Winter 2017): 175–190.

Professor Steve Wilson has been awarded a grant from the Fulbright Occasional Lecturer Fund to bring Fulbright Scholar Dr. Geetanjali Joshi (India) to campus for a four-day visit March 25-28. Dr. Joshi will present on the Beats and Hinduism in Steve’s undergraduate class on Women and the Beat Generation, as well as on Allen Ginsberg and Hinduism in Drs. Blair and McClancy’s Masterpieces of American Literature to 1865 classes. Steve has been awarded more OLF grants than any other faculty member at Texas State.

English Department Computer Lab Coordinator Matt Greengold has been elected to a one-year term on the Staff Council.

Lecturer Ben Reed has had two abstracts accepted for NeMLA 2018 in Pittsburgh. His paper “Messenger in a Bottle: Kurt Vonnegut’s Satirical Drawings in Breakfast of Champions” was accepted for the session titled “Art, Responsibility, and Satire: The Challenges of Kurt Vonnegut’s Fiction,” while Ben’s short story “Angle and Distance” was selected for the creative writing round table “Monsters and Monstrosity: A Tribute to Mary Shelley.”

Professor Mark Busby attended the Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers meeting in San Antonio, September 29^–30. He read from his new poetry collection, Through Our Times. Three of his poems, “Notification Officer,” “Symbiosis,” and “On the Death of My Neighbor’s Son,” appear in Writing Texas 2016-2017.

Professor Kathleen Peirce’s new book, Vault, is available from New Michigan Press. http://newmichiganpress.com/index.html#peirce

Lecturer Ross Feeler’s short story, “Varieties of Religious Experience,” was recently published online in Hypertext Magazine. https://www.hypertextmag.com/

Announcing:

Sigma Tau Delta has a book sale every first Monday and third Tuesday of the month from 9-3 in FH 108. And, they will have their new T-shirts on sale. Very nice!

Persona, the Texas State University student literary periodical that has published since 1963, is looking for students interested in serving in editorial positions – Managing Editor, Poetry Editor, Fiction Editor – and other possible staff positions, for the 2017-2018 issue. Please contact Roger Jones (RJ03@txstate.edu) by Wednesday October 18th if you are interested in serving in one of these positions.

The Children’s Literature Association’s annual conference will be in San Antonio June 28-30, 2018. The conference theme is “Refreshing Waters/Turbulent Waters,” and proposals for papers are due October 15. The call for papers and portal for submitting proposals can be found on the ChLA website: http://www.childlitassn.org/2018. For more information, contact conference chair, Marilynn Olson, mo03@txstate.edu.

Interested in spending the summer in Ireland? Join the English Department’s Texas State in Ireland program for five weeks in Cork. Contact Steve Wilson at sw13@txstate.edu for more information or to set up an application interview. The program’s 15 spots usually fill by mid-November.

 

Congratulations!

MATC alumna Dr. Susan Rauch has accepted an appointment as a Lecturer in Professional Writing in Science Communication & Technology at Massey University School of English and Media Studies, Palmerston North, New Zealand. Susan will teach, manage tutors in the writing for science communication and technology course curriculum, and redesign the writing for science communication course curriculum.

Professor John Blair’s poem “The Law of Unintended Consequences” has been awarded the 2017 Cultural Center of Cape Cod’s National Prize for Poetry. The poem and details of the prize can be found at http://www.cultural-center.org/submissions-proposals/#submissions

Senior Lecturer Keith Needham was featured in the September 28 issue of the University Star for his very special mentoring relationships in Bobcat Bond: http://star.txstate.edu/2017/09/28/bobcat-bond-program-forms-lifelong-friendships/

Lecturer Allison Grace Myers’s essay “Perfume Poured Out” was listed as Honorable Mention in the 2017 Best American Essays. The essay originally appeared in Image.

Three poems by Lecturer Meg Griffitts will be published in the #Ghost Motel Anthology by White Stag Publishing, and another poem titled “Prevention is the Best Self-Defense” will be in Crab Fat Magazine. Meg was a finalist for the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize.

Lecturer Stephen Harmon’s painting, Abstract #2, has been accepted to the Austin Visual Arts Association Fall Show at Austin Art Space Studio & Gallery, 7739 Northcross Drive. The exhibition will be held Oct. 13-Nov. 4, and there will be an opening reception on Friday, Oct. 13, 6-8 p.m.

Coming Soon!

Novelist and Endowed Chair in Creative Writing, Karen Russell, will be reading from her work on Tuesday, September 26 at 3:30 at the Wittliff Collections in Alkek Library. Karen won the 2012 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her first novel, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. She is a graduate of the Columbia MFA program, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2012 Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and a recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” fellowship. Russell is the author of St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories, and Sleep Donation: A Novella.

The MARC program will be hosting a workshop on Wednesday, September 27 from 5-6 p.m. in FH 376 on “Writing the Curriculum Vitae.”

Assistant Professor Cecily Parks is organizing a screening and conversation on Tuesday, October 3^rd at 3:30 p.m. in Room G02 of Centennial Hall, about Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry. The film was executive produced by Robert Redford and Terrence Malick, and focuses on novelist, poet, essayist, farmer, and activist Wendell Berry, one of the more vital figures in the American environmental movement. The filmmaker, Laura Dunn, and James McWilliams (History), will stay afterward for a conversation and Q & A. The event is co-sponsored by History, Philosophy, Sociology, and the College of Liberal Arts.

Senior Lecturer Edward Schaefer will be hosting a film screening on Thursday, October 12, at 7:30 p.m. in JCM 2121. The film is titled Through the Repellent Fence. The film’s producer, Jeffrey Brown, and director, Sam Wainwright Douglas, will be on hand for a Q&A and reception following the screening.

Also on October 12, Philipp Meyer will be reading from his work at 3:30 at the Wittliff Collections in Alkek Library, and on October 13 he will be presenting again at 7:30 at the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center in Kyle. Philipp is the author of the critically lauded novel American Rust, winner of the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a New York Times Notable Book. In 2010 he was named one of the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” fiction writers to watch. His novel The Son was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was recently adapted into an AMC television series. He is a graduate of Cornell University and has an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a James Michener Fellow.

Professor Susan Morrison will be speaking on a panel at a Cold War Spies roundtable on Monday, October 16 at 5pm in FH 230. A reception will precede the event. Her talk is titled “Teaching in East Germany in the 1980s: Interpreting my Stasi File.”

MFA student and Teaching Assistant Melanie Robinson and Claudia Cardona have been selected for an upcoming public art project (under their poetry collective name Caesura), as a part of a large festival called Luminaria to be held November 10-11 in Hemisfair Park in San Antonio. Their project, Ololyga: Think Like a Mouth, will be located at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. It explores the contributions and history of women in poetry and specifically highlights women of color, queer women, and local women poets who are fundamental to the history of poetry. Ololyga: Think Like a Mouth is a huge interactive art piece, and they need volunteers to help with construction. Please contact Melanie if you have the time and skills.

Congratulations!

Assistant Professor Geneva Gano’s article, “Michelle Tea’s Mission District Frontier: Nostalgia, Gentrification, Valencia,” was recently published in the Fall, 2017 issue of Studies in the Novel. Gano also presented on this topic at the American Literature Association Symposium on Regionalism and Place in American Literature held in New Orleans this month. Her paper was titled “Gentrification and Local Color: Literary Marketplacemaking in the San Francisco Mission District.”

Undergraduate student Lea Colchado was awarded a Texas State University Undergraduate Research Fellowship ($1000) to pursue archival research at Stanford University related to Geneva Gano’s ENG 3343 course on the Work and Career of Sandra Cisneros. Lea visited Stanford, as well as the Harry Ransom Research Center (UT Austin) and the Wittliff Collections (Texas State University) in summer, 2017 as part of her research.

M.A. student Seyedeh Razieh Araghi, was awarded a Texas State University Graduate Thesis Research Support Fellowship ($2000) to pursue archival research at Harvard University’s Widener Library related to her thesis on Iranian and U.S. American Feminist Literature. She visited Harvard in fall, 2017 to examine Betty Friedan’s papers and her writings related to Iran.

Senior Lecturer Jon Marc Smith and his writing partner Smith Henderson recently signed a contract for a book with Ecco tentatively titled The Midwife, to be published in 2018.

MATC alumnus Chase Rogers been hired as an instructional Designer with Whole Foods Market 365 (https://www.365bywholefoods.com/), which Chase says, is a Whole Foods brand created to make natural food groceries more accessible to all shoppers.

Associate Professor Scott Mogull has been very productive this year. His recent publications include a book published by Routledge, Scientific and Medical Communication: A Guide for Effective Practice, the first practice-line book in the ATTW-Routledge Book Series in Technical and Professional Communication. URL: https://www.routledge.com/Scientific-and-Medical-Communication-A-Guide-for-Effective-Practice/Mogull/p/book/9781138842557. Scott also published a research article in the prominent scientific/medical journal PLOS ONE, titled “Accuracy of Cited ‘Facts’ in Medical Research Articles: A Review of Study Methodology and Recalculation of Quotation Error Rate.” In the article, Dr. Mogull corrected the error rate of cited research “facts,” which are inaccurate summaries of previous research studies. He found that 14.5% of claims in the original medical studies are inaccurately summarized or presented when compared to the data and claims in the original studies. He is also the author of “Science vs. Science Commercialization in Neoliberalism (Extreme Capitalism): Examining the Conflicts and Ethics of Information Sharing in Opposing Social Systems,” a chapter in Scientific Communication: Practices, Theories, and Pedagogies. The book is part of the Routledge Series in Technical Communication, Rhetoric and Culture. Dr. Mogull also presented a research paper at the Rhetoric of Health & Medicine Symposium entitled, “Direct-to-Consumer Advertising in a Late-Capitalist, Saturated Pharmaceutical Drug Market: Discord in the Treximet Marketing as Greed Outpaces Innovation.” Congratulations, Scott!

Professor Susan Morrison’s novel, Grendel’s Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife, was chosen for 100 Must-Read Medieval Historical Fiction Novels by Book Riot (09-07-17).

Congratulations!

MATC alumna Swati Sahi accepted a writing instructor position at Purdue University Northwest in Hammond, Indiana.

Lecturer Ben Reed was recently interviewed by The Daily Vonnegut about teaching Kurt Vonnegut’s short fiction to the millennial generation. You can find his interview here: https://thedailyvonnegut.com/interviews/benjamin-reed-teaching-harrison-bergeron/. In further good news from Ben, his story “After Landing at Heathrow International…” was just published in Meridian’s “(No) Borders” issue. Also, he mentored a research paper by his ENG 1320 student Atticus Finch that was recently accepted for publication by the Texas State Undergraduate Research Journal (TXSTUR). The paper’s title is “Law School and the Possible Recovery of America’s Legal Profession.” The paper is scheduled to appear in issue 5.1.

Lecturer Ram Hinojosa was awarded an NEA-funded fellowship for veterans for a two-week residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

MFA Professor Cyrus Cassells’s poem “Elegy with a Gold Cradle,” which originally appeared in Agni, is in the new anthology, The Best American Poetry 2017, just out from Scribner’s. Cyrus has begun to serve a two-year appointment as of one of three judges for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry.

Lecturer Ashton Kamburoff’s poem “Self-Portrait as Eldest Son” has been published in (b)oink, while another poem, “Decomposture,” is forthcoming in Calamity. A piece of flash non-fiction entitled “The Hagglers” is due out in issue 17 of Proximity in January.

Congratulations!

Miriam Williams‘ article, “The Social Justice Impact of Plain Language: A Critical Approach to Plain Language Analysis,” (co-authored with Natasha Jones of University of Central Florida), will be published in the 2017 Plain Language Special Issue of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transactions on Professional Communication.

Joe Falocco was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in support of his “Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays” project. The grant of approximately $63,000, awarded through Summer Seminars and Institutes for College and University Teachers, supports professional development programs in the humanities for school teachers, and college and university faculty. The venue for this NEH seminar is the Curtain Theatre in Austin, a reconstructed early-modern playhouse owned by Austin-area philanthropists Richard and Laetitia Garriott de Cayeux. Inspired by the Globe Theater in London, this unique facility features many of the architectural features of Shakespeare’s original stage. Joe also recently performed in Cabaret and in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas at TexARTS Theatre in Lakeview.

Two poems by MFA graduate and Texas State Lecturer Autumn Hayes were recently published: “A Poem Some People Will Have to Misunderstand” appeared in 3:AM Magazine and “Sieges” appeared in Vol. 9, Issues 1-2 of The Seattle Review.

Katie Kapurch has been very busy with several projects. Her chapter, “The Wretched Life of a Lonely Heart: Sgt. Pepper’s Girls, Fandom, the Wilson Sisters, and Chrissie Hynde” appears in an edited collection titled The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper, and the Summer of Love (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). Her proposal for a new book, “Crying in the Sunshine: Conditional American Dreams in Los Angeles Pop Music,” has been accepted by Penn State University Press’s American Music History Series. Preliminary research for that book was made possible this summer by funding from the Texas State Research Enhancement Program. And, she wrote a review of Mothers in Children’s and Young Adult Literature: From the Eighteenth Century to Postfeminism, which appears in the first 2017 issue of The Lion and the Unicorn. Katie won the internal competition at Texas State to submit a proposal for an NEH Summer Stipend.

Keith Needham was named the Outstanding University Seminar Instructor for Texas State University. His photo will be catalogued on the Texas State University website as the first recipient of this award, which will be given each year hereafter. He also receives a $1,000 stipend.

Lecturer and MFA poetry graduate Vanessa Johnson has two poems in the current issue of SOFTBLOW.

Rebecca Bell-Metereau was recently interviewed by an online publication titled Paratonnerre about the influence of the original Alien film on gender roles, science fiction, and film in general. It’s in English, but it’s also translated into French, for those who would like to buff up on their French.

At the 44th annual Children’s Literature Association conference, Marilynn Olson presented “Sadder and Wiser Circuses: Seeds of Rebellion in the Billy Whiskers Series,” Teya Rosenberg presented “Travelling Spirits: Min(d)ing the Past to Forge the Future in Works by Virginia Hamilton and Julius Lester,” and Graeme Wend-Walker presented “Imagining Futures, Imagining a Past: Nnedi Okorafor’s Afrofuturist Works of Trans-Temporal Healing.” The conference was held in Tampa, FL in June.

Also in June, Roger Jones’s Japanese haibun e-chapbook “Goodbye” was published online by the Snapshot Press in the UK.

Kitty Ledbetter will present a seminar titled “Using Periodicals in Creative Research and Teaching” at the 50^th anniversary celebration of Victorian Periodicals Review on September 15 at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN.

Flore Chevaillier’s second book has been published by the Ohio State University Press. Divergent Trajectories: Interviews with Innovative Fiction Writers examines the aesthetic, political, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of contemporary fiction through a series of interviews with some of today’s most cutting-edge fiction writers.

Susan Morrison’s book, A Medieval Woman’s Companion: Women’s Lives in the European Middle Ages, won a gold medal in College Nonfiction from Literary Classics. It is also now available in German from Verlagshaus Römerweg (Imprint: Berlin University Press) as Frauen des Mittelalters: Künstlerinnen – Herrscherinnen – Denkerinnen (translator Herbert Genzmer).

 

Alumnus Updates

John Fry’s first full-length poetry collection, With the Dogstar as My Witness, was a finalist for this year’s Orison Poetry Prize, will be published by Orison Books in 2018. The manuscript has also been a finalist for Tupelo Press’s Dorset Prize and the Nightboat Poetry Prize. John graduated from the MFA program in 2012. He currently lives in the Texas Hill Country and is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Texas at Austin, where he’s writing a dissertation on medieval English literature. He edits poetry for Newfound Journal and also serves as an Assistant Program Coordinator for the University Writing Center at UT-Austin. His work has recently appeared in Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands (Aunt Lute, 2016), Waxwing, Blackbird, and Devil’s Lake.

• Congratuations!

  Laura Ellis-Lai received her Ph.D this May at the University of Texas-San Antonio. Her dissertation title is “Close Confidences: Students’ Experiences of Relational Pleasure, Reflective Competence, and Self-Authorship in FYC Research Writing.” Her dissertation includes a series of multi-year case studies from her English 1320 and Honors FYC Research-Writing courses at Texas State University.

  Robert T. Tally’s article, “An Anagogical Education,” appears in the current issue of the American Book Review 38.3 (March/April 2017): 6-7. The article is based on a talk he gave to a Sigma Tau Delta English Honors Society meeting last fall.

  Rob has another piece of good news this month. His article, “In the File Drawer Labeled ‘Science Fiction’: Genre after the Age of the Novel,” appears in the latest issue of The Journal of English Language and Literature, Vol.63, No.2 (2017): 201-217.

  Rebecca Bell-Metereau presented a paper titled “Switching Genders, or Whom Do We Really Love?” at the French American Studies Association (AFEA) conference on the Pursuit of Happiness in Strasbourg, France, in May.

  Texas State MFA graduate Luisa Muradyan Tannahill has won the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry for her manuscript, “American Radiance,” chosen by guest-judges Shara McCallum and Hilda Raz with Editor-in-Chief Kwame Dawes. Tannahill is originally from Odessa, Ukraine, and is currently a doctoral student in poetry at the University of Houston. Luisa currently serves as the editor of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. She was the recipient of the 2016 Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry. Her work appears in Poetry International, West Branch, Ninth Letter, the Los Angeles Review, Rattle, and the Paris-American, among other journals.

  Susan Hanson‘s photo “Texas Wild Rice” was recently chosen as the Grand Prize Winner in the Texas Hill Country Alliance’s 2017 Hill Country Photo Contest. This photo will be featured in the 2018 Texas Hill Country Calendar. Susan also has had two photos accepted for the Texas Photographic Society’s 30th Annual Members’ Only Show, juried by Malcolm Daniel, Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and four selected as finalists in the Hill Country Photography Club’s 13th annual Naturescapes Contest & Exhibition, which will open Sept. 9. Earlier this summer, Susan presented “Finding Balance in a Solo Canoe” at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment conference at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Congratulations:

Kathryn Ledbetter’s article, “Taking the Multitudes Abroad: Dinah Mulock Craik’s Travel Narratives in Victorian Family Magazines,” has been published in a special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review dedicated to Linda Peterson.

Susan Morrison’s book, A Medieval Woman’s Companion: Women’s Lives in the European Middle Ages, has won three 2016 Foreward INDIES Book Awards for Adult Nonfiction in Women’s Studies, History, and Young Adult categories.

MFA poetry graduate Meg Griffitts has a poem on the American Echolocation site: https://thefemlitmag.com/american-echolocation-or-another-black-body-in-a-bag-by-meg-e-griffitts-10857f985c39

Lauren Schiely presented at the Canadian Writing Centres Association in Toronto at the end of May. Her presentation was entitled “Sharing Their Stories: Continuing the Conversation on Narrative Inquiry as a Method of Research for Writing Centers.”

Flore Chevaillier presented “Fetishization and Jim Crow in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables” at the American Literature Association, held in Boston this past May. Her article “Reading Pierre Bourdieu after William Pietz,” appears in Intertexts: a Journal of Comparative and Theoretical Reflection.

MFA 2016 graduate, James Deitz’s poetry chapbook, Still Seeing a Dead Soldier, a poetic narrative exploration of life after the Iraqi War and living with PTSD, will be published by Turning Point, a WordTech Communications imprint. Three poems from this collection are featured in The Meadow.

MFA graduate and former lecturer Elizabeth Threadgill will begin a new position in August as Assistant Professor of English at Utica College, where she will be coordinating the developmental writing program and teaching advanced composition.

 

Other English Department News:

The following faculty have been recognized by the Honors College for supervising Honors theses: John Blair supervised Marissa Harris’s Daoine Sidhe: Celtic Superstitions of Death within Irish Fairy Tales Featuring the Dullahan and Banshee; René LeBlanc supervised Believe: A Collection; Twister Marquiss supervised Alexis Avignon’s More Human, Less Being: Stories; Stephanie Noll supervised Keeping Up with the Sexualities: An Interview Based Play; Aimee Roundtree supervised Riding the Tide of Modern Health Care: A Rhetorical Analysis of Low Technologies; Alan Schaefer supervised Luke Jenkins’ Werewolves and Doctors and Zombies: The Transformation of Spain through the Lens of Horrow.

Aimee Roundtree has been selected as the new Associate Dean for Research in the College of Liberal Arts. Aimee will begin her assignment this fall, replacing Brit Bousman of Anthropology, who served in the position since 2011.

Karen Russell will be joining us in August as the University Chair of Creative Writing for two years beginning this fall. She is the author of four creative books, including the best-selling Swamplandia! (2011) along with many other short stories and excerpts, in addition to being a Pulitzer Prize finalist, MacArthur Fellow, and Guggenheim Fellow.

Stan Rivkin has been selected for a senior lecturer position that combines teaching with assisting the Director of the MFA program.

Congratulations:

Twister Marquiss has been named Director of the Common Experience program.

Roger Jones had two poems accepted to appear later this year in Southern Poetry Anthology VIII:  Texas, edited by William Wright.

Amanda Scott attended the National Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) meeting, which took place from April 12-16th in San Diego, CA, presenting a personal essay entitled “A Good, Smiling Face: The Art of Preservation.”

The Bellingham Review has selected John Blair’s poem, “The Art of Forgetting,” as the winner of the 2017 49th Parallel Award for Poetry, for which he will receive a $1000 prize and publication in the Spring 2018 issue.

The Office of Retention Management named Keith Needham the 2017 Faculty Mentor of the Year for his mentoring of a Texas State student.

“Writing Center Tutor Corps: A Veterans-Tutoring-Veterans Program,” by Nancy Effinger Wilson and Micah Wright, appears in the latest issue of Writing Lab Newsletter.

Miles Wilson’s “Death by Fire” appears in the latest issue of Crazyhorse and was reprinted in Longreads (https://longreads.com/2017/05/08/death-by-fire/), which recently reprinted pieces from The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Esquire.  “Death by Fire,” along with “Bang” (Southwest Review) and “Body of Work” (Cream City Review), are part of a collection of creative nonfiction about the American West.

MFA fiction graduate Ray Robertson’s 8th novel, 1979, is forthcoming next year. This summer he will serve as the first North American writer-in-residence at the House of Writers in Trsic, Serbia: http://www.chathamdailynews.ca/2017/04/17/first-north-american-author-to-serve-as-writer-in-residence-at-house-of-writers [archived].

Octavio Pimentel will present “Not Making America Great: Racist Rhetoric Against Mexicans and African Americans” at the Western States Rhetoric and Literacy Conference, to be held in Salt Lake City this coming October.

Susan Morrison’s Grendel’s Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife (Top Hat Books, 2015) has been selected as a 2016 Wishing Shelf Book Award finalist in the category of Adult Fiction. This July, she’ll present “Making Kin with St. Francis, Pope Francis, and Francis the Ladybug: Ecological and Ethical Tenancy in the Anthropocene” as an invited lecture at Universität Würzburg (Germany) as part of the series Vorträge am Interdisziplinären Forum für Cultural Environmental and Animal Studies (IFCEAS).

MA graduate Shaun Clarkson has received his PhD from Purdue University.

A photo by Susan Hanson has been selected as the cover for Ecocritical Aesthetics:  Language, Beauty, and the Environment, edited by Scott Slovic and Peter Quigley, and soon to be released by Indiana University Press.

Dan Lochman co-organized three panels titled “Cognitive/Affective Cultures” for the Chicago meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, March 30-April 1 and presented “’The troublous passion of my pensiue mind’: Britomart, Mind, and Memory”; and presented on April 22 the paper “Mastering ‘mazy paths’: William Scott’s Model of Poesy on Heroic Narrative” at the South Central Renaissance Conference, held in Austin.

Alan Schaefer was named a favorite professor by the undergraduate inductees to Alpha Chi Honor Society.

Incoming MARC students Tiffany Rainey and A.R. Rogers have both received Graduate Merit Fellowships recognizing academic excellence.

MARC graduate Shaun Ford has been accepted into the PhD program in Theory and Cultural Studies at Purdue University for this coming fall, supported by a Doctoral Fellowship providing 5 years full funding, a tuition waiver, and medical insurance supplement.

Amelia Gray (fiction, 2007) won the 2016 New York City Public Library’s ‘Young Lion’ Award:  https://www.nypl.org/press/press-release/june-10-2016/writer-amelia-gray-wins-2016-young-lions-fiction-award-gutshot. Her second novel, Isadora, will be published on May 23^rd: “Historical novels about artists abound, but few attain the psychological intricacy, fluency of imagination, lacerating wit, or intoxicating beauty of Gray’s tale of Isadora Duncan” ―Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review).

James Knippen is the recipient of a 2017 Discovery/Boston Review prize; he will travel to New York City in May to give a reading. Also, two poems, “Poem” and “Portents,” appear in the current issue of Kenyon Review Online: http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2017-marapr/selections/james-henry-knippen-763879/.

Cecily Parks was selected as Outstanding English Professor of the Year by the Texas State chapter of Sigma Tau Delta.

A book that features a chapter written by Kitty Ledbetter, The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, has won the prestigious Robert L. Colby Book Prize from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. Her chapter is entitled “Women’s Periodicals.”

Congratulations:

MFA student Ashton Kamburoff was selected for a space in the Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop in Denver, Colorado by Ada Limón. Limón will lead the week-long workshop from June 12th-16th. Ashton also was named the 2017-18 Clark House Writer-In-Residence by the MFA faculty.

 

Mark Busby attended the Conference of College Teachers Association Conference, held at Tarrant County Community College from March 3-5, serving as a CCTE Council member as well as presenting “The Slave Narrative from Frederick Douglass to William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner to Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation” at the Texas College English Association affiliated meeting.

 

MFA fiction student Graham Oliver interviewed recent Whiting Award-winner Tony Tulathimutte for Electric Literature. They talked about the complex relationship between literature and video games: https://electricliterature.com/the-field-of-dreams-approach-on-writing-about-video-games-5c58d4ddf9f4.

 

Cecily Parks was named Outstanding English Professor of the Year by students in Texas State’s chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Honor Society.

 

Rob Tally’s article “The Southern Phoenix Triumphant: Richard Weaver, or, the Origins of Contemporary U.S. Conservatism” appears in b2o: An Online Journal (the peer-reviewed online journal of the boundary 2 editorial collective): http://www.boundary2.org/2017/03/robert-t-tally-jr-the-southern-phoenix-triumphant-richard-weaver-or-the-origins-of-contemporary-u-s-conservatism/.

 

MFA poetry graduate Jonathan Hobratsch conducted an interview with Cyrus Cassells for the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/2017-poetry-month-an-interview-with-cyrus-cassells_us_58de8c39e4b03c2b30f6a5db.

 

Steve Wilson has new poems in the latest issues of Texas Observer, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review and Noon: Journal of the Short Poem.

 

Tomás Q. Morín’s new collection of poetry Patient Zero was released on April 11th by Copper Canyon Press. The libretto he translated, Pancho Villa from a Safe Distance, will have its Austin premiere at the Paramount Theater as part of the Fusebox Festival on April 14th and 15th. More details can be found here: https://www.fuseboxfestival.com/dates/pancho-villa-from-a-safe-distance.

 

MARC graduate Sonia Arellano earned her PhD from the University of Arizona this semester.