March 26 - April 9, 2021

Dawes wins PEN award for Prairie Schooner work

Professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and internationally acclaimed poet, Kwame Dawes has been awarded the biennial PEN/Nora Magid Award for his editorship of the Prairie Schooner. 

The PEN America Literary Awards have honored many of the most outstanding voices in literature across diverse genres since 1963. The PEN awards represent authors from a large range of literary focuses, including fiction, poetry, science writing, essays, sports writing, biography, children’s literature, and drama. 

The biennial PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing recognizes an editor whose high literary standards and tastes have contributed to the excellence of the publication they edit. By no means is this Dawes first award, as a 2009 Emmy recipient, a 2001 Pushcart Prize and 2012 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in Poetry award winner, and Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Dawes is familiar with receiving esteemed honors. 

Watch the 2021 PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony, online at 6 p.m. CDT April 8 to support Professor Dawes, and UNL. 

Professor Melissa J. Homestead's Upcoming Book Set to Launch April 1

University  of Nebraska- Lincoln English professor and Director of the Cather Project, Melissa Homestead, is set to publish her eagerly anticipated book "The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis." Homestead's book  re-centers Edith Lewis and Willa Cather’s personal and professional life.

Homestead’s achievement will be celebrated with a virtual launch event April 1 at 7 p.m., featuring a conversation between Homestead and her colleague and fellow novelist Timothy Schaffert.

The event, sponsored by the Cather Project and Department of English, will be held over Zoom. It is free for participants, but registration is required.

New Summer Courses Made for a Pandemic Friendly Global Experience

An important part of the college experience for many students is the ability to study abroad. However, with study abroad travel prohibited until at least June 30th, many students are left feeling disappointed. To combat travel regulations the University of Nebraska–Lincoln is offering a series of summer classes at half the regular tuition rate to provide students global experiences without international travel.

More than 20 global experiential learning programs will be offered, covering a variety of subjects and addressing compelling world challenges. Examples include peace process negotiation, entrepreneurship in Rwanda, the rise of China and the Black Lives Matter movement around the world.

Register on canvas before May 1st, the last day of Summer and Fall registration. 

The Newberry Library- The World in the Book 1300-1800

The Newberry Library is offering a special course this fall on book history for undergraduates. The course is by application only, and will be online, twice a week in the fall and will have a global focus on the history of the book in the early modern period. 

If you would like to apply, please contact Dr. Stage (kstage2@unl.edu) or Dr. Schleck (jschleck2@unl.edu) for assistance with the application process. If you apply and are accepted into the course, you will be able to take it for elective credit.

Audre Lorde Broke the Silence

"A self-described Black lesbian mother warrior poet, Audre Lorde lived a life of possibility. To her readers, colleagues, and admirers, she offered a radical and liberating vision of the world in her work. Eminently faithful to the tenet that the personal is political, she wrote fearlessly from the landscape of her most intimate self. Lorde treated her body—the range of her corporeal needs, fears, and desires—as a resource of political and creative information, a platform from which she communicated her worldview. She was unique in her determination to speak and write without shame, but at the same time wholly representative, embodying the complexities of a contemporary radical Black feminist identity. Her life emblematized the concept of intersectionality, a term coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw to describe the ways in which distinct social identities, such as race and gender, are mutually constitutive. Lorde devoted her career to building bridges across social divides as well as nurturing the distinct voices of Black feminist writers who responded to the raw physicality of her imagery and her now famous rallying cries, such as, “Your silence will not protect you.”
Read more from Emily Bernard at The New Republic.

Existence as Resistance: How Josephine Baker Challenged Misogynoir

"As Whitfield reflected on her experiences starring as Josephine Baker, she grappled with how her dancing expressed Baker’s (and her own) unique talent and exuberance, while it was, at the same time, haunted by what cultural critic bell hooks, in her classic essay “Selling Hot Pussy,” termed “the white European fascination with the bodies of black people, particularly black female bodies.” Whitfield’s concern about what her parents might think perhaps suggests her fear of the broad social consequences of broaching “the traditional black pornographic imagination” for Black women."

Read more from Terri Simone Francis on LitHub.

Trends in Children’s Lit Track- America’s Racial History

For most of American history, Black children rarely saw themselves in children’s literature, and even when they did, the depictions usually were condescending, paternalistic or outright racist.

Amanda Gailey, associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, traces her interest in this subject to her time at Washington University in St. Louis, where a colleague approached her with the idea of creating a digital collection of children’s literature that would address how race was communicated to children.

Read the full article on the UNL website.

Femme Freedom on Film: On Daisies, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, and Twinning

"I’ve always had a soft spot for the ditz: Jessica Simpson, Karen from Mean Girls. It’s because I was one. An uptalker, a hair twirler, a space queen. Partly, I wanted all the ditzes to be taken seriously, to be respected and have our voices heard, but partly I wanted to revel in the cuteness of our head tilts, to celebrate the accidental hilarious brilliance of our queries about the true nature of chickens of the sea. And maybe, too, I loved the unselfconsciousness, the innocent curiosity, the all-around noncompetitive good time of the ditz against the hard rationality and anger of the Nick Lacheys of the world, against the strict rules and calculated behavior of the Regina Georges. I wanted, maybe, to live in a world of only ditzes: of girls who liked lipstick and cleavage, girls who could communicate through a nuanced collection of giggles and scoffs, girls who inquired, who blurted out whatever observations came to mind, always with an excessive use of the word “like.”

Read more from Sam Cohen on LitHub.

Why Alfred Hitchcock’s Films Still Feel Dangerous

"So many of Hitchcock's movies flourished at the box office. He was in demand and in the 1950s he had an unrivaled reputation for mystery and suspense. Even so, Psycho took everyone by surprise—though it played with a life-size cardboard cutout of the director in theatre lobbies warning that there would be no admission after the film had begun. That was asserting control, and the proper concentration in seeing a picture. We were put on the spot—there was no more carefree moviegoing. In its opening up of horror Psycho foresaw so much about where cinema was going, and it let us know how sinister Hitch had always been. A knowing cinema of cruelty—beyond mere exploitation—had been ordained."

Read more from David Thomson on LitHub.