Steve Behrendt’s essay, “Rousseau and British Romantic Women Writers,” appears as the lead essay in the recently published collection, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism: Gender and Selfhood, Politics and Nation, edited by Russell Goulbourne and David Higgins and published by Bloomsbury (London).

Joy Castro’s short fable The Little Painter appeared as Terrain’s “Letter to America” feature on January 29.

Ted Kooser reports that Stephen F. Austin University Press has published The Weight of the Weather; Regarding the Poetry of Ted Kooser, edited by Mark Sanders. It’s a compilation of interviews with Ted, critical articles about his work, and personal reminiscences by other poets. Along with his forthcoming new and selected poems, Kindest Regards, due out on his 79th birthday, Ted says these two substantial books feel much like tombstones, but he isn’t quite yet ready for the grave.

Patrick T. Randolph (PIESL) published part 2 of “Examining the Language-Based Components of the Head-to-Toe Method of Associations for Vocabulary Acquisition” in the Winter Issue of the College ESL Quarterly. This article examines three more of the highly important language learning tools of the method: (1) verbpathy (i.e., the immediate intuitive and personal feeling one experiences when he/she first encounters a word, phrase, or idiom); (2) emotion-based associations (i.e., the emotion or emotions associated with a specific lexical item); and (3) the ins and outs of understanding lexical register, or the formal or informal use of a vocabulary term.

James Brunton’s poem “Transplant” appears in the most recent issue of Mayday Magazine.

Kristi Carter’s chapbook, Red and Vast is now available from Dancing Girl Press. Two of her poems, “Far Flung” and “Weekday with Regular Onion Yellow,” appear in the current issue of Prairie Fire (Volume 38, No. 4, Winter 2017).

Katie Schmid Henson’s polemic against heterosexual marriage, “Why Would Anyone Ever Want to be a Wife?” was published at The Establishment. Her poem “After the Hospital” was published in the January/February issue of decomP magazine.

The Lincoln Mayor’s Committee for International Friendship sent Crystal Bock Thiessen (instructor in PIESL) to represent Lincoln at the Global Ties U.S. National Meeting in Washington, D.C., February 7-10. Global Ties U.S. works with the U.S. State Department to bring young future world leaders to the States on short-term exchange programs. Bock Thiessen is president of Lincoln’s branch of Global Ties U.S., The Lincoln Council for International Visitors, which brings guests from all over the world to learn more about agricultural, educational, governmental, entrepreneurial, and environmental endeavors in Lincoln. The National Meeting gave her the opportunity to learn more about citizen diplomacy and global exchange, as well as how to increase opportunities within and engagement for both the UNL and Lincoln communities.

Joy Castro gave public readings of her work at Vanderbilt University and, as part of Southern Word’s program for 7th- and 11th-grade youth, at the Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet High School in Nashville. With Ken Price and Jeannette Jones (HIST/IES), she visited Fisk University to build collaborative connections with faculty and administrators there as part of UNL’s “New Storytellers, New Stories: The Research Development Institute in Digital Ethnic Studies” project.

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster and Wheeler Winston Dixon are having an invited retrospective of their new video works at the BWA Contemporary Art Gallery, Katowice, Poland, March 2 – April 15, 2018, curated by Witold Stypa, director of the Museum of the Future in Berlin. The BWA Contemporary Art Gallery in Katowice is one of the biggest and most important institutions in Poland, specializing in contemporary art in all its forms; video, painting, sculpture, installations and related works. More than two hundred videos by Dixon and Foster will be screened daily during this period in a dedicated theater within the museum every day for a month and a half. The exhibition is a major screening of their work for an international audience. Says Foster, “We are deeply honored to present this invited screening of our work, especially since the videos will be screened continuously throughout the day in a theater, where audiences can come and see our work, with the programming constantly changing throughout the day.” Adds Dixon, “This is a remarkable chance to reach an international audience, and to have our works presented in a state of the art facility for the general public. While they can be viewed on any platform, our works are best seen projected on a large screen, and that’s what makes this screening so special for us.”

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster’s two eco-feminist films “Not” and “Popular Science” have been selected for screening by curator Katya Sanna for the international group exhibition “Global Warming and Water Wars: Vision of the Future” at the Lys d’Or Art Web Gallery in February 2018. Foster’s films “Making Women Great Again” and “Huldra’s Spell” screened as part of the “Directed by Women Film Festival: 2017-2018” curated by Barbara Ann O’Leary.

On February 22, Tom Lynch attended a book launch for his edited collection Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time at the National University of Ireland, Galway. The book includes a number of Irish writers and poets, hence the gathering at NUI Galway.

Amelia Montes gave a lecture entitled, Transnational Connections: La Llorona on the Danube, at The University of Augsburg, Germany, January 11, 2018. On March 6, 2018, Amelia will be giving a lecture entitled The Chicana Literary Canon: 20th and 21st Century U.S. Writers at The American Corners Center in Novi Sad, Serbia.

Shari Stenberg delivered the Winifred Bryan Memorial Lecture at TCU on February 15. Her talk was entitled, “‘Tweet Me Your First Assault’: Writing Shame and the Rhetorical Work of #NotOkay.” Her article by the same title is forthcoming this summer in Rhetoric Society Quarterly.

Patrick T. Randolph’s 2016 presentation, A Guaranteed, Humanistic Four-Step Process to Help Prevent Plagiarism was nominated by MIDTESOL (MidAmerica TESOL) for the Best of TESOL Affiliates Award, and it was selected and confirmed by International TESOL. He was one of 6 winners selected from over 7,000 presentations from the 109 worldwide TESOL Affiliates. Randolph is the first MIDTESOL member and UNL faculty to receive this award. He will give the award-winning presentation at the 2018 International TESOL Convention and English Language Expo in Chicago, IL, in March. He is also the first worldwide TESOL member to receive this award from two distinct TESOL Affiliates — MITESOL (2015) and MIDTESOL (2018). He also received the “Best of CoTESOL” in 2017.

Guy Reynolds received a ‘Certificate of Recognition for Contributions to Students’ from the Division of Student Affairs, The Parents Association and the Teaching Council of UNL.

Kristi Carter’s poem “Cosmovore Searches the Animal Shelter” has been nominated for the SFPA Rhysling. This poem appears in her collection, Cosmovore.

Nicole Green was recognized by UNL’s senior honor society, Mortar Board, as their February “Professor of the Month.” Four members of the Black Masque Chapter visited Nicole’s class on February 16th to present the award and share kind words from her former student, Elise Wordekemper.

Katie Schmid Henson won the Patricia Aakhus Award for her poem “Turning 32,” an award from Southern Indiana Review given for the best work across all genres to appear in the magazine in a given year. Her manuscript Big Fancy Animal was a semifinalist in Autumn House Press' Rising Writer first book contest. She received a Parents Recognition Award for service to students from the UNL Parents Association in February.