Laura Dimmit, Gabrielle Kirilloff, Chandler Warren, and James Wehrwein's article Exploring the Intersection of Personal and Public Authorial Voice in the Works of Willa Cather was recently published in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.

Marco Abel published "It’s a Battle of Stories: An Interview with Christoph Hochhäusler about The City Below, The Lies of the Victors, and Political Cinema" as a web exclusive in Cineaste (winter 2015). The long interview, together with Marco's introductory essay on the filmmaker's most recent films The City Below and The Lies of the Victors, can be accessed on the Cineaste website. Some of you might remember Hochhäusler from 2007 when he spent a week here as part of the "Berlin School" retrospective Marco organized at the Ross.

Xavier Navarro Aquino placed a short story in Day One literary journal and was published on December 9, 2015. He also has another story forthcoming in Guernica scheduled for publication in Spring 2016.

Marco Abel published "Henner Winckler: Filming Without Predetermined Results” in Senses of Cinema 77. The article was written as a companion piece to his 2013 book, The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School.

Raul Palma's short story "American Leather" will be included in Eclectica Magazine 20th Anniversary Best Fiction. Additionally, he was a finalist in Glimmer Train's October Very Short Fiction Contest.

Maria Nazos' translation of Dimitra Kotoula's Greek poem, "Case Study V: On Ethics" was solicited for publication in the anthology entitled "Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry" forthcoming from Penguin Books in April 2016 and edited by Karen Rhoads Van Dyck. Nazos' review of Martìn Espada's newest full-length collection of poems Vivas to Those Who Have Failed has been published in The Massachusetts Review blog.

Arden Eli Hill will have poems in the upcoming anthology Purple Sparks: Poetry by Survivors of Sexual Assault. This anthology is a fundraiser for youthSpark Voices to support sex-trafficking prevention.

Erin M. Bertram's lyric hybrid text “The Urge to Believe Is Stronger than Belief Itself” was published in 2015's Uprooted: An Anthology on Gender and Illness, and an excerpt was accepted for inclusion in Bared, an anthology on breasts, forthcoming from Les Femmes Folles Books. Her poem “Documentary Studies” was published in a December 2015 issue of Leveler, alongside a thoughtful essay by the editors about how they read her poem. And her poem “Bravado” was accepted by So to Speak Online and will be published in an upcoming issue.

Linda Garcia Merchant will be at the 2016 MLA Conference in Austin Texas, presenting her paper, "Past as Present: Mapping the Chicano Knowledge Bowl in Chicago" as part of a panel entitled, "Repair and Reparations in Digital Public Spaces." The panel, "address(es) the human side of repair in digital spaces: reparations, as a form of symbolic politics that renegotiates relationships between people. Topics include the digital representation of cultural heritage as restitution and conflict, issues of privacy and public-ness in preserving cultural artifacts, and the ideological underpinnings of digital tools."

Raul Palma will present at the Writer's Write Workshop, which is hosted by the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association (NLHA). The workshop will include fifty 8th grade students from Lincoln Public Schools who are interested in creative writing, and it will be facilitated by Twyla Hansen. The event will take place on February 18th, 2016 at the Bennett Martin Library.

Hali F. Sofala's poem, "An Ode to My Never Crossed Legs," was nominated for a 2015 Pushcart Prize by Blue Mesa Review.

Linda Garcia Merchant is the recipient of a Fellowship for the 2016 Humanities Without Walls Pre-Doctoral Summer Workshop. A Mellon funded, three week workshop that "aims to help prepare doctoral students for careers both within and outside the academy through a series of summer workshops. "

Aubrey Streit Krug was recently elected to serve as a graduate student liaison on the executive council of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. She will hold a three-year term from 2016 through 2018. Her responsibilities include "working with the ASLE Mentoring Coordinator and other ASLE Officers and Program Coordinators to develop and implement policies, initiatives, and programs that support the well-being and development of graduate students and graduate studies."

Erin M. Bertram will be co-leading a workshop, with Rebecca Macijeski and Sarah Fawn Montgomery, entitled “Redefining Silence: From Absence to _______,” at the 2016 National Association for Poetry Therapy Conference, held in Unity Village, MO, this April.

Raul Palma was awarded a Joy Currie Travel Fellowship for his presentation at AWP this coming Spring.

Fourth year Ph.D. student Belinda Acosta was awarded a Joy Currie Travel Fellowship to augment an ArtSmith Travel Grant received in December 2014. The ArtSmith grant allowed her to travel to Laredo, Texas, where part of her dissertation novel takes place. The Joy Currie Fellowship was established in the memory of the former Department of English graduate student who passed away in 2008.

Erin M. Bertram's poem “STL (X),” from her collaborative chapbook Where the Wind Bends Backwards , co-written with Ryan Collins, was nominated by 918 Studio for a 2015 Pushcart Prize. Her poems "Documentary Studies" and "Living Alone" were also named finalists in the 2015 Talking Writing, and "Living Alone" will be published, along with another poem, "A Dream of Eros," in an upcoming issue.