#TXSTEnglish

MA graduate Shaun Clarkson has received his PhD from Purdue University.

A photo by Susan Hanson has been selected as the cover for Ecocritical Aesthetics:  Language, Beauty, and the Environment, edited by Scott Slovic and Peter Quigley, and soon to be released by Indiana University Press.

Dan Lochman co-organized three panels titled “Cognitive/Affective Cultures” for the Chicago meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, March 30-April 1 and presented “’The troublous passion of my pensiue mind’: Britomart, Mind, and Memory”; and presented on April 22 the paper “Mastering ‘mazy paths’: William Scott’s Model of Poesy on Heroic Narrative” at the South Central Renaissance Conference, held in Austin.

Alan Schaefer was named a favorite professor by the undergraduate inductees to Alpha Chi Honor Society.

Incoming MARC students Tiffany Rainey and A.R. Rogers have both received Graduate Merit Fellowships recognizing academic excellence.

MARC graduate Shaun Ford has been accepted into the PhD program in Theory and Cultural Studies at Purdue University for this coming fall, supported by a Doctoral Fellowship providing 5 years full funding, a tuition waiver, and medical insurance supplement.

Amelia Gray (fiction, 2007) won the 2016 New York City Public Library’s ‘Young Lion’ Award:  https://www.nypl.org/press/press-release/june-10-2016/writer-amelia-gray-wins-2016-young-lions-fiction-award-gutshot. Her second novel, Isadora, will be published on May 23^rd: “Historical novels about artists abound, but few attain the psychological intricacy, fluency of imagination, lacerating wit, or intoxicating beauty of Gray’s tale of Isadora Duncan” ―Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review).

James Knippen is the recipient of a 2017 Discovery/Boston Review prize; he will travel to New York City in May to give a reading. Also, two poems, “Poem” and “Portents,” appear in the current issue of Kenyon Review Online: http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2017-marapr/selections/james-henry-knippen-763879/.

Cecily Parks was selected as Outstanding English Professor of the Year by the Texas State chapter of Sigma Tau Delta.

A book that features a chapter written by Kitty Ledbetter, The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, has won the prestigious Robert L. Colby Book Prize from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. Her chapter is entitled “Women’s Periodicals.”

Congratulations:

MFA student Ashton Kamburoff was selected for a space in the Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop in Denver, Colorado by Ada Limón. Limón will lead the week-long workshop from June 12th-16th. Ashton also was named the 2017-18 Clark House Writer-In-Residence by the MFA faculty.

 

Mark Busby attended the Conference of College Teachers Association Conference, held at Tarrant County Community College from March 3-5, serving as a CCTE Council member as well as presenting “The Slave Narrative from Frederick Douglass to William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner to Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation” at the Texas College English Association affiliated meeting.

 

MFA fiction student Graham Oliver interviewed recent Whiting Award-winner Tony Tulathimutte for Electric Literature. They talked about the complex relationship between literature and video games: https://electricliterature.com/the-field-of-dreams-approach-on-writing-about-video-games-5c58d4ddf9f4.

 

Cecily Parks was named Outstanding English Professor of the Year by students in Texas State’s chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Honor Society.

 

Rob Tally’s article “The Southern Phoenix Triumphant: Richard Weaver, or, the Origins of Contemporary U.S. Conservatism” appears in b2o: An Online Journal (the peer-reviewed online journal of the boundary 2 editorial collective): http://www.boundary2.org/2017/03/robert-t-tally-jr-the-southern-phoenix-triumphant-richard-weaver-or-the-origins-of-contemporary-u-s-conservatism/.

 

MFA poetry graduate Jonathan Hobratsch conducted an interview with Cyrus Cassells for the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/2017-poetry-month-an-interview-with-cyrus-cassells_us_58de8c39e4b03c2b30f6a5db.

 

Steve Wilson has new poems in the latest issues of Texas Observer, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review and Noon: Journal of the Short Poem.

 

Tomás Q. Morín’s new collection of poetry Patient Zero was released on April 11th by Copper Canyon Press. The libretto he translated, Pancho Villa from a Safe Distance, will have its Austin premiere at the Paramount Theater as part of the Fusebox Festival on April 14th and 15th. More details can be found here: https://www.fuseboxfestival.com/dates/pancho-villa-from-a-safe-distance.

 

MARC graduate Sonia Arellano earned her PhD from the University of Arizona this semester.

Congratulations:

Ms. Emily Chammah, who was named Emily Smith while at Texas State, spent a year in the MFA Fiction program a couple of years ago before moving to New York. She has just been named one of the 12 winners of the 2016 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She is listed at this PEN America site: http://pen.org/2017-pen-literary-awards-winners/.
Eric Leake’s interviews with Doug Hesse and Nancy Sommers have been re-published in the collection Teachers on the Edge: The Writing on the Edge Interviews 1989–2017 (Routledge).
Kitty Ledbetter attended the Texas State Historical Association’s 121st Annual Meeting in Houston March 2-4, where she presented “Textiles, Text, and Media Replication During the Mexican War.”
Miriam Williams has been named a Fellow of the Association for Teachers of Technical Writers. You can read the announcement of Miriam’s achievement here: http://attw.org/about-attw/fellows/2017-williams [archived].
Susan Morrison’s A Medieval Woman’s Companion: Women’s Lives in the European Middle Ages has just been named a 2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalist in three categories: Adult Nonfiction; Women’s Studies; and Young Adult Nonfiction: https://awards.forewordreviews.com/books/a-medieval-womans-companion/.
Suparno Banerjee and Graeme Wend-Walker represented Texas State at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, held in Orlando. Suparno presented “Communism and Soviet Utopias: From Aelita to Andromeda,” and Graeme presented “Virtual Celebrity: Exploring Identity in The Ziggurat, Watkin Tudor Jones’s Pre-Die Antwoord Sci-Fi Opus.” Graeme also read his short story “The Pale Evacuation” in an author’s panel.
Ben Reed’s flash fiction piece, “Brothers,” appears in the March 2017 issue of Ghost Parachute. His essay “Trigger Warnings” appears in the Fall/Winter issue of The Texas Review.
Dorothy Lawrenson will begin pursuit of her PhD in Creative Writing this fall at the University of Edinburgh, supported by a College Research Award to cover fees and provide a stipend.
Rob Tally’s “Giving Shape to Gloom; or, Keeping it Real in The House of the Seven Gables” appears in Nathaniel Hawthorne in the College Classroom (AMS Press, 2017). In addition, Rob will be the keynote speaker for “Turning Point(s),” the 30th Annual Graduate Association of French and Italian Students (GAFIS) symposium at the University of Wisconsin, March 31, 2017. His talk is titled “Swerves, Tropes, Peripeties: Toward a Theory of the Turning Point.”

Congratulations:

Manny Pina, MARC graduate and current instructor at St. Edward’s University, has been accepted into the PhD program in Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech University.
MFA fiction student Ramiro G. Hinojosa’s short story, “Rest & Relaxation,” will be published in the Fall 2017 issue of Huizache.
MA Literature student Thais Rutledge attended the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture in mid-February, presenting “Navigating Social Spaces: Ideology, Sexuality, and Memory in Mrs. Dalloway.”
Mark Busby attended the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association meeting in Albuquerque Feb 15-18 and read from his new poetry collection, Through Our Years, at a creative writing session.
MATC alumna Jennifer Cleveland has accepted a position as Business Analysis Coordinator with Sprint Accessibility. She will provide communication support for deaf and hard-of-hearing employees, and assist with proposal management and RFP (request  for proposal) processes.
MFA poetry student Ashton Kamburoff has accepted the position of poetry editor for Profane Journal. Profane publishes a print issue yearly in the winter and accepts poetry, fiction, flash, essays and interviews.
“Orientation,” a story by MFA fiction student Shannon Perri, will be published next month in fields magazine.
Octavio Pimentel has been invited to serve as a symposium scholar for the September 2017 Watson pre-conference symposium, and as a keynote speaker for the 2018 Thomas Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition. The conference and symposium, whose theme will be “Making Future Matter,” will both to be held at Louisville, Kentucky. The Thomas Watson conference is considered one of the top tier rhetoric and composition conferences.
Steve Wilson and Vanessa Couto Johnson took part in a reading sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Southwest this March.  The event, moderated by Will Jensen, celebrated the recent publication of the anthology Texas Weather, in which Steve and Vanessa’s poetry appears.

Congratulations:

Two stories by William Jensen were nominated by a member of the Board of Contributing Editors for Pushcart Prize XLII: Best of the Small Presses: “A Quiet Place to Hide” appeared in North Dakota Quarterly and “Come Again Another Day” appeared in the anthology, Texas Weather.

 

Rob Tally participated in The Society for Critical Exchange’s Winter Theory Institute, held Feb 9-12 at the University of Houston-Victoria. The topic of the 2017 Institute was “Antitheory,” and Rob’s talk was titled “Anti-Antitheory”: http://societyforcriticalexchange.org/wintertheoryinstitute.aspx.

 

Stephen Harmon’s poem, “Dawn,” has been accepted by Volt.

 

MFA poetry student Ashton Kamburoff’s will present “Blue Class / Working Collar: An Examination of the Poetics of Phil Levine” at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment at Wayne State University in Detroit, taking place this June.

 

Natasha Tretheway has chosen Cyrus Cassell’s poem, “Elegy with a Gold Cradle,” for Best American Poetry 2017, which will be published by Scribners in September. In Spring 2018 the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry (Southern Illinois University Press) will publish his sixth book, The Gospel According to Wild Indigo.

 

MATC alumni now hold the following positions in Texas State’s IT and University Marketing departments: Jennifer Small (User Service Consultant II, IT Assistance Center), Jenny Joy Van De Walle (Program Specialist – Technical Writer, IT Assistance Center), Jennifer Johnson (Coordinator, IT Projects – Technology Resources Administration), Jen LaGrange (Coordinator, IT Projects – IT Assistance Center), and Chase Rogers (Web Content Strategist – University Marketing).

 

Kate McClancy presented “‘It Doesn’t Have to Match’: Cold War Style and Masculinity in The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” at the Southwest Popular Culture / American Culture Association conference in Albuquerque this month.

 

MATC alumnus Jael Perales has been hired as an Academic Editor for the American Journal Experts Division of Research Square, a for-benefit company that helps researchers around the world get their work effectively communicated and published.

Congratulations:

MFA fiction student Ramiro G. Hinojosa’s short story, “Field Manual,” has been accepted for publication in War, Literature & the Arts.

 

In early February, Scott Mogull will present research entitled, “Intersection of Technical Communication and Marketing Genres: Spanning Silos through Product Documentation” at the Fifth Colloquium Technical Communication in the Field, hosted by the Université Paris Diderot.

 

MA Literature student Thais Rutledge has been accepted into The University of Texas at Austin’s PhD program in Comparative Literature, and will receive full funding.

 

Aimee Kendall Roundtree was interviewed on the “10 Minute Tech Comm” podcast about her article, “Social Health Content and Activity on Facebook: A Survey Study.” The episode is available at the following link: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/10minute-tech-comm/e/48933864. Aimee also received a $20K grant from State Farm to research and design an intervention for improving fire incident reporting strategies. She will use text mining and qualitative research methods to characterize best practices and identify barriers that hinder report accuracy, consistency, and quality. The project will help San Marcos and College Station Fire Departments set reporting guidelines, create reporting templates, and train firefighters.

 

Miles Wilson’s new and selected stories 1977-2017 will be published by the University of New Mexico Press.  His literary papers have been acquired by the Southwestern Writers Collection.

 

Sections 1-20 of Kathleen Peirce’s book-length poem Vault will appear in the next issue of Poetry International, and the book will be published in its entirety by New Michigan Press, available in the fall of this year.

 

Rob Tally’s edited collection of essays, The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space (Routledge 2017), has just been published: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Literature-and-Space/Tally-Jr/p/book/9781138816350.

 

Mark Busby’s collection of poetry, Through Our Times: Occasional Poems 1960-2017, is now out from Lamar University Literary Press.

Congratulations:

Leah Schwebel co-edited and contributed to a special issue of The Chaucer Review on “The Legend of Good Women”: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/645816/pdf. Leah’s article is entitled “Livy and Augustine as Negative Models in The Legend of Lucrece”; she also co-wrote the Introduction, “Looking Forward, Looking Back on the Legend of Good Women.” This past fall, Leah was recognized as an Alpha Chi favorite professor.

 

Flore Chevaillier presented “Machine, Body, and Text in Eduardo Kac’s Non-human Poetry” at the 2017 MLA meeting in Philadelphia this January.

 

MFA fiction student Graham Oliver has been rehired for 2017 as a Ploughshares blogger. Last year he interviewed translators for the site, and you can read his end-of-the-year round-up at this link: http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/lessons-from-a-year-in-translation/. His 2017 series will focus on newly released books with rural settings; his first entry looked at prize-winning novels from 2016: http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/past-the-city-limit-sign-the-role-of-rural-in-2016-books/.

 

Cecily Parks has three poems in the latest issue of Terrain.org: http://www.terrain.org/2017/poetry/cecily-parks/.

 

Alan Schaefer served as guest editor of the fall 2016 issue of Southwestern American Literature. The issue focuses on writing about and by musicians of the Southwest: http://www.txstate.edu/cssw/publications/sal.html.

 

Aimee Kendall Roundtree won a teaching grant along with Dr. Hunter Close (Physics), Dr. Kristina Collins (Education), Dr. Grayson Lawrence (Art and Design), and Dr. Ziliang Zong (Computer Science). She will serve as Project Director on “Coding Across the Disciplines,” a $100K project to teach computer programming skills to middle and high school teachers from all disciplines. The project was funded by WeTeach_CS, a program of The University of Texas at Austin’s Center for STEM Education.

 

Gabriella Corales – who graduated with a degree in English a few years ago, received a Rockefeller Fellowship and then completed her Masters degree at Stanford – currently teaches at the Impact Academy in California.  She recently published an essay on her experiences in Education Week Teacher: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/classroom_qa_with_larry_ferlazzo/2016/10/response_fear_should_not_stop_us_from_exploring_controversial_topics_in_school.html.

 

“In Summer 2017 the College of Liberal Arts will present a bilingual adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. Performances will be August 3 – 10 in Centennial Hall G02 on the Texas State Campus. Professional actors from Austin will collaborate with Texas State Spanish and Theatre majors to present this adaptation to the public. This production is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

Rob Tally’s essay “The Novel and the Map: Spatiotemporal Form and Discourse in Literary Cartography” appears in Space, Time, and the Limits of Human Understanding, edited by Shyam Wuppuluri and Giancarlo Ghiradri (Springer 2017).

Congratulations:

MFA fiction graduate and Senior Lecturer Eric Blankenburg’s “The Devil Doesn’t Care: Choice and Chance in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men” was accepted for the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association conference, to be held February 2017 in Albuquerque, NM. The paper was written as part of Mark Busby’s graduate seminar on Cormac McCarthy.

 

Rebecca Bell-Metereau’s “An Actor’s Director: Kubrick and Star Performances” appears in Critical Insights: Stanley Kubrick, published by Salem Press (2016).

 

Rob Tally’s essay “Tolkien’s Geopolitical Fantasy: Spatial Narrative in The Lord of the Rings” appears in Popular Fiction and Spatiality: Reading Genre Settings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Also recently published is “‘A Utopia of the In-Between,’ or, Limning the Liminal,” Rob’s foreword to Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place, published this year by London: Rowman & Littlefield International.

 

Katie Kapurch, Jon Marc Smith and Suparno Banerjee have received Texas State Research Enhancement Program grants for 2017.

 

Aimee Roundtree was named an Alphi Chi Favorite Professor for Fall 2016.

 

Last spring and summer, Doug Dorst worked on the writing staff of the new TV show, Z: The Beginning of Everything, a half-hour drama starring Christina Ricci as Zelda Fitzgerald. Amazon Prime will release all ten episodes of the first season simultaneously on January 27. Doug received Writers’ Guild credit for Episode 7 (“Where There Are Friends, There Are Riches”). A trailer for the show can be seen here, along with an early version of the pilot episode: https://www.amazon.com/Z-The-Beginning-of-Everything/dp/B017APVGL4 [archived].

 

MFA fiction alumna Christine Granados’s second short story collection, Fight Like a Man and Other Stories We Tell Our Children, will be published in March and was reviewed recently in Kirkus Reviews: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/christine-granados/fight-like-a-man-and-other-stories-we-tell-our-chi/ [archived].

Congratulations:

Susan Morrison was in Las Vegas recently to accept the Top Honors Book Award for Young Adult Fiction from Literary Classics, for her novel Grendel’s Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife: https://grendelsmotherthenovel.com/2016/10/18/grendels-mother-wins-top-honor-award/. Susan also received a $1,000 UT Center for European Studies: MSI Faculty Travel Grant for her current project called A Wall Newspaper: A U.S.-East German University Exchange Program During the Cold War. The grant will support her travel for research next summer.

 

MATC student Jonathan Prichard has accepted a Peace Corps assignment in Ecuador, beginning in May. He will serve as a health extension volunteer, a position similar to a community health organizer.

 

Octavio Pimentel’s essay “Changing Discourse: Giving a New Voice to Latinos” has been accepted for the 51st annual meeting of the Southwest Council of Latin American Studies, to be held at the Universidad Autónoma de Campeche in Campeche, México next March.

 

MFA fiction graduate and Lecturer Daniel Keltner signed a publishing contract for his first book, Into That Good Night, which will be published by Skyhorse in early 2018.

 

“Formed by Place: Spatiality, Irony, and Empire in Conrad’s ‘An Outpost of Progress,'” co-authored by Rob Tally and MA Literature student Thais Rutledge, appears in the latest issue of Transnational Literature: http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/current.html

 

MFA poetry student Ashton Kamburoff’s poem “Tagging Up” is a finalist for the Earl Weaver Baseball Writing Prize, sponsored by Cobalt Review. The winner will be announced during the World Series. His poem “Elegy for Bob Kaufman” will appear in the December issue of Rappahannock Review.

 

MFA poetry student Meg Griffitts’ “Not Missing a Beat[ing]: Reconstructing Violence within a Feminist Economy,” was accepted for the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association conference, to be held February 2017 in Albuquerque, NM.

 

Kitty Ledbetter attended the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) conference in Phoenix, AZ, where she presented “Over the Teacups’ and The Woman at Home.”

Congratulations:

In September, Mark Busby presented “Satireshot/Scattershot: Targets in Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” at the Western Literature Association conference in Big Sky, MT.  Mark read poetry at the Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers conference, held in San Antonio in early October.

 

“Éxito (Success),” written by Octavio Pimentel and Nancy Wilson, appears in Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies: New Latinx Keywords for Theory and Pedagogy: https://www.amazon.com/Decolonizing-Rhetoric-Composition-Studies-Keywords/dp/1137527234.

 

Recent MARC graduate Edward Santos Garza has accepted a position as a Rhetoric Assessment Affiliate for the University of Texas at Austin’s OnRamps program, which brings rigorous, dual-enrollment writing courses to thousands of students in underprivileged high schools across the state. In addition, Edward is in his first semester as an adjunct English professor at St. Edward’s University, where fellow MARC graduate Clare Murray is a new faculty member, as well.

 

Two poems by MFA poetry student Meg Griffitts appear in the latest issue of Luna Luna Magazine: http://www.lunalunamagazine.com/blog/poetry-by-meg-e-griffitts.

 

The Houston Public Poetry recently invited MFA poetry graduate and current lecturer Autumn Hayes to perform her poems with alt-country band Charlie and the Regrets at the inaugural “PM Show: Poets and Musicians at Night.” The show will take place on Saturday, October 22 at Rudyard’s Pub in Houston and is the first in a series of intentional collaborations between poets and musicians: http://www.publicpoetry.net/2016/10/the-pm-show/. Autumn is one of three poets specifically selected by the Public Poetry board; poets who wish to participate in future performances must audition. Four of Autumn’s poems – “No. 1: Color,” “No. 2: Textures,” “No. 3: Lengths,” and “What to Do with Silence?” – have been accepted for publication in African American Review.

 

Twister Marquiss, Director of Texas State University’s Common Reading Program and a faculty member in the English Department and Honors College, was presented with a “Foundations of Excellence” award during the Texas State Student Foundation’s annual dinner ceremony on Wednesday, Oct. 12. He was one of ten award recipients, and one of only three recipients from the university’s faculty. The award was presented by Honors student Haley Tucker. The Foundations of Excellence award is the Student Foundation’s annual recognition event that provides Student Foundation members with the opportunity to honor ten faculty and staff members who have made an extraordinary impact on the lives of Student Foundation members and the Texas State University community as a whole.

 

Eric Leake’s article “The Dinner Table Debate and the Uses of Hospitality” has been published in the latest issue of Present Tense: http://www.presenttensejournal.org/volume-6/the-dinner-table-debate-and-the-uses-of-hospitality/