MISCELLANY – APRIL 3, 2023

Texas State University has recognized Cyrus Cassells as a 2023 University Distinguished Professor. This appointment honors individuals whose performance in teaching, research, and service has been exemplary and recognized at the state, national, and international levels.  Cyrus will receive a $5,000 award, a commemorative medallion, and a plaque. Cyrus will retain the University Distinguished Professor title for the remainder of his time at Texas State. An interview with Cyrus appears in the latest issue of The Tupelo Quarterly.

John Blair has been named the 2023 recipient of the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry by Philadelphia Stories. John will be honored at an awards ceremony in Philadelphia on May 6th.

Miriam Williams is the 2023 recipient of the Society for Technical Communication’s Ken Rainey Award for Distinguished Research. The citation reads, “For exemplary leadership in the field of technical communication, demonstrating excellence in research methods, application of public policy, key scholarship on issues of race and ethnicity, and promotion of research that not only ‘is good’ but also ‘does good’ throughout the field and society.” Miriam will receive the award at the organization’s 2023 STC Summit Honors Event in Atlanta, GA in May 2023, where the organization will celebrate its platinum anniversary.

Bianca Alyssa Pérez’s debut chapbook GEMINI GOSPEL from Host Publications is available. Bianca extends an invitation to the chapbook launch on April 8th at 7pm at the Host Publications office.

MARC student Rich Riddle presented “Freedom in Thai Boys’ Love: Queer Representations and Global Fandom” at the American Comparative Literature Association’s Conference in Chicago.

Work by Steve Wilson, as well as MFA poetry graduates C. Prudence Arceneaux and Colin Pope, appears in the new collection from Tolsun Books: The Book of Life After Death: Essays and Poems. Steve Wilson’s prose poem “The Company Man” appears in the new anthology, Unknotting the Line: The Poetry in Prose.

Elliott Brandsma (B.A. in English and Art, 2013) has received several notable scholarships in support of his doctoral studies in Scandinavian literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The U.S. Department of Education awarded him two Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships for the upcoming year; he received a summer scholarship to study the Finnish language through the Finnish National Education Agency and an academic year fellowship to conduct dissertation research at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden. He has also been invited to Jonsered, Sweden, for a June writer’s residency at Villa Martinson, the former home of Nobel Prize-winning Swedish poet, Harry Martinson.

Andrew Barton’s article “Creating Climate Conscious Players: Final Fantasy VII’s Ecoactivist Fan Communities” appears in Przegląd Kulturoznawczy in a special issue titled, “Playing While The World Burns: Games in a Time of Crisis.”

MFA poetry student Melissa Huckabay’s poem “If You Wondered About the Astronaut Who Never Went to Space” was featured in the March 23 issue of SWWIM Every Day, an online literary journal.

Rob Tally presented seven invited talks or conference papers in March and April. He was a keynote speaker for the 25th Annual Conference of the Marxist Reading Group, University of Florida, in Gainesville; the theme of the conference was “Marxism and Cartography,” and Rob’s address was titled “Mapping the Ever Given: The World System in Crisis (as Usual).” He also gave an invited talk, “The Spatial Situation: Place, Orientation, and Mapping,” for the Prajna Foundation and Bharata Mata College, Kochi, Kerala, India (via Zoom). Rob presented “The Frame and the Map: Modernist Literary Spaces in the World System” at the American Comparative Literature Association convention in Chicago, and “The Ruin of Middle-earth: Sauron, the Second Age, and the Post-Apocalyptic Condition” at the 19th Annual University of Vermont Tolkien conference, in Burlington, VT [online]. Rob also presented three talks for the Tolkien Studies section of the Popular Culture Association’s annual conference in San Antonio: “No More Big Bosses: Orcs and the Utopian Impulse in Tolkien’s World System”; “‘Always the poor Uruks’: Orcs, Racism, and Violence”; and “Sauron: Weirdly Sexy.”

Percival Everett’s novel The Trees has won the 2022 L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize. Texas State will celebrate with a reading and book signing by Everett on Thursday, April 6th at 3:30pm at the Alkek Library’s Wittliff Collections. Join us on April 6th to welcome Percival Everett to the Texas State campus for this award and celebration.

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Miriam Williams at mfw@txstate.edu.

MISCELLANY – MARCH 23, 2023

The Department of English is proud of the achievements of all its graduate students. Recently, a committee of graduate faculty had the difficult project of selecting this year’s Outstanding Graduate Student in English from a truly exceptional group of nominees. This year’s Outstanding Graduate Student in English, Aaron Hand, has a remarkable record of publication and teaching but also of enriching the education and lives of the disadvantaged and incarcerated through initiatives at the national, state, county, and community levels. Appreciation goes to faculty who nominated or reviewed nominees’ materials in an abbreviated schedule. Aaron’s nomination materials have been forwarded to the College and will be reviewed there for the Outstanding Graduate Student in Liberal Arts award.

Whitney May is a Non-Tenure Line Workload Release Recipient for the 2023-2024 academic year. During this time, Whitney will complete a project on the American circus clown in post-war literature and popular culture. On March 13th, Whitney gave an invited guest lecture for a mass communication course at Delaware County Community College; the talk was on TikTok citizen journalism and the ongoing uprising in Iran.

Rob Tally’s latest book, The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies, is now available.

Poems by Cecily Parks, Kathleen Peirce, and Steve Wilson appear in Little Poems, a new volume in the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series.

Vanessa Couto Johnson’s poem “overtime” appears in issue 3.1 of Concision Poetry Journal.

MFA poetry student Rebecca D. Oxley’s poem “A Short List of Flies” has been accepted for publication for the Spring Issue of EQUINOX: Poetry and Prose.

The Department of English was represented at the 44th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando, Florida, by Suparno Banerjee, who contributed to the panel discussion “Global Methods/Knowledges Toward Rethinking SF/Fantastic Theory,” and Graeme Wend-Walker, who delivered his paper “The End of All Worlds: Young Adulthood’s Ragnarök.” On a writers panel, Graeme also read from his novel-in-progress, Space Mutant Sex Robots in the Anthropocene.

A review of Cyrus Cassells’s The World That the Shooter Left Us was recently published in Salamander.  

MFA fiction student Kayla King’s creative nonfiction piece “The Indictment of Robert Frost” will appear in the upcoming issue of Dublin-based journal Sonder Magazine. The issue will be launched on March 23 in Dublin and is also available for pre-order.

Tune in to the First-Gen Podcast to hear Octavio Pimentel in conversation with first-generation faculty, students, and staff on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3fZuVaNQH0TxvTtCArFnFK

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/…/the-first-gen…/id1671641263

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Miriam Williams at mfw@txstate.edu.

MISCELLANY – FEBRUARY 1, 2023

Amanda Scott’s creative nonfiction essay “A Room So Ancient I Almost Forgot” appears in the latest issue of Hayden’s Ferry Review. An interview with Amanda was published in the journal’s blog.

Sean Rose’s essay “Baseball, Boys, and Time” was published in the most recent issue of Ninth Letter. Sean also published Issue 1 of the mixed-media chapbook Spidertown, a collaboration between Sean and visual artist Claire Krüeger. Sean serves as editor-in-chief of the project, and more information can be found on Spidertown’s Instagram page, @welcome_to_spidertown.

Rob Tally was interviewed by Scott McLemee about his recent book, J.R.R’s The Hobbit: Realizing History through Fantasy: A Critical Companion, for Inside Higher Ed. Rob recently presented “‘You cannot press the One Ring too hard’: Tolkien and the Ambiguities of Magic in Middle-earth” at the Theoretical Aspects of Fantasy Studies: Representations of Magic Across Media Conference [remote] at the Centre for Fantasy Literature Studies, sponsored by the Taras Shevchanko Institute of Literature and the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, in Kyiv.

Rebecca Bell-Metereau’s recent and forthcoming  publications include the following: “J.D. Salinger Meets the Wrath of Manic Pixie Dream Girls” in Critical Insights: J.D. Salinger; “Life, Animated: Adapting a Book about a Hero with Autism” in Autism in Film and Television: On the Island; “Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun and Being Progressive, Black, and Probably Gay” in Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun (Grey House Publishing); and “Transgender Cinema” in Oxford Bibliographies.

Over the next few weeks, Steve Wilson will have poems in Blue Unicorn and Shot Glass Journal and in the anthologies Unknotting the Line: The Poetry in Prose (Dos Gatos Press), Little Poems (Everyman’s Library), and Awake in the World, Volume 3 (Riverfeet Press). His new book, Complicity, is due out in late February.

Graeme Wend-Walker presented the keynote for the English for International Communication Program at Rajamangala University of Technology Lanna in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

MFA student Sara Bawany’s spoken word poem Planting Seeds is available on the ACLU of Texas website.

MA Literature student Ali C. Armstrong’s prose piece “pictures: revisited” will be published in the Spring 2023 issue of The Harbour Journal.

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Miriam Williams at mfw@txstate.edu.

MISCELLANY – January 11, 2023

Sara Ramírez was recently appointed to the Chicana and Chicano Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Executive Committee for the Modern Language Association. Sara will serve on the committee for five years.

MFA fiction student Diamond Braxton was recently nominated for Best Microfiction for her story “A Piece of You,” which appeared in Stanchion, and was also nominated for Best of the Net 2022 for her piece “Sugar Rush,” featured in The Hellebore.

Leah Schwebel’s forthcoming book Tropes of Engagement: Chaucer’s Italian Poetics is now under contract with the University of Toronto Press. Leah’s piece “Chaucer and the Fantasy of Retroactive Consent” was published in the most recent issue of Studies in the Age of Chaucer.

Cyrus Cassells was recently interviewed for The Academy of American Poets.

MA Literature student Ali Armstrong’s poem “Ode to the Sky” appears in the latest issue of Literature Today.

MFA fiction graduate Caleb Ajinomoh has been awarded a MacDowell Fellowship.

Susan Morrison’s interview, “Story into Theory, Theory into Story: A Conversation on Braided Scholarship,” with Catriona Sandilands was published in Climate Changes Global Perspectives (Series: Challenges of Modernity) edited by Lena Pfeifer, Molina Klingler, and Hannah Nelson-Teutsch.

Vanessa Couto Johnson’s second full-length poetry book pH of Au was published on January 3rd. Additionally, Vanessa had six poems published in journals in December 2022: “Ginger(ly) braid” in Rough Cut; “there, a pet’s ick, lowing” and “i.e., b-tter” in The Broken City; “chatoyancy and release” in Vagabond City Lit ; “I’m all dewclaws” in The Shore; and “that’s pseudorandom” in Bombfire.

MFA poetry candidate Cathlin Noonan’s poem “Cirrhosis” will be published in Pidgeonholes on February 10th. Cathlin will present a sequence of poetry titled, “Scrying a Sequence: Transnational Irish Poetry from the Southwest,” at the 44th annual Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA) conference, taking place in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in February.

MFA fiction student Michael Ndubuisi Agugom’s poem “A Walk with My Father in ’29” is out in the UK, published by the Goatshed Press in their anthology, Goatshed One. Also, Michael’s short fiction “The Happiest People in the World” is coming out soon in Four Palaces Publishing’s anthology, Desire to Escape.

Several members of the English Department gave talks at the 2023 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in San Francisco, Jan. 5-8. Simon Lee presented “Addressing Stigma: Demonized Locales in Pat Barker’s Fiction”; Ruben Zecena presented “Dreaming the Impossible: Exploring Queer Migrant Melancholia in I Carry You With Me (2020)”; and Rob Tally gave two talks, “‘The Arm that Wields a Pick or Drives a Spike’: Melville and Marxist Literary Criticism” and “On Poe’s Late Style: Versatility and Transgression in the 1849 Tales.”

Whitney May’s essay “The Way the Cookie Doubles: Cripping the Cyber-Gothic of Black Mirror’s AI Tech” and Rob Tally’s “The Utopia of the Mirror: Angst, the Uncanny, and the Postmodern Mise-en-abyme” both appear in Humanity in a Black Mirror: Essays on Posthuman Fantasies in a Technological Near Future, edited by Jacob Blevins and Zahi Zalloua (McFarland 2023).

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Miriam Williams at mfw@txstate.edu.

MISCELLANY – December 1, 2022

Sara A. Ramírez presented “Expanding Space: The Decolonial Impetus to Rethink Reality in the Work of Andrea Muñoz Martinez” at the American Studies Association’s 2022 Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Spatial Literary Studies in China, co-edited by Ying Fang and Rob Tally, has just been published. This collection of 19 essays features work by leading scholars in China today and emerged in part from Rob’s participation in events at a number of universities in Tianjin, Ningbo, Hangzhou, and Shanghai, China, in 2017 and 2019. Dr. Ying Fang, a professor of comparative and world literature at Zhejiang Gongshang University in Hangzhou, was a visiting scholar in the English Department at Texas State University in 2017.

Rob Tally has also (remotely) presented invited keynote talks at four recent international conferences: (1) “The Road, the Map, and the Redbook of Westmarch: Towards a Literary Cartography of Middle-earth” for the “Zeit und Raum in Tolkiens Werk / Time and Space in Tolkien’s Work,” a conference of the Deutsche Tolkien Gesellschaft e.V. and the Institut für Anglistik / Amerikanistik, Friedrich Schiller Universität, Jena, Germany; (2) “Thinking Geocritically; or, the Situation of Spatial Literary Studies,” School of Foreign Languages, Southeast University, Nanjing, China; (3) “The Situation of Narrative: Space, Storytelling, and Critique,” for the “Narrating Spaces: Literature, Education, Geography, and Tourism,” 5th International Conference on Storytelling Revisited, University of Vic-Central University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain; and (4) “Marxism and Spatial Literary Studies,” for the “Reconstruction and Contemporary Development of Marxist Literary Criticism” conference, Centre for Theory of Literature and Art, School of Chinese Language and Literature, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China.

MA Literature student Katelyn Hammack’s poem “I, Woman” was recently accepted for publication in Querencia Press and will be included in their Winter 2022 anthology.

An interview with Cyrus Cassells was published in The Adroit Journal.

MFA Fiction student D.R. Garrett’s micro-fiction story Salvation Mountain was nominated for the Best Micro-Fiction 2023 anthology, which is published every year by Pelekinesis Press.

Sandra Sidi’s short story “The Garden of Israel Will Never Sleep” is featured on Narrative Magazine’s homepage.

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Miriam Williams at mfw@txstate.edu.

MISCELLANY – NOVEMBER 15, 2022

MATC graduate Brooke Turner is the new Vice President of STEAM Learning at Thinkery in Austin, Texas. Brooke is a co-founder of Kwaddle and recently joined the Board of Directors of 3 Day Startup.

Geneva Gano recently presented a talk titled “Possession and Transcendence: Pueblo Dance and Modernist Ekphrasis” at the Western Literature Association Conference in Santa Fe, NM. Geneva Gano’s essay “Modernist Activities and Native Acts in and around Northern New Mexico” was recently published in the Routledge Handbook of North American Indigenous Modernisms, edited by Kirby Brown, Stephen Ross, and Alana Sayers.

Susan Morrison presented a talk entitled “The Three Most Important Words in German: When ‘letters are considered sealed containers’” in a session entitled “Secret Police Hermeneutics: Interpretation and Misinterpretation and the Secret Police in the Eastern Bloc.” She presented at the Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) annual convention in Chicago, IL on November 10th.

Cyrus Cassells’s book The World That the Shooter Left Us is featured in Snowflakes in a Blizzard and was recently reviewed in Good River Review.

MFA poetry student Sara Bawany’s poem for dark-skinned girls was recently published in ArLiJo – Arlington Literary Journal.

Sandra Sidi’s essay “Searching for the Clear” (with Major Lauren Serrano) was an Honorable Mention for the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction and Essay Contest 2022.

Vanessa Couto Johnson has two poems, “chicken alanine” and “reddened monkeys-in-a-barrel,” out now in Landfill Journal.

Steph Grossman’s short story “Likeness” was accepted for publication in the literary magazine Joyland and will be published in May 2023.

MFA poetry candidate ​Joshua Bridgwater Hamilton has two new poems, “Chorus” and “Sunset/Flood,” coming out in the online edition of  San Antonio Review. Also, Miracle Monocle  accepted two of Joshua’s poems, “Vagary Ships” and “Interior Displacements,” for their next issue.

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Miriam Williams at mfw@txstate.edu.

MISCELLANY – November 1, 2022

MFA Endowed Chair in Creative Writing Kali Fajardo-Anstine appeared on Good Morning America last month. Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s book, Woman of Light, was featured as a ‘GMA’ Buzz Pick. You can view the appearance here:   https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Culture/video/woman-light-kali-fajardo-anstine-weeks-gma-buzz-91157322

Chris Dayley’s article, “Increasing Inclusion in Technical Communication Academic Programs,” has been accepted for publication in the February 2023 issue of Technical Communication.  Chris (with Dr. Isidore K. Dorpenyo of George Mason University) is editing a special issue of Technical Communication titled, “Practices, Reflections, and Methodologies: What Is Successful Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Technical Communication Workplace,” which will be published in August 2023.

Debra Monroe was recently featured in the Houston Chronicle, where she discussed her latest book, It Takes a Worried Woman. You can read the article here:  https://www.houstonchronicle.com/lifestyle/renew-houston/wellness/article/In-It-Takes-a-Worried-Woman-Texas-author-Debra-17515367.php?fbclid=IwAR2BLRfpvhWOT2Qtm7Yxo054vKuM2udCUuOYC0yb4IanmXm-XcXKy64vTjM

Tom Grimes’s new novel, Uncertainty is the Problem, has been excerpted in Narrative Magazine. An earlier excerpt can be found at: https://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/fall-2016/fiction/dynamics-faith-tom-grimes

According to the most recent “Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators,” Rob Tally was among the Top 2% of most cited authors in the field of Literary Studies worldwide in 2021.

MFA Creative Writing graduate and Lecturer Jessica Martinez’s nonfiction essay, “The Anatomy of a Powerlifter,” was recently published in Identity Theory.

Katie Kapurch was asked to weigh in on Madonna’s recent TikTok controversy for The Guardian. Her interview appears in “Madonna on TikTok: she’s recycling ‘the shock value of her heyday’,” published on October 24, 2022.

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Miriam Williams at mfw@txstate.edu.

Miscellany – October 10, 2022

On October 20, Cecily Parks will deliver the Walter Harding Lecture at the State University of New York at Geneseo. Her talk is titled “When I was Thoreau at Night: A Poem’s Pathways to a Life.” The lecture is named for an important scholar of Henry David Thoreau; past lecturers include Bill McKibben, William Cronon, and Megan Marshall.

Whitney S. May’s edited collection Encountering Pennywise: Critical Perspectives on Stephen King’s IT has been published by the University Press of Mississippi. The collection has been nominated for the PCA/ACA’s award for Best Edited Collection in Popular and American Culture. Shannon Shaw’s chapter “Send in the Clowns: Pennywise and the Monstrousness of Colonialism” also appears in the collection.

Rob Tally’s latest books include J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’: Realizing History Through Fantasy, part of the Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon book series, and Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora, co-edited with Melody Yunzi Li. In addition to their co-authored Introduction, “Remapping the Homeland,” the volume also includes an essay by Rob, “This Space Which Is Not One: Diaspora, Topophrenia, and the World System.” (Melody Li, a professor at the University of Houston, was a visiting speaker here in November 2019.) Learn more about the publications here:

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-11266-9

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-10157-1

Miles Wilson’s fifth book and second novel, McKenzie Rising: An American Frolic, has just been published by the University of Nevada Press. https://conta.cc/3dzY6WF

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Miriam Williams at mfw@txstate.edu.

Miscellany – September 15, 2022

Jennifer duBois’s fourth novel, The Last Language, will be published by Milkweed Books in fall 2023.

Becky Jackson’s article “Studying Emotion and Emotional Labor Over Time and Context” (coauthored with Jackie Grutsch McKinney and Nicole Caswell) was published in Emotions and Affect in Writing Centers, Eds. Janine Morris and Kelly Concannon, Parlor Press, 2022.

MFA Visiting Professor James Han Mattson has a new novel, The Grand Impostors, forthcoming from William Morrow. The suspense-driven novel is centered around three characters’ relationships with ghosts—a man who witnessed a traumatic event as a child and can’t tell where truth ends and imagination begins, a paranormal investigator with a rare eye disease that creates auras, and a Korean adoptee searching for signs of her mother in the afterlife—exploring what it means to be haunted and why we choose to believe.

Logan Fry’s poems “Homer” and “God’s Breath” appear in Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry & Opinion No. 15, now available at https://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/.

Rob Tally was interviewed on the BBC London radio show, Sunny and Shay. There he discussed his soon-to-be-published book J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’: Realizing History Through Fantasy. His portion of the interview goes from 27:00 minutes to 55:00 minutes. Listen here: https://buff.ly/3RxKzNO

MFA Poetry Candidate Isra Noreen Cheema’s poem “Koi Pond” was published by Shout Your Abortion and is available here: https://shoutyourabortion.com/writing/koi-pond/

Vanessa Couto Johnson has a poem in Abandon Journal‘s 3rd issue, “Unerased | Steep steps“, and two poems in Angel Rust‘s 14th issue, “fist things fist” and “heavens to murgatroyd (Snagglepuss Ghazal).”

 

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Miriam Williams at mfw@txstate.edu.

Miscellany – August 22, 2022

The current issue of PMLA features a special (Theories and Methodologies) section co-edited by Rob Tally and Princeton University professor Andrew Cole devoted to the 40th anniversary of Fredric Jameson’s monumental work of literary theory, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. In addition to an introduction co-authored by Cole and Tally, “Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious — Forty Years On,” the section features 11 original essays by leading literary critics from around the world, including Jameson himself, exploring the lasting significance of this landmark 1981 book. Rob Tally’s essay, “On Always Historicizing: The Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology Today” also appears in this section. This project began as a roundtable session of the 2021 MLA conference organized by Cole and Tally.

At the College of Liberal Arts’ Fall Faculty Meeting, Rob Tally was a recipient of a Golden Apple Award and a Presidential Distinction Award for Scholarly/Creative Activity, Laura Ellis-Lai was a recipient of a Golden Apple Award and a Presidential Distinction Award for Teaching, and Miriam Williams was a recipient of a Golden Apple Award and a Presidential Distinction Award for Service.

Chris Dayley is the recipient for the 2022 Programmatic Perspectives Research Article Award for his article, “Combatting Embedded Racism in TPC Academic Programs: Recruiting for Diversity Using Student-Informed Practices.” The award citation reads, “This award recognizes important critical and/or analytical insight that contributes something new to program administration in Technical and Professional Communication.” A formal announcement and recognition will take place at the 2022 Council of Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication Annual Conference.

Katie Kapurch is now serving as co-editor of AMP: American Music Perspectives, a peer-reviewed journal published by Penn State University Press. In 2022, AMP published her article, “Unvaulting ‘Disney Plus Pop’ in 2021: Romance, Melodrama, and Remembering in Taylor Swift’s All Too Well, McCartney’s Lyrics and The Beatles: Get Back.” She also edited AMP‘s special issue on women and gender in music.

Aimee Roundtree and Felicia Chong (Oakland University) are the recipients of the 2022 Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) Nell Ann Pickett Award for their article, “Student Recruitment in Technical and Professional Communication Programs.”  The Nell Ann Pickett Award is given each year to the best article published in the ATTW journal, Technical Communication Quarterly. 

Anne Winchell’s fantasy novel, Rise of the Phoenix, is out now. The novel is about a young woman who survived the execution of her family after the war and now nourishes a need for vengeance—and a phoenix egg.

Cyrus Cassells has been named a 2022 Poet Laureate Fellow by The Academy of American Poets. As part of this honor, Cyrus will receive $50,000, which will help support public poetry programs in the year ahead as presented in his proposal to the Academy.

Idza Luhumyo, a second-year MFA creative writing student, has been awarded the 2022 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. Idza was honored for the short story “Five Years Next Sunday,” which was described by the judges as “an incandescent story.” The award was announced July 18 at a ceremony in London.  

Leah Schwebel presented a paper, “Petrarch and Zenobia, Revisited,” at the New Chaucer Society in Durham, UK. Also, this summer graduate students in Leah Schwebel’s Dante seminar created a collaborative, online, English commentary on the Commedia, which they completed in the form of a website. While some students looked at visual representations of Dante’s work, others compiled references to music that Dante mentions, and still others traced biblical and classical allusions, to name a few approaches. You can find the website here: https://sites.google.com/g.comalisd.org/divinecomedyhumanitiesproject/home?authuser=0

Geneva Gano attended the 15th International D.H. Lawrence Conference in Albuquerque and Taos, New Mexico and presented, “Lawrence’s Mozo: Mornings in Mexico and Revolutionary Caricature,” which is from her current book project, “Revolutionary Forms: U.S. Literary Modernism and the Mexican Vogue, 1910-1940.”

Sara A. Ramírez and Geneva Gano participated in the Scholarly Colloquium on the Work and Career of Sandra Cisneros, which was focused on the Chicana author Sandra Cisneros and her vast collection of papers (held at the Wittliff Collections). It brought eight scholars to the Texas State University campus (and two on zoom) to conduct and deliver peer reviews of essays-in-progress for inclusion in the edited volume, “¡Ay Tú! Critical Essays on the Work and Career of Sandra Cisneros,” which is currently under review at UT Press. The participants found this colloquium to be especially generative, offering an opportunity for collaborative, cross-institutional research and helping to seed future research work within the Wittliff and beyond: at conferences, in publications, and in grant proposals.

MA Literature student Bryce Jeter presented a paper titled, “Othermother Realness: Marlon Riggs and the Filmic Embodiment of Queer and Black Alternative Motherhood in the AIDS Epidemic,” at UCLA’s Q-Grad: Queer Graduate Student Research Conference.

MATC graduate Meghalee Das (PhD Candidate in Texas Tech’s Technical Communication & Rhetoric Program) is the recipient of the 2022 Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) Graduate Research Award and the 2022 ATTW Amplification Award.

Eric Leake presented “Difficult Empathy as Rhetorical Encounter” at the Rhetoric Society of America Biennial Conference.

Steve Wilson’s poem, “Call It a Kind of Grace,” appears in A Fire to Light Our Tongues: Texas Writers on Spirituality, out now from TCU Press.

First-year MFA poetry student Cathlin Noonan’s “Ghazal with Louse” was named a finalist for Crazyhorse Magazine’s Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize. https://crazyhorse.cofc.edu/prizes/2022-crazyhorse-prize-winners-finalists/

Cathlin’s poem “Abortion Made a Road” was a finalist for Ruminate Magazine’s poetry prize; the poem will be published in the September issue. Here is the announcement: https://www.ruminatemagazine.com/blogs/ruminate-magazine/winners-of-the-2022-poetry-prize

Ben Reed’s essay, “On Raking Up the Dead: How the unusual afterlife of a Prussian servant sheds light on social-media comeuppance in the time of COVID-19,” was a finalist for the s Perkoff Prize for new writing on health and medicine. The placement came with a small honorarium and the Missouri Review editors also selected the essay for their online prose feature, BLAST. The work can be found here: https://www.missourireview.com/on-raking-up-the-dead-by-ben-reed/

MFA poetry candidate Melissa M. Huckabay and MFA poetry candidate Rebecca Oxley will have poems published in the Mutabilis Press’ anthology, Chaos Dive Reunion. 

Andrew Barton’s piece, “‘But the Planet’s What Matters, Right?’: The Entangled Environmentalism of Three Final Fantasy Remake Communities,” is out in the SFRA Review and is available here: https://sfrareview.org/vol-52-no-3-summer-2022/

Note: Please email your Miscellany items to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Miriam Williams at mfw@txstate.edu .