Category: Miscellany Archive

Ana Stefanovska, a Visiting Scholar at Texas State from February to June 2018, recently defended her Ph.D. dissertation, titled “Lo spazio letterario nella narrativa del Neorealismo” (or Literary Space in Neorealist Narrative) at the University of Padua (Italy). While at Texas State, she studied spatial literary theory and criticism with Rob Tally, gave two talks at national conferences, and also completed two chapters of her dissertation. Ana is from Skopje, the Republic of Macedonia.

 

Rob Tally’s essay “Critique Unlimited” appears in the book, What’s Wrong with Antitheory?, edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo (Bloomsbury, 2019).

 

“Kill Yr Idols,” a work of creative non-fiction by MFA fiction graduate Levis Keltner, appears in a recent issue of Anomaly: http://anmly.org/ap29/levis-keltner/

 

Steve Wilson’s poem “Solo Road-Trip West” will appear in both the San Antonio Express-News and the Houston Chronicle.  Steve was awarded a Common Experience Event Grant to support the October 23 poetry reading, “‘Tell Me This Didn’t Happen’: Poems on Truth,” with readings by Steve, Cecily Parks, Kathleen Peirce, Naomi Shihab Nye, John Blair and Roger Jones.  A live music performance and refreshments will be provided before the event, which begins at 5:30 in the Gallery of the Common Experience (Lampasas Bldg).

 

Lecturer and MFA fiction graduate Shannon Perri recently had a short story, “Liquid Gold,” published in Texas Observer: https://www.texasobserver.org/short-story-contest-finalist-liquid-gold/

 

Malvern Books will be hosting a reading by MFA poetry graduate Logan Fry at the launch of his new poetry collection Harpo Before the Opus on Saturday, October 19, at 7 pm: http://malvernbooks.com/event/logan-fry-book-launch/?instance_id=3104.

 

MFA poetry student Brent Green (under the pen name Casey Aimer) has had five poems published or accepted recently: “Lawrence Sullivan Ross” and “Antique Existence,” published at The Fictional Cafe: https://www.fictionalcafe.com/posing-the-tough-questions-poetry-by-casey-aimer/; “Weapons of Mass Production,” published at Whatever Keeps the Lights On: https://whateverkeepsthelightson.com/weapons-of-mass; “To Find if You’re Sleeping Next to a Corpse Watch the Chest,” at LampLit Underground; and “Heart Doesn’t Work Like It Used To,” to be published soon at Ars Medica.

 

MFA fiction student Caleb Ajinomoh’s essay, “Against Exclusion” will be published in the November issue of the AWP Chronicle.

 

Mark Busby read from new poems at the annual meeting of the Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers (TACWT), which took place in Houston from September 26-29. His poem, “Remembering Steven,” about his brother Steven Busby (1944-2018), appears in Writing Texas.

 

Sara Bechtol (MFA fiction student) has a story, “My Banana Milk,” forthcoming in Silk Road Review.

Stephanie Noll’s essay “The Sidearm of a Saguaro” can be found at Cleaning Up Glitter: https://www.cleaningupglitter.com/the-sidearm-of-a-saguaro-stephanie-noll.

“A Great White Whale,” by MFA fiction student Caleb Ajinomoh, appears in the Summer/Fall print issue of CircleShow.

William Jensen’s story “You Can Outrun the Devil if You Try” will be included in the anthology Road Kill vol. 4: Texas Horror by Texas Writers. His Pushcart-nominated story “Camino Real” will be reprinted in the upcoming “best of the decade” issue of Stoneboat.

MARC student Lea Colchado will present “Slumber of Sins and The Shadow Beast: Looking at Teresa De Cartagena’s Writings Through an Anzaldúan Lens” at the Texas Medieval Association (TEMA) Conference, taking place at Texas State University in October.

Jennifer duBois’ article “The Un-reinvention of Jerry Springer” was just published on New York Magazine’s The Cut: https://www.thecut.com/2019/09/i-think-about-this-a-lot-jerry-springers-un-reinvention.html?utm_campaign=nym&utm_medium=s1&utm_source=tw

Joe Falocco is currently performing in Archive Theatre’s Austin production of Cyrano. In this original translation by director Jennifer Rose Davis, Joe plays five roles, three of which involve stage combat. To the delight of his students, Dr. Falocco is killed onstage three times during the course of the evening. Here are a few recent reviews of the production. https://ctxlivetheatre.com/reviews/20190903-review-cyrano-de-bergerac-by-the-archive-/ https://www.austinchronicle.com/arts/2019-09-06/cyrano-de-bergerac/?fbclid=IwAR0_CLIxkmJrTDMFewufMlUOhl0KdhUHSaH6hhl6ddmEDzLwns_kGubav2E 

MARC student Sam Garcia will present “Writing Queerly: How Trans Perspectives Can Benefit Writing Center Sessions,” on Oct. 19 at the meeting of the International Writing Centers Association and National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing, taking place in Columbus, OH.

“Stull,” a short story by MFA fiction student Steph Grossman, was published in Joyland Magazine: http://bit.ly/2Y7naY7.

Whitney May’s essay, “‘To Test the Limits and Break Through’: How Femslash Rejects the Straight-Coding of Queer Experiences in Disney’s Frozen,” appears in the new edited collection Representing Kink: Fringe Sexuality and Textuality in Literature, Digital Narrative, and Popular Culture, from Lexington Books.

2nd-year MFA poetry student Luke William’s fourth Songs For Children album was released over the summer and is available to stream and download at https://www.lukekwilliam.com/songsforchildren4.

In the cover story for the October 2019 Texas Monthly, “Battling Over the Past,” the Texas Historical Commission’s marker explaining the 1918 Porvenir Massacre, with text researched and written by MARC graduate and Lecturer Connor Wilson, is cited as an example of recent efforts by historians to more accurately reflect Texas history: “The Porvenir marker. . . had to overcome years of steadfast opposition from local interests. But at public events and lectures, [Professor Martinez of Brown University, who petitioned for creating the marker] has received profuse thanks from descendants of the victims of racist violence. She’s also been thanked by some descendants of Texas Rangers who have struggled to understand their ancestors’ participation in such violence. . . .”

This summer, Flore Chevaillier presented “Time, Body, and Narrative in Bhanu Kapil’s work” at the European Conference on Arts & Humanities in Brighton, England; and “The Scarred Body of the Text: Storytelling and Experiment in Bhanu Kapil’s work” at the Progressive Connections Conference on “Storytelling & the Body” in Verona, Italy.

MFA fiction student Ryan Lopez’s short story “Back Then” has been accepted for publication in Obra, a literary journal from the MFA of the Americas. This month, he’ll present “Castles in the Air: The Victorian Princess and the Rescuing Imagination” at the Victorian Popular Fiction Association Study Day: The Threatened Child in Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction and Culture, taking place in Dublin this September; and “Faith Like a Child: Imagination in MacDonald, Burnett, and Montgomery” at The Southwest Conference on Christianity and Literature, to be held at University of Dallas.

MARC student Sarah Piercy will present “Generation Z Speaks: Conversations with First-Year Writing Students” at CCCC in Milwaukee next March; and “Across the Generations: Studying First-Year Writing and Identity” at TYCA-SW (Two-Year College Association-Southwest), taking place in Conroe this coming October.

Miriam Williams presented the Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) Kickoff Keynote to the Texas A&M University Central Texas community on September 4, 2019. The QEP is a SACS accreditation requirement to help universities improve student learning outcomes. Miriam’s talk discussed her writing experiences with regulatory and environmental agencies and made recommendations for implementing the university’s writing-focused QEP.

MFA poetry student James Trask has poems forthcoming in the next issue of The Windward Review: “Clash by Moonlight” and “This Night.” James will read at the launch party for the issue, which takes place on September 19 at the Texas A&M-Corpus Christi campus.

MFA fiction student Sandra Sidi has an essay in the latest issue of The Atlantic: “The Male Gaze on Steriods”: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/get-a-weapon/596677/ 

Lecturer and MFA poetry graduate Vanessa Couto Johnson was in Las Vegas from September 6-7 to read from her latest poetry book Pungent dins concentric at Nevada Humanities’ Poetry Matters! reading series and to lead a poetry workshop focused on the prose poem form at the Winchester Dondero Cultural Center.

The personal essay, “Stable,” by MFA fiction student Mary-Pat Buss-Hayton was just published in the print edition of the literary magazine Inverted Syntax.

Aimee Roundtree published “A Qualitative Approach Towards Understanding HIV-Related Stress in Texas” in Texas Medicine; the study based upon quantitative research was written with several colleagues and a Texas State graduate student from the Psychology program on whose thesis committee she served: https://www.texmed.org/Aug19Journal/ 

Naomi Shihab Nye will be selecting and introducing poems for The New York Times Magazine for this year. It’s a prestigious position that rotates annually. She started in August 2019 and will be in the position until Aug 2020.

MARC graduate Faith Williams has been promoted to Assistant Professor of English at Tulsa (OK) Community College.

James Reeves’ book, Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century: A Literary History of Atheism, is now under contract with Cambridge University Press and should be released in 2020. In July, James attended the NEH Summer Seminar on “Religion, Secularism, and the Novel” at the University of Iowa, where he presented research from his book manuscript and revised an article on “Antislavery Literature and the Decline of Hell.”

Writers for Hillviews recently interviewed Katie Kapurch about her Beatles research: https://news.txstate.edu/research-and-innovation/2019/-study-of-literature-and-rhetoric-leads-professor-on-long-and-winding-road-to-the-beatles.html. Katie and Jon Marc Smith recently co-authored “A Fear So Real: Film Noir’s Fallen Man in Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town and the David Lynch Oeuvre,” published in the journal, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies (Penn State UP). The article appears in a 2019 special issue focused on Springsteen.

Kitty Ledbetter’s essay titled “Periodical Poetry” has been published in the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing. Issue 15.2 of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, guest-edited by Kitty Ledbetter, has been published online at https://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue152/issue152. The special issue is focused on “Women and Leisure” and includes an introduction to the issue by Kitty and her essay titled “Rinkualism, Punch, and Women on Wheels.”

Jon Marc Smith is mentioned in this article from the Austin Chronicle discussing Roky Erickson, Doug Sahm, and the blueprint for punk rock: https://www.austinchronicle.com/music/2019-08-09/how-a-collaboration-between-roky-erickson-and-doug-sahm-became-part-of-the-blueprint-for-punk-rock/

Julie McCormick Weng published Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism (Syracuse University Press) with Kathryn Conrad and Coílín Parsons. She also published “A Reconsideration of Joyce’s Non-Fiction,” a review of Katherine Ebury’s and James Alexander Fraser’s Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings: “Outside his Jurisfiction” in James Joyce Literary Supplement.

Steve Wilson new book of poetry, The Reaches, is now open for pre-publication orders at this link: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-reaches-by-steve-wilson/. The book is due for release in November.

Cyrus Cassell’s poem “More Than Watchmen at Daybreak,” first published in Agni, appeared as the poem of the day on August 23 at Poetry Daily: https://poems.com/poem/more-than-watchmen-at-daybreak/ 

Department Chair Victoria Smith was interviewed for a Time article on the new movie about Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West: https://time.com/5655270/virginia-woolf-vita-sackville-west-relationship/?fbclid=IwAR13UqGehwAAq9WIShD3xOachSD3qkVhRg_gxa-gHMOp9mnoiRfpZR6GCKw 

In June Leah Schwebel presented ‘“Oon seyde that Omer made lyes’: Chaucer’s Intertextual Poetics” at the biennial London Chaucer Conference.” She also spent time working with manuscripts at the Oxford Bodleian Library and the British Library in London, research supported by an REP grant.

In June, Geneva Gano travelled to Shenandoah University in Virginia to deliver a paper at the Willa Cather International Seminar: “UnAmerican Activities: The Sexual Lives of Hired Girls, or, Cather’s Critique of Capitalism.” Following that, she spent a week at the University of Maryland researching Texas author Katherine Anne Porter’s connections to Mexico. She received a Research Enhancement Grant from the University to conduct this research, which will be part of her book project on the influence of the Mexican Revolution on U.S. Modernism.

Ben Reed’s panel proposal for the AWP 2020 in San Antonio has been accepted. The title is “Space Is the Place: Literary Spatialities and New Approaches to Placemaking.” He will be joined by Kelli Jo Ford, Angela Palm, Ito Romo, and Texas State MFA alumnus Ali Haider. In July he attended the MLA International Symposium in Lisbon, Portugal, where he read “Genealogy: A Dream Within a Dream,” which is an excerpt from a planned book on littoral spatialities in discourse and experience. Earlier this summer he taught his second writing workshop for veterans through VSA Texas, the state organization on arts and disability; and moderated a panel at the Writers League of Texas Agents & Editors Conference : “Discovering Your Book’s Voice, Tone, and Style,” with Christopher Brown, Mark Dery, and Charlotte Gullick.

MFA fiction student Alex Kale’s essay, “River Creatures, Minor Characters,” has been accepted for publication in Wussy Mag.

A new poem by MFA poetry student Anthony Bradley appears in Honey & Lime #3: the Queer Issue: https://honeyandlimelit.wixsite.com/website/anthony-isaac-bradley 

Texas State’s News Service featured Katie Kapurch’s work recently: https://news.txstate.edu/featured-faculty/2019/kapurch-discusses-race-boundaries-in-country-music.html?fbclid=IwAR37taz_BV0DwVKjqqr7f62R2aNa1rxx4WFAWjYbCijDvLhGcSO-iDTZ7Og

Amanda Scott’s essay, “Room with Bright Window,” was recently published in Crab Orchard Review. She also recently moderated the panel “Writing the Quiet Moments Between Plot Points” at the Writers’ League of Texas’s Agents & Editors Conference.

The following faculty served on Faculty Senate committees or as Faculty Senate appointees during the 2018-2019 academic year. They not only learned about many facets of the complex institution that is Texas State, but they have also helped promote the English Department’s visibility and interests: Steve Wilson – Academic Freedom Committee; Dan Lochman – Academic Governance Committee; Rebecca Bell-Metereau – Environment & Sustainability Committee, as well as serving as a replacement on the Presidential Teaching Excellence Award Committee and as the Senate’s ex officio member of the university’s Campus Facilities Committee; Amanda Scott – Nontenure-line Faculty Committee; Amanda Meyer – Nontenure-line Faculty Committee; Kitty Ledbetter – University Lecturers Committee; Aimee Roundtree – Performing Arts Committee; Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler – Presidential Award Selection Committee for Scholarly/Creative Activity; Vicki Smith – Honor Code Council.

On July 25, Kitty Ledbetter presented “Women of the World” at the meeting of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, held in Brighton, UK. After the conference she spent the week in London conducting research at the British Library and the University of Reading.

In late July, Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler presented “The Lady and the Icon: Two Miltonic Failures and Why They Failed” at the triennial conference of the International Association of University Professors of English, held at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland.

English interns in Mr. Dan Price’s English 3312 Internship class presented electronic portfolios of their work on July 31. Works discussed included those from their internships, work from both creative and analytical courses, and films. Braeden Long interned with the Austin Radio Network (104.9 The Horn), writing wrote sports stories and social media pieces and doing radio production work. Sarah Rodriguez interned with the San Antonio Film Festival, assisting in organizing and executing the festival itself as well as reviewing and critiquing films submitted to the festival. Chandler Treon interned for Dr. Rebecca Bell-Mettereau, assisting her in establishing a film concentration within the English major.

Jessie Herrada Nance, an alumna of the MA Literature program now employed by Portland State University and Portland Community College, has published “’Civil Wildness’: Colonial Landscapes in Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia” in the Spring 2019 issue of Studies in Philology. Jessie completed her PhD in English at the University of Oregon in 2015.

MFA fiction student Mary-Pat Hayton had two creative nonfiction pieces recently accepted for publication in online literary magazines: “Inheritance,” in Waxing and Waning; and “Threshold,” in Uncomfortable Revolution.

Dan Lochman has received a two-month fellowship to research early modern medical texts at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany in the summer of 2020. The project is titled “Early Modern Cognition and In-spired Energeia: Philosophy, Theology, and Medicine.” The project will provide access to difficult-to-find sources and will contribute to an ongoing book project.

Cedric Synnestvedt’s short story “Dares” was published in the latest issue of BULL.

MFA fiction student Robert Madole’s translation of the German text Nina and Tom, by author Tom Kummer, was just released by Rare Bird Books.

Geneva Gano presented “UnAmerican Activities: The Sexual Lives of Hired Girls, or, Cather’s Critique of Capitalism” at the International Willa Cather Seminar, held at Shenandoah University in mid-June. She then spent a week at the University of Maryland’s Hornbake Library researching Texas writer Katherine Anne Porter’s writings from Mexico.

Recent BA double-major in English and Anthropology Chisom Ogoke (Outstanding Senior in English and Outstanding Undergraduate Student in Liberal Arts) has won an $8,500 Phi Kappa Phi Fellowship (the first awarded to a Texas State student) to support her study in the MFA in Creative Writing program. Congratulations to Chisom, and thanks to Graeme Wend-Walker, who mentored her and wrote letters supporting her application.

Dr. Terri Leclerq co-authored “Why are books banned in prison? Sex, drugs and a critique of systematic oppression” for Salon: https://www.salon.com/2019/06/15/why-are-books-banned-in-prison-sex-drugs-and-a-critique-of-systematic-oppression/. Dr. Leclerq received both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Texas State University and is a founder and active member of the Donor and Alumni Advisory Council for the Department of English at Texas State. The council works to create a bond between the English Department’s faculty, students, alumna, and donors.

Dan Lochman’s “Pierced with Passion: Brains, Bodies and Worlds in Early Modern Texts” appears in Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Culture, ed. Miranda Anderson and Michael Wheeler (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. 229-249. This is the second of four volumes of The Edinburgh History of Distributed Cognition, each with chapters on constructions of distributed cognition from classical antiquity to modernism that emerged during a series of workshops in Edinburgh in 2014.

Joe Falocco recently performed in a staged reading of Three Times Fast as part of the Winter Park Playhouse’s Florida Festival of New Musicals. This work tells the story of a teenage girl struggling with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Dr. Falocco played the girl’s father, Eddie: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/arts-and-theater/os-et-florida-festival-new-musicals-success-20190625-temnrkds2bavrcdoegmlfaeclu-story.html?fbclid=IwAR0jdX89xcER48h8zGexWIw213sBjDzCQlFdW3Bc4Idkd1HND4han27CNH4 

Naomi Shihab Nye and Vanessa Couto Johnson will be reading their poetry at The Good Kind (Southtown) in San Antonio on June 30. The event begins at 4:00 p.m., with reading closer to 5:00 p.m. Find more details here: https://www.sacurrent.com/sanantonio/good-poems-at-the-good-kind/Event?oid=21417769&fbclid=IwAR1DM5IqRl5eWVTdsiQOtIPs8mH3uAS-AEBvYlYAoCvc-e0gDykXu1M3Tkw

Two poems by MFA poetry student Abigail Kipp, “A queen” and “boys,” appear in down in the dirt. 

In mid-May, Alyssa Crow (a graduate of the MARC program) successfully defended her dissertation at the University of Utah for a PhD in Rhetoric and Writing.

MFA poetry student Nour Al Ghraowi has several recent acceptances: “More Than Numbers,” an essay about her journey to the U.S., will be published in Dame Magazine; the poem “Arranged” will appear in So To Speak Journal; and the poem “This is Hard to Say” will be published in Mizna Journal.

MFA poetry student Anthony Bradley’s essay, “My Accent Makes Me Beautiful,” has been accepted by The Coachella Review.

Susan Morrison was interviewed by Zak Jason for the May issue of Wired (https://www.wired.com/story/pooping-dark/). The article, “On Pooping in the Dark—No Lights, No Phones, No Distractions,” includes a number of Susan’s insights: “[W]e prefer not to confront our shit, and that’s dangerous. The less mindful we are of where what we eat goes, the less we consider our impact on the environment.”

“Faking It in Seven Disciplines,” an essay by MFA fiction student Kim McFarden, has been published in Belmont Story Review.

MA Literature graduate Jo McIntosh, an Instructor at Concordia University (Austin), has been named holder of the Otto W. and Norma L. Schaefer Endowed Chair in Literature. The award provides assigned time for research and monetary support for inviting scholars to present at Concordia over the next two years.

MFA fiction student Gazzmine Wilkins’ experimental essay, “Hiram Clarke,” will appear in the Texas Observer.

Katie Kapurch’s article, “’Old Town Road’’s Pop Outlaws: Lil Nas X Remixes the Mac-and-Jack Hustle,” was published on CultureSonar recently. The research relates to Katie’s NEH-funded project about African Americans’ musical conversations with the Beatles: https://www.culturesonar.com/old-town-roads-pop-outlaws-lil-nas-x-remixes-the-mac-and-jack-hustle/ 

MFA fiction student Ryan Lopez’s short story “Shadows Doth Make Bright” appears in Deep Overstock: https://deepoverstock.com/2019/06/03/shadows-doth-make-bright-ryan-shane-lopez/ 

Rob Tally will serve as a featured speaker at this year’s Symposium of the University Consortium of Geographic Information Science, to be held in Washington, DC this week. The theme of the symposium is “The Geospatial Humanities: Transdisciplinary Opportunities for the GIScience Community.

Naomi Shihab Nye’s essay on her memoires of W.S. Merwin, who passed away in late April, appeared in a recent Texas Observer: https://www.texasobserver.org/remembering-w-s-merwin-honorary-texan/

 

Susan Morrison’s “Waste in Literature and Culture: Aesthetics, Form, and Ethics” appears in the current issue of EuropeNow – the entire issue is on waste. “Slow Pilgrimage Ecopoetics” was published in Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 10.1 (2019): 40-59. http://ecozona.eu/article/view/2527/3110

 

On May 7th, English interns in Mr. Dan Price’s English 3312 Internship class presented on their semester’s experience. Denisse Torres worked as a paralegal in the Attorney for Students office. Ashley Morris blogged and did other media relations for On Vinyl Media, a music licensing company. Zane Altemus worked in the Governor’s Office dealing with economic development and tourism. Nyeira Leonard did a variety of outreach and marketing activities for Student Support Services; Langston Neuburger worked for the Texas State Writing Center, using his experience in technical communication to redesign their policies and procedures.

 

Rob Tally’s “The End-of-the-World as World System” appears in Other Globes: Past and Peripheral Imaginations of Globalization, eds. Simon Ferdinand, Irene Villaescusa-Illán, and Esther Peeren (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

 

For a new production of Cyrano de Bergerac, Joe Falocco will be playing the Viscount de Valvert, who loses the epic “duel in verse” to Cyrano. This role will give Joe the opportunity to use his “long-dormant skills in rapier combat.” He will also have a cameo as a confused Italian Friar later in the show. The Archive Theater boldly creates new translations and adaptations of beloved stories to make them more accessible to contemporary audiences. They develop exquisitely detailed, extensively researched, and historically informed productions that provide visual context and understanding for the stories they tell. They combine powerful storytelling, gorgeous costumes, and live music on period instruments to give their patrons a taste of living in another world at another time. The show will be staged at Austin’s Scottish Rite Theater in September.

 

MFA poetry student Abigail Kipp has three of my poems in voices of eve.

 

Cyrus Cassells’ The Gospel According to Wild Indigo was a finalist for the 2018 Balcones Poetry Prize for an Outstanding Book of the Year.

 

MFA fiction student Clayton Bradshaw’s short story, “How to Grieve for Hyacinths,” appears in the latest issue of Collateral Journal.

MARC graduate Casie Moreland recently completed her PhD at Arizona State University.  She was featured in a story published by ASU Now: https://asunow.asu.edu/20181130-never-stop-wondering-and-ask-librarian-tips-success-first-gen-grad

Flore Chevaillier’s “Experiment with Textual Materiality: Page, Author, and Medium in the Works of Steve Tomasula, Michael Martone, and Eduardo Kac” appears in the Winter 2018 issue of College Literature.

Katie Kapurch has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to research African Americans’ musical conversations with the Beatles.

Steve Wilson’s poem “The Aardwolf” appears in the new poetry anthology Enchantment of the Ordinary, out this month from Mutabilis Press.

Congratulations to the following Senior Lecturers / Lecturers, whom the Faculty Senate has approved for Nontenure Line Faculty Workload Releases: Graeme Mullen, Amanda North, Danny Peters, and Sean Rose.

In December, Susan Morrison gave a talk entitled “Slow Ecopoetics: A Pilgrimage through Waste” at the Rice University symposium, “Waste: Histories and Futures.” She also taught 12th graders at Austin’s Liberal Arts and Science Academy about Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale” and fecopoetics.

Nancy Wilson received thanks for her ongoing service to General Education Council from Assistant Vice President for Academic Services Mary Ellen Cavitt, who writes, “Thank you for all you have done to ensure that course audits and holistic assessments of components and competencies were completed” during calendar year 2018. Your work as a member of the GEC is precisely the type of institutional service that supports the interests of our undergraduate students, your faculty colleagues, and the administration.”

Vicki Smith also received thanks from Dr. Cavitt for her service as Vice Chair of the Honor Code Council. In this position, Assistant Vice President for Academic Services Cavitt writes, Dr. Smith “assumed many additional responsibilities and put forth countless hours to ensure a fair and valuable academic environment be provided to all faculty and students.”

The Honors College offered thanks to the following faculty who supported students completing contract work in English courses for Honors credit: Laura Ellis-Lai, Eric Leake, Chad Hammett, Kate McClancy, and Chris Margrave (2 students). The College also thanked the following faculty for supervising Honors theses: John Blair, Rene LeBlanc, Teya Rosenberg, Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler, Rob Tally, and Anne Winchell; and for serving as second readers on Honors theses: Stephanie Noll and Cecily Parks.

Logan Fry has been chosen as the winner of Omnidawn’s 1st/2nd Poetry Book Prize for 2018, judged by Srikanth Reddy. Omnidawn will be publishing his book, Harpo Before the Opus, in the fall of 2019.

Ross Feeler won the Key West Literary Seminar’s 2019 Marianne Russo Award for a novel-in-progress.

“Hail to the Krueg,” a short story by Cedric Synnestvedt, MFA fiction graduate and current department Lecturer, will be in the January issue of Jabberwock Review.

MARC graduate Alexis McGee recently received her PhD from the University of Texas-San Antonio and has been hired as an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama.

Dan Lochman’s “’[T]he fault of the man and not the poet’: Sidney’s Troubled Double Vision of Thomas More’s Utopia” was published in Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, 41.3 (Summer 2018), 93-115. It’s a special issue of the University of Toronto-based journal, titled “Utopia for 500 Years,” with papers from a September 2016 conference of the same name at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan.

Rob Tally’s new book, Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination, has just been published by Indiana University Press: https://www.amazon.com/Topophrenia-Narrative-Spatial-Imagination-Humanities/dp/0253037662/

MARC student Sarah Percy will present her research project, “Generation Z: Practicing Classical Pedagogy and Digital Rhetoric in Composition Classrooms,” at the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico on February 20-23, 2019.

On November 28th, Texas State senior English major Chisom Ogoke was a guest in Graeme Wend-Walker’s Mythology class, where she discussed mythopoeia and how she is using it to produce a magical realist account of the principles underlying Darwinian evolution.

MARC graduate Casie Moreland recently received her PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from Arizona State University and has been hired as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Western Oregon University.

Three poems by MFA poetry student Emily Ellison appear in the latest issue of Foothill Literary Journal.

MARC graduate Justin Whitney recently received his PhD from the University of Utah and has been hired as an Assistant Professor at the State University of New York at Delhi.

Dr. Rebecca Jackson was named an Alpha Chi “Favorite Professor” in Fall 2018.