Author: Corey

Kali Fajardo-Anstine, the Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. You can read more about this exciting news here.

B.A. in English and MFA graduate Dr. Trey Moody received tenure and promotion to Associate Professor at Creighton University. In the fall,  Dr. Moody will begin service as Associate Chair. His forthcoming poetry collection will be published by
Conduit Books & Ephemera in October 2023.

MFA Fiction candidate Charmaine Denison-George’s essay, “Haunted: A Decade With Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah,” was recently published in Brittle Paper.

MATC graduate Meghalee Das was recently awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Graduate School at Texas Tech University, where she is currently completing her PhD in Technical Communication & Rhetoric.

Texas State MFA fiction student Charlene Caruthers has been accepted into the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s PhD in Creative Writing program and will begin her studies this coming fall.

Susan Morrison’s essay, “Behind the Iron Canon: Teaching Literary Theory in East Germany,” was published in The Font: A Literary Journal for Language Teachers. The editor describes Susan’s story as a “twisty tale of Cold War intrigue.”

MA Literature student Ali Armstrong’s “Pictures Revisited” was published in Disruptive Entanglements: Transnational Considerations of Performance and Adaptation, the latest issue from The Harbour Journal through the Université de Montréal in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

MARC student Jayson Guest presented a workshop titled, “New Wave Tsunami: Speaking for Code-Meshing and World Englishes as the Future of Academic and Professional Language,” at the South Central Writing Centers Association Conference at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

Kate McClancy recently chaired the spring meeting of the Comics Arts Conference at WonderCon as well as presented two conference papers: “Sinking Deeper into the Cold War: Don’t Worry Darling and the Dangers of Nostalgia” at PCA/ACA in San Antonio and “’I’m just bored of men like you’: Burning Down Nostalgic Masculinity” at the War & Media Studies Special Interest Group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference (SCMS) in Denver.

Cyrus Cassells’s poem, “Sung from a Hospice,” a Pushcart Prize winner, is featured in Copper Canyon’s just-published anthology, A House Called Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Poetry, edited by Michael Wiegers. A review of Cyrus’s latest hybrid poetry collection, To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu, was recently published in CulturalDaily.com.

On Sunday, May 7th at 2:00 p.m., Vanessa Couto Johnson will read from her new poetry book,
pH of Au, with four other poets who have been published in Parlor Press’s Free Verse Editions 2022, over Zoom. You can find the Zoom link here.

Sigma Tau Delta participated in Texas State’s 20th annual Bobcat Build. Abra Gist, Jayson Guest, Cathlin Noonan, Madison O’Hara, Shannon Shaw, and Nancy Wilson helped long-time San Marcos residents with landscaping and painting.

Tune in to the First-Gen Podcast to hear Octavio Pimentel in conversation with first-generation faculty, students, and staff on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3fZuVaNQH0TxvTtCArFnFK

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/…/the-first-gen…/id1671641263

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Miriam Williams at mfw@txstate.edu. You can also submit news to the Miscellany Form here: https://www.english.txst.edu/news/Miscellany-Submission.html

Texas State University has recognized Cyrus Cassells as a 2023 University Distinguished Professor. This appointment honors individuals whose performance in teaching, research, and service has been exemplary and recognized at the state, national, and international levels.  Cyrus will receive a $5,000 award, a commemorative medallion, and a plaque. Cyrus will retain the University Distinguished Professor title for the remainder of his time at Texas State. An interview with Cyrus appears in the latest issue of The Tupelo Quarterly.

John Blair has been named the 2023 recipient of the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry by Philadelphia Stories. John will be honored at an awards ceremony in Philadelphia on May 6th.

Miriam Williams is the 2023 recipient of the Society for Technical Communication’s Ken Rainey Award for Distinguished Research. The citation reads, “For exemplary leadership in the field of technical communication, demonstrating excellence in research methods, application of public policy, key scholarship on issues of race and ethnicity, and promotion of research that not only ‘is good’ but also ‘does good’ throughout the field and society.” Miriam will receive the award at the organization’s 2023 STC Summit Honors Event in Atlanta, GA in May 2023, where the organization will celebrate its platinum anniversary.

Bianca Alyssa Pérez’s debut chapbook GEMINI GOSPEL from Host Publications is available. Bianca extends an invitation to the chapbook launch on April 8^th at 7pm at the Host Publications office.

MARC student Rich Riddle presented “Freedom in Thai Boys’ Love: Queer Representations and Global Fandom” at the American Comparative Literature Association’s Conference in Chicago.

Work by Steve Wilson, as well as MFA poetry graduates C. Prudence Arceneaux and Colin Pope, appears in the new collection from Tolsun Books: The Book of Life After Death: Essays and Poems. Steve Wilson’s prose poem “The Company Man” appears in the new anthology, Unknotting the Line: The Poetry in Prose.

Elliott Brandsma (B.A. in English and Art, 2013) has received several notable scholarships in support of his doctoral studies in Scandinavian literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The U.S. Department of Education awarded him two Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships for the upcoming year; he received a summer scholarship to study the Finnish language through the Finnish National Education Agency and an academic year fellowship to conduct dissertation research at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden. He has also been invited to Jonsered, Sweden, for a June writer’s residency at Villa Martinson, the former home of Nobel Prize-winning Swedish poet, Harry Martinson.

Andrew Barton’s article “Creating Climate Conscious Players: Final Fantasy VII’s Ecoactivist Fan Communities” appears in Przegląd Kulturoznawczy in a special issue titled, “Playing While The World Burns: Games in a Time of Crisis.”

MFA poetry student Melissa Huckabay’s poem “If You Wondered About the Astronaut Who Never Went to Space” was featured in the March 23 issue of SWWIM Every Day, an online literary journal.

Rob Tally presented seven invited talks or conference papers in March and April. He was a keynote speaker for the 25th Annual Conference of the Marxist Reading Group, University of Florida, in Gainesville; the theme of the conference was “Marxism and Cartography,” and Rob’s address was titled “Mapping the Ever Given: The World System in Crisis (as Usual).” He also gave an invited talk, “The Spatial Situation: Place, Orientation, and Mapping,” for the Prajna Foundation and Bharata Mata College, Kochi, Kerala, India (via Zoom). Rob presented “The Frame and the Map: Modernist Literary Spaces in the World System” at the American Comparative Literature Association convention in Chicago, and “The Ruin of Middle-earth: Sauron, the Second Age, and the Post-Apocalyptic Condition” at the 19th Annual University of Vermont Tolkien conference, in Burlington, VT [online]. Rob also presented three talks for the Tolkien Studies section of the Popular Culture Association’s annual conference in San Antonio: “No More Big Bosses: Orcs and the Utopian Impulse in Tolkien’s World System”; “‘Always the poor Uruks’: Orcs, Racism, and Violence”; and “Sauron: Weirdly Sexy.”

Percival Everett’s novel The Trees has won the 2022 L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize. Texas State will celebrate with a reading and book signing by Everett on Thursday, April 6th at 3:30pm at the Alkek Library’s Wittliff Collections. Join us on April 6th to welcome Percival Everett to the Texas State campus for this award and celebration.

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

The Department of English is proud of the achievements of all its graduate students. Recently, a committee of graduate faculty had the difficult project of selecting this year’s Outstanding Graduate Student in English from a truly exceptional group of nominees. This year’s Outstanding Graduate Student in English, Aaron Hand, has a remarkable record of publication and teaching but also of enriching the education and lives of the disadvantaged and incarcerated through initiatives at the national, state, county, and community levels. Appreciation goes to faculty who nominated or reviewed nominees’ materials in an abbreviated schedule. Aaron’s nomination materials have been forwarded to the College and will be reviewed there for the Outstanding Graduate Student in Liberal Arts award.

Whitney May is a Non-Tenure Line Workload Release Recipient for the 2023-2024 academic year. During this time, Whitney will complete a project on the American circus clown in post-war literature and popular culture. On March 13th, Whitney gave an invited guest lecture for a mass communication course at Delaware County Community College; the talk was on TikTok citizen journalism and the ongoing uprising in Iran.

Rob Tally’s latest book, The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies, is now available.

Poems by Cecily Parks, Kathleen Peirce, and Steve Wilson appear in Little Poems, a new volume in the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series.

Vanessa Couto Johnson’s poem “overtime” appears in issue 3.1 of Concision Poetry Journal.

MFA poetry student Rebecca D. Oxley’s poem “A Short List of Flies” has been accepted for publication for the Spring Issue of EQUINOX: Poetry and Prose.

The Department of English was represented at the 44th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando, Florida, by Suparno Banerjee, who contributed to the panel discussion “Global Methods/Knowledges Toward Rethinking SF/Fantastic Theory,” and Graeme Wend-Walker, who delivered his paper “The End of All Worlds: Young Adulthood’s Ragnarök.” On a writers panel, Graeme also read from his novel-in-progress, Space Mutant Sex Robots in the Anthropocene.

A review of Cyrus Cassells’s The World That the Shooter Left Us was recently published in Salamander.  

MFA fiction student Kayla King’s creative nonfiction piece “The Indictment of Robert Frost” will appear in the upcoming issue of Dublin-based journal Sonder Magazine. The issue will be launched on March 23 in Dublin and is also available for pre-order.

Tune in to the First-Gen Podcast to hear Octavio Pimentel in conversation with first-generation faculty, students, and staff on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3fZuVaNQH0TxvTtCArFnFK

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/…/the-first-gen…/id1671641263

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

Amanda Scott’s creative nonfiction essay “A Room So Ancient I Almost Forgot” appears in the latest issue of Hayden’s Ferry Review. An interview with Amanda was published in the journal’s blog.

Sean Rose’s essay “Baseball, Boys, and Time” was published in the most recent issue of Ninth Letter. Sean also published Issue 1 of the mixed-media chapbook Spidertown, a collaboration between Sean and visual artist Claire Krüeger. Sean serves as editor-in-chief of the project, and more information can be found on Spidertown’s Instagram page, @welcome_to_spidertown.

Rob Tally was interviewed by Scott McLemee about his recent book, J.R.R’s The Hobbit: Realizing History through Fantasy: A Critical Companion, for Inside Higher Ed. Rob recently presented “‘You cannot press the One Ring too hard’: Tolkien and the Ambiguities of Magic in Middle-earth” at the Theoretical Aspects of Fantasy Studies: Representations of Magic Across Media Conference [remote] at the Centre for Fantasy Literature Studies, sponsored by the Taras Shevchanko Institute of Literature and the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, in Kyiv.

Rebecca Bell-Metereau’s recent and forthcoming  publications include the following: “J.D. Salinger Meets the Wrath of Manic Pixie Dream Girls” in Critical Insights: J.D. Salinger; “Life, Animated: Adapting a Book about a Hero with Autism” in Autism in Film and Television: On the Island; “Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun and Being Progressive, Black, and Probably Gay” in Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun (Grey House Publishing); and “Transgender Cinema” in Oxford Bibliographies.

Over the next few weeks, Steve Wilson will have poems in Blue Unicorn and Shot Glass Journal and in the anthologies Unknotting the Line: The Poetry in Prose (Dos Gatos Press), Little Poems (Everyman’s Library), and Awake in the World, Volume 3 (Riverfeet Press). His new book, Complicity, is due out in late February.

Graeme Wend-Walker presented the keynote for the English for International Communication Program at Rajamangala University of Technology Lanna in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

MFA student Sara Bawany’s spoken word poem Planting Seeds is available on the ACLU of Texas website.

MA Literature student Ali C. Armstrong’s prose piece “pictures: revisited” will be published in the Spring 2023 issue of The Harbour Journal.

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

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.

Sara A. Ramírez presented “Expanding Space: The Decolonial Impetus to Rethink Reality in the Work of Andrea Muñoz Martinez” at the American Studies Association’s 2022 Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Spatial Literary Studies in China, co-edited by Ying Fang and Rob Tally, has just been published. This collection of 19 essays features work by leading scholars in China today and emerged in part from Rob’s participation in events at a number of universities in Tianjin, Ningbo, Hangzhou, and Shanghai, China, in 2017 and 2019. Dr. Ying Fang, a professor of comparative and world literature at Zhejiang Gongshang University in Hangzhou, was a visiting scholar in the English Department at Texas State University in 2017.

Rob Tally has also (remotely) presented invited keynote talks at four recent international conferences: (1) “The Road, the Map, and the Redbook of Westmarch: Towards a Literary Cartography of Middle-earth” for the “Zeit und Raum in Tolkiens Werk / Time and Space in Tolkien’s Work,” a conference of the Deutsche Tolkien Gesellschaft e.V. and the Institut für Anglistik / Amerikanistik, Friedrich Schiller Universität, Jena, Germany; (2) “Thinking Geocritically; or, the Situation of Spatial Literary Studies,” School of Foreign Languages, Southeast University, Nanjing, China; (3) “The Situation of Narrative: Space, Storytelling, and Critique,” for the “Narrating Spaces: Literature, Education, Geography, and Tourism,” 5th International Conference on Storytelling Revisited, University of Vic-Central University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain; and (4) “Marxism and Spatial Literary Studies,” for the “Reconstruction and Contemporary Development of Marxist Literary Criticism” conference, Centre for Theory of Literature and Art, School of Chinese Language and Literature, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China.

MA Literature student Katelyn Hammack’s poem “I, Woman” was recently accepted for publication in Querencia Press and will be included in their Winter 2022 anthology.

An interview with Cyrus Cassells was published in The Adroit Journal.

MFA Fiction student D.R. Garrett’s micro-fiction story Salvation Mountain was nominated for the Best Micro-Fiction 2023 anthology, which is published every year by Pelekinesis Press.

Sandra Sidi’s short story “The Garden of Israel Will Never Sleep” is featured on Narrative Magazine’s homepage.

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

MATC graduate Brooke Turner is the new Vice President of STEAM Learning at Thinkery in Austin, Texas. Brooke is a co-founder of Kwaddle and recently joined the Board of Directors of 3 Day Startup.

Geneva Gano recently presented a talk titled “Possession and Transcendence: Pueblo Dance and Modernist Ekphrasis” at the Western Literature Association Conference in Santa Fe, NM. Geneva Gano’s essay “Modernist Activities and Native Acts in and around Northern New Mexico” was recently published in the Routledge Handbook of North American Indigenous Modernisms, edited by Kirby Brown, Stephen Ross, and Alana Sayers.

Susan Morrison presented a talk entitled “The Three Most Important Words in German: When ‘letters are considered sealed containers’” in a session entitled “Secret Police Hermeneutics: Interpretation and Misinterpretation and the Secret Police in the Eastern Bloc.” She presented at the Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) annual convention in Chicago, IL on November 10^th.

Cyrus Cassells’s book The World That the Shooter Left Us is featured in Snowflakes in a Blizzard and was recently reviewed in Good River Review.

MFA poetry student Sara Bawany’s poem for dark-skinned girls was recently published in ArLiJo – Arlington Literary Journal.

Sandra Sidi’s essay “Searching for the Clear” (with Major Lauren Serrano) was an Honorable Mention for the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction and Essay Contest 2022.

Vanessa Couto Johnson has two poems, “chicken alanine” and “reddened monkeys-in-a-barrel,” out now in Landfill Journal.

Steph Grossman’s short story “Likeness” was accepted for publication in the literary magazine Joyland and will be published in May 2023.

MFA poetry candidate ​Joshua Bridgwater Hamilton has two new poems, “Chorus” and “Sunset/Flood,” coming out in the online edition of  San Antonio Review. Also, Miracle Monocle  accepted two of Joshua’s poems, “Vagary Ships” and “Interior Displacements,” for their next issue.

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

MFA Endowed Chair in Creative Writing Kali Fajardo-Anstine appeared on Good Morning America last month. Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s book, Woman of Light, was featured as a ‘GMA’ Buzz Pick. You can view the appearance here:   https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Culture/video/woman-light-kali-fajardo-anstine-weeks-gma-buzz-91157322

Chris Dayley’s article, “Increasing Inclusion in Technical Communication Academic Programs,” has been accepted for publication in the February 2023 issue of Technical Communication.  Chris (with Dr. Isidore K. Dorpenyo of George Mason University) is editing a special issue of Technical Communication titled, “Practices, Reflections, and Methodologies: What Is Successful Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Technical Communication Workplace,” which will be published in August 2023.

Debra Monroe was recently featured in the Houston Chronicle, where she discussed her latest book, It Takes a Worried Woman. You can read the article here:  https://www.houstonchronicle.com/lifestyle/renew-houston/wellness/article/In-It-Takes-a-Worried-Woman-Texas-author-Debra-17515367.php?fbclid=IwAR2BLRfpvhWOT2Qtm7Yxo054vKuM2udCUuOYC0yb4IanmXm-XcXKy64vTjM

Tom Grimes’s new novel, Uncertainty is the Problem, has been excerpted in Narrative Magazine. An earlier excerpt can be found at: https://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/fall-2016/fiction/dynamics-faith-tom-grimes

According to the most recent “Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators,” Rob Tally was among the Top 2% of most cited authors in the field of Literary Studies worldwide in 2021.

MFA Creative Writing graduate and Lecturer Jessica Martinez’s nonfiction essay, “The Anatomy of a Powerlifter,” was recently published in Identity Theory.

Katie Kapurch was asked to weigh in on Madonna’s recent TikTok controversy for The Guardian. Her interview appears in “Madonna on TikTok: she’s recycling ‘the shock value of her heyday’,” published on October 24, 2022.

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

On October 20, Cecily Parks will deliver the Walter Harding Lecture at the State University of New York at Geneseo. Her talk is titled “When I was Thoreau at Night: A Poem’s Pathways to a Life.” The lecture is named for an important scholar of Henry David Thoreau; past lecturers include Bill McKibben, William Cronon, and Megan Marshall.

Whitney S. May’s edited collection Encountering Pennywise: Critical Perspectives on Stephen King’s IT has been published by the University Press of Mississippi. The collection has been nominated for the PCA/ACA’s award for Best Edited Collection in Popular and American Culture. Shannon Shaw’s chapter “Send in the Clowns: Pennywise and the Monstrousness of Colonialism” also appears in the collection.

Rob Tally’s latest books include J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’: Realizing History Through Fantasy, part of the Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon book series, and Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora, co-edited with Melody Yunzi Li. In addition to their co-authored Introduction, “Remapping the Homeland,” the volume also includes an essay by Rob, “This Space Which Is Not One: Diaspora, Topophrenia, and the World System.” (Melody Li, a professor at the University of Houston, was a visiting speaker here in November 2019.) Learn more about the publications here:

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-11266-9

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-10157-1

Miles Wilson’s fifth book and second novel, McKenzie Rising: An American Frolic, has just been published by the University of Nevada Press. https://conta.cc/3dzY6WF

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