Category: Miscellany

Congratulations:

Rebecca Jackson’s article (written with Jackie Grutsch McKinney and Nicole Caswell), “Writing Center Administration as/and Emotional Labor,” will appear in the fall 2016 issue of Composition Forum. Her article, also written with Jackie Grutsch McKinney and Nicole Caswell, “Metaphors We Work By: New Writing Center Directors’ Labor and Identities” will appear in the collection, WPAs in Transition, to be published by Utah State UP in 2017.

 

Katie Kapurch’s co-edited collection with Kenneth Womack, New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles: Things We Said Today, is out from Palgrave Macmillan’s Pop Culture, Music and Identity series. The book includes Katie’s chapter “Crying, Waiting, Hoping: The Beatles, Girl Culture, and the Melodramatic Mode”; as well as a chapter co-authored by Katie and Jon Marc Smith, “Blackbird Singing: Paul McCartney’s Romance of Racial Harmony and Post-Racial America.”

 

Steve Wilson has new poems forthcoming in San Pedro River Review and Beloit Poetry Journal.

 

MFA fiction student Graham Oliver interviewed the founder of Dallas-based, translation-focused publisher Deep Vellum, Will Evans, for The Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/2016/08/the-rumpus-interview-with-will-evans/ [archived].

 

MATC alumna Susan Rauch graduated from Texas Tech University with a PhD in Technical Communication & Rhetoric this month. Her dissertation title is ““Rhetoric and Economics of User Attention in e-Health: How Technology Influences Clinicians’ Decision Making in EHR Clinical Documentation.” Susan will begin work as a full-time instructor in Texas Tech University’s English Department this fall.

 

The first excerpt of Tom Grimes’s new novel appears in the current issue of Narrative: http://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/fall-2016/fiction/dynamics-faith-tom-grimes.

 

Stephanie Noll’s organization, Old Books for New Teachers, which helps first-year teachers build classroom libraries, was the spotlighted organization at Backyard Story Night on Sunday, August 29. Backyard Story Night is a monthly storytelling event in Austin that collects donations for a different nonprofit each month. An article about the event, with a mention of Stephanie’s work, can be found here: http://orangemag.co/atx/2016/8/29/austinites-share-their-tales-at-backyard-story-night [archived]. Also, thanks to a successful social media fundraising campaign, Stephanie was able to provide Texas State MFA graduate Abby Minde (who now teaches at KIPP Austin Collegiate) with 20 copies of All American Boys, a young adult novel about police brutality. For this project, Stephanie is collaborating with Badgerdog Literary Publishing, Inc., an Austin-area program that places writers in schools. Abby’s students will read All American Boys and then participate in several writing workshops with prompts and activities connected to the text.

 

English DepartmentMiscellanyAugust 15, 2016
Congratulations:

 

The Office of Equity and Access has selected Geneva Gano’s proposal, “Emily Hobson Public Lecture and Classroom Visits on ’Lavender/Red: Liberation/Solidarity in the Gay/Lesbian Left’” to receive funding in the amount of $1,100.00. In October, Ms. Hobson will visit Professor Gano’s fall grad class to talk about the Women’s liberation movement and women’s literature, and will also give a public talk.

 

Susan Morrison’s Grendel’s Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife won the Words on Wings Book Award for young adult fiction, a Literary Classics Top Honors Award 2016: http://www.clcawards.org/2016_Award_Books.html.

 

MARC graduate student Kristin Milligan, who completed her degree this August, has been hired as the Associate Director of the Learning Center at East Central College in Union, Missouri.

 

English majors Bianco Beronio, Devin Baumann, Thomas Gresham (who graduated Spring 2016), Michael Salinas, and Julia Whitmore each presented talks on Tolkien at Mythcon 47, the annual meeting of the Mythopoeic Society, held in San Antonio this August. Rob Tally also presented at the convention, discussing “Tolkien’s Red Dragons: Fantasy and Marxist Literary Criticism,” as well as taking part in a roundtable on teaching Tolkien.

 

Aimee Roundtree’s research on how the autism community uses Twitter for advocacy was accepted for presentation at the Center for Disease Control’s National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing and Media, taking place this August in Atlanta. Her work, “#TweetLikeANeurotyical: Understanding Diagnosis Attitudes and Experiences of the Autism Community Online,” situates hashtags used by the community as a form of linguistic reclamation similar to other minority groups.

 

William Jensen’s debut novel, Cities of Men, was sold to Turner Publishing. The book should be published in either summer or fall of 2017.

 

In April 2016, Joe Falocco was invited to deliver a presentation on teaching Shakespeare in the twenty-first century at the Universidad Autonoma de Hidalgo in Pachuca, Mexico as part of the 2016 Festival Internacional del Imagen. He spoke to an audience comprised of hundreds of undergraduates and Festival attendees. While in Pachuca, Joe was also interviewed by a local radio station.

 

MFA poetry student Meg Griffitts’ poem “How To Return Home” will be featured in the fall issue of Hypertrophic, which comes out in September.

 

Rob Tally’s essay “The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Middle-earth: Tolkien, Cinema, and Literary Cartography” appears in the collection Topographies of Popular Culture, edited by Maarit Piipponen and Markku Salmela.

Congratulations:

Emelia Rae Salzmann was born on June 9th at 7:13 p.m., weighing 7 lbs. 14 oz. and measuring 20 inches long. Mother Alicia Salzmann and baby are both doing well.

 

Kitty Ledbetter’s article titled “Periodicals for Women” has been published in the Routledge Companion to Victorian Periodicals. She recently attended a book launch at the University of Greenwich for contributors to the volume. While in the UK she also conducted research at the British Library and presented a paper titled “Cultural Value and Essay Competitions in Victorian Women’s Periodicals” at a conference held by Plymouth University Nineteenth-Century Studies on The Operation and Representation of ‘Judgement’ in 19th-Century Cultures.

 

Marilynn Olson gave a talk entitled “Billy Whiskers (1902-1930): Nation-Building in an Age of Change” to the graduate students in children’s literature at Beijing Normal University on June 3rd.  BNU is a major center for children’s literature in China, and the visit included a round-table discussion and significant interaction with thesis students.  On June 4th she attended the 3rd biennial US-China Symposium in Qingdao (also the first international children’s literature symposium, since representatives from Japan, Taiwan, and Australia were invited), giving another presentation “Some examples of the use of theories about cognition and cognitive distribution in The Rules of Summer by Shaun Tan (2013).

 

A committee comprised of Children’s Lit. scholars Marilynn Olson, Teya Rosenberg, Katie Kapurch, and Graeme Wend-Walker has been successful in its bid for Texas State to host the 2018 annual Children’s Literature Association Conference. The conference, which draws scholars from around the world, will be held in San Antonio in June 2018. It will be themed around “springs and rivers.”

 

Katie Kapurch’s article, “Something Else Besides a Daughter?: Maternal Melodrama Meets Postfeminist Girlhood in Tangled and Brave,” appears in the latest issue of The Lion and the Unicorn.

 

Mark Busby’s “McMurtry’s Best,” which appears in the July 2016 Texas monthly, is a companion piece to Skip Hollandsworth’s profile of Larry McMurtry at 80. Mark discusses his list of McMurtry’s six best books in addition to Lonesome Dove: http://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/larry-mcmurtrys-best-books/.

 

Enkay Iguh (B.A. in English, Texas State, 2013; MFA in Creative Writing, NYU, 2015) has been named a 2016 NYC Emerging Writers Fellow by The Center for Fiction: http://www.centerforfiction.org/forwriters/grants-and-awards/?mc_cid=a4162db5cd&mc_eid=3c0df9a291.

Congratulations:

The following English faculty were promoted / granted tenure this year: Suparno Banerjee, Joseph Falocco and Scott Mogull were tenured and promoted to Associate Professor; Pinfan Zhu and Octavio Pimentel were promoted to Professor.

 

Teya Rosenberg represented the department and university at the 43rd Annual Children’s Literature Conference in Columbus, OH, June 9-11, 2016. She presented a paper, “The Mythical, the Magical, the Racial: Considering Structure and Genre in American Born Chinese” and began her duties as Vice-President/President-Elect of the Association. Also in attendance and presenting were Texas State English department alumni Beth Pearce, currently visiting assistant professor at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; and Elissa Myers, currently working on her doctorate at CUNY Graduate Center.

 

John Blair’s short story manuscript White Sands was selected by judge Amy Hempel as the one finalist for this year’s AWP Grace Paley Prize. In praising the collection, Hempel wrote “Dusty, venom-soaked lives, relying on motorcycles and trucks to speed them towards fates as welcoming as a cinderblock wall at eighty miles per hour.  The reckless couple who connect some of these stories rely on ‘hard cash, hard-earned’ and, whether hiding or chasing, have a close and uncomfortable relationship with the natural world.  Even ‘love bugs’ arrive as a plague.  Risks are taken throughout, starting with the opening story—a harsh beauty—that sets the tone for a collection of stories as lyrical as they are deadly.” The prize’s winner and finalist will be announced on the AWP website soon and in the September issue of the Writer’s Chronicle.

 

Steve Wilson and MFA poetry student Meg Griffitts took part in a discussion of the Beat Generation sponsored by KUT radio and recorded live for the “Views & Brews” series: http://kutpodcasts.org/views-and-brews/vb-the-beat-generation.

 

Thanks to the following faculty who served on Honor’s thesis committees this past year: Twister Marquiss, Jon Marc Smith, Susan Morrison, Deborah Balzhiser, Anne Winchell, Victoria Smith, Lindy Kosmitis, Elvin Holt, and Stephanie Noll.

 

Recent MARC graduate Edward Santos Garza has published a book review, “Celebrating the Hyphen,” in Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture. Discussing Latinx icons such as Selena and Ritchie Valens, Garza’s review concerns Reclaiming Poch@ Pop: Examining the Rhetoric of Cultural Deficiency, by Cruz Medina: http://enculturation.net/celebrating-the-hyphen [archived].

 

Jo Jarl – one of the first two graduates of the MATC program, in 2001 – has retired after 13 years as a tech writer and editor for IBM and IBM Tivoli.

Congratulations:

MFA poetry student Autumn Hayes’ poem “Sieges” has been accepted by The Seattle Review.

 

Graeme Wend-Walker has graduated from the Texas State PD Citizen Police Academy. This semester-long program involved extensive training in police procedures, including criminal law and the penal code; emergency management and first responder training, including response to active shooter events; campus mental health; certification in CPR; crime scene investigation; personal defense and krav maga; and the use of firearms and tasers.

 

MATC alumna Susan Rauch successfully defensed her dissertation last month.  Susan completed doctoral studies in Texas Tech University’s Technical Communication & Rhetoric Program. Her dissertation title is “Rhetoric and Economics of User Attention in e-Health: How Technology Influences Clinicians’ Decision Making in EHR Clinical Documentation.”

 

Chris Margrave recently presented his paper “Curators of the Absurd: Contemporary Comedians as Prophets of Confrontation and Jesters of Delight” at the American Literature Association Conference, held in San Francisco on May 27.

 

Susan’s Morrison article on “Six trailblazing medieval women” appears in the latest issue of the BBC’s History Extra: http://www.historyextra.com/article/feature/trailblazing-medieval-women.

 

MFA fiction student Allison Grace Myers presented her paper “A Liberated Religion: The Black Church in Beloved” at the American Literature Association Conference, held in San Francisco this past May.

 

MATC alumnus David Hernandez has accepted a position with the Texas Health and Human Services Commission’s Office of Social Services, in Austin. David will help implement a Leadership and Professional Development Program, analyze federal and state policies to determine changes to the Electronic Benefit Transfer program, and propose revisions to the Texas Administrative Code.

Congratulations:

MFA student Graham Oliver interviewed former Austin Bat Cave director Manuel Gonzales about his new book The Regional Office is Under Attack! for The Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/2016/04/the-rumpus-interview-with-manuel-gonzales/ [archived].

 

Tiwi Retnaningdyah, who earned her MA in Literature at Texas State a few years ago, received her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the University of Melbourne last month. She is now back in Indonesia, teaching at the State University of Surabaya.

 

Tina Zigon, who traveled from Slovenia to pursue an MA in Literature at Texas State, today defended her PhD dissertation at the University of Buffalo. Dr. Zigon currently resides in Kuwait City.

 

A poem by MFA poetry graduate and current Lecturer Amanda North, “Bloodline,” has been published on The Open Bar at Tin House: http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/42726/bloodline.html [archived].

 

Sigma Tau Delta named Vicki Smith as 2016 Outstanding Professor of English.

 

Two poems by Steve Wilson, “The Beauty of the Village” and “Of April,” are featured on the Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College website, as part of their series on ekphrastic poetry: http://maiermuseum.org/ekphrastic/ekphrastic-poem/ [archived].

 

The Society for Technical Communication (STC) Board of Directors passed a motion to create a Texas State University student chapter of STC.  MATC student and Graduate Assistant David Hernandez submitted the application, recruited student members, and serves as President of the Texas State University Student Chapter of STC.

Congratulations:

Graduating MFA fiction student Josh Lopez has been selected as the 2016-17 L.D. Clark and LaVerne Harrell Clark Writer-in-Residence. Josh will live and write in the Clarks’ historic home in Smithville and also teach classes in the Department of English.

 

John Blair’s new prize-winning collection of poems Playful Song Called Beautiful has just been released and is now available from the University of Iowa Press, online at Amazon.com and elsewhere.

 

In July 2015, Teya Rosenberg gave the keynote lecture for “Child, Youth, and Place in Atlantic Canadian Literature,” a symposium that included scholars from across Canada and the US. Her lecture, “We Do Have Jack: Considering Contexts for the Jack Series by Andy Jones and Darka Erdelji,” plus other highlights of the symposium (including a wonderful puppet show), are now available online on YouTube and through Sea Stacks, a website for Atlantic Canadian books for young readers: https://seastacks.lib.unb.ca/content/child-youth-and-place-atlantic-canadian-literature-9th-raddall-symposium.

 

Haley Stuart, senior English major, has won Sigma Tau Delta’s national Herbert Hughes Short Story Award for her story, “Semblance.” The story appears in the 2016 issue of The Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle, the honor society’s national journal of creative writing. This is her first publication. The 2016 issue is available online as a PDF: http://www.english.org/sigmatd/pdf/publications/rectangle.pdf.

 

Rob Tally’s article “Lukács’s Literary Cartography: Spatiality, Cognitive Mapping, and The Theory of the Novel” appears in the current issue of Mediations (Spring 2016).

 

MFA poetry student James Deitz’s poem “After the Iraqi Sun” will appear in the Austin International Poetry Festival anthology, di-verse-city. Anamesa Interdisciplinary Journal is publishing “Check Fire in Tikrit, Iraq” in its Spring 2016 issue.

 

MATC student Amanda Scott presented “Sense and Sexuality: Using Creative Nonfiction Flash to Examine Memory, Trauma, and Identity” at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) conference, which recently took place in Seattle. She will present “Reconciling Hybridity: Towards a More Inclusive Understanding of Biracial Identity in Technical Communication” at the Association for Teachers of Technical Writing Conference, to be held April 6 in Houston.

Congratulations:

The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses, edited by Cecily Parks, was published by Everyman’s Library in March.

 

Kitty Ledbetter organized a panel and presented her paper entitled “Technology Revolutionizes the History of Women’s Needlework” at the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies conference, held in Asheville, NC on March 12.

 

Miles Wilson’s story “Tough” (The Georgia Review, Spring 2015) is one of three finalists for awards from Western Writers of America and the Texas Institute of Letters.  “Bang,’ a piece of creative nonfiction, is forthcoming in the first volume of the second hundred years of Southwest Review.  His poems “You, Theordore Roethke” and “Keeping Track” will appear in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume  VIII: Texas.  Last fall he was a featured reader at the South Dakota Festival of Books where he presented with Pete Dexter, winner of the National Book Award for Paris Trout.

 

Michael Noll has accepted a position as Program Director for the Writers’ League of Texas. The Austin-based nonprofit offers one-day writing classes, a week-long writing retreat, and the annual Agents & Editors Conference every June.

 

Rob Tally presented “Literary Cartography, Marxism, and Form” at the American Comparative Literature Association’s annual meeting, held in Cambridge, MA.

 

Mark Busby’s essay, “The Polychotomous Southwest,” appears in Critical Insights: Southwestern Literature, edited by Will Brannon (Hackensack, NJ:  Salem/Grey House Publishing, 2016): 2-19.  At the March Conference of College Teachers of English in San Antonio, Mark presented “Moving Targets:  Geography in Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk”; and as a member of the CCTE Advisory Council, he chaired three Rhetoric sessions.

 

Logan Fry’s two poems, “Gershwin’s Wash Room” and “Essential Isles,” will appear in New American Writing, and the poems “Gesticulation Overture” and “The Master and Margarita” will be in Volt. Both issues are slated for release this spring.

 

In March, Graeme Wend-Walker presented “Gormenghast and Brakebills: Wonderment in Collapse” at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, held in Orlando, Florida.

Congratulations:

Miles Wilson, who retired last August after a career of 35 years at Texas State, has been approved to receive the title of Distinguished Faculty Emeritus. He will be invited to attend the fall convocation ceremony to receive an acknowledgment from President Trauth. Only three faculty from across the university are selected for this honor each year.

 

Dorothy Lawrenson, a 3rd-year poetry student in the MFA program in Creative Writing, has been named the 2016 Outstanding Master’s Student in the College of Liberal Arts. She will receive an award at this year’s Liberal Arts Awards Day celebration on April 20th, 6 pm, Alkek Teaching Theatre.

 

Through the Veil, the first book by Colleen (Booker) Halverson, who received her degree in English from Texas State, has just been published by Entangled. The story draws from Colleen’s participation in the Texas State in Ireland program, sponsored by the English Department each summer.

 

Susan Morrison’s novel, Grendel’s Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife, is a finalist for Foreward Reviews‘ 2015 Indiefab Book of the Year Award: Historical (Adult Fiction).

 

Vanessa Johnson’s poem “Render Billow” will appear in Field.

 

In “The Ripple Effect in Faculty-Driven Internationalization,” appearing on pages 36-37 of the IIE Networker (published by the Institute for International Education), author Daris Hale discusses Steve Wilson’s influence on the Fulbright program at Texas State. http://www.nxtbook.com/naylor/IIEB/IIEB0116/index.php#/0

 

Texas State University graduate Enkay Iguh (B.A. in English, 2013), who completed her MFA in fiction at NYU last year, has won the Disquiet International Literary Prize. She will receive a full fellowship to the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal, and her story “House Girl” will appear in Guernica Magazine.

 

Scott Mogull will present research on the accuracy of cited claims in the medical literature at the 42nd Conference of the European Medical Writers Association, which will be held in Munich, Germany this May.

 

Joyland Magazine has published “The Resurrection Act,” a short story by MFA fiction student Shannon Perri: http://www.joylandmagazine.com/regions/south/resurrection-act

Congratulations:

Paul and Robin Cohen gave an invited talk on Shakespeare and Postmodernism for Philosophy Department students and faculty.

 

Three English Department faculty members presented at the 35th Annual Conference on the First-Year Experience (FYE), held in Orlando, Florida in mid-February: Dr. Nancy Wilson, Director of Lower-Division Studies; MARC graduate student and teaching assistant Edward Garza; and Twister Marquiss, Director of Texas State’s Common Reading Program. The presentation, entitled “From Common Reading to a Common Experience: Fostering a Campus-wide Conversation,” recounted the success of the 2015-2016 Common Reading book — Tomás Rivera’s …y no se lo tragó la tierra / …And the Earth Did not Devour Him — including the book’s use for the diagnostic essay in English 1310 classes.

 

MA Literature student Thais Rutledge presented “Displacing Septimus: Spatial Narrative and the Medical Gaze in Mrs. Dalloway” at the Louisville meeting of the International Virginia Woolf Society.

 

In Story Circle Book Reviews, Susan Wittig Albert reviews Susan Morrison’s book, A Medieval Woman’s Companion: Women’s Lives in the European Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2016): “A Medieval Woman’s Companion is—I’m not exaggerating here—the best introduction I know of to the widely varied lives of medieval women.” Read the complete review here: http://www.storycirclebookreviews.org/reviews/medievalwoman.shtml. Susan guest-blogged for medieval mystery writer Candace Robb, on “A Medieval Woman’s Companion as Inspiration for Novelists”: https://ecampion.wordpress.com/2016/02/14/a-medieval-womans-companion-as-inspiration-for-novelists/. Finally, Susan was interviewed by Madeline Barnes on Waste Studies and medieval liminality. Barnes, who was Outstanding Senior in English 2014, is currently a Masters student in Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University. You can see the interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS70Vrf1PX8.

 

Recent MFA fiction graduate Sarah Rafael Garcia had a story, “Selling Happiness,” published in Lumen: http://www.lumenmag.net/sarah-rafael-garcia-03. An interview regarding her work with the writing program she founded, Barrio Writers, appears in The Fem: https://thefemlitmagazine.wordpress.com/2016/02/15/featured-fem-meet-sarah-rafael-garcia/.

 

Eric Leake’s co-authored chapter “Composing Place, Composing Las Vegas” has been published in the collection Rhetorics of Names and Naming, part of the Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Composition series. His article “Empathizer-in-Chief: The Promotion and Performance of Empathy in the Speeches of Barack Obama” has been published in the Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric: http://contemporaryrhetoric.com/.

 

Michael Noll’s story, “The Tank Yard,” has been selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2016. It first appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Congratulations:

Doug Dorst and co-author J.J. Abrams were the recipients of the Bronze Medal for the 2015 Leserpreis, an annual prize voted on by German readers, for his their recent book, S. (German edition).

 

Susan Morrison published “Five things you might not know about medieval women – the life of St. Margaret” at Celebrate Scotland: https://www.celebrate-scotland.co.uk/News-and-Features/1975/Five_things_you_might_not_know_about_medieval_women__the_life_of_Saint_Margaret/

 

Lecturer Anne Winchell presented “Female or Male: A Not So Simple Choice” at the Southwest Popular Culture/American Culture Conference in Albuquerque, NM; along with her undergraduate student Natalie Hays, who presented “No One Expects a Female Inquisition: A Study on Gender Representation in Video Games.”

 

On February 14, Kitty Ledbetter will perform with her husband Alan Munde as part of Texas State’s Supple Music Series: http://www.finearts.txstate.edu/meta-calendar/encore-listing.html [archived].

 

Tomas Morin’s second poetry collection, Patient Zero, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in spring 2017. Also, Tomas will participate in a panel entitled “Paying It Forward: Literary Mentorship” at the Associated Writing Programs Conference next month, as well as taking part in some off-site readings.

 

Tom Grimes’s new novel will be excerpted in the next issue of Narrative magazine.

 

Sean Trolinder (MFA fiction graduate – 2012) recently had a short story, “City of Crushed Dreams,” accepted for publication in a future issue of Louisiana Literature. A draft of this story began in one of Debra Monroe’s fiction workshops.