The latest about publications, lectures, and awards from English faculty and staff.
Department of English course coordinator Jess McKenna was honored with a College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Service Award for 2014-5, recognizing her exemplary efforts in the department. She received the award at the CLA Staff Appreciation Ceremony January 21.
M. J. Fitzgerald and John Wright were quoted in a Star Tribune article about author Harper Lee and the "sequel" to To Kill a Mockingbird.
Elaine Auyoung contributed an essay on how Tolstoy uses details in Anna Karenina to The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine, which was just released from Oxford University Press in January. She gave a talk called "How to Believe in Mr. Collins," about how Jane Austen trains readers to learn how her characters think, at the International Conference on Narrative in Chicago (March 6-8).
Charles Baxter's new book, There's Something I Want You to Do, published by Pantheon, has been reviewed widely and positively, including in The New York Times Sunday Book Review and The New York Review of Books.
Timothy Brennan has been invited to the Franklin Humanities Center at Duke University to lead, with Professor Keya Ganguly (CSCL), a two-session mini-seminar on "materialism and left-Hegelian thought today" April 14 and 16. The title of the seminar is "Materialist Conservation."
Michael Dennis Browne (Emeritus) published The Voices: Poems, with Carnegie Mellon University Press. The first publication reading will take place April 16 in Andersen Library at the University. His credo "All the Beautiful Things," with music by Timothy Takach, was performed at the Minneapolis Downtown Biennial Choral Festival, February 15. He completed "A Blessing of Cranes" for music by Abbie Betinis. The oratorio To Be Certain of the Dawn was performed at Oregon State University, Corvallis (January 29), and scheduled for San Diego State University (April 25) and Festival Chorale Oregon, Salem (April 26). The latter is the 19th performance of the work since November 1995.
Maria Damon (Emerita) published a chapbook of x-stitch visual poems, XXX, with Nous-zot Press. Her essay "HeavenHell, USA 1946-1965: Beat Poetry" is published in The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry, edited by Walter Kalaidjian (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Recent journal articles include "'A Voca(liza)tion for Longing': Kinship, History and Absence chez Nathaniel Mackey" in Talisman (winter 2015; special section on Nathaniel Mackey edited by Joseph Donahue). She published reviews of Elise Cowen. Poems and Fragments, edited by Tony Trigilio, in Journal of Beat Studies, and Christine Wertheim. mUutter-bAbel in Rain Taxi Review of Books (winter 2014). Her creative projects include "The Ceramic Age for Alan Read," acquired by Bury Museum and Gallery, Bury, England, UK, February 2015; "The Slush Pile: My Brain on Yarn" (textile assemblage) in Baum Bim Baum Bim Baum Bim Bim, A Bad Penny Review, April 2015; two cross-stitch visual poems and short essay "The Uneasy" in Truck, February 2015; three textile visual poems in The Portable Boog Reader 8: Part II; and "Inspiration: Maria Damon" in Stitches, January 2015. She gave the Oppen Memorial Lecture, San Francisco Poetry Center, UCSF, December 13, 2014.
Ray Gonzalez's book Soul Over Lightning (University of Arizona Press) is a finalist for a 2015 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. His poems and fiction are included in two new anthologies: Fightin' Words: 25 Years of Poetry and Prose from P.E.N. Oakland (Heyday Books) and Field of Fantasies: Baseball Stories of the Strange and Supernatural (Nightshade Books). His poetry appears in new issues of Caliban and Terrain.
Michael Hancher published "Digital Dictionaries: Introduction" in Dictionaries 35 (2014), an essay introducing revised versions of papers presented at a session he organized for the annual meeting of the MLA held in Boston in January 2013. Jennifer Howard subsequently interviewed the panel participants for a substantial article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, "In the Digital Era, Our Dictionaries Read Us" (March 11, 2013).
Qadri Ismail received Imagine Fund support for his project Rights and the Wronged.
Nabil Matar published "The Qur'an in English Writings, 1453-1697" in Christian-Muslim Relations (Brill, 2014), edited by David Thomas and John Chesworth, and "Paradise Lost as an Islamic Epic: Muhammad Anani's Translation" in English Studies, 2014 (online).
Toni A. H. McNaron (Emerita) recently published a spiritual memoir entitled Into the Paradox: Conservative Spirit, Feminist Politics. She continues teaching short classes at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum ("Books in the Garden") and through Continuing Education. Finally, she facilitates an informal discussion of Shakespeare's plays in her home called "Shakespeare in the Living Room."
Paula Rabinowitz's book American Pulp was reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement February 11 and in The New Yorker January 5. She was quoted in an article about paperback publisher Ian Ballantine in Investors Business Daily. She was interviewed about the book by radio stations in Ireland and England.
Peter Reed (Emeritus) was awarded a Professional Development Grant for Retirees, through the University of Minnesota Retirees Association (UMRA), to work on a further book on the artwork of writer Kurt Vonnegut. This project will focus on art created subsequent to the period of that contained in Kurt Vonnegut Drawings, edited by Nanette Vonnegut and to which he contributed. In the new collection, he will work jointly with the artist Joe Petro III, who silkscreened and reproduced most of Vonnegut's post-1986 work.
Marty Roth (Emeritus) is currently working on a book about change, Disruption and Difference: An Ethnography of Change.
Andrew Scheil was appointed the Donald V. Hawkins Associate Professor of English for a three-year term (beginning July 2015).
