News of Note Week of November 17th

Migrating geese take a break on Ingersoll Hall’s front lawn

• Last week, TEFL/TESL faculty and students attended the Annual Co-TESOL Convention in Denver (November 14-15, 2014). Three student-led presentations were delivered at the convention: Angela Sharpe, Moriah Kent and Tatiana Nekrasova-Beker discussed the benefits of Using Corpora in the L2 Classroom; Kenshin Huang and Tatiana Nekrasova-Beker shared their insights on Engaging Asian Students in Classroom Interactions, and Reyila Hadeer and Victor Kuan presented a session on Teacher’s Support during Project-based Learning. Due to the generous support of INTO-CSU, 16 graduate students attended the convention this year.
• Sarah Sloane gave two presentations, one at a roundtable and another on a featured panel at Writing on the Range, a conference held at University of Denver for college and university faculty from Colorado (and a couple from New Mexico) who do scholarship in the field of writing studies.Her roundtable participation included a discussion of state guidelines for advanced composition classes and a proposal for an advanced writing course that starts by reading Colorado prepper literature. Looking historically at the various permutations of prepper responses to a culture of fear as it has informed 1980s survivalist literature, 1990s prepper handbooks, and contemporary descriptions of potential disasters and 72-hour bug-out bags, students will examine the shaky evidence and rhetorical appeals embedded in YouTube videos, podcasts, social media, listserves like “Vegas Preppers,” and blogs about prepping. Students will then move from reading these flawed rhetorical constructions to composing their own well-supported arguments on a wide range of topics. Students will develop the rhetorical sensitivity and critical acumen necessary to compose within more typical rhetorical situations and Colorado contexts.

  Her featured panel presentation discussed the Colorado State University Composition Program, its location within local, regional, and state contexts, and our program’s collaborative efforts to bring state-of-the-art facilities to support critical analyses of websites, blogs, podcasts, prezis, and new notions of intellectual property, copyright, credibility, the material and the virtual, credibility, representation, and all the many forms, genres, and questions that digital systems, digital publics, and online social networks allow.

• Leif Sorensen’s essay “Against the Post-Apocalyptic: Narrative Closure in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One,” on the most recent novel by MacArthur genius grant recipient Colson Whitehead is now available in the current issue of Contemporary Literature.

  Professor Sorensen also attended the annual meeting of the Modernist Studies Association in Pittsburgh in early November and presented a paper, “Fragmented Ancestors,” on the literary recoveries of Américo Paredes and D’Arcy McNickle.

• Graduating English Education student Clint Pendley has accepted a position teaching seventh grade Literacy and English Language Development at Columbia Middle School in Aurora, CO.  Congratulations, Clint!
• Greyrock Review is now accepting submissions! Greyrock Review is an undergraduate anthology at Colorado State University. Submissions are open from October 6, 2014 to December 1, 2014 for original work in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual arts. Any undergraduate at CSU may submit their work at https://greyrockreview.submittable.com/submit for free and will be notified by December 15, 2014. Any questions may be sent to editor.csu@gmail.com

News of Note Week of November 9th

image by Jill Salahub

• SueEllen Campbell ran a workshop on teaching climate change in literature classes at the Western Literature Association conference on November 7 in Victoria, B.C.
• VCU’s literary journal, Blackbird, has published three of Camille Dungy’s poems: http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v13n2/poetry/dungy_c/index.shtml
• Ecotone, a literary journal published by the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, recently published “Differentiation,” an essay that chronicles some of the highlights of the trip Camille Dungy took to Barrow, Alaska this February: http://www.ecotonejournal.com/index.php/articles/details/differentiation
• Sasha Steensen will be reading in Iowa City at Prairie Lights Books on November 18th and in Chicago at Danny’s on November 19th.
• Debby Thompson’s “Strange Rays, Indeed,” a personal essay about radioactivity, has been nominated by Chautauqua for a Pushcart Prize.

News of Note Week of November 3rd

Fall lingers at Ingersoll Hall, even as the first winter snow blows in. Image by Jill Salahub

• John Calderazzo will soon give a talk about science communication at the National Wildlife Research Center in Fort Collins.
• Tobi Jacobi presented a workshop on historical documents from the 1920s New York State Training School for Girls at the Hudson Area Library in late October.
• Tobi Jacobi presented a critical paper on the popular Netflix series Orange is the New Black and women’s prison writing at the Western States Rhetoric and Literacy conference in Reno, NV in early November.
• Sasha Steensen and Martin Corless-Smith interviewed one another for The Conversant. You can read the discussion here: http://theconversant.org/?p=8495.
• Karen Montgomery Moore’s proposal “Reading the Dead Bodies on Bones” was accepted for presentation at the College of Liberal Arts Graduate Student Symposium with the theme “Constructing Humanity” at the University of Nevada-Reno in February. She adds, “They extended their proposal deadline to the 15th! I’d love company!”
• On Saturday, November 1st, eleven English department faculty members helped award $14,000 in scholarship money at the CSU Senior Scholarship Day. In conjunction with the Admissions Office, Dan Beachy-Quick, Tatiana Nekrasova-Beker, Ellen Brinks, Pam Coke, Ashley Davies, Katie Hoffman, Zach Hutchins, Tobi Jacobi, Ed Lessor, Sarah Sloane, and Leif Sorensen conducted writing workshops with and read timed essays from 91 Colorado high school seniors. We are thankful for their hard work!
• On October 10-11th, undergraduate and graduate students from the CSU English department attended the Colorado Language Arts Society Regional Conference at the School of Mines in Golden, CO.  Past NCTE@CSU President and current student teacher Tyler Arko served on two separate panels.  Pam Coke moderated one of these panels, and she presented a second session with CSU alum Steven Ray Parker, who is now a full-time English teacher at Kinard Core Knowledge School in Fort Collins.  Student attendees included current NCTE@CSU President Anton Gerth, NCTE@CSU Vice-President Belle Kraxberger, and NCTE@CSU member Jenna Franklin.  Louann Reid and Antero Garcia attended as well; Antero will be a featured presenter at next year’s conference.
• For English Department graduating undergraduates and MA graduate students: Thursday, November 13th, 3:30 – 5:00 p.m., Academic Village C141 (Engineering Hall). “Pursuing an MA or PhD in English: Everything You Wanted to Know.” This workshop will focus on the following: what advanced work in higher education entails; how to identify good graduate programs for your needs; what to expect from the application process and how to maximize your chances of success. After a presentation, faculty from various areas of English will be on hand to answer any questions you have and to speak personally about their own experiences.

News of Note Week of October 27th

Blue sky over Ingersoll Hall in Fall, image by Jill Salahub

• Gerry Delahunty presented his paper on “Lexical semantics: How much English teachers need to know?” at the 7th International Conference on English Language Teaching (ELT) in China, in Nanjing, China.
• Lisa Langstraat and Sue Doe are delighted to announce that their book-length collection, Generation Vet: Student-Veterans, Composition, and the Post-9/11 University, has been released by Utah State Press and the University Press of Colorado.  Sue and Lisa celebrated by giving a presentation at CSU’s first-ever national veteran symposium on Thursday, October 30. Their presentation focused on “Pathologization and Sanitization: Two Problematic Extremes of University Relationships with Military and Veteran Populations” which is based on their ongoing longitudinal study of over two dozen student-veterans and their transitional literacies.
• Jonathan Starke (MFA Fiction/Nonfiction 2011) has essays in the current issues of North American Review and River Teeth and an essay in the annual Baltimore Review print issue. He also has a short story in the summer issue of Shenandoah. He’s spending the winter vagabonding through France, Croatia, Germany, and anywhere one can find authentic handmade soaps and local beers.
• Upcoming 4×4 Reading, November 4th – Reading will be Hannah Kezema from Naropa University, Aditi Machado from Denver University, Caroline Rothnie from CU–Boulder, and CSU’s own Melissa Hohl. University Center for the Arts , 7:30pm.
• Greyrock Review is now accepting submissions! Greyrock Review is an undergraduate anthology at Colorado State University. Submissions are open from October 6, 2014 to December 1, 2014 for original work in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual arts. Any undergraduate at CSU may submit their work at https://greyrockreview.submittable.com/submit for free and will be notified by December 15, 2014. Any questions may be sent to editor.csu@gmail.com

News of Note Week of October 20th

Ingersoll Hall in Fall, image by Jill Salahub

• SueEllen Campbell and John Calderazzo recently gave a talk at Northern Arizona University, “The Real Work: Facing Climate Change.” They were also interviewed on the local NPR station. John also spoke to an environmental communications class.
• A portfolio of essays on “The Work of Poetry” has just been released by Free Verse, including, among various riches, work by Matthew Cooperman and Dan Beachy-Quick. The special feature marks the 25th edition of Free Verse, and can be found at http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/Archives/2014/prose/WorkOfPoetry.html
• The most recent issue of Shakespeare Studies, vol. 42, is now available. This issue includes Barbara Sebek’s contribution to a forum on “Diet and Identity in Shakespeare’s England,” edited by Kim Coles and Gitanjali Shahani Chopra.
• Todd Mitchell ran two writing and craft sessions at ReadCon — a High Plains Library District Event in Greeley to celebrate texts and the creation of texts. Here’s an article from Thursday’s Greeley Tribune with more information on the event: http://www.greeleytribune.com/entertainment/13486821-113/readcon-greeley-downtown-event Lit Pick recently did an author interview with Todd Mitchell. If you’re curious to learn how love letters, DFW, and snakes have influenced Todd, you can find the interview here: http://www.litpick.com/author/todd-mitchell
• Daniel Owen, INTO adjunct, has accepted an appointment as an English Language Fellow from the Department of State.  He will have a 10-month Fellowship in Yamousoukro, Cote d’Ivoire.  He will be teaching at National Polytechnic Institute Felix Houphouet Boigny (INPHB). INPHB is a prestigious public university with undergraduate and graduate degree programs in sciences, engineering, and business.  He will be teaching general English courses and business English at both the undergraduate and graduate level.
• Sue Ring deRosset, (MA, Creative Nonfiction, Summer 2013), teaches creative writing workshops at Front Range Community College, recently taught a workshop through Northern Colorado Writers, and is a freelance editorial consultant for memoirists and novelists. Chapter 1 of her thesis, a memoir, appeared in the Spring 2013 Front Range Review as a stand-alone essay titled “The Chambered Nautilus.” Since graduation, she’s had poems published in the Rocky Mountain NP Poetic Inventory and online, and an essay published in the Fort Collins Courier. A book on vultures, the first in a series of limited-edition, hand-bound, letterpress books, is forthcoming from Wolverine Farm Publishing.
• Greyrock Review Fundraiser Reading at Cranknstein Tuesday, October 28, 2014 at 7 pm to raise money for publication. Camille Dungy, Matthew Cooperman and others will read, and there will be many fabulous prizes!
• Greyrock Review is now accepting submissions! Greyrock Review is an undergraduate anthology at Colorado State University. Submissions are open from October 6, 2014 to December 1, 2014 for original work in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual arts. Any undergraduate at CSU may submit their work at https://greyrockreview.submittable.com/submit for free and will be notified by December 15, 2014. Any questions may be sent to editor.csu@gmail.com

News of Note Week of October 13th

image by Jill Salahub

• Dan Beachy-Quick is writer-in-residence at Susquehanna University this week. He is visiting Susquehanna as part of the Raji-Syman Visiting Writers Series, and will be giving a reading while there.
• Tobi Jacobi and Dr. Laura Rogers (Albany College of Health Science and Pharmacy) will deliver a talk entitled “Becoming Incorrigible: The Girls of the Hudson Training School, 1921-32” at the Hudson Area Library in upstate, NY on Oct. 29th.
• Derek Askey (MFA fiction, 2013) has accepted the position of Editorial Assistant with The Sun in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
• Ben Findlay (MFA Spring 2014) started work in Minneapolis as the Development & Publicity assistant at Coffee House Press.
• Greyrock Review is now accepting submissions! Greyrock Review is an undergraduate anthology at Colorado State University. Submissions are open from October 6, 2014 to December 1, 2014 for original work in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual arts. Any undergraduate at CSU may submit their work at https://greyrockreview.submittable.com/submit for free and will be notified by December 15, 2014. Any questions may be sent to editor.csu@gmail.com
• The first fundraising event for the 2015 Greyrock Review is coming up fast! On October 28th, please join them at CRANKNSTEIN (located in Old Town Fort Collins) for a spectacular reading featuring CSU professors such as Matthew Cooperman and Camille Dungy, as well as graduate and undergraduate CSU writers! During this event there will also be a raffle featuring prizes from local businesses such as Mugs, Bean Cycle, Momo Lolo, and more! Raffle tickets are only $3 each! Other raffle prizes include various novels donated by Old Firehouse Books. Pre-sales for raffle tickets will be held in the Clark C building on October 27 and 28. On these two days only you can get a tasty doughnut AND a raffle ticket for only $3! “Hope to see you all there and thank you for your support!”

News of Note Week of October 6th

The leaves turn color as renovations on Eddy Hall continue

• Samantha Iocovetto (MA in Creative Nonfiction, 2014) has a craft essay, “Defining the Ideal Essay,” on the Brevity blog. You can read it here: http://brevity.wordpress.com/2014/10/01/defining-the-ideal-essay/
• Dan Beachy-Quick gave a talk and a reading at University of Northern Texas.
• Tobi Jacobi has been selected to deliver the 14th annual Women’s Studies Boyer Lecture on Thursday, Oct. 23.  The Harriet Patsy Boyer Memorial lecture and reception will begin at 4pm in the Grey Rock Room in Lory Student Center.  Tobi’s talk is titled “Seeing Beyond Our Feet: Understanding the Possibilities and Limits of Feminist Writing Workshops Behind Bars.”
• Sasha Steensen recently read at the University of Nevada Las Vegas as part of the Black Mountain Institute’s alumni series.  She was interviewed by KNPR, Nevada’s National Public Radio.  You can listen to that interview here: http://knprnews.org/post/black-mountain-institute-hosts-poet-sasha-steensen
• Six sections of Felicia Zamora’s (MFA 2012) long poem “Quotient” were accepted for publication in the Spring 2015 issue of Crazyhorse, and her poem “{Honest} Random {Caused by Desire to De-Categorize} Self” has been selected for publication in the next issue of the Carolina Quarterly. Her manuscript Quotient was selected as a finalist for the 2014 Sawtooth Poetry Prize and a semifinalist in the 2014 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Prize. Her set of poems was chosen as a finalist in The Iowa Review Awards in poetry 2014, and her chapbook Imbibe {et alia} here was selected as a semifinalist in the 2014 New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM Chapbook Contest.
• Greyrock Review is now accepting submissions for fiction, non-fiction, poetry, visual art, and cover art. Students can go to greyockreview.submittable.com/submit to submit and read the guidelines. Submissions are open through December 1st.

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Fall Advising for Spring 2015 Registration

English department advising has changed over the last year or so. Basically, Academic Support Coordinators (ASCs) (Mandy Billings and Joanna Doxey) advise English majors who have completed up to 60 credits, and regular faculty advise students who have completed more than 60 credits and mentor students regardless of the number of credits they have completed. Mandy and Joanna’s office is Clark C-140.

English freshmen and sophomores should meet with an ASC for pre-registration advising for spring semester 2015. If you are uncertain who your ASC is, you can check your assignment on your RAMweb account.  Please contact Sheila Dargon to schedule your advising appointment with either Mandy or Joanna.

Juniors, seniors, and transfer students with 60 or more credits will be advised and given their advising codes by their English department faculty advisor/mentor. They have also been assigned an ASC and can schedule an appointment with Mandy or Joanna through Sheila Dargon.

Please schedule your appointment in advance of your RAMWeb Registration date.

News of Note: Week of September 22nd

image by Jill Salahub

• Dan Beachy-Quick will be reading with Julie Carr and Mathias Svalina on Tuesday Sept. 30 from 7-9 p.m. at the Forge Publick House (232 Walnut Street, Fort Collins).
• Antero Garcia published a co-authored article in the journal Race, Ethnicity, and Education. It is called “Toward a teacher solidarity lens: former teachers of color (re)envisioning educational research” and can be accessed here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13613324.2014.946494#.VCWEyUj3kqMNext week, Antero will be co-presenting at The Digital Shift conference – an online conference held for librarians. His presentation is called “Creating a Collective Culture of Education: Classroom/Library Partnerships that Support Students’ Academic and Civic Learning.” For the first time, registration is free and can be found here: http://www.thedigitalshift.com/tds/libraries-at-the-center/speakers/
• Kristin George Bagdanov’s manuscript “Being a Body” was a finalist in Cleveland State University’s First Book Contest. https://www.csuohio.edu/class/poetry-center/2014-first-book-and-open-book-competition-results

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Creative and Performing Arts Scholarship Competition Deadline: Friday, October 3rd by 4:00 p.m. Find out more about this scholarship here: https://englishcsu.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/creative-and-performing-arts-scholarship-competition-in-creative-writing/.

News of Note for the Week of September 8th

Pulitzer Prize-winning Beat poet & eco-activist Gary Snyder will be reading at the Organ Recital Hall this Wednesday, Sept. 17th, at 7:30 p.m. NO TICKETS ARE REQUIRED. It is first come, first served, so people should arrive early.

In other news:

• This summer, Jacket2 released a feature on the second-wave Objectivist poet John Taggart, edited by Matthew Cooperman. A collection of 17 essays, appreciations, reviews, poems and career appraisals, the 200 page feature included, among other things, a group poem, “Seeds Sown for John Taggart,” composed by Matthew and recent MFAs, including Joanna Doxey, Lincoln Greenhaw, Anamika Dugger, Kaelyn Riley, Hannah Holler Blair, Sarah Louise Pieplow, Rachel Linnea Brown and Mickey Kenney. The poem (and the feature) evolved out of a Graduate Poetry Workshop back in 2011, where they read Taggart’s new and selected poems, Is Music. More information can be found at: http://jacket2.org/feature/reasons-singing-john-taggart
• EJ Levy gave a reading at Politics & Prose in DC last weekend; she will read at DePauw, give the Beck lecture at Denison, and read at the Kenyon Literary Festival next month as winner of the 2014 GLCA New Writers Award in Fiction. Her essay on marriage appeared in Salon this summer: http://www.salon.com/2014/07/29/im_a_lesbian_marrying_a_man/
• Sasha Steensen and Dan Beachy-Quick have published essays in the Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art.  Sasha’s essay, “With Pleasure: Gertrude Stein and the Sentence Diagram” can be found at http://www.taosjournalofpoetry.com/with-pleasure-gertrude-stein-and-the-sentence-diagram/, and Dan’s essay,  “Of Time and Timelessness in the Poetic Sentence,” can be found at http://www.taosjournalofpoetry.com/of-time-and-timelessness-in-the-poetic-sentence/
• Debby Thompson’s essay “The Four Stages of Cancer,” which was published in Upstreet, has been nominated by that journal for a Pushcart Prize.
• Kristina Quynn taught a TILT seminar this week, “Reading Closely: Harnessing the Power of Literary Studies to Boost Student Learning.” In attendance were CSU faculty and graduate students from a range of departments, including Veterinary Science, Economics, Sociology, Computer Science, and many more.
• Poems by Mary Crow have been accepted for publication in several literary magazines: “And Then” by Illuminations, “Blown Away” by Mojave River Review, “Full Circle” by Big Muddy, and “Double Agent” by Driftwood Press Literary Review.

News of Note for the Week of September 1st

Many English Department faculty offices are located in Ingersoll Hall during the Eddy Hall renovations, (image by Jill Salahub)

English Department Office Hours: The English Office hours are 7:45 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. (closed during lunch, 12:00-1:00 p.m.). We are located in the Behavioral Sciences Building, Room A105.

• Omnidawn will be publishing a chapbook by Dan Beachy-Quick titled Shields & Shards & Stitches & Songs this spring. Poems from it have just appeared on The Academy of American Poets “poem-a-day” site as well as large selection at the online journal Fogged Clarity.
• Leslee Becker has received a writing residency at the Brush Creek Foundation Ranch in Wyoming.
• Tatiana Nekrasova-Beker, Yana Rozanova, and Tony Becker will be presenting their topic, Examining ESP Course Materials: Language Exposure and Learning Opportunities, on September 26th at the 2014 American Association for Corpus Linguistics in Flagstaff, AZ.
• Matthew Cooperman and Dan Beachy-Quick both have poems up at the latest Fogged Clarity. In addition, there are interviews with both of them, and snappy photos. http://foggedclarity.com