Author: hao39

Miscellany – September 1, 2023

Katie Kapurch’s co-edited collection, The Beatles and Humour, has been published by Bloomsbury. Katie authored a chapter about Shakespeare’s and Lewis Carroll’s influences and co-authored a chapter about the band’s debt to humor in Black music. The book is available now in digital formats, hardback coming this month.

Eric Leake’s book, Difficult Empathy and Rhetorical Encounters , was published by Routledge.

Becky Jackson (with co-authors Jackie Grutsch McKinney and Nicole Caswell) will deliver the keynote address at the annual conference of the Nebraska Writing Center Consortium on Friday, November 3, 2023. The keynote will merge findings from their award-winning book, The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors, with their current longitudinal study on writing center director burnout.

MFA Endowed Chair Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s novel, Woman of Light, was awarded the WILLA Award in Historical Fiction from Women Writing the West. The WILLA Literary Awards, named in honor of Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Willa Cather, recognizes the best in literature, featuring women’s or girls’ stories set in the North American West that are published each year.

Cyrus Cassells has been named a Texas State University System Regents’ Professor. The Regents’ Professor designation honors outstanding members of the system’s professoriate who have achieved excellence in teaching, research, publication, and community service, while demonstrating an unwavering dedication to their students and university. Cyrus will be honored in a ceremony at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, on November 17, 2023, at the quarterly Texas State University System meeting. The award includes $10,000.

Amanda Scott recently joined the 2023 Bedford New Scholars Advisory Board, an annual program that unites graduate students who share trends and insights on the various teaching challenges that they face in college composition classrooms.

Mike Hennessey, distinguished emeritus, published his anthology, Little Poems, an Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets volume (Kopf, 2023) this spring, with a favorable review appearing in the July 18 New York Times.  

Along with the Crafting Communities project team, Denae Dyck published an article entitled, “Making Things Together: Collaborating and Mentoring on an OER Project.” Their Crafting Communities project recently received an Open Scholarship Award from the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI).

Robert Tally was recently a guest on the New Books Network podcast to discuss his book, For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Age of Capitalist Realism. You can listen to the interview here.

Susan Morrison gave a talk, “Pilgrimage and Metaphor: Agency for Medieval Women Pilgrims and Writers,” at a seminar entitled “Viatrices et itinera ad Loca Sancta” [“Travels and trips to the Holy Places”], Instituto de Estudios Gallegos Padre Sarmiento in Santiago, Spain on July 24, 2023.

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

MISCELLANY – AUGUST 2, 2023

MFA graduate Ledia Xhoga’s novel Misinterpretation will be published by Tin House Books  in fall 2024.

MFA graduate Reyes Ramirez was one of the five finalists for the 2023 Young Lions Fiction Award for The Book of Wanderers. Established in 2001, The New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award is awarded each spring to a writer age 35 or younger for a novel or a collection of short stories.

Denae Dyck presented “Ruskin’s Mythopoesis and the Making of Reflective Readers” at the annual conference of the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada. At this conference, which marked the association’s 50th anniversary, she also co-facilitated a pedagogy workshop, together with the co-organizers of Crafting Communities . Their Crafting Communities project recently received an Open Scholarship Award from the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI).

MARC graduate Cooper Day successfully defended his dissertation at the University of Louisville and has accepted a tenure-track position at Francis Marion University

MFA poetry student Cathlin Noonan presented “Living Archive: Immanence through Compression in ‘Krapp’s Last Tape'” during the Annual American Conference for Irish Studies in San Jose, California.

MFA graduate Melissa McEver Huckabay was awarded a space as Contributor in Poetry for the 2023 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Rob Tally’s essay “The Urban Itinerary and the City Map: The Experience of Metropolitan Space” appears in The Cambridge Companion to the City in World Literature, edited by Ato Quayson and Jini Kim Watson (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Rob’s article “Rehabilitating Theory” appears in the American Book Review 44.1 (Spring 2023), a special issue devoted to “weak theory,” edited by Jeffrey Di Leo and Christian Moraru.

MFA fiction student Hannah Smothers recently published her first short story, “Fingers,” in Wigleaf.

Steph Grossman’s horror-tinged short story “Likeness” was published in Joyland. The short story was selected by editor Winona León.

Vanessa Couto Johnson has two poems, “leaflet” and “mission,” in Red Tree Review.

Logan Fry recently published several poems: “What the Mist Said” in The Decadent Review; “Blue Board” in Sixth Finch; “The Bead of the Weld,” “The Gloss Abrades,” and “Moss in a Tube” in Annulet #5; “Furnace” and “Fabricant” in Afternoon Visitor #8; and “Hinge Spray-Painted Purple” and “Pour” in Sprung Formal #18.d.

MATC graduate Meghalee Das is the recipient of the Kairos Graduate Student and Adjunct Award for Service, which recognizes activities that promote excellent computers and writing pedagogy, theory, and community building. She received the award at the 2023 Computers and Writing conference at UC Davis.

MARC graduate Jayson Guest spent July 2023 in Kathmandu, Nepal, teaching English to economically disadvantaged women.

MFA graduate Samantha Allen’s debut novel Pay Dirt Road has won the coveted Dashiell Hammett Award for Literary Excellence in Crime Writing.

MFA graduate Autumn Hayes recently read at the Chaos Dive Reunion book launch at Blue Willow Bookshop.

English majors in the Texas State in Ireland program learned traditional Irish dances from locals in Cork, participated in a nature walk conducted by the Cork Nature Network, hiked and boated in Gougane Barra Forest Park, lunched at Cronin’s Pub, and spent the night at the Gougane Barra Hotel.

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