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• Tobi Jacobi presented a workshop on historical documents from the 1920s New York State Training School for Girls at the Hudson Area Library in late October.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 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 for the Week of May 12th

The hallways of Eddy are much quieter these past few days, the calm before the “storm” of an upcoming renovation.

• The Eddy Building will be going through a remodel beginning the week of May 19^th! The English Department offices will move over to the Behavioral Sciences Building, Rooms A104-112. The phone number will remain the same.
• The Writing Center will be relocating to Johnson Hall Room 119 for the summer (and the 2014-15 academic year). We will reopen on Tuesday, May 27 and will close on Thursday, August 7. The Writing Center will be open during the summer Mondays through Thursdays 10:00am-12:30pm. While we offer walk-ins if they are available, we recommend that clients make appointments with us to guarantee a consultation. To make an appointment, please visit: https://colostate.mywconline.com/. Thanks, and we look forward to serving you!
• The Eddy 300 Lab will close early Friday, May 16^th at 2:00 pm. It will remain closed during the Eddy Building construction. Students needing to print please use the Clark Lab.
• Tobi Jacobi gave a keynote on research sustainability and ethics highlighting her prison work in the Composition and Cultural Rhetoric program at Syracuse University. She also began work on 20th Century prison narratives from the New York Training School for Girls with the non-profit Prison Public Memory Project in Hudson, NY in mid-May.
• Community Literacy Center (CLC) interns, Elise Yenne, Brittany Devons, and Olivia Pait successfully completed their year-long community writing teaching with two public readings as the Spring 2014 SpeakOut! journal was launched during the last two weeks. Thanks to assistant director Lauren Alessi for her leadership all year!
• Sasha Steensen talks about her new book with Maggie Millner at ZYZZYVA: http://www.zyzzyva.org/2014/05/13/the-beauty-and-violence-of-a-family-and-of-a-nation-qa-with-sasha-steensen/
• Ian Blake has accepted a position at Holyoke Junior and Senior High School in Holyoke, Colorado to teach English.
• Pattie Cowell’s “Resisting the Border:  Natural Narrative, Everyday Story” was published recently in Western American Literature 48:4 (2014): 445-463.

News of Note from the Week of April 28th

The Eddy Redbud tree is in bloom.

• There’s a podcast interview with Dan Beachy-Quick at Poetry Northwest.
• Leslee Becker won First Prize in the Boston Review’s 2014 Fiction Contest for her story, “Severance.”
• Basic Veterinary Immunology co-authored by Gerry Callahan and Robin Yates was published this month by University Press of Colorado, Boulder, Co.
• Antero Garcia is the featured guest on the Connect Learning Alliance Podcast today. I talk about “Making Learning Relevant.” The program can be streamed or downloaded here: http://clalliance.org/whatsnew-main/antero-garcia-podcast-making-learning-relevant/
• Tobi Jacobi gave a presentation on developing self-care strategies for volunteers working in jail/prison writing programs at recent workshop on “Innovations in Prison” sponsored by UCLA and the UK Economic and Social Research Council.
• Elise Yenne (CLC intern) won 1st place for her service-learning poster presentation for the 2014 CSU CURC competition.  She highlighted her work as an intern and writing workshop facilitator with the Larimer County Detention Center men’s writing group.
• Rachel Linnea Brown’s poem “Memento” has been selected for publication by Gulf Coast.  She has also accepted a position at University of Kansas as a PhD student of Nineteenth-Century American Literature.  Rachel will be attending KU with a research fellowship, a department fellowship, and a $5,000 Mary Elizabeth and Andrew P. Debicki Scholarship for graduate studies.  She is excited to begin her KU studies in the fall.
• Kristin George Bagdanov’s poems “Damage Body” and “Commodity Body” were accepted for publication in Word Riot.
• This year’s issue of the Greyrock Review is now available for purchase! Please stop by the English Department office, Eddy Building, Room 359. The Journal is $12 and T-Shirts, white with this year’s cover and green with the Greyrock logo are $20.00. Stickers are available in black & white and green & gold for $2 each.

Alumni News: Kayann Short, PhD, (CSU, Alumna 1988) has received the following awards: for A Bushel’s Worth: An Ecobiography:

• Sarton Memoir Award Finalist from Story Circle Network
• Nautilus Silver Award in Green Living & Sustainability

The Sarton Memoir Award is presented annually by Story Circle Network, an international network of women lifewriters. The award is named in honor of May Sarton (1912-1995), distinguished American poet, novelist, and author of twelve memoirs and journals.

Nautilus “Better Books for a Better World” Awards recognize exceptional literary contributions to spiritual growth, conscious living, high-level wellness, green values, responsible leadership and positive social change.

Published by Torrey House Press, A Bushel’s Worth: An Ecobiography is a memoir of reunion with a family’s farming past and a call to action for farmland preservation through community supported agriculture today. These awards exemplify the way A Bushel’s Worth engages readers across generations and diverse backgrounds through stories that portray the relationship between food, farming, and the environment.

A retired award-winning teacher from the University of Colorado-Boulder, Short farms and teaches writing at Stonebridge Farm, the first community-supported agricultural farm (CSA) in Boulder County. Established in 1992, Stonebridge is committed to small-scale, organic farming and agricultural land preservation on the Front Range. Short offers writing workshops to community groups, libraries, and book clubs. She also teaches at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast. She will offer a “food preservation stories” workshop September 18-19 at her farm outside Lyons, CO.

A Bushel’s Worth is a books-in-a-bag selection of the Longmont Public Library. More about A Bushel’s Worth, including a virtual book tour, press kit, links to reading videos and digital excerpts, and book group suggestions and discussion questions are available at http://abushelsworth.com