Daffodils
image by Jill Salahub
  • Stephanie G’Schwind’s National Endowment for the Arts grant application, on behalf of the Center for Literary Publishing, was funded for $15,000. The grant will fund two issues of Colorado Review and the most recent title in the Mountain West Poetry Series: We Remain Traditional, by Arizona poet Sylvia Chan (February 2018).
  • Congratulations to Lynn Shutters, selected as the Thomas Mark Scholar for 2018-19.  This new award supports scholarship on the life and works of literary figures, particularly those of the early modern period.  It honors Thomas Mark, a professor in the English department from 1957 to 1995.  The award will provide time and support while Lynn is on leave next year to finish her monograph, Chaucer’s Pagan Women.
  • Bruce Ronda delivered the Martha Scott Trimble Lecture on February 27:  “Lizzie, Truman, and Annie:  Reading and Writing the Transcendentalists.” Based on his recent book, The Fate of Transcendentalism: Secularity, Materiality, and Human Flourishing (2017),  Ronda’s talk explores the work of three figures associated with the nineteenth-century American transcendentalist movement or inspired by it:  reformer and essayist Elizabeth Peabody, novelist Truman Nelson, and writer Annie Dillard.  Each of these reveals a distinctive side of transcendentalism, and all share a common commitment to what Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls “secularity.” The talk and reception were free and open to the public.
  • Lynn Badia’s course proposal was selected to be the inaugural course for the CLA’s interdisciplinary team-teaching initiative. Lynn created the course with Dr. Erika Osborne, Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History. The course, “Cultural Extraction: Energy in the Humanities,” will be offered in Fall 2018.  Here is the short course description: “Cultural Extraction: Energy in the Humanities” — We are in the midst of a global energy transition. Scholars and artists across the humanities are working to better understand the relationship between energy and culture. This course will harness the capacities of student artists, writers, and thinkers with the creation of a mock-museum on campus titled, “A Museum of the Twenty-First Century Energy Transition.” This “museum” will examine our current energy transition as if looking back from the future. To create the museum’s content, students will consider a range of readings, films, and artworks while also embarking on several field trips to witness the artifacts of energy infrastructures along the Front Range.
  • Doug Cloud’s article (with Will Penman), “How We Make Sense of Trump and Why It Matters for Racial Justice” has just been published in the open access Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric.  You can access it here: http://contemporaryrhetoric.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Penman_Cloud_8_1_2_8.pdf.
  • Sasha Steensen will be traveling to Tampa (for the AWP conference), New York City, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh to read from her new book, Gatherest.  A long essay, “Pure Shame,” was recently published in Interim. 
  • Veterans Voices is a program co-sponsored by the Ft. Collins Public Library and CSU CLA & English Department.  The following CSU Faculty will participate in a series of four Veterans Writing Workshops: Ross Atkinson (MA-English Education), Dan Beachy-Quick, Virginia Chaffee, Sue Doe, Dan Robinson, and Lisa Langstraat.  This four-part workshop series, for veterans, military family members, as well as active and reserve service members, provides strategies and support for writing fiction, poetry, and non-fiction.  The workshops (to be held March 7, 14, 21, and 28) will be followed by a celebratory reading by the participants, and Jason Arment, a Denver writer and veteran, will be our keynote speaker and will read several creative non-fiction pieces about his experiences during and after his service.
  • Emily Ziffer (MFA-Fiction) has been selected for the 2018-2019 Alfa Fellowship, a year-long professional development program in Moscow, where she will be studying Russian language and literary translation.
  • Zach Hutchins attended the Society of Early Americanists conference on “Religion and Politics in Early America” this past weekend, where he presented an essay on the Boston arson attacks of 1723 and their relevance to the writings of Phillis Wheatley and other enslaved writers.  Also in the last week, his essay “Paradise Lost and the Subversive Structural Poetics of Letters from an American Farmer” was accepted for publication in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and he signed a contract with Pennsylvania State University Press for a book scheduled to appear in 2019, She Calleth Her Friends: The Writings of Elizabeth Webb.
  • Doug Cloud was interviewed for re:verb, a new podcast on rhetoric, the humanities and public affairs. You can listen here: https://www.reverbcast.com/podcasts/2018/3/1/e1-why-listen-to-a-podcast-about-rhetoric-and-the-humanities.
  • Mary Crow has had her prose poem “Suddenly” accepted for publication by Cleaver’s Magazine and her poem “Everything in the Dream Is You” accepted by Notre Dame Review.  She has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
  • Leslee Becker has been awarded a writing fellowship at Brush Creek Foundation in Wyoming.
  • Nancy Henke, Mike Palmquist, and Sue Doe gave papers on their panel “WAC In the Absence of a WAC Program” at the 4C’s conference in Kansas City, March 16.  They narrated the long history of WAC at CSU, starting in the late 1970s and including the newly rejuvenated WAC Clearinghouse, discussed the implications of the formal elimination of the WAC program during the recession and budget cuts of 2009, and laid plans for new niche-based WAC efforts such as Nancy’s recent work with the College of Engineering.
  • Among the finalists for the 2018 Colorado Book Awards: Camille Dungy’s Trophic Cascade (poetry category) and Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (creative nonfiction); Stephanie G’Schwind’s Beautiful Flesh: A Body of Essays (anthology); and Todd Mitchell’s The Last Panther (juvenile literature).
  • Roze Hentschell delivered a paper, “Animating the Space of the Dead: The Walkers of St Paul’s Cathedral Nave,” on March 22nd at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in New Orleans. In an exciting turn of events, she was able to connect with former students CSU Students, Megan Palmer (Literature M.A. SP2006) and Katie Adkison (Literature M.A. SP2014) who were also giving presentations.
  • Todd Mitchell’s middle grade novel The Last Panther was recently selected by the Denver Bookbar for their new “Local to Local” program. Bookbar is purchasing several crates of the novel, as well as hundreds of other books, to donate to Denver area school children to encourage summer reading. If you’re ever in Denver, please support this incredibly generous program by stopping by Bookbar sometime and maybe buying a book or a beer from them.
  • Karen Montgomery Moore’s essay, “Affect, Anxiety, and the Abject Corpse in A Study in Scarlet” has been selected to receive the 2017 Earl Bargainnier Award.  The Earl is given to the best paper by a first-time presenter in the Mystery and Detective Fiction Caucus at the Popular Culture/American Culture Association National Conference.  She was told “we had a strong group of contenders, but the Earl Committee really appreciated your research and approach.” This paper was her master’s final project, and her advisers were Ellen Brinks and Debby Thompson. She was able to attend this conference with NTTF professional development funds. Karen will accept the award at the 2018 PCA/ACA National Conference next week, and attend the conference, again with support from NTTF professional development funds.
  • Emily Harnden was named a winner for the AWP Intro Journals Award in Creative Nonfiction for her essay, “9:47” and will be published by Puerto del Sol.
  • Colin Rauning wrote this history essay for the U.S. Naval Institute on how China’s period of sustained foreign intervention and imperialism in the 19th and 20th century, known as the Century of Humiliation, affects current U.S. policy in the South China Sea, https://blog.usni.org/posts/2018/03/12/how-chinas-century-of-humiliation-affects-u-s-policy-in-the-south-china-sea
  • Dan Beachy-Quick has an essay on influence, “Epistemic Flow,” published online on the Universite Grenoble Alpes journal Representations dans le monde anglophone: https://representations.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/spip.php?article46
  • Harrison Candelaria Fletcher had two image-text lyric essay hybrid things – “Slightest Edge” and “The Crossing” – picked up by Passages North. They’ll be out in Issue 40 in Spring 2019.
  • Doug Cloud’s article “The Rise of the Gay Warrior: Rhetorical Archetypes and the Transformation of Identity Categories” has been accepted for publication in Discourse & Communication.
  • Camille Dungy’s poem “Elegy beginning in the shade of Aunt Mary’s mulberry tree” is featured online as part of a special edition of Boston Review called What Nature? https://bostonreview.net/poetry/camille-dungy-elegy-beginning-shade-aunt-marys-mulberry-tree
  • Third year MFA candidate Claire Boyles has an interview on the Kenyon Review’s website, which you can read at: https://www.kenyonreview.org/conversation/claire-boyles/. Her story, “Chickens, 2019,” appears in the Mar/Apr journal.
  • Caleb Gonzalez presented his research paper, “Who Do We Call Author? Re-Imagining Authorship Through Decoloniality within Three Textual Examples of Mexican Adolescent Literature,” on March 24th at the 14th Annual Graduate History Association Conference at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. This year’s conference carried the theme “Critical Conversations: Breaking Barriers Through Discourse and Dialogue.” Caleb was the only presenter from anywhere west of Pennsylvania and the only graduate student of Creative Writing who attended and presented at the conference. Out of twenty-two presentations from PhD/masters students of History, Philosophy, and Literature, his paper won the top conference prize. In his presentation, Caleb encouraged the need for interdisciplinary work between History and Writing Studies.
  • John Calderazzo gave two nonfiction workshops at the Virginia C. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University: “Finding the Story You Need to Write” and “Using the Techniques of Fiction to Write Nonfiction.” He also spoke at ASU’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society: “Using Story Telling to Communicate Science and Research to the Public and Decision Makers.” On March 20, he was a guest speaker at CSU Writes.  “Blogging for Fun and Profit” describes how centuries of ship’s logs widened their interdisciplinary reach to become today’s online blogs; they also can help break writer’s block and offer low-pressure ways to draft scholarly writing.  On February 19, he teamed with business entrepreneur and former student Candyce Edelen (English, ’88!) to offer a story-telling workshop at the national B2B Marketing Conference in Phoenix.

EVENTS

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 via this Friendly URL: http://c-fund.us/d31

 

Tatiana Nekrasova-Beker and Tony Becker present “Guiding Second Language Students through Their Graduate Writing: Experiences, Challenges, & Strategies” as part of CSU Writes small panel/BIG TOPICS series, on Tuesday, April 3, from 4:00-5:00 p.m. in Lory Student Center 312.  This short panel session addresses common issues faculty face when giving feedback about the writing of their graduate students who are English language learners (ELLs). The session will explore some of the common issues and offer strategies for providing feedback.  For more details, see https://csuwrites.colostate.edu/guest-speakers/.

 

CSU Writes Workshop:  NTTF—Strategies for Pursuing Your Research (& Writing) Agenda, Tuesday, April 10, from 3:00-4:30 p.m. in Lory Student Center 308.  Non-tenure track faculty often face additional teaching/research obligations that impact their available time for writing manuscripts or grant applications. This workshop considers the advantages of pursuing a research agenda and ways NTTF might do so.  For more details, see https://csuwrites.colostate.edu/guest-speakers/.

SUBMISSIONS

Outstanding Undergraduate Writing Award in Composition, Rhetoric, & Literacy

Submissions Due:  April 9, 2018

The English Department is pleased to announce the Outstanding Undergraduate Writing Award in Composition, Rhetoric, & Literacy. The award is intended to recognize innovative ideas, critical thinking, and stellar communication in the broad area of writing studies. Students should consider submitting revised writing from their courses related to rhetoric and composition.

Multimodal and print submissions are welcomed.  Applicants must be registered undergraduate students. First place ($100) and second place ($50) prizes will be awarded. Winners will be honored at the English Department Awards Reception on Monday, April 24th from 4-6p.m. in the LSC North Ballroom.

Submission Guidelines: Students should submit a project that represents their best critical work in composition, rhetoric, and literacy studies.

  • Essays should be no longer than 15 pages (or equivalent). Shorter projects are also welcome.
  • Only one submission is allowed per student.
  • Please submit an electronic copy (only). Include with your submission a title page with your name, address, phone number, e-mail address, university ID number, and title of your project.
  • Also indicate the course in which the work was completed (if it was composed for a course) and the professor who taught the course.

Submission deadline:  Monday, April 9, 2018, at 5:00 p.m. Submissions should be sent to Tobi.Jacobi@colostate.edu

 

 

Outstanding Graduate Writing Award in Composition, Rhetoric, & Literacy

Submissions Due:  April 9, 2018

The English Department is pleased to announce the Outstanding Graduate Writing Award in Composition, Rhetoric, & Literacy, which recognizes outstanding writing and research in composition, rhetoric, and/or literacy studies at the graduate level.

This award is intended to recognize innovative ideas, critical thinking, and stellar communication in the broad area of writing studies.  Multimodal and print submissions are welcomed.  Applicants must be registered graduate students. First place ($100) and second place ($50) will be awarded. Winners will be honored at the English Department Awards Reception on Monday, April 24th from 4-6p.m. in the LSC North Ballroom.

Submission Guidelines: Students should submit a project that represents their best critical work in composition, rhetoric, and literacy studies.

  • Essays should be no longer than 20 pages (or equivalent). Shorter projects are also welcome.
  • Only one submission is allowed per student.
  • Please submit an electronic copy (only). Include with your submission a title page with your name, address, phone number, e-mail address, university ID number, and title of your project.
  • Also indicate the course in which the work was completed (if it was composed for a course) and the professor who taught the course. 

Submission deadline:  Monday, April 9, 2018, at 5:00 p.m. Submissions should be sent to Tobi.Jacobi@colostate.edu

 

 

Outstanding Literary Essay Awards

The English Department’s Literature Program announces the 14th annual Outstanding Literary Essay Awards contest, which recognizes outstanding critical writing and interpretive work in literary studies.  Applicants must be registered graduate or undergraduate English majors or minors.  Awards of $100 for first place, $75 for second place, and $50 for third place will be offered at both the graduate and undergraduate level.  Winners will be honored at the English Department Awards on Monday, April 23, 2018.

Submission Guidelines: Students should submit an essay that represents their best critical work in literary studies.  Undergraduate essays should be no longer than 15 pages and graduate essays should be no longer than 20 pages.  Shorter papers are welcome.  Only one submission is allowed per student.

Eligibility:     (1) Essay should be written for a course taken in the CSU English Dept.

(2)  Writer should be an English major or English minor

Submission deadline is Monday April 2, 2018, at 5:00 p.m. 

Please submit:

  • TWO clean copies, with no name, address, or instructor’s comments. Only a title and page numbers should appear on the paper.
  • Include with your essay a separate cover letter with your (a)name, (b)address, (c) phone number, (d) e-mail address, (e)university ID number, (f) title of your essay (g) course for which the essay was written and the professor who taught the course, and (h) indicate whether you are an undergraduate English major, minoring in English, or a graduate student at CSU.

Address your cover letter to: Professor Zach Hutchins, Department of English, Campus Delivery 1773, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO  80523-1773.  Cover letter and submissions can be dropped off at the English Department Office in Eddy Building, Room 359.