Department of English

Jennifer duBois’s new novel, The Last Language, has received positive early reviews from Kirkus (starred review), Publisher’s Weekly and Shelf Awareness. It will be out October 17 from Milkweed Editions, and you can pre-order here.

Rob Tally is now a contributing editor for the American Book Review, and his brief article “Mapping Culture” appears in the current issue (Vol. 44, no. 2 [Summer 2023]). It is the first entry in his series of ABR columns, “Cartographies,” featuring topics in contemporary literary criticism and theory.

Cecily Parks’s third book of poems, The Seeds, will be published by Alice James Books in 2025. She will be a Rea Writer at the University of Virginia from October 11-13, 2023.

Katie Kapurch published an essay, “Why ‘Barbie’ and ‘The Little Mermaid’ made 2023 the dead girl summer,” in The Conversation. Katie Kapurch was invited to review The McCartney Legacy for the Journal of Beatles Studies, published by Liverpool University Press. The review appears in the most recent open-access issue here.

MFA student Sara Bawany’s second book of poetry, Quarter Life Crisis, will be published October 22, 2023 from FlowerSong Press. 

Cassie Polasek recently presented, “‘The last pagan on earth:’ An Allegorical Reading of Bobby Western’s Consciousness,” at the Cormac McCarthy Society’s Special Symposium on The Passenger and Stella Maris held at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Miriam Williams at mfw@txstate.edu. You can also submit to the Miscellany Form here: https://www.english.txst.edu/news/Miscellany-Submission.html

Katie Kapurch’s co-edited collection, The Beatles and Humour, has been published by Bloomsbury. Katie authored a chapter about Shakespeare’s and Lewis Carroll’s influences and co-authored a chapter about the band’s debt to humor in Black music. The book is available now in digital formats, hardback coming this month.

Eric Leake’s book, Difficult Empathy and Rhetorical Encounters , was published by Routledge.

Becky Jackson (with co-authors Jackie Grutsch McKinney and Nicole Caswell) will deliver the keynote address at the annual conference of the Nebraska Writing Center Consortium on Friday, November 3, 2023. The keynote will merge findings from their award-winning book, The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors, with their current longitudinal study on writing center director burnout.

MFA Endowed Chair Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s novel, Woman of Light, was awarded the WILLA Award in Historical Fiction from Women Writing the West. The WILLA Literary Awards, named in honor of Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Willa Cather, recognizes the best in literature, featuring women’s or girls’ stories set in the North American West that are published each year.

Cyrus Cassells has been named a Texas State University System Regents’ Professor. The Regents’ Professor designation honors outstanding members of the system’s professoriate who have achieved excellence in teaching, research, publication, and community service, while demonstrating an unwavering dedication to their students and university. Cyrus will be honored in a ceremony at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, on November 17, 2023, at the quarterly Texas State University System meeting. The award includes $10,000.

Amanda Scott recently joined the 2023 Bedford New Scholars Advisory Board, an annual program that unites graduate students who share trends and insights on the various teaching challenges that they face in college composition classrooms.

Mike Hennessey, distinguished emeritus, published his anthology, Little Poems, an Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets volume (Kopf, 2023) this spring, with a favorable review appearing in the July 18 New York Times.  

Along with the Crafting Communities project team, Denae Dyck published an article entitled, “Making Things Together: Collaborating and Mentoring on an OER Project.” Their Crafting Communities project recently received an Open Scholarship Award from the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI).

Robert Tally was recently a guest on the New Books Network podcast to discuss his book, For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Age of Capitalist Realism. You can listen to the interview here.

Susan Morrison gave a talk, “Pilgrimage and Metaphor: Agency for Medieval Women Pilgrims and Writers,” at a seminar entitled “Viatrices et itinera ad Loca Sancta” [“Travels and trips to the Holy Places”], Instituto de Estudios Gallegos Padre Sarmiento in Santiago, Spain on July 24, 2023.

Note: Please email your news to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Miriam Williams at mfw@txstate.edu. You can also submit to the Miscellany Form here: https://www.english.txst.edu/news/Miscellany-Submission.html

Kali Fajardo-Anstine, the Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. You can read more about this exciting news here.

B.A. in English and MFA graduate Dr. Trey Moody received tenure and promotion to Associate Professor at Creighton University. In the fall,  Dr. Moody will begin service as Associate Chair. His forthcoming poetry collection will be published by
Conduit Books & Ephemera in October 2023.

MFA Fiction candidate Charmaine Denison-George’s essay, “Haunted: A Decade With Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah,” was recently published in Brittle Paper.

MATC graduate Meghalee Das was recently awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Graduate School at Texas Tech University, where she is currently completing her PhD in Technical Communication & Rhetoric.

Texas State MFA fiction student Charlene Caruthers has been accepted into the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s PhD in Creative Writing program and will begin her studies this coming fall.

Susan Morrison’s essay, “Behind the Iron Canon: Teaching Literary Theory in East Germany,” was published in The Font: A Literary Journal for Language Teachers. The editor describes Susan’s story as a “twisty tale of Cold War intrigue.”

MA Literature student Ali Armstrong’s “Pictures Revisited” was published in Disruptive Entanglements: Transnational Considerations of Performance and Adaptation, the latest issue from The Harbour Journal through the Université de Montréal in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

MARC student Jayson Guest presented a workshop titled, “New Wave Tsunami: Speaking for Code-Meshing and World Englishes as the Future of Academic and Professional Language,” at the South Central Writing Centers Association Conference at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

Kate McClancy recently chaired the spring meeting of the Comics Arts Conference at WonderCon as well as presented two conference papers: “Sinking Deeper into the Cold War: Don’t Worry Darling and the Dangers of Nostalgia” at PCA/ACA in San Antonio and “’I’m just bored of men like you’: Burning Down Nostalgic Masculinity” at the War & Media Studies Special Interest Group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference (SCMS) in Denver.

Cyrus Cassells’s poem, “Sung from a Hospice,” a Pushcart Prize winner, is featured in Copper Canyon’s just-published anthology, A House Called Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Poetry, edited by Michael Wiegers. A review of Cyrus’s latest hybrid poetry collection, To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu, was recently published in CulturalDaily.com.

On Sunday, May 7th at 2:00 p.m., Vanessa Couto Johnson will read from her new poetry book,
pH of Au, with four other poets who have been published in Parlor Press’s Free Verse Editions 2022, over Zoom. You can find the Zoom link here.

Sigma Tau Delta participated in Texas State’s 20th annual Bobcat Build. Abra Gist, Jayson Guest, Cathlin Noonan, Madison O’Hara, Shannon Shaw, and Nancy Wilson helped long-time San Marcos residents with landscaping and painting.

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. You can also submit news to the Miscellany Form here: https://www.english.txst.edu/news/Miscellany-Submission.html

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 8^th 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.