Alumnus Justin Hocking accepting his award
Alumnus Justin Hocking accepting his award
  • Alumnus Justin Hocking’s memoir The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld won the Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. The book is also: a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, listed as one of Ten Brilliant Books That Will Grab You from Page One in Kirkus Reviews and The Huffington Post, selected by Hector Tobar as his Favorite Book of 2014 in Publisher’s Weekly and Salon.com, A Library Journal Best Books of 2014 Selection, a Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2014 Selection, a Hudson’s Books 2014 Booksellers Favorite, a Book Club pick for April 2014 on The Nervous Breakdown, and a #3 Denver Post Bestseller.
  • Moriah Kent, a graduate student in the TEFL/TESL program, was awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship grant. She will spend 10 months teaching English at a Bulgarian secondary school. She chose to apply to Bulgaria because she wanted to gain experience in the European educational system and has long admired art and culture of the Balkan region.
  • Tim Amidon was elected to the Committee on the Responsibilities and Standing of Academic Faculty (CoRSAF).
  • A free pdf chapbook of Dan Beachy-Quick’s early sections of “A Quiet Book” is available at Essay Press: http://www.essaypress.org/ep-23/
  • Leslee Becker has received a writing residency/fellowship at Brush Creek Foundation in Wyoming.
  • Pam Coke’s article  “Making Meaning of Experience: Navigating the Transformation from Graduate Student to Tenure-Track Professor,” co-authored with her graduate school colleagues Sheila Benson and Monie Hayes, appears in the April 2015 issue of The Journal of Transformative Education.  You can access the article here: http://jtd.sagepub.com/content/current.
  • The members of NCTE@CSU held officer elections at their meeting on Wednesday, April 22, 2015. Congratulations to our new slate of student officers: Jenna Franklin (President); Emily Rice (Vice President); Paul Binkley (Secretary); Ian McCreary (Treasurer); and Morgan Bennett (Marketing Coordinator). Thank you to our outgoing officers: Anton Gerth (President); Belle Kraxberger (Vice President); Alex Andrews (Secretary); Jenna Franklin (Treasurer); and Emily Rice (Marketing Coordinator). Faculty sponsor Pam Coke is thankful for you and proud of you.
  • Sue Doe presented preliminary results of the TILT-funded course redesign study, “Engaged Learning Through Writing: A Faculty Development Project” alongside Mary Pilgrim (Math) and Hilary Spriggs (Math) on Saturday April 18 at the Rocky Mountain Regional Conference of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), at Colorado College. Preliminary results from their study suggest outcomes similar to those found in a similar study undertaken with the Department of Psychology — that student learning is improved at a statistically significant level by low-stakes engagement writing in the disciplinary classroom. The interdisciplinary study group, which also includes Kate Kiefer, will also present their project to the CSU Math Department on April 27.
  • Camille Dungy spoke at the CLA’s Great Conversations on April 23. Topic: How the environment is changing how we write and why.
  • Bruce Ronda’s chapter “Imagination and Apocalypse: Christopher Cranch’s Novels for Young Readers” appears in Romantic Education in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. National and Transatlantic Contexts (New York: Routledge, 2015).  Also: he has signed a pre-publication contract with University of Georgia Press for The Fate of Transcendentalism.
  • Cory Holland just published a paper in American Speech: Bayley, Robert, and Cory Holland. “Variation in Chicano English: the case of final (z) devoicing.” American Speech 89, no. 4 (2014): 385-407. http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/content/89/4/385.full.pdf+html And a book review in the LinguistList on “Sounds Interesting” by J.C. Wells. https://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?SubID=35993937
  •  As part of a short but nice review of Dan Robinson’s forthcoming novel, Death of a Century (out June 5), Publishers Weekly wrote, “Set in 1922, Robinson’s atmospheric tale of betrayal and revenge paints a passionate picture of the Lost Generation, those who came of age during WWI.”
  • Kristin George Bagdanov’s poem “Moon Body” was accepted for publication by Berkeley Poetry Review.  She has also accepted an offer to attend UC Davis’s PhD in Literature program, where she will be a Provost’s Fellow in the fall.
  • Mandi Casolo has accepted an offer of admission to the University of Houston’s English Literature and Creative Writing PhD program with a teaching fellowship, and was awarded the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Fiction.

Now Taking Applications: English Department Communications Internship

Number of positions: 2
Internship term: Fall 2015 Semester, 15 weeks, August 24th – December 11th, 2015
Total credits: 2
Hours: 80 hours (40 per credit hour), approximately 5 per week
Stipend: $500
Application Deadline: Friday, May 8th by 12:00 p.m.

The English Department is looking for two engaged, self-motivated, responsible, creative, and enthusiastic CSU students, undergraduate or graduate, with good communication and writing skills to help tell the story of the English Department. The interns in this position will help facilitate communication and community with students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends of the English Department.

Interns will spend most of their time researching, interviewing, attending events, writing, and developing content — both for print and online. A major responsibility of this internship will be creating content for the department’s blog. Interns will work directly with the English department’s Communications Coordinator to meet departmental communication needs and complete various content development projects as assigned, including but not limited to creating profiles of people (alumni, faculty & staff, students), programs and projects; conducting interviews; providing event coverage (which would include attendance and photos, along with other modes of recording where relevant); and reporting departmental news and upcoming events.

For these internship positions, some prior reporting or blogging experience and/or education is preferred, as well as an understanding of principles for writing for the web and strong communication skills, both in person and in text. We also prefer applicants who are familiar with the English Department, its programs, people, and events – and who are willing to learn more. Content will be developed in various modes, and therefore skill with technologies such as sound recording and photography, as well as image and sound editing experience is preferred. We are also looking for interns with good people skills, the ability to participate in effective verbal and written exchanges, understanding that as they attend events and conduct interviews and such, they are acting as a “goodwill ambassador” for the department.

Applicants should email or hand deliver to the English Department main office the following: a cover letter, résumé, contact information for three references (phone and email), and three writing samples (plus multimedia samples, if applicable) by the application deadline to:

English Department
c/o Jill Salahub: Communications Coordinator
Jill.Salahub@colostate.edu
A105 Behavioral Sciences Bldg.
1773 Campus Delivery
Ft. Collins, CO 80523-1773