Graduate students earn fellowships, awards for 2017-2018

May 17, 2017 by Erin Chambers

More than a dozen fellowships, residencies, and assistantships were awarded to Department of English doctoral candidates and masters students this year. Please join us in congratulating these scholars on their accomplishments and wishing them well as they embark on these endeavors.

A complete list of awards and honors received by graduate students in the Department of English can be found on our awards page.

Erin BertramErin Bertram received the Maude Hammond Fling Fellowship, as well as a 2017 Digital Scholarship Incubator Fellowship from University Libraries. Bertram is a Ph.D. student and Chancellor’s Fellow in Creative Writing-Poetry, with a specialization in Women’s & Gender Studies. They hold an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and a certificate in Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies from Washington University in St. Louis, where they were a Teaching Fellow and Jr. Writer-in-Residence. They have also done continuing education work through Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. The author of eleven chapbooks, including Memento Mori, their poems and lyric hybrid texts have appeared in Leveler, So to Speak, Uprooted: An Anthology on Gender and Illness, as a published finalist in the 2013 Diagram Essay Contest, and elsewhere. They have received a Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Writing Fellowship and a Summer Faculty Research Grant from Augustana College, a John Woods Scholarship from Prague Summer Program, and a 2015 Pushcart Prize nomination. The former drummer for Busted Chandeliers, they live with their partner, serve on the board of the Lincoln Zen Center, and are an OutSpeaking volunteer with UNL's LGBTQA+ Resource Center. 

Daniel ClausenDaniel Clausen was awarded a Dean's Fellowship by the Office of Graduate Studies. Clausen is a Ph.D. student specializing in nineteenth-century American literature, with particular interest in agrarian narratives as a way to understand work, nature, and place in literature and culture. He is a Center for Great Plains Studies graduate fellow, a member of the department's Place interest group and 19th century studies interdisciplinary program, and blogs with the Watershed blog collective. He has taught courses on Science Fiction, Wikipedia as a writing community, Introduction to Literature, and writing argument. Before coming to Nebraska, he received his M.A. in Literature at Boise State University, in his home town of Boise, Idaho. He has presented work at conferences of the International Walt Whitman Week, Western Literature Association, and the Association of the Study of Literature and the Environment, and published reviews in ISLE, WAL, and ESQ. He also enjoys translation and received the Gutekunst Translation Prize from the Goethe Institute of New York in 2012.

Ryler Dustin is the recipient of the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, a ten-month residency in Oregon's Rogue River Valley. Dustin is a doctoral candidate in Creative Writing-Fiction and is a graduate of the University of Houston's M.F.A. program, where he was awarded the prestigious Verlain Poetry Prize. He is the author of Heavy Lead Birdsong (Write Bloody Publishing, 2008) and has headlined at venues from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe to Washington State University. A finalist in the Individual World Poetry Slam, Ryler has won the Sue C Boynton award and the Bart Baxter Poetry Contest. He recently received his second Pushcart nomination.

Linda Garcia Merchant was awarded a 2017 Digital Scholarship Incubator Fellowship from University Libraries. Linda is a second year Ph.D. scholar concentrating in U.S. Latina and Chicana Literatures, and Digital Humanities. As the Technical Director of the Chicana Por Mi Raza Digital Memory Collective, Linda and Dr. Maria Cotera of the University of Michigan have produced over 125 filmed oral history interviews and collected more than 7,000 documents and ephemera from iconic figures of the Chicana and Feminist movements. She is also an award winning Chicana filmmaker, whose films, Las Mujeres de La Caucus Chicana (The Women of the Chicana Caucus), Palabras Dulces, Palabras Amargas (Sweet Words, Bitter Words), Yo Soy Eva, and Thresholds, are shown in courses on women of color feminism, global feminisms, queer and social movement both nationally and internationally.

David Henson received a 2017-2018 Chancellors Recruitment Fellowship to pursue a Ph.D. in Creative Writing-Fiction at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Henson is a writer and songwriter from Illinois whose work has appeared in Problem House Press and Big Bridge. He is an editorial assistant for Prairie Schooner and has written for the Watershed Blog on critical theory.

Eder JaramilloEder Jaramillo received a Dissertation Award from Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Jaramillo is a doctoral student in the Department of English, where he is affiliated with the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program. His dissertation, titled Prospero's Books: New World Colonization in Anglo-Spanish Text, is an inter-imperial study of sixteenth and seventeenth century Anglo-Spanish relations in matters of expansionism in the New World, with a special emphasis on early modern drama and colonial texts. His intertextual analysis of Shakespeare's The Tempest draws on various forms of early modern colonial writings in order to assess how these texts intertwine a history of imperialism in Europe and England.

Maria NazosMaria Nazos was awarded a Van Sickle Fellowship in creative writing. Nazos is a Ph.D. student in Creative Writing-Poetry. She earned her B.A. in English from the University of Iowa, and has an M.F.A in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her poetry engages the natural landscape, the people who inhabit it, and the question of what it means to be human. She has received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Santa Fe Art Institute, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Marge Piercy selected her chapbook “Trailer Park heart” as runner up for the Providence Philbrick Poetry Project Award. Wising Up Press published A Hymn That Meanders, her first full-length collection of poems, in 2011. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Humanities Review, The Florida Review, The New Ohio Review,  Poet Lore, and elsewhere. In addition to poetry writing, her interests include gender studies.

Lydia PresleyLydia Presley was accepted and awarded a bursary to attend the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. Presley received her B.A. in English Literature and Music Performance from Eureka College in Eureka, IL and her M.A. in English with specializations in Great Plains Studies and Ethnic Studies from University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is currently a Ph.D. student and Othmer Fellow studying English Literature whose research and interests center on Native American literature. Specifically, she studies boarding school narratives and the survival and resistance found in them. Her current projects are working with the gossip columns in the Genoa Indian School's newspaper, The Pipe of Peace, and the creation of a digital humanities project that will allow for the preservation and accessibility of stories told by the students at the Genoa Indian School.

Raul PalmaRaul Palma was awarded a Van Sickle Fellowship in creative writing, as well as a Diversity Scholar Fellowship at Ithaca College. Palma is a Ph.D. student in Creative Writing-Fiction and is also pursuing a specialization in ethnic studies. He serves as assistant editor of fiction for Prairie Schooner, and as a contributing editor for Watershed. Most recently, his work appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Alimentum, decomP, Gargoyle, Midwestern Gothic, NANO, Rhino, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. Palma has been the recipient of the Sandoz/Prairie Schooner story prize, the Soul-Keats Making Mary Mackey story prize, and a finalist in many contests. His fiction has been anthologized in 2013 Extract(s) II2014 Best of Vine Leaves Journal, and Eclectica 20 Year Fiction Anthology. Additionally, his work has been supported with fellowships and scholarships from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, the Santa Fe Writer's Conference, Sewanee Writer's Conference, Sundress Academy for the Arts. His collection of stories In These Cities of Ultraviolet Light finished top-3 in Indiana Review's Blue Light's Book Prize, his novella Immaculate Mulch was shortlisted for the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Prize, and his collection of poetry and flash creative non-fiction and fiction was a finalist in the Vine Leaves Book Prize.

Ivan YoungIvan Young won the John Robinson Award for his scholarly paper "Barbaric Sex: The Problem of Rape, Cannibalism and Sodomy in Shakespeare's Work." Young is a doctoral student in Creative Writing-Poetry and a recipient of the Othmer Fellowship.  He holds and M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of South Carolina, as well as a B.S. in Zoology from Clemson University. He is the author of Smell of Salt, Ghost of Rain (Brick House Books, 2015) and A Shape in the Waves (Stepping Stones Press, 2009), and won the 2008 SC Poetry Initiative's Chapbook Contest, received a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award (2011), and won the 2013 Norton Girault Literary Prize. His work has been published in Passages NorthSoutheast ReviewNorth American ReviewCream City ReviewThe London MagazineFourteen HillsHayden's  Ferry ReviewSouthern Humanities Review, and Zone 3, among others.

Alexandria Deluise and Claire Jimenez were named Othmer Fellows for 2017-2018.

Alexander Ramirez was awarded a 2017-2018 Chancellors Recruitment Fellowship to pursue a doctoral degree in the Department of English.

Alexandria DeluiseMark Housten and Ilana Masad each received a Card Recruitment Fellowships to study composition and rhetoric.