Pascha Sotolongo Stevenson had three short stories published in December: “Sad Bird” in The Chattahoochee Review, “Ember” in American Short Fiction, and “Chicory” in The Normal School.

Jessica Poli's poem “Ode to Seventh Grade Girls” was published in Redivider.

Alexander Ramirez's article “The Mess and the Work: Diffusion, Delimitations, and the Undying Labor of the Batman” appeared in the December issue of The Journal of American Culture. His nonfiction essay “On Defeat and Diego” has been named a runner-up in the 2020 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize contest by the The Missouri Review.

David Winter had two poems published in TriQuarterly, “Lucky Jew” and “What the Suitcase Bearing My Family Name Might Have Contained When It Arrived At Auschwitz.”

Ken Price recently gave two talks at the virtual MLA conference “Good Strategies and Inescapable Uncertainties in Building Sustainable Digital Archives” and “The Press for Notoriety: Whitman's Cultivation of Celebrity Status.” He was also interviewed by Caterina Bernardini about his book Whitman in Washington: Becoming the National Poet in the Federal City. Their conversation is now posted on the YouTube site of the National Archives.

To mark the publication (U Nebraska P, March 2021) of More in Time: A Tribute to Ted Kooser, the coeditors, Jess Poli, Marco Abel, and Timothy Schaffert would like to invite everyone to attend a Zoom event on Wednesday, April 7, 5:00 - 6:30pm. The event will be co-organized by UNP and Francie & Finch Bookshop and a Zoom registration will be shared with the department once the event has been set up. For more on the event see the department's event calendar.

Melissa Homestead is pleased to share the news about Amber Harris (formerly Leichner), Ph.D. 2012, has accepted a position as Director of Student Support Services at Montana State University Northern in Havre, MT.

The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) has awarded The Charles W. Chesnutt Archive a one-year grant of $152,648 to begin work on the complete incoming and outgoing correspondence of Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932). The co-PIs on what is hoped to be a multi-year project are Stephanie Browner of the New School in New York City, Matt Cohen, and Ken Price. The remarkable range of tone and topic in the correspondence sheds light on Chesnutt as a writer, as a legal thinker, and as a rhetorician and astute navigator of race in wide ranging contexts. The letters also reveal Chesnutt's little studied connections within the black intelligentsia. Notably, despite an increasingly segregated U.S., Chesnutt had extensive contacts in black and white circles alike. Accounts to date have underestimated the importance of his ties to Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Patterson Green (one of Chesnutt's cousins and among the first African Americans to hold public office in Cleveland), Kelly Miller (the distinguished mathematician, sociologist, and lawyer who long served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University), and others.

Matt and Ken wish to thank the entire Chesnutt team at UNL for development of the Chesnutt Archive thus far and preparation of this grant proposal. Special thanks in particular go to research professors Brett Barney and Kevin McMullen, graduate students Tara Ballard, Samantha Gilmore, and Ashlyn Stewart, and undergraduate English major and UCARE student focused on Chesnutt's correspondence, Bianca Swift. We are also much indebted to the good work of Karin Dalziel and Laura Weakly at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities.