Category: Miscellany

The Department of English congratulates undergrad Abby Myers, winner of the First-Gen Essay Contest Scholarship in the First-Year/Sophomore category! The department’s annual First-Gen celebration took place on Thursday, April 11, 2024. 

Katie Kapurch was interviewed about the history of “Blackbird” covers by Nardos Haile for “What Beyoncé’s Cover of the Beatles’ ‘Blackbird’ Means to Black History and Music: https://www.salon.com/2024/04/08/what-beyoncs-cover-of-the-beatles-blackbird-means-to-black-history-and-music/.

Kate McClancy presented her paper “‘A Chain Reaction That Would Destroy the Entire World’: Blowing Up Patriarchal Capitalism in Barbie and Oppenheimer” at the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in Boston. She also organized and chaired the Comics Arts Conference’s spring meeting at WonderCon in Anaheim.

 Diamond Braxton, MFA Fiction student, was one of the less than 10% accepted into the Tin House Summer Workshop to study under Denne Michele Norris to work on her collection of short stories (https://tinhouse.com/workshop/summer-workshop-2/). In addition, her newest fiction piece “Dreams of the Fam Who Came Before Me” is forthcoming in Foglifter’s 9.1 Spring Issue. (https://foglifterjournal.com/shop/).

 In honor of the cultural critic Fredric Jameson’s 90^th birthday this month, Robert Tally has organized a series of brief essays for the Verso Books blog site. These will feature 25 different critics, each writing on one of Jameson’s books published over the course of his 65-year career. The first, Daniel Hartley’s article on Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961), appeared on April 2, 2024 – available here: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/jameson-at-90 — and entries will be posted every few days over the next month or so. Jameson’s newest book, Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization, will be published in early May.

 Rob also presented a talk, “The Orphaned Bolg: Examining the Orkish Mind,” at The Psychologies of Middle-earth, the 20^th Annual University of Vermont Tolkien Conference, on April 13, 2024.

MFA alumna Sabah Carrim’s review of For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Era of Capitalist Realism by Robert T. Tally Jr. appears in the Modern Language Review, Vol. 119, Part 2 (April 2024).

 Texas State MFA alumnus Nkiacha Atemnkeng has been admitted into three PhD programs: the PhD in Rhetorics, Communication and Information Design at Clemson University, the Writing and Rhetoric PhD program at George Mason University and the PhD in Rhetoric, Writing and Professional Communication at East Carolina University. He is equally an alternate candidate at the PhD in Rhetoric, Scientific and Technical Communication at the University of Minnesota. In addition, Nkiacha’s historical fiction, a short story titled “Killing Achebe” will be the the anchor story for the forthcoming Bakwa 12: History fiction anthology published by Bakwa Books. Also, Nkiacha’s essay “Usain Bolting to Sylt Island” appears in The Lagos Review as part of the Migration and the Writer essay series: https://thelagosreview.ng/usain-bolting-to-sylt-island-nkiacha-atemnkeng/.

 MFA student Naomi Wilson’s poem, “As Mardou,” has been accepted for publication in Black Fire This Time, Volume 2, by Willow Books, a division of Aquarius Press. The book is set for launch in late April, courtesy of University Press of Mississippi.

 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  

Cyrus Cassells’s ninth book of poems, Is There Room for Another Horse On Your Horse Ranch?, was published on March 15, 2024: https://fourwaybooks.com/site/is-there-room-for-another-horse-on-your-horse-ranch/. Additionally, Cyrus has won the Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translation of a Book published in 2022 and 2023 from the Texas Institute of Letters. Cyrus won for his translation of To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2023). This is Cyrus’s second Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for translation in four years. Finally, Cyrus’s new website, designed by MFA alum Aaron Hand, is now live: https://cyruscassells.com/.

More good news: Cyrus serves as the April 2024 Guest Editor for the Academy of American Poets’ international Poem-a-Day: https://poets.org/poem-day-guest-editors-2024. In that capacity, he has chosen 22 new poems by some of America’s most revered poets to celebrate National Poetry Month. Starting April 1, the site will feature a recorded interview with Cyrus and director Mary Sutton about his process in selecting the poems. Also, a special issue of the University of Gottingen’s New American Studies Journal focusing on brand-new work by contemporary African American poets, curated and introduced by Cyrus, will be published this Spring, taught as a university class, and then be expanded to become a published anthology from University of Gottingen Press.

MFA Poetry candidate Sara Bawany is a recipient of a Summer 2024 Residency Fellowship from The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA): http://www.sundresspublications.com/news/2024/03/sundress-academy-for-the-arts-announces-winners-of-summer-2024-residency-fellowships/.

MFA alumna and genocide studies scholar Dr. Sabah Carrim has organized the Genocide Awareness Symposium at Texas State, which takes place in the Department of Philosophy, Comal Hall, April 1–12, 2024. Marking the 30^th anniversary of the genocide against the Tutsi, this event will see some of the most distinguished professors in Genocide Studies and Prevention from across the US and Canada addressing a range of pertinent issues. More information, including the complete schedule, is available here: https://www.txst.edu/philosophy/dialogue-series/genocide-awareness-symposium.html.

Also, Sabah’s short story “Fading Mehndi” has just been shortlisted in the Afritondo Short Story Prize 2024: https://www.afritondo.com/shortlist-2024.

On March 27, Leah Schwebel presented a talk, “Palm Sunday, Roman Triumphs: A Crossover,” at the New Directions in Medieval Literary Studies conference, sponsored by the Institute for Arts and Humanities and the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

On March 29, Robert Tally presented remotely an invited talk, “Spatial Criticism, Worldly and Otherworldly,” at the İzmir Democracy University in Turkey. The session was moderated by Dr. Selin Şencan, a former visiting scholar in our department.

Cathlin Noonan’s poem, “Do You Have to Pee Before We Go?” came out in the Spring issue of West Trade Review. Her poem “In Which I Imagine Myself as my Great Aunt Helen” is forthcoming in Lumina. 

The Department of English was represented at the 45th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando, Florida, by Graeme Wend-Walker (“New Audiences for Old Ghosts: Tradition and Terror in Horror Stories for Young Thais,” and Andrew Barton (“‘I’m a messed up person’: Painting, Whimsy, and Depression in Chicory: A Colorful Tale”). On a writers panel, Graeme also read his short story, “The Narrator.”

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 

Robert Tally’s brief article “Sauron: Weirdly Sexy” appears in the Journal of Tolkien Research: https://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  

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 Gist, Joe Lozano, and Bianca Pérez. Joshua’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  

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 Review: https://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 

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 Review: https://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 Review: https://www.artsbythepeople.org/platform-review-home/2023/12/1/cathlin-noonan. 

William Jensen’s newest short story “Are We Decent People?” recently appeared in Bull: https://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 South: https://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  

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  

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 PopMatters. On 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  

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