Claire Harlan Orsi has stories in current issues of Confrontation and Joyland and an essay in The New Inquiry.

Three of Steve Behrendt's poems have been reprinted in A Sandhills Reader: Thirty Years of Great Writing from the Great Plains (2015); he also has a poem in the latest issue of Plainsongs. Steve's essay, "Teaching Fielding's Idea of the Novel with Joseph Andrews" appears in the just-published Approaches to Teaching the Works of Henry Fielding, edited by Jennifer Wilson and Elizabeth Kraft. New York: MLA, 2015. 71-76. Another of Steve's essays, "Shelley's Narrative Fiction Fragments" just came out in The Neglected Shelley, edited by Alan Weinberg and Timothy Webb. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. 95-115.

Karen Babine's essay, "Reading Galway," was published by Slag Glass City.

Pascha Sotolongo Stevenson's CNF piece, "Flight to Cuba," appears in the current issue of Saw Palm – a special issue devoted to the Florida Cuba connection.

Wheeler Winston Dixon has published a new essay on William Wellman's 1931 Pre-code film "Night Nurse" in the February 2016 issue of Senses of Cinema.

Dixon has also published two new articles. The first is "Ecstatic Cinema: Romantic Experimental Filmmaking in the 1960s," in Moving Image Archive News February 20, 2016, examining personal filmmaking during this period of artistic ferment, before the advent of structuralism. In the era we live in, ecstasy is in short supply. Escape from reality is one thing, and it's in high demand right now, packaged and sold in a seemingly endless series of comic book and blockbuster franchise films that bludgeon audiences into submission, but that's not what I'm talking about here. Rather, I'm examining a group of films made in the early to mid 1960s that openly celebrated life, and our connection to it, through a strategy of sensory overload that sought to make the viewer almost a participant in the film's content, to convey, without restraint, the sheer joy of existence in world of seemingly endless possibility. Perhaps it's impossible to make such films today; perhaps we have lost our connection to the real world to such a degree that only CGI effects and amped-up soundtracks reach mass audiences. But, as I argue, there seems to be a small but growing counter-movement that values these visions of another time and place, and seeks to preserve them — perhaps as signposts to the future of cinema, reclaimed from the past.

Dixon's second new article is "From Hippie to Yuppie: The Big Chill…," Quarterly Review of Film and Video (February, 2016): 1-13, and once again, he regrets that the article is behind a paywall. It also centers on the 1960s, with this abstract: "In the 1960s, which came on the heels of the repressive Cold War 1950s, and heralded a new age of freedom of thought and shaking off the shackles of conformism which had dominated American politics during that era, a new wave of optimism swept through American culture, fueled mostly by a younger generation that rejected the old norms of racism, sexism, capitalism and homophobia for a much more egalitarian approach to living – the Hippie era. Centering in San Francisco, spreading to New York, and fueled by the British Invasion of bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones in the early 1960s, as well as opposition to the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, the Hippie movement soon dominated American pop and social culture among the young, much to the consternation of their elders. But as the 1960s wore on, it became clear that the flame of idealism was being co-opted by commercial interests and consumerist agendas, and the Vietnam War ground on with no end in sight."

In the last few months, Dixon has just published four new book reviews, as follows:
"Political Fellini: Journey to the End of Italy by Andrea Minuz, trans. by Marcus Perryman," (Review), Choice (March 2016): #53-2997.
"The Permanent Crisis of Film Criticism: The Anxiety of Authority by Mattias Frey," (Review), Choice (February 2016): #53-2579.
"The Westerns and War Films of John Ford by Sue Matheson," Library Journal (January 2016): 107-108.
"A Grammar of Cinepoiesis: Poetic Cameras of Italian Cinema by Silvia Carlorosi," in Choice March 2016: #53-2994.

Finally, Dixon has created a new half-hour video, AN AMERICAN DREAM (available on Vimeo), of which he says that "AN AMERICAN DREAM is composed entirely of Public Domain stock footage, accompanied by an electronically manipulated music track, and traces the rise of late-stage capitalism in the United States, and the decline of personal interaction. Money, violence, and consumerism dominate the images here, as befits a society in which 1% of the populace control 99% of the nation's wealth, leaving the rest of us as mere spectators. Unlike my 1972 film SERIAL METAPHYSICS, which appropriated television commercials to create a somewhat playful vision of a society mediated by advertising, AN AMERICAN DREAM is a requiem for a society in which inequality is the new norm."

Marco Abel published a review of Christian Petzold (U Illinois P, 2013), Jaimey Fisher's study of the most prominent of the so-called Berlin School filmmakers, in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 52.1 (February 2016): 93-96.

Patrick T. Randolph and Joseph Ruppert (Western Michigan University) just got their book proposal for creative writing accepted by TESOL Press. The working title is New Ways in Teaching Creative Writing for the ELL Community. This will be the first multi-genre creative writing book for English Language Teachers. Calls for submissions will be out shortly, so please consider submitting! Randolph also got his poem, "Covered in Noise," accepted by the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets for their 2017 Poets' Calendar. The poem focuses on a trout fishing adventure with his father in the northern woods of Wisconsin. Their fishing is cut short by a wave of hungry mosquitoes, causing the boy and his father to flee through the woods to their trusty pick up truck!

Emily Herrick of the Programs in English as a Second Language and former PIESL colleague Jean Arnold will edit a book for TESOL Press, New Ways in Teaching with Music.

Erin M. Bertram's poem "The View from above Deserves to Be Shared," an erasure of some of aerial photographer Michael Collier's writing about landscape, will appear in the next issue of H_NGM_N.

Rebecca Macijeski has two poems appearing in the current issue of Sycamore Review. She also has poems forthcoming in Metonym, Reed Magazine, and Nimrod.

Gabriel Houck's story, "The Dot Matrix", will appear in the fall 2016 issue of Cimarron Review.

Ashley Strosnider, managing editor of Prairie Schooner, had a new piece of flash fiction, "A Few Electric Seconds," published in New South.

Joy Castro's essay "Racial and Ethnic Justice in the Creative Writing Course" appeared in Gulf Coast.

Pete Capuano's first book, Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Body, was just shortlisted for the 2015 British Society for Literature and Science Book Award.

Kristi Carter's poem, "Sudden as Spring," will appear in Nimrod International Journal: Mirrors and Prisms: Writers of Marginalized Orientations and Gender Identities, due for publication later this year.

Maria Nazos' translation "Landscapes VIII" has been accepted for publication in The Mid-American Review.

Janette Avelar, Elayna Gonzalez, and Walter Wrigley, English undergraduates and advising interns, presented a poster on “Undergraduate Advising Internships: Pathways to the Profession” at the February 25th UNL Academic Advising Association conference.

Chigozie Obioma wrote an article, "Lagos is set to double in size in 15 years. How will my city possibly cope?" for the Guardian UK.

Jeannette Schollaert will present her paper "'Figurations of Blackness': Framing Gendered Voices and Spaces in The Professor's House and As I Lay Dying" at the Mid-America American Studies Association 2016 Conference in Lawrence, Kansas on March 5. Jeannette will also present at this month's Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association National Conference in Seattle, Washington. Her paper "Postcards and Imaging Travel in J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst's Novel S." is part of the Travel & Tourism section.

In February, Robert Lipscomb presented his paper titled "Queer Identities and Gay Stereotypes: Revisiting Russo's Taxonomy" at the Southwest Popular/American Culture Conference in Albuquerque, NM funded in part with a Joy Currie Graduate Student Travel Fellowship.

On Feb. 10, Ph.D. student Aubrey Streit Krug presented a talk about John G. Neihardt's Omaha stories at a public symposium she helped organize with UNL's Center for Great Plains Studies and the University of Nebraska Press.

Kristi Carter read a collection of poems in a presentation titled "Distance as Beauty: Reading of Poems Concerning the Intersection of Pop Culture and Trauma Narratives" at the Southwest Popular / American Culture Association Conference in February. Participation in this event was made possible by the Joy Currie Travel Fellowship. Much thanks to the graduate committee as well as Alex Currie. Kristi Carter will read another selection of poems from one of her manuscripts, Cosmovore, at the Indiana University Interdisciplinary Conference: "Digesting Discourses: Taste, Appetite, and Consumption" in Bloomington, IN on March 5th.

Kelly Payne co-hosted the 2016 Academic Advising Conference on "Diversity and Social Justice in Advising” on February 25th. During the conference she facilitated a student panel on “UNL Advising Through Our Students’ Eyes” which focused on diverse identities and advising.

Karen Babine's book, Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life, (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) is a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. Winners will be announced on April 16, 2016.

Mike Page's book Frederik Pohl (University of Illinois Press, 2015) is reviewed by Locus Magazine's lead reviewer, Gary K. Wolfe, in the February issue. The book also made the Locus 2015 "Recommended Reading" list and is on the ballot for the Locus Award in the non-fiction category.

Patrick T. Randolph has picked up 3 more citations on Google Scholar for his work in Ethnomethodology and Idioms in the ELL classroom with Dr. Paul McPherron of Hunter College.

Erin M. Bertram received a scholarship from the National Association for Poetry Therapy Conference where, in April, she'll co-lead a workshop, with Sarah Fawn Montgomery and Rebecca Macijeski, on the value of silence.

Joy Castro has been named series editor of a new book series, Machete: The Ohio State Series in Literary Nonfiction, which is devoted to showcasing fresh stories, innovative forms, and groundbreaking aesthetics by a diversity of authors from underrepresented groups whose writing has historically been ignored or marginalized. The series will publish two to four books each year.

Daniel Clausen was appointed the "Captain" of the Graduate Fellows of the Center for Great Plains Studies.

Jaime Brunton has been selected to participate in a seminar with Judith Butler as part of the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at the New School for Social Research this June. As an ICSI Fellow, Jaime will take part in Butler's master class "Freud to Klein: Death Drive, Pleasure, Ethics," participate in public forums on the Institute themes, and present her research on biopolitics and psychoanalysis. Jaime has also been awarded a grant from the New School.

Chigozie Obioma's The Fishermen is one of five finalists for The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, an L.A. Times Book Prize.