Department Newsletter Summer/Fall 2026

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Marco Abel published “Queering Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia: The Sexual Politics of Christian Petzold’s Roter Himmel (Afire)” in German Quarterly (vol. 98, no. 4, Fall 2025, pp. 292–96; published in January 2026); “A Press Conference Gone Awry: Controversy at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival” in Senses of Cinema (no. 117, May 2026, 6,000 words); “Ein Leben lang nichts zu verkaufen – Nachruf Werner Enke” in critic.de (July 26, 2026, 2,800 words); “‘Im Schatten der Giants’: Veith von Fürstenbergs Kurzfilme” in SigiGötz-Entertainment (double issue 41/42, Summer 2026, pp. 31–38); and “‘Wir sind nicht diese Strebertypen’: In Memoriam Bernhard Marsch, Kurzfilmregisseur der Kölner Gruppe” in Revolver (no. 54, June 2026, pp. 110–43). 

Together with his regular collaborator Jaimey Fisher, Marco also recorded the audio commentary for the new Blu-ray release of Christian Petzold’s Undine (IFC Films, May 2026). And the University of Nebraska Press Provocations book series, which Marco co-edits with our former colleague Roland Végső, published its twelfth book, The Renewable Normal, by the After Oil Collective (October 2026). 

Rachel Azima, Katie Levin, Meredith Steck, and Jasmine Kar Tang’s edited collection, The Reluctant Supervisor: Recognizing and Rethinking Power in Writing Center Supervisory Practices, was published by Utah State University Press in October. 

Willa Cather and Letters (Cather Studies, vol. 15), edited by Melissa Homestead, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in July. 

Melissa’s essay “Building Not Under Forty” appeared in the Willa Cather Review (vol. 67, no. 1, Spring 2026).

Tom Knoblauch’s essay “‘It’s a Haunt’: Doubles, the East-West Gap, and American Hauntology in Willa Cather’s ‘Consequences’ and ‘A Death in the Desert’” will appear in Willa Cather’s New York Intersections (Cather Studies, vol. 16) from the University of Nebraska Press in 2027. 

Tom’s review of Elizabeth Winkler’s Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature was published in the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association. He is also under contract for a chapter about Elaine May’s influence on Tina Fey in the forthcoming The Works of Elaine May from Bloomsbury Academic.

An essay co-authored by Sarah Danielson (current UNL English MA student), Michael Hodge (UNL English BA alum), and Kevin McMullen, titled “A Model for Creating and Publishing a Collaborative Critical Edition in the Classroom,” was published in Scholarly Editing, the official journal of the Association for Documentary Editing, in July. The essay is a discussion of the class project in Kevin’s Spring 2024 section of ENGL 355 that resulted in the publication of a critical edition of Susan Glaspell’s novel Fidelity (Southern Illinois University Press, 2025). Sarah and Michael were both students in the class and co-editors of the volume.

The Selected Poems of Harriet Monroe, edited by Kevin’s Spring 2025 section of ENGL 355, was published in September, also by Southern Illinois University Press, under its Saluki Publishing trade imprint. Monroe, while mainly known as the founding editor of Poetry magazine, was also a prolific poet, and her work had all been out of print since the early twentieth century. Students in the class selected which poems to include in the volume, in addition to researching and writing a critical introduction and explanatory notes. Kevin would like to extend a hearty congratulations to all of his student co-editors: Isabel Anderson, Grayce Baustert, Tommy Beemer, Saylor Behrens, Gabriel Bennett, Ariana Joy S. Cobler, Danni Cooper, Sophia Dao, Suzette Donovan, Stephen Exon, Mason Gadwood, Jared Ganshorn, Megan Hacker, Alexa Rose Harrington, Aubrey Herzberg, Shaylee Hipsag, Emma Izzo, Madeleine Lewis, Reagan Maulick, Terezie Moudra, Lilian Nguyen, Cole Osborne, Harvey Wiersma, and Ava M. Williams. 

Additionally, Kevin and co-authors Stephanie M. Blalock, Stefan Schöberlein, and Jason Stacy have a chapter in Students in the Archives: Pedagogy in Practice (ed. Heather Fox and Amanda Stuckey), which was just published in October by University of Illinois Press. The chapter is titled “Containing Multitudes: Interdisciplinary Student Research at the Walt Whitman Archive.” 

Stephanie Browner and Ken Price published “Rethinking Charles W. Chesnutt Through His Correspondence” in Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature (no. 149, Summer 2026, pp. 93–106).

Pascha Sotolongo’s middle-grade/all-ages novel End of World by Chicken (working title) will be published by Dutton/Penguin Random House in 2028. Set in western Nebraska, the story is a fable that centers an immigrant family and their apocalypse-minded pet hen.

Shari Stenberg's new book, Centering Student Activism: Feminist Rhetorical Interruptions of Sexual Assault Culture, was published by Utah State University Press, an imprint of the University Press of Colorado (October 2026). A book release celebration will be held at Francie & Finch at 5:30 p.m. on December 2.

Hope Wabuke published the poems “This Is Normal” and “Homecoming” in the October issue of Poetry magazine. 

Her next full-length collection of poetry Blood on the Leaves (BOA Editions) will be published on November 3, with a book launch at Francie & Finch at 5:30 p.m. on November 4. 

Laura White's new book, The Play of Belief in Nineteenth-Century Fairy Tales and Fairy Narratives, was published by Routledge in June. A book launch, featuring Laura in conversation with Guy Reynolds about the book, will be held at Francie & Finch at 5:30 p.m. on November 3.

Ava Winter’s poem “What the Suitcase Bearing My Family Name Might Have Contained When It Arrived at Auschwitz” was featured on the podcast The Slowdown (June 23, 2026).

Abraham Kedong Ali’s poem “Still Counting” was published in Isele Magazine (August 2026). His poem “The Tiny, Shiny Box” also appeared in Libretto Magazine (July 2026). And his poem “Accent” was published in Streetlight Magazine (May 2026). 

Abraham’s poetry packet—featuring the poems “Ledger,” “Ice,” and “Sunset”—was accepted for inclusion in the forthcoming anthology Black Psalms of the Shivering Ones (Wilfrid Laurier University Press). 

Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto’s nonfiction essay “A Windmill in a Whirlwind” was published in Isele Magazine. His essay “On Lineage and Voice” was also published by Olongo Africa.

Alina Nguyễn’s poem “Routine Spiral” appeared in diaCRITICS this summer.

Kasey Peters was named the winner of the 2026 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction by series editor Lori Ostlund. Peters’ book, Stop If You Want To, will be published by the University of Georgia Press in the fall of 2027.

Tom Knoblauch presented a Reel Talk lecture on Céline Sciamma’s challenges to the cinematic canon following a screening of Portrait of a Lady on Fire at Film Streams in Omaha in August. 

Kevin McMullen, along with Brett Barney and Ashlyn Stewart (UNL English PhD alum), co-wrote and co-presented the paper “Scoping and Organizing a Capacious Digital Edition” at the Annual Conference of the European Society for Textual Scholarship in Lublin, Poland, in late May. 

In May, Ken Price spoke to a gathering of Texas poets near Houston on “The Civil War Letters of Walt Whitman and his Family: ‘They make us see things through new eyes.’” In June, in New York City, he spoke on “The End and the Means: The Whitman Archive and the Digital Life Cycle.” And in September, in Cleveland, he gave the opening talk, “Fixing the Vote: Charles Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington in The Negro Problem,” for a Rowfant Club Symposium on Chesnutt held at the Western Reserve Historical Society Library.

Guy Reynolds gave a paper at the Narrative Conference, organized by the International Society for the Study of Narrative, in Aarhus, Denmark, on June 6. The paper was on William Golding and was titled “The Inheritors and Neanderthal Sensoriness.”

Richard Lawer, a PhD student specializing in Composition and Rhetoric, presented his paper “Speaking Gender, Performing Power: Linguistic Constructions of Masculinity and Femininity in Akan and Dangme” at the 57th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, held at the University at Buffalo in May. The presentation highlighted how language both reproduces gendered expectations and provides opportunities for speakers, particularly women, to negotiate agency and resist established power relations.

Alina Nguyễn will participate in a poetry reading and present her paper “Queer Worlds: Bridging the Self and Academia through Poetic Research and Beyond the Institution” at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association Conference in Seattle this November.

Malik Rasaq recently participated in a panel discussion moderated by Carmen McCain at the 2026 Kano International Poetry Festival. Titled “Archiving Indigenous Languages through Poetry and Creative Writing,” the panel explored the roles of writers in promoting indigenous languages through creative writing. Malik also discussed his roles in celebrating Yoruba writers and veterans through Atelewo, an indigenous literary organization he co-founded in 2017. 

James Brunton’s poetry chapbook manuscript Queer History was named runner-up for the Cow Creek Chapbook Prize from Pittsburg State University in Kansas. James’ poem “Tonight I'm Supposed to Meet a Stranger” appears in the current issue of Beloit Poetry Journal. 

Kevin McMullen and the Walt Whitman Archive (WWA) had a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant reinstated in July, after it had been terminated in April 2025. After taking a wee break, Kevin and the rest of the WWA journalism team will resume their digitization of Whitman’s journalistic writings for the New Orleans Crescent in 1848, as well as attempt to use their attribution methods to identify Charles W. Chesnutt’s anonymous writings for a New York paper in the 1880s.

Additionally, Ken Price, the principal investigator, and co-principal investigators Kevin McMullen and Brett Barney received a new two-year, $350,000 NEH grant to digitize Whitman’s Reconstruction-era manuscripts. These approximately 320 manuscripts, when published in 2028, will join the roughly 450 late-life manuscripts that are set to be published on the Walt Whitman Archive later this year.

The Charles W. Chesnutt Archive (CWCA) received a new three-year, $300,000 NEH grant to continue the editing of Chesnutt’s incoming and outgoing correspondence. Stephanie Browner of The New School in New York City will serve as principal investigator, and Ken will be co-principal investigator, overseeing the sub-award. The project will result in the publication of 450 new letters on the CWCA site by 2029.

At a meeting in June 2026, the Society for Textual Scholarship announced a new award for graduate students named The Jerome J. McGann and Kenneth M. Price Graduate Prize in Textual Studies. This annual prize will recognize exceptional graduate student work in textual scholarship broadly conceived. The prize honors research distinguished by intellectual rigor, methodological innovation, and sustained engagement with the material, historical, theoretical, and technological dimensions of textuality across media, disciplines, languages, and historical periods: “In associating this prize jointly with Jerome J. McGann and Kenneth M. Price, the Society for Textual Scholarship honors two scholars whose work has decisively reoriented contemporary understandings of texts, archives, editing, and literary scholarship. Across distinct but deeply interconnected bodies of work, McGann and Price have reimagined textual scholarship not as a narrowly conceived editorial practice, but as a dynamic field of historical inquiry, interpretive experimentation, collaborative research, and public intellectual life.” 

The 2026 partnership between North Star High School and ENGL 357/377 brought 53 ninth graders to campus October 1 for a writing marathon, admissions presentation, lunch, and read-around. This longstanding partnership between the English Education classes and North Star challenges college students to lead activities and support the writing process for young writers while learning about pedagogy, with seven joint meetings throughout the semester. Tina Le (current UNL English PhD student) and Rachael Shah facilitated with support from the English Department, the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education, UNL Admissions, and North Star High School. 

From June 22–26, Akua Agyeiwaa Denkyi-Manieson participated in the fifth annual Summer Institute offered by the Educational Excellence and Inclusion Training Opportunities program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The institute brought together more than 20 teachers and professors from the United States, creating valuable opportunities for exchange across educational settings. Through practical curriculum development activities, she gained firsthand insight into designing English and humanities curricula for American classrooms, strengthening her pedagogical knowledge and confidence as an educator. 

Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto’s The Naming received praise from Foreword Reviews, which described the collection as a work through which there is “much to gain from African knowledge, not least an understanding of how one’s ancestors can bless a life.” The Naming was also recognized as one of the notable books of 2025 by Afrocritik, Brittle Paper, and Open Country Mag. 

Over the summer, Alina Nguyễn received a Rumpus/Harnisch Microgrant.

Malik Rasaq’s full-length poetry collection, The Origin of Wounds, was longlisted for the 2026 Nigeria Prize for Literature. The collection was also selected by Jaki Shelton Green as a co-winner of the 2025 Julie Suk Poetry Competition for the best book published by a literary press. 

Malik’s poem “Suitcase” was announced as a finalist for the 2026 Montreal International Poetry Prize. His poem “Ode to Naming” was selected as one of the top ten submissions for the 2026 Black Warrior Poetry Prize, judged by Kaveh Akbar. His review of The Red We Silk by Nicole Lachat (UNL English PhD alum) and Rootbound by Manthipe Moila is forthcoming from Wasafiri magazine, UK.