Department of English Newsletter April 2015
Upcoming Department Events
Publications & Acceptances
Katie Schmid Henson's chapbook manuscript won the Turnbuckle Chapbook Prize. It will be released by Split Lip Press in July.
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster has published an essay, “Magnolia: A Savage Attack on Masculinity and Whiteness,“ in Senses of Cinema 74 (February 2015). Wheeler Winston published an essay on Anderson's film "Punch Drunk Love" in the same issue of Senses of Cinema.
"Roses and Toads," a short story by Timothy Schaffert (derived from Charles Perrault's classic fairy tale "Toads and Diamonds") appears in the current issue of Faerie Magazine. The US paperback edition of The Swan Gondola was recently released; the UK paperback appears soon (with a redesigned cover).
Ph.D. Student Raul Palma's poem "Batido de Mamey" is forthcoming in Gargoyle. His poem "Hija" is forthcoming in Azahares: Spanish Language Literary Magazine 2015. His short story "Jurassic Love" appeared in Bartleby Snopes. His story "A Captain's Retirement" was nominated by decomP for Queen's Ferry Press' anthology of Best Small Fictions 2015. His review of Barbara Brinson Curiel's Mexican Jenny & Other Poems appeared on Rattle's Microreviews.
Eman Hassan had two poems accepted for the Fall 15 issue of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts.
Gabriel Houck's short story, "Missed Connections", was a finalist at StoryQuarterly and Ploughshares, and was accepted for publication in Fourteen Hills.
Maria Nazos' poem "Still Life" is forthcoming in The Atticus Review. Her two poetry translations of the Greek author Dimitra Kotoula entitled "Escape or the Words" and "Landscapes I" are forthcoming in Mead: The Magazine of Literature & Libations.
Zachary Beare's essay "It Gets Better...All In Good Time: Messianic Rhetoric and a Political Theology of Social Control" will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal for Cultural Research.
Joy Castro's prose poem "At a Bar, or Series of Bars, over a Series of Evenings or Years" appears in Quarter After Eight 21 in a special portfolio devoted to prose-poem responses to Baudelaire's Paris Spleen. Her review essay "Families in Motion, Fueled by Faith" appears in the March/April 2015 issue of Women's Review of Books. Her personal essay "Where the Story Begins and Ends: Practically a Fairy Tale", a tribute to our own Laura White, appears in Origins journal's Jack K. Walsh Mentorship Essays, a special series in collaboration with Letras Latinas.
Katie McWain received the Joy Currie Graduate Student Travel Fellowship for presenting her paper "Resilience and Reciprocity: Feminist Rhetorical Strategies in Community Literacy Work" at the 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication.
Jordan Farmer's story "Delinquents" will appear in Day One Magazine and later be featured as an e-book available through amazon.com
Steve Behrendt's long essay, "Wordsworth and Nation," has been published in The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth, edited by Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson, and just released in February. Among other things, Steve's essay explores some aspects of Wordsworth's later life that have traditionally been left largely unexamined by scholars.
Conferences, Readings, Workshops & Presentations
On February 24th, Jane Hanson was an invited speaker for Rachel Azima's Writing Center class, speaking on the topic, "PIESL Program and International Students’ Needs for Writing Well".
Matthew Guzman will present his paper, "Those Becoming, Those Being," at the upcoming ASLE conference in Moscow, ID.
Raul Palma presented his paper "Intersitiality and Conflict: Examining US/Cuban Relations Through Cuban Literature" at the Tenth Annual James A. Rawley Graduate Conference in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Daniel Clausen was invited to work with ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance on the annual feature "The Year in Conferences." Daniel will be part of a team of graduate students covering the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment's biennial conference at the University of Idaho in June. The feature will be published in early 2016. Daniel will also present a paper at ASLE entitled "'Something Puissant in Whaling': Moby-Dick in the Age of Petroculture."
Kelly Meyer, Ashanka Kumari, and Katie McWain presented papers on a panel on "Writing Reciprocity: The Risks and Rewards of Community Literacy Initiatives" at the 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication on March 19 in Tampa, Florida. Kelly's paper was entitled “A Relational Ethic: The New Land Grant Institution Mission"; Ashanka presented “What is the Cost of Community Literacy?: A Clarion Call for Teaching Students to Navigate Web Resources”; and Katie spoke on her piece “Reciprocity and Resilience: Feminist Rhetorical Practices in Community Literacy Work." Dr. Elenore Long (Arizona State University) served as a respondent for this panel.
Steve Behrendt delivered the Centenary Whalley Lecture at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, on 27 March, marking the centenary of the birth of the distinguished Coleridge scholar, poet and interdisciplinary humanist George Whalley, who spent his academic career at Queen's. The lecture kicked off a series of events that will culminate in Summer 2015 with a conference commemorating Whalley, his work, and his career. Steve's lecture was (somewhat whimsically) titled "Of Literary History, Landscape Architecture and Museum Studies, Of Cabbages and Kings."
Maria Nazos will be doing a tributary reading for late friend and poetry activist Joe Gouveia with the editor of The Naugatuck River Review Lori Desrosiers and several other poets at the 2015 AWP Writers' Conference Minneapolis in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Thursday, April 9th at 10:30 AM.
Rhonda Garelick continues to lecture about her new book, Mademoiselle. In April, she will be speaking at Tulane University in New Orleans and on May 6th, she will appear in conversation with fashion icon, Diane von Furstenberg, as part of the "Live from the NYPL" series at the New York Public Library.
Zachary Beare presented "The Perverse Pleasures of Doing It All Wrong: Failure, Play, and the Absurd" at the 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication in Tampa, FL.
Joy Castro is serving as the visiting writer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, April 1-2. She attended the CIC Academic Leadership Program symposium at Northwestern University, February 5-7.
Julia Schleck presented a paper at the Renaissance Society of America's annual meeting in Berlin, Germany. "The Martial Problems of the British East India Company" was part of a panel she organized entitled "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: Alternate Histories of the Mughal Empire and the East India Company".
Dan Froid will present a paper on the transatlantic connections between the works of Felicia Hemans and Catharine Maria Sedgwick at the University of Iowa's Craft Critique Culture conference on April 10.
Ken Price delivered a paper, "The Body of Work: Handwriting, Signatures, Identity, and Authenticity in Whitman and Dickinson," at Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson: A Colloquy, Paris, France. Shortly afterward he gave an invited talk at Kenyon College on "The Machine in the Ivory Tower: Problems, Possibilities, and Prospects in the Digital Liberal Arts."
Dr. Amelia M.L. Montes was invited by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) for their Latino Studies Speaker Series. She gave a lecture, "Seeking to Understand the Body: Gloria Anzaldúa and Diabetes" on Wednesday, March 25th, in the University Room, Hyde Hall. She also spoke in three classes at UNC.
Kelly Payne presented her paper, "Valuable Exhibitions: The Auction Block, the Altar, and Theories of Material Culture in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Antislavery Fiction" in Boston, M.A. at the Nineteenth Century Studies Association Conference, "Material Cultures/Material Worlds." She thanks the Graduate Committee and Joy Currie's husband, Alexander Currie, for granting support for this conference through the Joy Currie Graduate Travel Fellowship.
Lindsay Andrews presented "Literary Curating: Thaxter and Gardner as Collectors of Friendship" at the Nineteenth Century Studies Association conference in Boston on March 28th. She is grateful for the opportunity to attend the conference due in part to the Joy Currie Fellowship, which endows graduate students with additional support for travel.
Activities, Accolades, & Grants
Katelyn Hemmeke has received a U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) award. She will complete two months of intensive language study in Korea this summer.
Alicia Meyers won the Francis Drake Student Travel Award given to support attendance at the annual meeting of the Queen Elizabeth I Society in conjunction with the South Central Renaissance Conference. The award is competitive and is meant to support original scholarship relating to Tudor history. The award was presented to Meyers at the conference, and her achievement was formally recognized at the annual luncheon.
Have news or noteworthy happenings to share?
The Department of English encourages our faculty and current students to submit stories about their activities and publications of note by filling out the Department Newsletter Submission Form.