Miscellany – March 17, 2024

Robert Tally’s brief article “Sauron: Weirdly Sexy” appears in the Journal of Tolkien Researchhttps://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol18/iss2/1/. Also, Rob’s essay “Point-of-View as Cognitive Mapping: The Case of Mrs. Dalloway” has just been published in the American Book Review (available here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/article/921790); the same ABR issue features Rob’s review of Bruce Robbins’s Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/article/921801).

Bryce Jeter’s review of Joe Vallese, ed., It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror was recently published in Science Fiction Film and Television, Volume 17.1 (Spring 2024): 145–148. (Available here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/105/article/922166.)

Elliott Brandsma (English and Art ’13), who is working toward his PhD in Scandinavian Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has received an American Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship to fund his dissertation research in Sweden during the 2024-25 academic year. The fellowship will support his tenure as a visiting researcher in the Department of Literature and the Center for Multidisciplinary Research on Religion and Society (CRS) at Uppsala University. He is currently a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow and guest researcher in the Department of Aesthetics, Art History and Comparative Literature at Södertörns högskola in Huddinge, Sweden. 

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

MISCELLANY – MARCH 1, 2024

On February 29, 2024, The University Star featured an article on Denae Dyck and her new book, Biblical Wisdom and the Victorian Literary Imagination. (James Reeves is quoted in the article as well.) Available here:  https://universitystar.com/25305/life-and-arts/associate-professor-to-bridge-literary-and-religious-gap-with-book/.

Associate Professor Cecily Parks’s poem “Hackberry” is featured in You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, a new anthology of previously unpublished poems releasing on April 2, edited by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón and published by Milkweed Editions in association with the Library of Congress.

Ben Reed’s personal essay, “Vicarious Incantation: The Mixtape Love Letter,” will be published in a forthcoming issue of Cream City Review. Additionally, Ben has been awarded the Nontenure Line Faculty Workload Release to develop his essay collection on the beach as a place and site of metaphor in literature, music, and film. He will take this time in Fall 2024.

On February 27, drea brown, along with other faculty from Texas State and from San Marcos High School, was a featured speaker at The Importance of Black Storytelling: Texas State’s African American Read-In in the LBJ Ballroom.

Anthony Edsall will present a talk, “Silvered Rhetoric: Demagoguery, Temporality, and Necropolitics in an Age of School Shootings,” at the Northeast Modern Language Association’s convention in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 9, 2024.

Steph Grossman’s short story “Red on Yellow” was published in Salamander #57: available at https://salamandermag.org/

The Center for the Study of the Southwest has granted MA Literature student Ali Armstrong the opportunity to visit Granbury, Texas, in March, the site of the Mitchell-Truitt Feud, to explore further research associated with her essay “The Eyes of History: Folklore, Oral Storytelling, and Regeneration Through Violence in John Graves’s Goodbye to a River: A Narrative.” Ali plans to conduct local interviews and add to her existing research on the feud done through The Wittliff Collections. She will present her findings at the Texas State Graduate Student Research Conference on Tuesday, April 2. Additionally, Ali’s “The Golden Values: Gendered Strength, Biblical, and Numerical Symbolism in Rossetti and Milton” has been accepted for the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA)’s conference, which will take place in Waco, Texas, in September 2024.

In February, Joshua Bridgwater Hamilton attended AWP and sat for a signing session for his chapbook, Rain Minnows, with the publisher Gnashing Teeth Publishing. At the People’s Literary Festival, he read his own poetry at a panel, “Ethereal Poetry of Sadness, Longing, Beauty, and the Damned.” He also chaired a People’s Literary Festival panel titled “Central Texas Bilingual Poetry: Versos del corazon de Tejas,” featuring Texas State MFA poets Abra GistJoe Lozano, and Bianca PérezJoshua’s debut full-length poetry collection, Excavator, launches April 28 with Gnashing Teeth Publishing. 

Jay Cruz presented a talk, “Critical Pedagogy as Resistance in Grimms’ Fairy Tales” at the 2024 Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference in Albuquerque, NM.

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

MISCELLANY – FEBRUARY 1, 2024

MATC alumna Meghalee Das, who is completing her PhD in Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech University, will become an Assistant Professor in the School of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication at James Madison University beginning Fall Semester 2024.

MFA Fiction student Charmaine Denison-George’s essay, “Impedimenta” was anthologized in Black Diaspora: Tales and Poems from the Sons and Daughters of Africa, edited by Monique Franz (Kinsman Avenue Publishing, 2024). Charmaine’s working-in-progress thesis has also been accepted for workshop with Madeleine Blais at the Eckerd College Writers in Paradise conference (January 2024).

Cathlin Noonan’s poem “That Winter, I Find Your Father’s Arrest Notice in a 1940 Newspaper” was recently published in The Citron Reviewhttps://citronreview.com/2023/12/29/that-winter-i-find-your-fathers-arrest-notice-in-a-1940-newspaper/.

Ben Austin’s short story “Il Faut Ecouter Mac Doe,” has been published in J Journal and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

MFA Poetry candidate Em Fullenwider’s poem “Ode to a Fishman” will be published in the Winter 2024 issue of Reverie Literary Magazine.

Rob Tally’s work was recently featured in a Chinese publication, Jianqing Tuo and Yuan Zhang’s “Existential Predicament and Breakthrough of Literary Space Theory: A Study on Robert T. Tally Jr.’s Theory of Literary Cartography” in Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 43.4 (2024), 82–92: https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol43/iss4/9.

Nithya Sivashankar’s essay titled “‘Tell Pebble All About It’: Displacement and Distancing in Contemporary Picturebooks about Arab Refugees” has been published in the latest issue of Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature. The essay can be accessed here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/918613

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

MISCELLANY – JANUARY 15, 2024

Happy New Year!  

MFA Poetry student Sara Bawany’s creative nonfiction piece, “What’s in a Name?: On Mislabeling ‘Violence’” has been published in the Infrarrealista Reviewhttps://infrarrealistas.org/whats-in-a-name/. Also, one of Sara’s poems, “Uncles of Palestine,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by her publisher, FlowerSong Press; the poem appears in Sara’s new poetry book Quarter Life Crisis. 

Denae Dyck published “Spiritual Authority for a (Post)Secular Age: Olive Schreiner’s Dreams as Literary Theology.” Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, vol. 5. no. 2, Autumn 2023, pp. 73-88, doi: 10.46911/QBRM1938. Also, at MLA 2024, Denae gave a paper entitled “Celebrating Women’s Voices: Wit, Wisdom, and Editorial Practices in the Women’s Penny Paper” (special session on Celebration and Commemoration in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press). 

Julie McCormick Weng’s book, co-edited with Malcolm Sen, Race in Irish Literature and Culture, was published in January with Cambridge University Press. The book includes her chapter “W. B. Yeats, the Irish Free State, and the Rhetoric of Race Suicide“ alongside her co-authored introduction, “The Racial Imaginaries of Irish Literature and Culture.” In 2023, Weng’s essay “Reading James Joyce in the Wake of the #MeToo Movement” published in Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism (Clemson UP), edited by Katherine Ebury, Bridget English, and Matthew Fogarty. 

Cyrus Cassells’s To The Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu received another strong review recently: https://www.greenlindenpress.com/interviews-and-reviews#/salvador-espriu/; a new hardback collector’s edition of the book was published on November 30. Cyrus has also been selected as one of 12 award-winning poets who will serve as guest editors for the Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day” series in 2024: https://poets.org/twelve-award-winning-poets-serve-guest-editors-poem-day-2024. 

Dr. Ana Stefanovska, who was a visiting scholar in the English Department in 2018, has just published her first book, Lo spazio letterario del neorealismo [The Literary Space of Neorealism] (Padova University Press, 2023): https://www.padovauniversitypress.it/en/publications/9788869383502

Cathlin Noonan recently had three poems published in Platform Reviewhttps://www.artsbythepeople.org/platform-review-home/2023/12/1/cathlin-noonan

William Jensen’s newest short story “Are We Decent People?” recently appeared in Bullhttps://mrbullbull.com/newbull/fiction/are-we-decent-people/

MFA alumna Dr. Sabah Carrim presented an invited talk, “The Fundamentals of Genocide Studies and Mass Atrocity Prevention,” at Izmir Democracy University in Turkey, via Zoom. The event was hosted by former Texas State visiting scholar Selin Şencan, who is now a professor of English there. 

MFA Fiction student Hannah Smothers’s short story “Yolo” was published in Five Southhttps://fivesouth.net/yolo-by-hannah-smothers/. Also, Hannah’s essay “Intruders” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the Ocean State Review

Robert Tally’s book The Fiction of Dread: Dystopia, Monstrosity, and Apocalypse (Bloomsbury) has just been published: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/fiction-of-dread-9781501375866/. Rob’s book Representing Middle-earth: Tolkien, Form, and Ideology (McFarland) also appeared recently: https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/representing-middle-earth/. A short book in Turkish, Robert T. Tally Jr. Ile Mekânsallik Üzerine [On Spatiality with Robert T. Tally Jr.], edited, translated, and organized by Emel Aras, is now available: https://hece.com.tr/kategori/Soylesi/Mekansallik_Uzerine.html; Dr. Aras was a visiting scholar in the English Department in 2021–22. Rob has also published two articles recently: “Unmappably Cosmopolitan: Reconfiguring Criticism of World Literature in an Era of Globalization,” Migrating Minds: A Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism 1.1 (Fall 2023): 7–24 (available at: https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/1086508) and, in Chinese, “The Logic of the Situation: Space, Mapping, and the Sense of Place” (translated by Dr. Fang Ying), Journal of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies 34.6 (November 2023): 53–65. Additionally, at the MLA 2024 convention, Rob presented “The Clouds Overhead, the Actual Soil, and the Map: Real-and-Imagined Spaces of Hawthorne’s Literary Cartography” on a panel titled Hawthorne and Space, sponsored by the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society, and he participated in “Celebration and Spatiality: A Geocritical Roundtable.” 

Dr. Fang Ying, Professor of English at Zhejiang Gongshang University and a former visiting scholar in the English Department in 2017, has received a prestigious government award, the second prize of the 22nd Zhejiang Philosophy and Social Sciences Outstanding Achievement Award, for her Chinese translation of Robert Tally’s 2013 book Spatiality

MFA alumnus Michael Agugom’s short story “The Happiest People in the World,” published in Desire to Escape by Four Palaces Publishing, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His short story “True Yarn” is due out this year in African Ghost Short Stories, published by Flame Tree Publishing: https://blog.flametreepublishing.com/fantasy-gothic/gothic-fantasy-successful-submissions-african-ghost-0

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

MISCELLANY – DECEMBER 1, 2023

drea brown was invited to present at the Texas Humanities sponsored event Poetic Legacies: Interpreting New Texts from Writers Inspired by Phillis Wheatley Peters, held at Texas Christian University in September 2023. They presented on two panels “Phillis Wheatley in the Classroom: A Roundtable Discussion” and “Creative Reflections on Phillis Wheatley” at the Phillis Wheatley Festival at Jackson State University in November 2023. drea’s poem “karintha at dusk noon and midnight” was featured as part of Cane: A New Critical Edition & Oracular Card Deck edited by Diane Exavier, Carlos Sirah, Anne de Marcken, published by The 3rd Thing Press, in October 2023. Their essay in verse “How Strangely Changed: Phillis Wheatley in Niobean Myth & Memory” is published in Niobes: Antiquity, Modernity, Critical Theory, edited by Mario Telò and Andrew Benjamin, forthcoming in February 2024 from The Ohio State University Press. 

Katie Kapurch and Jon Marc Smith’s book BLACKBIRD, with a foreword by Cyrus Cassells, was published on November 14. The Penn State UP book is about Black musicians’ influences on and responses to the Beatles and is supported by a major award that Katie Kapurch received from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

MFA Poetry Candidate Sara Bawany’s poem, “Uncles of Palestine,” was nominated for a  Pushcart Prize by  FlowerSong Press. The poem was published in Sara Bawany’s new book, Quarter Life Crisis

Chris Dayley, Meghalee Das (MATC alum and Texas Tech Doctoral Candidate), Isidore Kafui Dorpenyo (George Mason University), Aimee Kendall Roundtree, and Miriam F. Williams’s article, “Evaluating Immigrants’ Perceptions of U.S. Banks’ Diversity and Inclusion Claims/Initiatives,” will be published in the next guest-edited special issue of Technical Communication. This IRB-approved study included text-mining, content analysis, thematic analysis, and interviews with U.S. immigrants from the Global South. 

Jennifer duBois’s most recent novel, The Last Language, received a rave review from The Washington Post.  

MFA Fiction Candidate D.R. Garrett’s short story, “The Color of Love” has been published in the Fall 2023 issue of the bi-annual print literary journal Awakenings Review.   

Rob Tally’s “Orcs and Revolution” appears as part of a special feature, “Nine Tolkien Scholars Responded to Charles W. Mill’s ‘The Wretched of Middle-earth: An Orkish Manifesto,'” in the current issue of Mythlore. Bianca L. Beronio, an English Department graduate and current M.A. student at Texas A&M-Commerce, also contributed to the forum, with “The Power of Fantasy: Exploring Racism in Middle-earth.” In addition, Rob’s brief article “Marxism and Spatiality” appears in the new issue of the American Book Review 44.3 (Fall 2023). And an Italian edition of Rob Tally’s 2013 book Spatiality has been published as Spazialità, translated by Eleonora Rao, Debora A. Sarnelli, and Ana Stefanofska (Milan: Mimesis Edizione, 2023); Ana Stefanovska, who was a visiting scholar at Texas State in 2018, also wrote a “Postfazione” for this volume. 

Cyrus Cassells’s collaborative poem with Brian Turner, “Corsair,” was the Poem-a-Day selection for the Academy of American Poets on November 29. 

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  

Miscellany – November 1, 2023 

Jon Marc Smith’s novel, Make Them Cry (Ecco 2020, co-authored with Smith Henderson), was translated into French and published by Belfond Noir as Fais-les Pleurer in Spring 2023.  

 John Blair’s seventh book, The Shape of Things to Come—Poems, which chronicles in verse the beginnings of the atomic age, has been published by Gival Press and is now available on Amazon, Barnesandnoble.com, and Givalpress.com

Debra Monroe’s essay “Last Home,” which first appeared in Air / Light magazine, has been cited as Notable in Houghton Mifflin’s annual anthology Best American Essays 2023

Cyrus Cassells’s The World That the Shooter Left Us was recently named a poetry finalist in this year’s Housatonic Book Awards

 Whitney May’s essay, “Gol o Bolbol Go Viral: Iranian Protest Songs in the Age of Social Media,” appears on PopMattersOn October 30th, Whitney May gave an invited address at SUNY Old Westbury’s annual horror conference. This talk was over Pennywise’s literary origins and the future of insurgent clowning at political protests. 

Third year MFA poetry student Cathlin Noonan’s poem “On Marriage: A Fasting” will appear in SWWIM Every Day on November 8, 2023. 

Rob Tally gave three conference presentations recently. Rob was the keynote speaker for Mapping Spaces and (the) US, a conference sponsored by the Romanian Association for American Studies and Romanian–U.S. Fulbright Commission at Ovidius University, Constanţa, Romania; his presentation, “Unmappable America: Space, Cosmopolitanism, and the Crisis of Representation,” was delivered remotely. Rob presented “Great Goblins: The Representation of the Orc in The Hobbit at the online Northeast Popular Culture Association conference. And Rob presented “‘I’m as Mad as Hell, and I’m Not Going to Take This Anymore’: Anger, Critique, and the Culture Wars” at the annual conference of the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts (SCLA) in Philadelphia (the theme of the conference was “Anger”). Also, as of October 7, 2023, Rob is now the President of the SCLA, which will hold its 2024 conference in Austin. 

Two of MFA graduate Melissa McEver Huckabay’s poems appeared in literary journals in October: “The Worried Woman Odes” in Thimble Literary Magazine and “Elegy for a Promise Ring” in Sweet: A Literary Confection. 

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  

Miscellany – October 1,  2023 

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

Miscellany – September 1, 2023

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

MISCELLANY – AUGUST 2, 2023

MFA graduate Ledia Xhoga’s novel Misinterpretation will be published by Tin House Books  in fall 2024.

MFA graduate Reyes Ramirez was one of the five finalists for the 2023 Young Lions Fiction Award for The Book of Wanderers. Established in 2001, The New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award is awarded each spring to a writer age 35 or younger for a novel or a collection of short stories.

Denae Dyck presented “Ruskin’s Mythopoesis and the Making of Reflective Readers” at the annual conference of the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada. At this conference, which marked the association’s 50th anniversary, she also co-facilitated a pedagogy workshop, together with the co-organizers of Crafting Communities . Their Crafting Communities project recently received an Open Scholarship Award from the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI).

MARC graduate Cooper Day successfully defended his dissertation at the University of Louisville and has accepted a tenure-track position at Francis Marion University

MFA poetry student Cathlin Noonan presented “Living Archive: Immanence through Compression in ‘Krapp’s Last Tape'” during the Annual American Conference for Irish Studies in San Jose, California.

MFA graduate Melissa McEver Huckabay was awarded a space as Contributor in Poetry for the 2023 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Rob Tally’s essay “The Urban Itinerary and the City Map: The Experience of Metropolitan Space” appears in The Cambridge Companion to the City in World Literatureedited by Ato Quayson and Jini Kim Watson (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Rob’s article “Rehabilitating Theory” appears in the American Book Review 44.1 (Spring 2023), a special issue devoted to “weak theory,” edited by Jeffrey Di Leo and Christian Moraru.

MFA fiction student Hannah Smothers recently published her first short story, “Fingers,” in Wigleaf.

Steph Grossman’s horror-tinged short story “Likeness” was published in Joyland. The short story was selected by editor Winona León.

Vanessa Couto Johnson has two poems, “leaflet” and “mission,” in Red Tree Review.

Logan Fry recently published several poems: “What the Mist Said” in The Decadent Review; “Blue Board” in Sixth Finch; “The Bead of the Weld,” “The Gloss Abrades,” and “Moss in a Tube” in Annulet #5; “Furnace” and “Fabricant” in Afternoon Visitor #8; and “Hinge Spray-Painted Purple” and “Pour” in Sprung Formal #18.d.

MATC graduate Meghalee Das is the recipient of the Kairos Graduate Student and Adjunct Award for Service, which recognizes activities that promote excellent computers and writing pedagogy, theory, and community building. She received the award at the 2023 Computers and Writing conference at UC Davis.

MARC graduate Jayson Guest spent July 2023 in Kathmandu, Nepal, teaching English to economically disadvantaged women.

MFA graduate Samantha Allen’s debut novel Pay Dirt Road has won the coveted Dashiell Hammett Award for Literary Excellence in Crime Writing.

MFA graduate Autumn Hayes recently read at the Chaos Dive Reunion book launch at Blue Willow Bookshop.

English majors in the Texas State in Ireland program learned traditional Irish dances from locals in Cork, participated in a nature walk conducted by the Cork Nature Network, hiked and boated in Gougane Barra Forest Park, lunched at Cronin’s Pub, and spent the night at the Gougane Barra Hotel.

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

MISCELLANY – MAY 1, 2023

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