Black History Month Announcement
Did you catch our Black History Month celebration on the blog? Check it out: https://english.colostate.edu/tag/black-history-month/
  • We had 30 people at our inaugural Composition Program Meta Monday, “Beyond the Rhetorical Situation,” facilitated by Dr. Doug Cloud. A hearty thank you to Doug and everyone who came!
  • Joanna Doxey has a few poems in the latest issue of Ghost Proposal, here: http://ghostproposal.com/ . She was recently invited by the Sigma Tau Delta chapter at Union College (NY), her undergraduate alma mater, to speak and read poetry.
  • Todd Mitchell had a fun time encouraging literacy and creativity for young people this past week with author visits to Bethke Elementary School and Polaris Expeditionary Learning School. He’s looking forward to working with students at McGraw elementary school next week. In addition, Todd’s book, The Last Panther, was recently selected by educators to be the latest addition to National Geographic’s Giant Traveling Map for Florida.
  • Big news!! Colin Raunig (MFA, 2018) has his first piece in The Atlantic Monthly! https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/01/the-lasting-psychological-stress-of-nuclear-deterrence/550280/
  • Catie Young’s poem “Abject Object (every body come on in)” has been accepted by Lana Turner.
  • The 2018 Popular Culture Association conference included a paper by Cindy Mediavilla of UCLA: “Camelot in the Wild West: The Arthurian Novels of Arthur Latham and James Work.” The Library Journal and FiveStar/Cengage Publishing announces a new mystery novel series by James Work. The debut novel, “Unmentionable Murders”, will be published in June, followed in about six months by “Small Delightful Murders,” then “The Dunraven Hoard.”
  • Cole Konopka’s translation, “assumed and then,” has been accepted by the Hawai’i Review Online. The poem is translated from the German work, “angenommen aber,” by Berlin-based poet, Rike Scheffler, whose book, der rest ist resonanz, was published by kookbooks in 2014.
  • Catie Young has a chapbook of poems out this week at dancing girl press. It’s called What Is Revealed When I Reveal It to You and can be found here.
  • Debby Thompson‘s essay “Concaves” won the Lamar York Prize in Nonfiction and will be published in the spring issue of The Chattahoochee Review.
  • Tony Becker recently had an article, “Not to scale? An argument-based inquiry into the validity of an L2 writing rating scale,” published in the journal, Assessing Writing (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2018.01.001).
  • Dan Beachy-Quick’s poem, “Totality of Spheres,” at the online journal Territory: http://themapisnot.com/issue-vii-alternate-earths. For the past two weeks, and the next two to come, Dan has been writing on Craft for Poets & Writers (see “Hundreds of Eyes” and “The Craft of Humility, the Craft of Love,” https://www.pw.org/content/craft_capsule_hundreds_of_eyes).
  • EJ Levy has a piece on the #MeToo movement in The Paris Review Daily this week:  https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/02/20/real-scandal-academia/.
  • Sarah Sloane co-authored the article “The Cultural Functions and Social Potential of Queer Monuments: A Preliminary Inventory and Analysis,” published under the name Sloane French in The Journal of Homosexuality, August 2017.  She participated in five presentations on- and off-ship during Semester at Sea in Fall 2017:  “What Makes a Good Question?” (45-minute lecture); “Take Back the Night Readings” (presenting Sloane’s prose poems and selections from Dorothy Allison and Adrienne Rich in between each of six survivors of sexual assault in 90-minute presentation); “Life is as Long as a Piece of String” (eulogy given at a memorial service for a student who died during the SAS voyage); and informal presentations about living in the USA and being LGBTQ in the USA at universities in, respectively, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and Kobe, Japan. She will be delivering a lecture on “Words Will Never Hurt Me: Medical Languages Describing Trans Identity and Experience from Harry Benjamin (1966) to the DSM-5 (2013)” on March 9 at the TRANSforming Gender Conference at CU-Boulder, March 8-10, 2018.  The conference is free to all who would like to attend.

Creative Writing Reading Series Ramfunder Campaign

The CSU English Department Creative Writing Reading Series has launched an online fundraiser with Ramfunder.  Your contribution will help us bring established and rising literary stars to CSU, where they can share their work and thoughts with CSU students and Fort Collins community members.  Please check out our Ramfunder campaign here: http://c-fund.us/d31

 

Composition Program Meta Monday

Please mark your calendars for our remaining spring semester Composition Program Meta Mondays. All faculty and graduate students are invited!

March 5, from 4:00 pm-5:00 pm, in Eddy 2:  Effective library research and research-based assignments, with facilitator Kristy Nowak, Instruction & Foundational Experience Librarian

April 2, from 4:00 pm-5:00 pm, in Eddy 2:  Responding to students in sticky situations, with facilitator Pam Coke, Associate Professor of English Education

  

TEFL/TESL Advocacy Week

Advocacy Week, presented by the TEFL/TESL Student Association, is just around the corner.  Mini-presentations will occur all week beginning Monday, February 26, with the week culminating in a keynote address on Friday, March 2.

Prominent scholar in second language acquisition and language teaching research, Dr. Bill VanPatten, will present the keynote address.  Dr. VanPatten will speak on “Talking Past Each Other (And What This Means for Advocacy and Beyond)” on March 2 in the Lory Student Center Room 382.  We’ll begin with refreshments at 4:30 pm, followed by the presentation at 5:00 pm. Please find additional information regarding the keynote address on the events calendar.

 

Inaugural Meeting of the New English Club

Ready to venture beyond the classroom and Beyond the Lines?  Come to the inaugural meeting of the new English Club, Beyond the Lines, to hang out with fellow English nerds!  Created by students, our new Department club is designed to bring together like-minded English enthusiasts to build community throughout our Department.  Rather than having this just be a student organization, we want to bring together faculty, staff and students to share our excitement for the field.  We’ll gather weekly on Thursday evenings from 6:15-7:15 with a rotating schedule of board games, movies, snacks and hang out time, and guest speakers (maybe you’d like to volunteer to be our first one!). Come meet new friends and build relationships with those strangers in all your classes and in the offices on the other side of Eddy!

First Meeting:  Thursday, March 1 – Board Game Bonanza, Eddy 100, 6:15 pm-7:15 pm.  Come play board games with fellow English Majors and professors!

Faculty and Staff: As this is a brand new club, we’d really appreciate it would take a minute to tell your students about it at the beginning of your class (or invite one of the club founders to come advertise it!).  If you have questions or want to be one of our guest speakers on a topic you’re passionate about please feel free to email kaarivon@rams.colostate.edu.

 

English Department’s Inaugural Service Day

The inaugural English Department Service Day will take place this spring, on Saturday, April 14, most likely in the afternoon into the early evening.  This is an opportunity for us all to gather to participate in a project benefiting the Northern Colorado community.

Specifics are still in the works, but on this weekend before Earth Day, we will come together for several hours to strengthen our own community by reaching out to the broader one.  We have a big project at a local park lined up and will end the day with food, drink, and music at a central location.  Significant others and children are welcome; all can contribute, participate, play.  More details to follow, including specific time, but for now, save the date!

Beth Lechleitner and Sue Doe, event coordinators