Department of English Newsletter September 2014

Upcoming Department Events

Sep
10
3:30 pm
Love Library South, Room 111
Sep
18
11:30 am
Sep
18
7:00 pm
Center for Great Plains Studies, Room 1155
Sep
19
4:00 pm
Sep
26
4:00 pm

Publications & Acceptances

Grace Bauer's poems are included in two recent poetry anthologies -- "A Little Like Dorothy" in Obsessions: Sestinas for the 21st Century and "Noah's Wife Addresses the Department of the Interior" in Maple Leaf Rag V. Grace 's poems have also appeared in recent issues of several journals, including Hotel Amerika, Hobble Creek Review, Gargoyle, Fairy Tale Review, Route Nine, Storm Cellar, Route 7 Review and Connotations. Her review of Ai's Collected Poems appears in the latest issue of Prairie Schooner.

Cover image of Refractions by Stephen BehrendtStephen Behrendt's new collection of poems (his fourth), Refractions, has just been published by Shechem Press (Spokane, WA) in an edition that includes woodcut images.

Cover image of Mademoiselle by Rhonda GarelickRhonda Garelick's book, Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History, was published this month by Random House, and by Macmillan in Australia. She will be having a book launch event at the Museum of the City of New York, where she will be speaking with New Yorker writer and National Book Award winner Judith Thurman.

Reviews and mentions have appeared in Publishers Weekly, Book List, Library Journal (starred review), Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar, Town and Country, and are forthcoming in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, USA Today, More Magazine, and other venues.

Ken Price has recently published the following:

"Walt Whitman and Civil War Washington," in Leviathan 16 (2014), 118-131.

"Civil War Washington: The City and the Site," co-authored with Susan Lawrence et al. in Civil War Washington: History, Place, and Digital Scholarship, ed. Susan Lawrence (University of Nebraska Press, 2015). This volume will reprint "Walt Whitman and Civil War Washington."

"'Many long dumb voices . . . clarified and transfigured': The Walt Whitman Archive and the Scholarly Edition in the Digital Age" forthcoming in Nuovi annali della Scuola speciale per archivisti e bibliotecari, (November 2014).

"Social Scholarly Editing," in New Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (Blackwell Publishing), forthcoming 2015.

Jack Vespa published an article titled "Veiled Movements in The Vale of Esthwaite in the Winter 2014 issue of The Wordsworth Circle. The article, an excerpt from his book manuscript, is one that was produced during a faculty development leave, for which he remains thankful.

Ashanka Kumari had her article "Blake Set to Music" accepted for publication in the Blake Quarterly.

Zachary Beare and Marcus Meade had their essay "'The Most Important Project of Our Time!': Hyperbole as a Discourse Feature of Student Writing" accepted for publication in College Composition and Communication. Zachary also had his chapter "Metanoia as an Alternative to Kairos: The Queer Practices of Serendipitous Failure" accepted for the collection Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research edited by Maureen Daly Goggin and Peter Goggin.

Jordan Farmer's stories Dust, Lost in the Flood, My Father's Fiddle, and The Adjunct will appear in The Southwest Review, Appalachian Heritage, Southern Humanities Review, and Pembroke Magazine respectively. Jordan Farmer's story Lost in the Flood was also a finalist of both the Cutbank Montana Prize in Fiction and The Sycamore Review's Wabash Fiction Prize.

Claire Harlan Orsi’s story "Citizens of the Real World" will appear in the Fall Issue of Confrontation.

Jackie Harris has scholarly book reviews forthcoming in Rocky Mountain Review and the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association and recently had a book chapter proposal accepted for a forthcoming volume titled Saving the World: Girlhood and Evangelicalism in the Nineteenth Century; her work for this chapter derives from dissertation research on Mary Martha Sherwood.

Gabriel Houck's short story, Homecoming, was accepted for publication by Moon City Review and will appear in the Spring 2015 issue.

Ted Kooser has two books coming out this month, The Wheeling Year: A Poet's Field Book, prose vignettes from U of NE Press, and Splitting an Order, poems from Copper Canyon.

Rebecca Macijeski has recent poetry acceptances from the following journals: "The Planets" in Poet Lore, "What Was Here" in Mud Season Review, "Gathering" and "My Letters" in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and "When I Sleep" in Phantom Drift.

Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s chapbook, The Astronaut Checks His Watch, will be released by Finishing Line Press this month. Her essay, “Lessons in Cartography,” which originally appeared in Crab Orchard Review, was named a notable in Best American Essays 2014. Her poem, “Taste Testing,” appears in the current issue of Alimentum. Her poems, “After Electric” and “After Electric II,” will appear in Blood and Thunder: Musings on the Art of Medicine. Her poem, “Daisy Comes to Tea,” will appear in the Great Gatsby Anthology. Her poems, “Remembrance,” “Shadow Man,” and “Great Gran,” will appear in Shadowed: Unheard Voices Anthology. Her poems, “Bloom” and “Life Size,” will appear in Arroyo Literary Review.

Raul Palma's novella Immaculate Mulch was short listed as a finalist for the Pirate's Alley William Faulkner Novella prize and will be published by Unsolicited Press in the spring. His story "Ropa Vieja" appeared in Alimentum, and his poem "Saturday Night" is forthcoming in Rhino.

Casey Pycior had a story appear in Midwestern Gothic and a short essay in Watershed Review over the summer, and he has stories forthcoming in Red Earth Review, Harpur Palate, and Fiction Attic Press's Anthology, Flash in the Attic, Vol. 2.

Jessica Rivera-Mueller’s article, "Asking and Understanding Questions: An Inquiry-Based Framework for Writing Teacher Development," will appear in the January 2015 issue of Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education.

Erica Rogers accepted a renewable, two-year contracted "visiting associate professor and lecturer" position at the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire. Her connection with the UNL Department of English remains steadfast as she is completing her dissertation under the supervision and mentoring of Debbie Minter. Though the City of Eau Claire and the UWEC campus is lovely, Ms. Rogers misses the restaurant and coffee house culture of Lincoln, and is already concerned about the 80 inches of estimated snowfall predicted for her first Wisconsin winter.

Hali Sofala's poem Color Purple Kids of Putnam County was recently featured as the Poem of the Week at The Missouri Review.

Conferences, Readings, Workshops & Presentations

Marco Abel presented his paper, “‘New Munich Group’ Filmmaking: With Nonchalance Before the Abyss,” at the German Studies Association conference in Kansas City in September.

Grace Bauer presented several readings this past spring and summer, including readings at Xavier University, The New Orleans' Public Library Latter Library Reading Series, the Maple Leaf Reading Series (New Orleans), Georgia Tech University (Atlanta) and Big Blue Marble Books (Philadelphia).

Joy Castro was a featured presenter at the 2014 Kentucky Women Writers Conference in Lexington, September 12 & 13. She taught a two-day writing workshop and gave a reading with Leslie Jamison (The Empathy Exams).

This summer, Jackie Harris attended Dickens Universe at the University of California—Santa Cruz where she participated in the graduate student writing workshop with part of her dissertation research on the girls’ school stories of L. T. Meade. She sincerely thanks Pete Capuano for this wonderful opportunity and the English Department for supporting UNL’s continued participation within the Dickens Project. This summer she also traveled to Louisville, Kentucky to serve as an AP English Language & Composition Exam Scorer for Educational Testing Services. In September Jackie will attend Concordia University’s annual Plum Creek Children’s Literacy Festival and in February she will present on Our Mutual Friend at the 2015 Dickens Project Winter Conference in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Ashanka Kumari presented a collaborative project "A Character Network Methodology for Macroanalysis" with Alex Kinnaman and Jennifer Isasi at Nodes & Networks in Lawrence, Kansas in September. This project team also included Ross Harrison and Morgan Condello. She also presented "Detecting Linguistic Signal in Cather's Early Journalism: Polishing the Bibliography" alongside Grace Thomas at Digital Humanities 2014 in Lausanne, Switzerland in early July. This project team also included Courtney Lawton, Joseba Moreno, and Carmen Smith.

Tom Lynch presented a number of papers over the summer. First, he traveled to Red Cloud for the 2014 Willa Cather Spring Conference. There he delivered a keynote presentation titled "Nature, Gardens, and the Settler-Colonial Imaginary in the West and Outback: Cather and Others." The talk, though not especially kind to Cather's portrayal of nature, was reasonably well received by the Cather-philes in attendance. He subsequently participated in the annual Passing Show, where, along with several other speakers he discussed possible solutions to the problem posed by Cather's settler-colonial portrayals of nature. The highlight of the trip was the opportunity to take several hikes on the Cather Memorial Prairie, a prairie restoration effort that is in fact an example of the kinds of solutions discussed at the Passing Show. Later in the summer, he traveled to Australia for two conferences. At the "Afterlives of the Pastoral" conference at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, he presented a paper on "Ecopastoralism: Settler-Colonial Reinhabitation Narratives in the U.S. West and Australian Outback." If he ever gets it finished, a revised version of this talk should appear in a special issue of Australian Literary Studies next spring. He subsequently traveled to Sydney where he was scheduled to present a paper at the Cormac McCarthy Society conference titled "Uncanny Ecologies: The Haunted Settler-Colonial Landscapes of Cormac McCarthy and Randolph Stow." Unfortunately illness prevented his presentation of this paper.

Ken Price delivered two presentations earlier this year, both in Italy:

  • "Walt Whitman's Bureaucratic and Democratic Vistas: New Light on the Poet's Decade in Washington, DC," The Centro Studi Americani in Rome, Italy, May 2014.
  • "Archive Theory, Digital Humanities, and the Assembling of Walt Whitman," The University of Macerata, Italy, May 2014.

Tom Bennitt, Jordan Farmer, Raul Palma, Casey Pycior, and Nick White will be presenting on "Writing Fiction in the Plains" at the 2014 Mari Sandoz Conference on September 26th at Chadron State College.

Activities, Accolades, & Grants

Cover image of The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin SchoolThe German Studies Association—the main scholarly body in the US for scholars who study the politics, history, and culture of the German-language regions—awarded Marco Abel its prize for Best Book 2014 for his The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School (Camden House, November 2013).

Melissa Homestead spent the month of July on an Eccles Center Fellowship in North American Studies at the British Library in London, researching Catharine Sedgwick's transatlantic cultural networks. In August, the NEH announced its funding of the Complete Letters of Willa Cather, a digital edition, and Melissa will serve as Associate Editor.

Ken Price participated in the meeting of the MLA committee on scholarly editions in New York City in September. Ken, along with Ed Folsom of the University of Iowa, received a grant of $58,000 from the National Historical Publications and Record Commission for "Walt Whitman and Post-Reconstruction America, Part 3."

Jaime Brunton's full-length poetry manuscript, Reclaimed, was named a finalist for the Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize. Additionally, her poetry chapbook manuscript, Opera on TV, was named a finalist for the Mississippi Valley Poetry Chapbook Contest.

Ryler Dustin was awarded the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency for Spring 2016. He will be spending seven months in a remote cabin in Oregon's Rouge River Valley.

This spring, Jackie Harris was awarded a 2014-2015 UNL Dean’s Fellowship. She would like to extend her gratitude to Laura White and Stephen Behrendt for their recommendation letters and continued mentorship and support.

Rebecca Macijeski will participate in the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project for the month of October. Along with other 30/30 poets, she will write and post one poem per day throughout October as part of a creative fundraising challenge, sort of like a poem marathon. Feel free to read and/or "sponsor" her work online.

Benjamin Vogt's weekly garden column at Houzz just surpassed 1 million total views. His articles include personal narratives about gardening, sustainable design strategies, wildlife gardens, and native plant profiles for the Tallgrass Prairie region.

Have news or noteworthy happenings to share?

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