CSU Lagoon by by CSU student Christian Knoll
CSU Lagoon in Fall, by CSU student Christian Knoll
  • Ricki Ginsberg was elected President-Elect of the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of the National Council of Teachers of English (ALAN). She will be organizing the 2020 ALAN Workshop, which will involve 80+ young adult authors.
  • The Last Panther, by Todd Mitchell, won a 2018 Green Prize for Sustainable Literature. Todd also recently conducted a novel writing workshop in Windsor at the Clearview Library.
  • Dr. Barbara Sebek and Judith Lane will sing in a concert of music by mystic composers and poets on Saturday, November 10 at 7:00 p.m. and Sunday, November 11 at 3:00 p.m.  Both performances will be held at Plymouth Congregational Church.  Laudamus, a small auditioned choir, will include the poetry of Christopher Smart, St. John of the Cross, Hildegard von Bingen and others set to music by Rachmaninoff, Bortniansky, Anton Arensky, and Wiliam Albright.  Christopher Smart’s texts are illuminated by an amazingly inventive accompaniment by harp and organ.  Tickets are available at the door or on line at laudamus.org.
  • Debby Thompson’s essay collection, entitled Dog Relations: Essays on Living in a Trans-species Family, was the winner of the Red Hen Press Nonfiction Prize and will be published next year.
  • The Short Story Project has selected two of Steven Schwartz’s stories, “Seeing Miles” and “The Last Communist,” for its website.  https://www.shortstoryproject.com/writers/steven-schwartz/
  • Yash Seyedbagheri’s flash piece, “Mr. Sandman” has been accepted at Out of The Gutter Online.
  • Fabiola Ehlers-Zavala has been selected by the TESOL International Association Board of Directors to serve as member of the Research Professional Council (RPC), effective November 1, 2018.  This is a one-year term with the option to renew at the end of the appointment.  The RPC “informs, supports and guides TESOL International Association’s research initiatives and priorities.”
  • Aparna Gollapudi’s paper, “Girl Acting/Acting a Girl — A Young Actress on the Eighteenth-Century stage” was presented by proxy at the East-Central/American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference in Staunton, Virginia.
  • The Summer Sustainability Workshop’s instructors, Paul Hellmund and Kristie Yelinek, are featured in an upcoming course through ACUE (the Association of College and University Educators), “Effective Teaching Practices with a Concentration in Career Guidance.” Upon successful completion of courses through ACUE, instructors and professors earn a certificate that is endorsed by both ACUE and the American Council on Education. ACUE attended one day of class this past summer to interview both the instructors and students about the pedagogy and practices in the classroom that related to career readiness. The instructors and students are featured in two specific modules: “Embedding Career Guidance in Your Course” and “Developing Students’ Career-Ready Skills.”  The course will be available at a future date, but two portions from the module can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/290580557/9dadfd701f and here: https://vimeo.com/290579813/610ec5ebbf.
  • Roze Hentschell will be presented a paper, “‘Ungracious Pastors’: The College of Minor Canons at St Paul’s Cathedral,” at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in Albuquerque, NM.
  • At the Western States Rhetoric and Literacy Conference (November 2-3, New Mexico State University) Sarah Sloane explored the rhetorical dimensions of online responses to Dr. Christine Ford’s testimony during Judge Kavanaugh’s public hearings leading to his confirmation as an Associate Judge of the Supreme Court. Sloane studied three online sources (www.girlwithacane.com; the Fiamengo Files; and Lefty Liars) through Robin Lakoff’s four categories of rhetorical effect in recent political discourse.
  • Sarah Sloane’s short piece on nonfiction interpretation, “Apparitional Knowledge:  The Ghosts That Writers Fail to See,” was included at the NonfictionNow conference in Phoenix on November 3. Sloane did attend in person because of the conflict with WSRLC (above), but her Húslestur’s facilitator is generously including Sloane’s Apparitional Knowledge in the roundtable on Hauntings. NB:  Conference coordinators characterize Icelandic Húslesturs as lively conversations held around a roundtable. In contrast, many Icelandic dictionaries define it as a venerable cultural ritual where “gatherings of Icelanders listen to each other read books aloud during evenings in the spa.” Bring a towel.
  • During the CSU Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality Symposium at CSU campus (October 19-21), Sarah Sloane’s proposed VR project was chosen by a team of eight computer science graduate students.  During a 48-hour, intense competition among 10 teams within an all-night “Create-a-thon,” this team’s mixed reality “Making Waves,” initiated by Sloane’s concept, is a virtual space where participants visualize sound waves and create music through virtual sound manipulation. Sloane’s proposal imagined using music and other arts as innovative modality to complement more traditional research methodologies, which “Making Waves” allows. The team’s rendition of Sloane’s project proposal won “The Land Grant Prize.” https://www.research.colostate.edu/create/teams
  • Finally, Sarah Sloane’s short prose piece, “Memory is Antipode to Travel” is currently on exhibit in the Griffin Foundation Gallery at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art. She is one of ten multidisciplinary Semester at Sea faculty to choose two art objects from the Allicar Museum’s permanent collection and write about their connection with travel. Sloane chose Colorado artist Vance Kirkland’s (1904-1981) mid-Modern painting “Mysteries of Space,” which Kirkland created by dipping wooden dowels in paint and outlining possible worlds in a primitive pointillism. Sarah found Kirkland’s counterpoint in Wolfgang Volz’s (1948- ) “Columbus Circle,” a car crash rendered in a gelatin silver print on vinyl. Sloane writes in the exhibit and elsewhere how the two images reveal an ideal of travel versus the hard facts of its painful interruptions:  a casual traveler’s superficial, synchronic wandering the world punctuated by an unpredictable, diachronic stumble into piercing memory. The exhibit was curated by CSU art historian Professor Eleanor Moseman and runs in the art museum from October 5 to December 14.
  • Alice Stopher’s story “estuaries” won Crazyhorse‘s 2018 Crazyshorts! Short-Short Fiction Competition. The story will appear in the spring issue of the magazine, Crazyhorse no. 95.
  • David Milofsky is very pleased to announce that had has signed a contract with the University of Wisconsin Press to publish his sixth novel. The book will be published next fall.
  • The second ForkSocket reading of the semester will be held Friday, November 9th, at 7:00 PM at Wolverine Farms Letterpress and Publick House. Our readers will be MFA candidates Hannah Bright, Esther Hayes, and Alick McCallum.

Beyond Academia workshop poster

Words for the Earth Award Flyer