MISCELLANY – JANUARY 19, 2022

John Blair has been named the recipient of Reed Magazine‘s 2021 Edwin Markham Award for Poetry.

The latest issue of the Journal of Texas Music History, co-edited by Alan Schaefer and Dr. Jason Mellard of the Department of History and the Center for Texas Music History, appeared in December 2021. Free print copies are available in Brazos Hall. Read online here: https://www.txstate.edu/ctmh/publications/journal/vol21.html

Second-year MFA candidate Melissa Huckabay’s poem, “Pink Evening Primrose, or Buttercup As My Mom Called It,” is featured in issue 13 of Poetry South.

Sandra Sidi co-authored a report on unjust detentions in America with the SMU Dedman School of Law. It is available here:

https://www.smu.edu/-/media/Site/Law/Deason-Center/Publications/Public-Defense/Initial-Appearance-Campaign/Ending-Injustice-Solving-The-Initial-Appearance-Crisis-FINAL.pdf?la=en

MFA fiction candidate Hannah Smothers has published the personal essay, “How Much is a Dog’s Life Worth?” in Texas Monthly: https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/texas-dog-life-value/

Rob Tally participated remotely in two round-table sessions, “Reading Poe Today” and “Marxism, Form, and Futurity,” at the MLA convention in Washington, DC. He also was a featured speaker at “The Eminescu–Poe Transatlantic Online Conference,” Bucharest, Romania, on January 17, 2022.

MISCELLANY – December 14, 2021

MFA student D. R. Garrett’s story “Wild Horses” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Active Muse.

Josh Lopez’s story “The Incorrigible Hulk” appears in an issue of West Branch, which was guest edited by MFA graduate Tomás Q. Morín.

Susan Morrison’s book chapter “Waste” appears in The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Stephanie Foote.

Amanda Mixon’s piece, “‘Out long enough to be historic’: Racialized Gay Space in Pre-Stonewall San Antonio,” was recently published in Southern Spaces.

Rob Tally’s article “Bathsheba’s Stomach; or, Poiesis and Criticism in Paul A. Bové’s Love’s Shadow” appears in the current issue of symploke. His chapter “A Postmodern Mappa Mundi: Cosmopolitanism, Heterotopia, and the World System” was published in Migrating Minds: Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism, edited by Didier Coste et al. (Routledge), and his “Worlding Spatiality Studies” appears in The Bloomsbury Handbook on World Theory, edited by Jeffrey Di Leo and Christian Moraru (Bloomsbury). Also, on Dec. 4, 2021, Rob remotely delivered the keynote speech, “Representing Space: Literary Cartography as Critique,” at the International Forum of Literary Cartography and Celebration of the Foundation of Research Center of Literary Cartography at Southwest University, in Chongqing, China; Rob has been named the Honorary Director of that Research Center.

Two poems by Steve Wilson, “O Bluedark Dream” and “Prayer Along the Road,” appear in Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose, out this month from New Rivers Press.

MARC graduate Lea Christine Colchado was awarded the Jeanette Morgan Endowment for Excellence in Research and Teaching of Rhetoric and Composition by the University of Houston’s English Department. The award is in recognition of Lea’s upcoming Conference on College Composition and Communication presentation on Anzaldúan modes of writing and Chicana epistemology in academia.

Miles Wilson’s fifth book and second novel, McKenzie Rampant: A Frolic for Oregon, will be published in 2022 by the University of Nevada Press.

The following poems by Vanessa Couto Johnson were recently published: “{march 14 2021} | daylight saving pi paa ærten” appears in Street Cake Experimental Writing Magazine; “*? where we’re going we don’t need *?” and “fix[ations/tures]” appear in Superstition Review; “The photoreconnaissance wants an autogiro” appears in  Scrawl Place; and “Spring Lake” is out in Sublunary Review.

 

Note: In spring 2022, Miriam Williams will be on leave. Please email your Miscellany items to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Rob Tally.

MISCELLANY – November 23, 2021

Department of English 

Miscellany 

November 23, 2021  

Susan Morrison was named a Texas State University System Regents’ Professor at the November 18th quarterly Board of Regents’ meeting. “The System’s highest faculty honor, the Regents’ Professor Award, is conferred upon professors who demonstrate excellence and exemplary achievement in the areas of teaching, research and publication, and service.”

 

Susan Morrison was recently interviewed by Asijit Datta from The Heritage College, based in Kolkata, India. View the discussion here: Wasting and Being Wasted: Self, Animals, Society.

 

Aimee Roundtree was appointed Faculty Fellow for the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs (ORSP). The ORSP Faculty Fellow appointment is designed to complement leadership development programs in higher education and provides direct, hands-on experience in learning all dimensions of research administration.

 

Debra Monroe’s eighth book, It Takes a Worried Woman, a collection of essays, will be published in 2022 by the University of Georgia Press (The Crux Series in Literary Nonfiction). Five essays from this book have been published this year.

 

The Department of English was represented at the 2021 Pacific Ancient & Modern Language Association Conferencein Las Vegas by Chisom Ogoke (“Madam Biko”), Jay Cruz (“Kerouac’s Pilgrimage Toward Empathy”), and Graeme Wend-Walker (“Children of the Night in a Sunburnt Country: Australian Vampires on Film”). Graeme also organized and chaired a special session, “Nnedi Okorafor: Destruction and Wholeness in African (and African-American) Science Fiction and Fantasy.”

 

On December 1, Cecily Parks will read poems, participate in a Q&A, and lead a creative writing exercise for Emergency Medicine residents and faculty in the Humanities Track and Wellness Track at New York Presbyterian Hospital – Weill Cornell. She is one of two poets featured in the event, which is titled “Caring: Depictions of Physicians by their Friends, Family, and Loved Ones.”

 

The Adroit Journal has nominated Ben Reed’s short story “The Interpretation of Dreams” for inclusion in Best American Short Stories.

 

Sandra Sidi’s short story “To Save a Butterfly” has won second place in Narrative Magazine’s Fall 2021 Short Story contest.

miscellany – November 1, 2021

Aimee Roundtree’s “Ethics and Facial Recognition Technology: An Integrative Review” was published in  IEEE’s 2021 3rd World Symposium on Artificial Intelligence (WSAI). Aimee will serve as keynote speaker at the 11th Annual Symposium on Communicating Complex Information.

MFA poetry student Fernando Izaguirre’s new poem “Abdomen” appears in New York Quarterly.

Amanda Scott was interviewed about Porter House Review by Becky Tuch, curator of the Lit Mag News Roundup. The interview is part of Becky Tuch’s editor series.

The Chinese translation of Rob Tally’s book Spatiality has been published by Peking University Press in Beijing. It was translated by Dr. Fang Ying, a professor at Zhejiang Gongshang University, who was a visiting scholar in Texas State’s Department of English in 2018.  Rob recently co-organized the annual conference of the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts (SCLA), whose theme was “Spaces,” which took place October 14-16, 2021, in Austin. At the conference Rob presented a paper, “The Heterotopian Enclave,” and was elected Vice-President of the SCLA. Rob will be the keynote speaker at the 4th International Symposium on Sea Literature and Culture, hosted by the University of Ningbo, and his article, “‘Don’t the great tales never end?’: Tolkien, History, and the Desire Called Marx,” appears in the current issue of the Journal of English Language and Literature.

Three poems by Vanessa Couto Johnson appear in The Collidescope  and one poem in Club Plum Literary JournalThe Account informed Vanessa that her essay “my powerlifted Body” has been nominated for Best of the Net.

MISCELLANY – October 15, 2021

Elvin Holt was honored this week at Texas State’s Naming Streets Ceremony.  Elvin Holt Drive is on Texas State’s Round Rock Campus. The street commemorates Dr. Elvin Holt, the first Black professor in the Department of English, for his work in multicultural curriculum development.

Tom Grimes’s play New World will be produced, in a Spanish translation, and open in Madrid in early 2022.

MFA graduate Tomás Q. Morín’s newest collection Machete was published this week.

Kate McClancy’s chapter, “Fighting a Lonely War: Frank Castle and the Domestication of Vietnam,” appears in Judge, Jury, and Executioner: Essays on the Punisher in Print and on Screen from McFarland.

Cecily Parks’s poem “December” appears in the latest The Best American Poetry, edited by Tracy K. Smith.

Sandra Sidi’s essay “The Bridge” was chosen as Narrative Magazine’s Top Five Stories of the Week for 2020-2021.

MFA graduate Meg E. Griffitts’ collection Hallucinating a Homestead was recently published by Two Sylvias Press.

MFA graduate Dallas Raquel Klein’s poems “Gathering” and “night swim after matrimony” appear in Sandy River Review.

MISCELLANY – September 27, 2021

On September 8, 2021, Rob Tally gave an invited talk, “On Academic Book Reviewing,” for a meeting of the Equipe de Récherche en Littératures de l’Afrique Noire et de la Diaspora, Université de Lomé, Lomé, Togo. On September 24, 2021, Rob gave the keynote address (“The Place of Geocriticism”) for Space, Place, and Topography: Geographical Imaginations in Indian Writings in English, a virtual conference sponsored by the Departments of English of Seva Bharati Mahavidyalaya, Kapgari, and Subarnarekha Mahavidyalaya, Gopiballavpur, West Bengal, India. On October 1, 2021, Rob will give a featured talk titled, “Critique as Virtue,” for The Ethics of Critique in a Time of Precarity and Pandemic, a research conference of the National Research Foundation (NRF) Korea–U.S. Special Cooperation Program. Rob is also the event’s co-organizer, with Dr. Youngmin Kim of Dongguk University in Seoul.

MFA fiction graduate and Lecturer Sandra Sidi has placed 2nd in Narrative Magazine’s 2021 Spring Short Story Contest for her piece “To Save a Butterfly.”

Geneva Gano presented research on poet Robinson Jeffers on the “New Scholarship in Jeffers Studies” panel sponsored by the Tor House Foundation and Robinson Jeffers Association on August 26.

Octavio Pimentel will participate in the City of Kyle’s “Dialogue for Peace and Progress 2021 – Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month” on Friday, October 1, starting at 7 p.m. Octavio will present “Empowering Latinx Composition Students: Recognizing their Lenguage y Cultura en la Clase de Escritura (Language and Culture in the Writing Classroom)” at the 2022 CCCC Annual Convention in Chicago, Illinois.

Miriam Williams’ article, “Archives, Rhetorical Absence, and Critical Imagination: Examining Black Women’s Mental Health Narratives at Virginia’s Central State Hospital from 1891-1936,” (co-authored with Natasha N. Jones of Michigan State) has been accepted for publication in a special issue on social justice in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication.

Roger Jones’ tanka sequence “Early Pandemic” has been accepted for publication in Ribbons​, the official publication of the Tanka Society of America. His tanka prose poem “Short Cuts” was published in Ribbons ​in August.

Susan Morrison presented a talk, “Pilgrimage and Metaphor: Agency for Medieval Women Pilgrims and Writers,” at the 13th International Colloquium Compostela on Medieval Women on Pilgrimage in Christianity, Judaism and Islam in Santiago de Compostela, Spain (entirely Zoom conference).

MISCELLANY – SEPTEMBER 7, 2021

Octavio Pimentel will present, “Black Lives Matter and Antiracist Projects in Writing Program Administration,” at the 2021 NCTE Annual Convention in Louisville, KY. Octavio’s article, “The Push for the 1974 Statement…Once Again,” appears in Writing Program Administration and chapter, “Dandole Gas: Un Profe con Sangre del Fil,” is forthcoming in Cross-Talking With An American Academic of Color: Essays in Honor of Victor Villanueva. 

 

MFA graduate Kaitlyn Burd’s novel, We Love You, Daisy Buchanan, was named the winner of the Writers’ League of Texas’s Manuscript Contest in the General Fiction category.

 An interview with Cyrus Cassells by Michael Hettich appears in Hole in the Head Review. 

Susan Morrison was one of two speakers in a keynote conversation for the “Climate/Changes/ Global Perspectives” Environmental Humanities International Online Summer Symposium through the University of Würzburg, Germany. Susan’s poem, “The Song of the Lark,” appeared in The Ekphrastic Review.

Miriam Williams’ article, “Gun Control and Gun Rights: A Conceptual Framework for Analyzing Public Policy in Technical Communication,” was published in the August issue of Technical Communication Quarterly.

Eric Leake’s response essay, “Entering Decolonial Translation through Dwelling and Storytelling,” was published in The Expanding Universe of Writing Studies: Higher Education Writing Research (Peter Lang). Eric presented, “Living and Languaging Abroad and Cultivating Empathy,” via Zoom at LinGOcultura, a festival of languages and cultures hosted by Nova Gorica, Slovenia, and Gorizia, Italy, as European Capitals of Culture 2025.

Three poems by Vanessa Couto Johnson appear in TERSE Journal

 MFA graduate Leticia Urieta’s book, Las Criaturasis forthcoming from FlowerSong Press.

  MFA graduate Tomás Q. Morín’s poem,”Sartana and Machete in Outer Space,” is featured in Virginia Quarterly Review. 

 MA Literature grad Tina Žigon has just started teaching high school English at the International School of Minnesota, a private college preparatory school just outside of Minneapolis.

  The MA Literature program congratulates the Spring and Summer 2021 graduates for successfully completing their degrees during these trying times, writing about a wide variety of fascinating topics:

Christopher Concepcion Malave, “Representations of Children in Fairy Tales and Disney Adaptations,” Area Exam, Dir. Teya Rosenberg

Moriah Grayson, “The Swamp and the Monster: Space, Liminality and Empathy in Maleficent and The Shape of Water,” Thesis, Dir. Robert T. Tally, Jr.

Luise Noé, “Intermedial Reparations After Postmodernism: The Intermedial Turn in Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex and Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag,” Thesis, Dir. Robert T. Tally, Jr.

Jennifer Ricks, “Trusting the Child Narrator in Literature,” Area Exam, Dir. Teya Rosenberg

Rosie Sedgwick, “Cheat Codes of the Gods: Narrative and Greek Mythology in Video Games,” Dir. Suparno Banerjee

Christopher Solis, “Family Dysfunction in McEwan’s The Cement Garden, Lessing’s The Fifth Child, and Callenbach’s Ecotopia,” Area Exam, Dir. Allan Chavkin

Aaryn Stafford “Youth Reactions to Death in Children’s and Young Adult Literature,” Area Exam, Dir. Graeme Wend-Walker

Samantha Van Dale “Recycled Tropes, Suffocating Stereotypes, or Hope for Film Heroines,” Thesis, Dir. Rebecca Bell-Metereau

Raquel Zuniga, “Healing Self, Healing Community: A Chicana Feminist Analysis of Historical and Intergenerational Trauma in Anzaldúa’s and Cisneros’s Writing,” Thesis, Dir. Sara A. Ramírez.

English major Beyonce Morales has accepted a paid internship with the Texas Faculty Association (TFA). Her duties will include developing the organization’s social media presence, collaborating on the TFA newsletter, and researching subjects of interest to TFA officers.

MISCELLANY – AUGUST 6, 2021

MFA graduate Reyes Ramirez’s short story collection, The Book of Wanderers, is forthcoming from The University of Arizona Press in Spring 2022.

The latest issue of The Fight and the Fiddle is entirely devoted to the work of Cyrus Cassells. The issue includes the editor’s interview with Cyrus, an essay on his work by poet Roger Reeves, and three new poems from The World That the Shooter Left Us (Four Way: Feb. 2022) and Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch? (Four Way: Feb. 2024).

Scott Mogull’s article, “Developing Technical Videos: Genres (or “Templates”) for Video Planning, Storyboarding, Scriptwriting, and Production,” was published in the August 2021 issue of Technical Communication.

Steve Wilson’s poem, “Goodwife’s Prayer, Autumn 1653,” appears in Tiny Seed Literary Journal. The poem is also forthcoming in Tiny Seed Press’s anthology, Anthology Forest: Nature-Inspired Poetry.

Susan Morrison’s story, “The Stylite,” appears in the latest issue of Feminist Spaces.

Chris Dayley’s article, “Combatting Embedded Racism in TPC Academic Programs: Recruiting for Diversity Using Student-Informed Practices,” appears in the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication’s journal, Programmatic Perspectives

Naomi Nye Elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Texas Sate University is pleased to celebrate Naomi Nye’s election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the oldest and most esteemed honorary societies in the United States. She is among 252 people chosen by the American Academy this year, and the first ever elected from Texas State.

Nye writes she is “deeply proud to be affiliated with Texas State and the students in Creative Writing.” Nye teaches Masters of Fine Arts graduate student workshops in creative writing and also has open workshops for students interested in writing fiction.

As a poet, novelist and songwriter, Nye has authored or edited more than 30 books, including three novels and 12 collections of poetry.  In 2020 she was honored with a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle. She has won four Pushcart Prizes, the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize and many notable book and best book citations from the American Library Association. She received the Robert Creeley Award in 2013 and received the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature.

Her collection of poems for young adults, “Honeybee,” won the 2008 Arab American Book Award in the children’s/young adult category. Her novel for children, The Turtle of Oman, was chosen both a Best Book of 2014 by the Horn Book and a 2015 Notable Children’s Book by the American Library Association. Nye was named Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation in 2019 and was awarded the 2019 Lon Tinkle Award by the Texas Institute of Letters. Her most recent books of poetry include, Cast Away: Poems of our times (Greenwillow Books, 2020); The Tiny Journalist (BOA Editions Ltd, 2019); and Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018; Greenwillow Books, HarperCollins).

In 2018 Nye donated her literary papers to The Wittliff Collections at Texas State.

Founded in 1780, the Academy honors exceptional individuals in a variety of fields and convenes these leaders to advance new ideas and address important issues toward the public good. Members include some of the most accomplished voices in the arts and humanities, social policy, education, global affairs, and science and technology. Notable members from the Academy’s history include Margaret Mead, Jonas Salk, Barbara McClintock, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, John Hope Franklin, Georgia O’Keeffe, I.M. Pei, and Toni Morrison.

“We are honoring the excellence of these individuals, celebrating what they have achieved so far, and imagining what they will continue to accomplish,” said David Oxtoby, President of the American Academy. “The past year has been replete with evidence of how things can get worse; this is an opportunity to illuminate the importance of art, ideas, knowledge, and leadership that can make a better world.”

John Adams and John Hancock were founding fathers of the Academy along with 60 other scholar-patriots who understood that a new republic would require institutions able to gather knowledge and advance learning in service to the public good.

MISCELLANY – JULY 15, 2021

Alethea Maldonado, an English major from the Class of 2013, has just been honored with a NCTE Early Career Teacher of Color Leadership Award: https://ncte.org/awards/ncte-early-career-educator-teacher-of-color-leadership-award/

Alethea currently teaches 7th and 8th grade ESL at Lockhart Junior High School.

MFA graduate Tomás Q. Morín was featured on the cover of the latest issue of The American Poetry Review. You can read one of his poems from the issue here:

https://aprweb.org/poems/machetes

Geneva Gano was recently a guest on Priscilla Vance Leder’s radio show. They discussed Jenn Shapland’s hybrid memoir/biography, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers. In uncovering McCullers’ suppressed queer identity, Shapland celebrates her own—and the reader’s, regardless of gender or sexual orientation. You can hear the conversation here: https://www.mixcloud.com/PLeder/my-autobiography-of-carson-mccullers-by-jenn-shapland-broadcast-june-8-2021/?fbclid=IwAR0gXwwBrf8Vmgihq74cRZFHDZgjW4TLc6zgi_Oc5-Gef3A_xSCB4_mnNmI

A Turkish translation of Rob Tally’s book Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism has just been published; the translator, Emel Aras, who had also translated Rob’s Spatiality into Turkish, will be a visiting scholar in the English Department this coming school year. Rob’s article “Canon to Right of Them, Canon to Left,” on Harold Bloom’s posthumously published The American Canon, appears in the current issue of The American Book Review. Rob will give a keynote talk titled, “Topophrenia, Mapping, and the Situation of the Subject,” via Zoom for a symposium on “The Spatial Imagination and City-Making in Literature,” sponsored by the Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, in Belgium.

Amanda Scott’s creative nonfiction piece “A Filling Station, A Falling Stallion” was recently published in Hobart. You can read the piece here: https://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/a-filling-station-a-falling-stallion

Anne Winchell published a chapter entitled “Storytelling in Video Games” in the book Teaching the Game: A collection of syllabi for game design, development, and implementation (Vols. 1-2), edited by Richard Ferdig, Emily Baumgartner, & Enrico Gandolfi and published by ETC Press on July 1, 2021. This invited, peer-reviewed chapter discusses HON3396X: Storytelling in Video Games.

MFA graduate Nour Al Ghraowi’s poem “Khalini Ahkilak (Let me tell you)” appears in World Literature Today.

MFA fiction student Molly Yingling’s flash fiction piece “Expiry” recently appeared in Hobart.

Eric Leake’s co-authored chapter “Encountering Difference Through Empathy and Translingualism” was published in The Matter of Practice: Exploring New Materialisms in the Research and Teaching of Languages and Literacies (Information Age Press).

MFA student SG Huerta is featured in The Kenyon Review’s Poetry Today series. They answer questions about poetry, poetics, and their new book The Things We Bring With Us: Travel Poems: https://kenyonreview.org/2021/06/poetry-today-ricardo-maldonado-and-sg-huerta/

Graeme Wend-Walker was the guest on KZSM’s “Bookmarked” with Priscilla Vance Leder, where he discussed Russell Hoban’s novel Kleinzeit and his upcoming book on Hoban. Graeme’s short story “Your Pineapple Fritter Is Ready” appears in the current issue of Danse Macabre (number 135).

A new story One Talented Cat from MFA graduate Ryan Shane Lopez appears in Bodega.

On June 28, James Reeves was interviewed by Carrie Lynn Evans, host of the New Books Network’s “Secularism” channel, about his book, Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge UP, 2020). The podcast is available here: https://newbooksnetwork.com/godless-fictions-in-the-eighteenth-century and on all major podcast platforms (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audacity, etc.)