• The latest issue of Interim was devoted in part to Sasha Steensen’s work. The issue includes six poems by Sasha, as well as an essay she wrote on Magurerite Duras. The issue also includes a book review of her latest book, Gatherest.
• Harrison Candelaria Fletcher had three image-text prose poems – “Stain,” “Imprint” and “Communion” – picked up for publication by Blue Mesa Review. He also had a lyric essay, “Identity Theft,” named as a finalist for the 2018 Best of the Net anthology.
• Dan Beachy-Quick has three poems published in the lovely, little online journal Dial2:  https://www.dial2magazine.com.
• Last Friday, Mike Palmquist presented a talk on curriculum design and led a workshop on teaching first-year composition at Northern Virginia Community College Annandale. The college serves 68,000 students and offers roughly 300 sections of composition each semester.
• Sue Doe and Steven Shulman (Economics), representing the Center for the Study of Academic Labor, as well as Maria Maisto, Founder and Executive Director of the New Faculty Majority, presented at the Western States Leadership Forum on April 25 in Boulder. Their plenary talk on “Contingent Faculty and Notions of Belonging on U.S. College Campuses” was presented to Provosts and Vice Presidents from universities across the western U.S.
• Sections from Katherine Indermaur‘s “Facing the Mirror: An Essay” are forthcoming in New Delta Review.
• There’s an excellent new review of Aby Kaupang and Matthew Cooperman’s NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified), currently up at The Rumpus: https://therumpus.net/2019/04/nos-by-aby-kaupang-and-matthew-cooperman.
• Sarah Sloane gave a three-hour creative writing workshop to the local chapter of Elders Action Network. EAN is an international organization of people 50+ who are “engaged elders in activism primarily attached to climate change.” Sarah’s most recent book is in the final stages of copy-editing (in English and Spanish) and is due out from New American Press in early 2020. A mixed memoir and biography, Sloane calls the co-authored Bodies Like Us:  The True Story of Guatemalan Guerrilla Otoniel de la Roca Mendoza an example of “activist nonfiction.”
• Mike Palmquist presented the keynote address at the Singapore Institute of Technology’s Faculty Retreat last Friday.  The theme of the conference was communication in the professions.  Mike’s talk was titled, “Using Writing to Improve Student Learning, Critical Thinking, and Professional Skills.”  Mike also participated on a panel about communication in the workplace.
• Harrison Candelaria Fletcher had an image-text lyric essay, “Confluence,” picked up by Barzakh, a journal with an “internationalist stance seeking work that transcends genre.”  He’s also honored to have a piece selected for the Best of Brevity anthology due out in the fall (https://rosemetalpress.com/announcing-the-best-of-brevity-anthology)
• Daniel Schonning’s (MFA Poetry) poem, “The Unmarked Graves at Grandview Cemetery” was a finalist in the 2019 Pinch Literary Awards.  It will be forthcoming in the Fall 2019 edition of The Pinch Journal.
• Katherine Indermaur (Summer 2019, MFA Poetry) has accepted a position as the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance’s development associate.  She will start on June 10 in Salt Lake City.
• Esther Hayes‘s (MFA Fiction) story, “Yes, She Has Been to the Ocean” was selected as third place in the 2019 Pinch Literary Awards.
• Hannah Bright’s (MFA Creative Nonfiction) essay “How to Bleed a Child” is forthcoming in the literary journal Sweet: A Literary Confection.
• Mikey Borgard (MFA) will be continuing her studies in the University of Missouri’s Ph.D. program this fall as a multi-genre writer.  Mizzou’s Graduate School has awarded her the Gus T. Ridgel Scholarship, a university-wide award presented to the most promising incoming graduate student.  Their pool of nominees included STEM students as well as students in the humanities.  Mikey is deeply humbled by this honor and grateful to everyone at Colorado State for our support and encouragement! Mikey’s first publication, an essay titled “Constellation of Grace,” was shortlisted for the Steinberg Essay Prize and will appear in Fourth Genre‘s next issue.
• Ryan Lanham (MFA Creative Nonfiction) was awarded a fellowship for this summer’s Lit Fest in Denver, hosted by Lighthouse Writers Workshop, for his hermit crab essay, “Clearing Procedures for the M-4 Series Weapon.”

Retirements

English department instructor Deborah Dimon has taught in the English department since 1997, when she started as a GTA. She has been a mentor for new instructors, a composition placement exam rater, and CSU placement exam administrator. In addition to teaching literature and composition, she has also advised honors theses or projects and offered an honors section of a course. Deborah has also published creative nonfiction, including two essays and a textbook chapter.  Rabbit Creek Country: Three Lives in the Heart of the Mountain West, co-authored with Jon Thiem was named Colorado Book of the Year by the Aspen Writer’s Program. She has both attended and presented at numerous events such as colloquia, readings, and seminars. In 2012, she received a Senior Teaching Appointment, which recognized years of quality teaching and contributions to the department. When we asked her plans for retirement, she said, “I will have time with my family and friends and the mountains. I still plan to do the things I have dreamed of doing.”

English department Associate Professor Judy Doenges taught graduate and undergraduate fiction writing workshops and literature courses. She published a novel, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World. Her short fiction collection, What She Left Me, won a Ferro-Grumley Award, a Washington State Governor s Writers Award, the Bakeless Prize, and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, Nimrod, Green Mountains Review, Guernica, and in several anthologies. Her reviews have appeared in the Washington Post and the Seattle Times. She has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, the Ohio Arts Council, and Bread Loaf Writers Conference. In 2012, she won a PEN/O. Henry award. Judy contributed to the department in many ways, including service as the chair of Tenure and Promotion and Graduate Coordinator. She was a member of ten other committees as well. Given her work for the profession and her mentorship of MFA students, her impact on fiction writers will be felt far into the future.

English department Professor Ellen Brinks taught courses in British Romanticism, the Victorian period, literary theory, gothic literature and film, and in colonial and postcolonial literatures. Her research explored the cultural context of gender and sexuality and the tensions between individual and social expressions of identity. She published numerous essays, including ones on women and 17th-century cartography, on the intersection of economics and sexuality in contemporary film, on the presence of the aesthetic in Winnicottian object relations theory, and on gothic representation and traumatic history. Her first book, Gothic Masculinity, appeared in 2003, and her second book, Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870-1920, was published by Ashgate Press in 2013. Among her many contributions to the department, Ellen started the Zambia Education Abroad program and led it for several years. She also started Rekindle the Classics, a partnership between CSU English and Poudre Library District that provides English department graduate students opportunities to lead discussions with community members on classics new and old. These programs will continue because of their importance to the department and the foundation Ellen built. 

English department Communication Coordinator Jill Salahub first came to CSU 19 years ago as a graduate student in the English M.A. Communication Development program. While a graduate student, she worked as a tutor in the Writing Center, as a Writing Teaching Assistant, and as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. After graduating, she taught various Composition courses for the English department, specializing in Writing for the Web. From 2004 until 2010, she was the Editor/Programmer for Writing@CSU, acting as a Project Director from 2008 to 2010. From 2010 until 2019, she was an Editor and then the Communications Coordinator for the English department, transforming the department’s communications efforts into a program staffed with interns and a budget. Most notably, she created the department’s first blog and helped to redesign the department’s website — not once but twice. She is leaving CSU to spend more time writing and working as a contemplative practice guide specializing in yoga asana, meditation, and writing as practice.

 

In Memoriam

Jim Tanner, a former professor in the English department, passed away at the end of March. Patti Cowell said of him, “Jim Tanner was among the first people I met when I moved to Fort Collins to join CSU’s English Department in 1976. I remember him as a quiet man, quietly doing fine teaching and always willing to help a newcomer find her way. Over the years, as I got to know him better, I enjoyed his deadpan humor, literary expertise, and apparent ease with students. I understand second-hand that he was a skilled regular at an on-going departmental poker game!” Current department chair Louann Reid added, “He retired in 2000, so I knew Jim for a fairly short time. He struck me as dignified and reserved–until we had somewhat longer conversations and I saw his humorous side. I understood that he was liked by students and knew that he was a legendary host of poker nights that continued well past retirement.”