Author: mjr100

Congratulations:

Mark Busby presented “My Night with Ken Kesey” at the Western Literature Association in Reno, NV on Oct. 17.  The talk is based upon Kesey’s visit to San Marcos and Wimberley in 1994.

Rob Tally’s article “An American Bakhtin: Jonathan Arac, or, the Critic in the Age of the Novel” will appear in the next issue of symplokē.

Roger Jones’ poem “Government Bridge” has been accepted by Town Creek Poetry Journal.

At the upcoming Seventh International Research Conference for Graduate Students, sponsored by Texas State’s Graduate College, the following graduate students will present their work: Danielle McEwen will present “Connecting Past to Present: Using New Media Theory in Museum Website Development”; Edward Garza, “Renovating the House on Mango Street: Expanding Latinx Literature in First-Year Composition Classes”; Amanda Scott, The Subject is the Matter: Towards a More Inclusive Understanding of Hybrid Racial Identity in Technical Communication”; and Tyler Dukes, Coleridge and the Hypnagogic State: Blending Folklore and Fairy Tale to Create the Unconscious in “Christabel.”

MATC Alumna Alex Podwalny is Communications Executive with Mercom Capital Group in Austin.  Alex writes that Mercom is a hybrid communications and research firm with clients in the clean tech space.

MFA fiction student Stanislav Rivkin’s story, “How To Survive a Non-Funeral,” will appear in the next issue of Glimmer Train.

Vanessa Couto Johnson’s chapbook manuscript rotoscoping collage in Cork City (a sequence of poems that include quotes from the film Waking Life) will be published in 2016 by dancing girl press.

Dr. Jaime Mejia and MARC students Edward Garza and Clare Murray delivered papers on the panel “Strategies for Teaching Argument and Persuasion in Relation to Latin@ Literary and Cultural Spheres” at the Third Annual Trends in Teaching College Composition conference held this past October in McKinney, TX.

Congratulations:

MFA poetry student Jason Duncan’s poems “The Botany of Absence,” “The Creation of Loneliness,” “Ghazal of Burning Silk,” “Neurology,” and “Pica” have been accepted for publication in Lamar University’s New Writers Series anthology.

Stephanie Noll’s essay, “The Myth of Gender,” can be found at Graceless: http://graceless.me/the-myth-about-gender/ [archived]. On October 18, Stephanie moderated “Behind the Barrel,” a conversation with authors Elliot Ackerman (Green on Blue) and Texas State graduate Brandon Caro (Old Silk Road) at the Texas Book Festival.

Susan Morrison published a blog post on the recent Texas Medieval Association conference, held at Texas State in October: http://grendelsmotherthenovel.com/2015/10/18/whats-so-medieval-about-texas/. A number of faculty and graduate students from the English Department participated.  MFA poetry student Dorothy Lawrenson received the award for the best essay by a Graduate Student presented at the conference.

On October 22, Alan Schaefer moderated a conversation with documentary filmmaker Pawel Wysoczanski on truth in documentary cinema. Mr. Wysoczanski visited Texas for the Austin Polish Film Festival. His most recent film, JUREK, a documentary about the famous Polish alpine climber Jerzy Kukuczka, was screened at the festival.

MFA fiction graduate Sarah Rafael Garcia’s short story “Little Secrets” (“Mentirillas” in Spanish), which she wrote during a workshop class with author Cristina Garcia, was recently published in English and translated in Spanish in Contrapuntos: http://www.amazon.com/Contrapuntos-III-Live-Anthology-Spanish-ebook/dp/B0163NM0XC/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1445271054&sr=1-1&keywords=contrapuntos+iii [archived].

Cecily Parks and Susan Morrison will be reading from their latest books at the Travis Heights Art Trail in Austin on Saturday and Sunday November 7th & 8th.  For more information and the schedule of their readings, please check out this website: http://travisheightsarttrail.org/calendar-of-readings/ [archived].

On Thursday, 11/5, at 3:30 p.m. in FH 230, Dr. Mark Bracher will give a public talk titled “Developing Compassionate Identities through Literary Study.” The talk is part of the Therese Kayser Lindsey Visiting Scholar Series. Dr. Bracher is a leading figure in the cognitive humanities and literary study. His most recent book is Literature and Social Justice: Protest Novels, Cognitive Politics, and Schema Criticism (Univ. of Texas Press, 2013). He is Professor of English at Kent State University.

Congratulations:

MFA fiction student and MARC alumnus Graham Oliver interviewed the writer David Lipsky for The Rumpus. Lipsky’s 2010 book about David Foster Wallace, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, was recently adapted into the film The End of the Tour, starring Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg.  You can read the interview here: http://therumpus.net/2015/09/the-rumpus-interview-with-david-lipsky/

Debra Monroe will be launching her new book, My Unsentimental Education, on Saturday, October 24 at 4 p.m. at BookPeople in Austin, on 6th & Lamar. At the event, there will be introductory remarks by Scott Blackwood, Texas State MFA program alumnus and award-winning author. Two chapters from the book have previously been cited as “Notable” in Best American Essays. Recent excerpts and essays she’s written about it include an essay in Salon; an essay titled “The Memoir of Discovery, Not Recovery” in Kirkus Reviews (widely shared on social media); an excerpt published by Longreads on Oct. 1, reposted by the Internet aggregator, Digg on Oct. 4. Enthusiastic reviews and feature stories have appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution; The Dallas Morning News; the Minneapolis Star Tribune; the Houston Chronicle; the San Francisco Review of Books; the Wisconsin State Journal; and Amazon’s recommended books column, Omnivoracious. The review that best captures the unconventional spirit of the book appeared in the Chicago Tribune:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-my-unsentimental-education-debra-monroe-20151008-story.html.

One of Susan Hanson’s photos, taken at Jacob’s Well, received first place in this year’s Texas Photographic Society Members Only Show, judged by Keith Carter. It was one of 50 images selected out of 1020 submissions. The show will open Dec. 10 at the TCC Photo Gallery in Longview: http://d19cgyi5s8w5eh.cloudfront.net/eml/ZvFNIrc7RlCcaGBcgr9OHg?e=carol.serur%40gmail.com&a=H6IyvOlWRZOw5re48l-mqg&f=5f8bee0a&t=1.

MFA poetry graduate and current Lecturer James Knippen will have two poems, “Beggars” and “Lilies,” published in an upcoming issue of Gulf Coast. His poem “Kitchen,” previously published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, will be included in The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology, forthcoming from Lamar University Press.

MFA poetry student Ashton Kamburoff’s poem “For the Love of a Cadillac and a Cousin” has been accepted by Rose Red Review.

The Katherine Anne Porter House hosted an interview between Texas authors Mary Helen Specht and Nan Cuba.  The interview is featured in the October issue of Texas Monthly and can be found online: http://www.texasmonthly.com/list/the-10-writers-to-watch-and-read/mary-helen-specht-and-nan-cuba/.

Congratulations:

Kathleen McClancy’s “Iron Curtain Man versus Captain American Exceptionalism: World War II and Cold War Nostalgia in Marvel’s War on Super-Terror” just came out in Marvel Comics’ Civil War and the Age of Terror: Critical Essays on the Comic Saga, from McFarland. Earlier this summer, “Atomic Housewives: *Shutter Island* and the Domestication of Nuclear Holocaust” came out in the June issue of the Journal of Popular Film and Television.

“No Dancing in Waco” and “Once, and Again After Midnight,” two poems by MFA poetry student Ashton Kamburoff, have been accepted by Shadowgraph Quarterly.

Becky Jackson will participate in the panel “The Extracurriculum Within Our Walls” at the 2016 Conference on College Composition and Communication Convention. She will also co-chair (with Eric Leake) the annual meeting of the Master’s Degree Consortium of Writing Studies Specialists at the conference.

Edna Rehbein, a Lecturer in the English Department and also an Assistant Vice Presdient for Academic Affairs, has been selected for an Alumnae Achievement Award by her alma mater, know formerly as Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia but now coed and is simply Randolph College. She will receive the award in Virginia on September 19th and will have an opportunity to teach a class while there. She attended Randolph-Macon in the 1970s and earned an AB degree with a double major in Spanish and Latin American Studies, graduating with Honors and Magna Cum Laude. Upon graduation she received a Danforth Fellowship for graduate students to study in doctoral programs with the purpose of becoming university professors. Randolph College has a very strong history as a liberal arts college and many of its graduates continue with graduate and professional programs.

Miriam Williams and Octavio Pimentel’s Communicating Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in Technical Communication, published in 2015 by Baywood Publishing Company, has been nominated for the 2016 Technical and Scientific Communication Awards sponsored by the Conference on College Composition & Communication.

MFA fiction graduate Sarah Rafael Garcia has been granted an artist-in-residence position at the Grand Central Arts Center in Santa Ana, California from March of 2016 through March of 2017, with which she will develop her of proposed Santana’s Fairy Tales, a collection is inspired by and including one of the feminist fairytales submitted in her MFA thesis. *Santana’s Fairy Tales* is an oral history, storytelling project that integrates community-based interviews to create contemporary fairytales and fables that represent the history and real stories of Mexican/Mexican-American residents of Santa Ana (inspired by the Grimms’ Fairy Tales). The exhibit will present a mixed media installation that will be curated in collaboration with local visual, musical, and performance artists. The exhibit will showcase a fully illustrated published book; an ‘open book’ performance with a narrator and actors; along with the band “Viento Callejero,” who will compose and play a score for a featured story out of the collection. The artist-in-residence position includes a $10,000 honorarium and an apartment in the downtown artist district (near the art center), as well as funds for the artists participating in the project and for all curating expenses. Santana’s Fairy Tales is supported in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, through a grant supporting the Artist-in-Residence initiative at Grand Central Art Center.

Congratulations:

MARC graduate Cheyenne Riggs has accepted a full-time lecturer position in the Department of English at the University of Oklahoma.

Nancy Wilson’s article, “Coming in from the (Binary) Code,” will appear in the Spring 2015 issue of Writing on the Edge.

Trey Moody’s poem, “What Needs To Be Done,” is in the current issue of Puerto del Sol.

The following English faculty were name Alpha Chi Favorite Professors by students graduating Spring 2015: John Blair, Chad Hammett, Susan Hanson, Elvin Holt, Rebecca Jackson, Katie Kapurch, Lindy Kosmitis, Twister Marquiss, Stephanie Motz, Stephanie Noll, and Anne Winchell.  Alpha Chi is a National College Honor Society that recognizes “academic excellence and exemplary character” in students.

MATC student Emily Clark, this year’s Outstanding Graduate Student in English, has accepted a position at Schneider Electric as a technical writer. Emily will write documentation for tollway system software and hardware.

MFA poetry student Laura Kraay’s comic-poetry hybrid, “Notes to My Ex,” appears in the latest issue of Hobart: http://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/notes-to-my-ex.

Our Visiting Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Komi Begedou, and a colleague currently at New York University have been awarded a $10,000 grant from NYU and D-Prize for their “Jeunes Braves” project to expand classes helping teenage girls in Togo avoid unwanted pregnancy. In late April, Komi was guest speaker at the Togo Independence Day celebration held by the Togo Association of Central Texas, in Austin.

Steve Wilson has poems forthcoming in Southwestern American Literature, Midwest Quarterly, and Beloit Poetry Journal.

Congratulations:

Susan Hanson, Elvin Holt and Twister Marquiss have been named Alpha Chi Favorite Professors for spring 2015.

MARC graduate Megan Boeshart has been accepted into the PhD program in English at Old Dominion University, where she will focus on program emphases in writing & rhetoric and technology & media studies.

MFA poetry student Sarah Howze’s poem “Scene I: Stuck in the House of Tiny Deaths, Somewhere in Texas” will be published in the Spring 2015 edition of Anamesa.

A Texas State University team competed at the International Business Ethics Case Competition in New Orleans, LA in late April. The graduate student team, including English Department Administrative Assistant Shaula Rocha, along with Travis Stockton and David Tamez, won 1st place in the 90-second presentation division, and runner-up in the 25-minute presentation division.

Mary McCulley, a 2008 graduate of the MARC program, has accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in the English Department at Cedarville University in Ohio. Mary is currently completing her dissertation on 19th-century women’s rhetoric and literature at Texas Christian University. She will start her new position in the fall.

Mark Busby was the featured author for the launch of the 2015 volume of The Mayo Review at Texas A&M University-Commerce on April 23.   As part of the launch, Mark conducted a morning writing workshop; presented a paper in the afternoon entitled “The Scholar as Novelist, the Novelist as Scholar”; and offered a reading from his novel Cedar Crossing in the evening. Two of his stories are featured in the new volume of The Mayo Review.

Students in Laura Ellis-Lai’s fall 2014 Honors writing course presented their work at the National Conference for Undergraduate Research last week at Eastern Washington University. Congratulations to undergraduate researchers Marcela Zuniga Arteaga, Brian Woods, Lindsey Robertson, Amber Cabading, and Glen Stevenson. Laura’s talk at the NCUR Faculty and Administrator Network, about the research she did as a result of participating in Texas State’s Faculty Learning Community on Globalization this year, was titled: “Supporting International Independent Research for Undergraduates.”

Octavio Pimentel has agreed to serve as Second Stage Reviewer for the 2016 Conference on College Composition and Communication.

Graduating MARC student Shaun Bryan has been accepted into the M.A. in Applied Philosophy and Ethics (MAAPE) program at Texas State for fall 2015. He plans to study the philosophy of cognition, logic, the philosophy of language and its connection to cognition, the philosophy of education, and the mind/body connection in continuation of his research into disability studies.