U. English Dept. News |
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Upcoming Events
Marina van Zuylen, of Bard College, will deliver a lecture on April 3; her visit is the latest installment in the English Department's Speaker Series. Dr. van Zuylen is the author of two books: Difficulty as an Aesthetic Principle (Tubingen, 1993) and Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art (Cornell University Press, 2005). We look forward to visits this spring by two poets, Jim Reese and Julie Sheehan. Details will be announced soon. The VLP Poetry Festival will be held February 23; see the VLP News Desk below for details. Student Achievements
Brittany Neiles is studying on exchange at Warwick University in the UK this semester and reports that "it's wonderful!" Amber Wegehaupt is completing her final semester of college on exchange in Granada, Spain. Next year she will be teaching English in Los Angeles with Teach for America. (There were nine exclamation points in the ten-line email Amber sent with this news, so she must be excited about her plans.) Amber's recently defended Honors Thesis, "Making Connections and Feeling Connected: Implications of English as a Second Language Conversation Sessions in the University of South Dakota Writing Center," represented the first original educational research conducted in the USD Writing Center. MA students Simon Ferrell, Toni Hoffmeir, and Kimberly Raaphorst are planning to present their work as a panel at the Red River Graduate Student Conference in Fargo, ND in February. Mary Honerman, an MA student, is the mother of Madeline Mae Honerman, born December 17. Masters student Melissa Zurovski is now Melissa Lind, having married Steve Lind on December 22. At the Southwest /Texas Popular Culture Association/ American Culture Association Conference in Albuquerque in February, doctoral students Patricia DiMond and Courtney Huse-Wika will present papers. Melissa Houghton, an MA student, and Annie Christain, a PhD student, will read their poetry at the conference as well. Annie is also reading at the Southern Literature and Culture Conference in April. Four doctoral students were nominated for the Associated Writing Programs' national Intro Award competition: Annie Christain and Sarah Den Boer for poetry, Amy Walsh for fiction, and Ryan Allen for creative non-fiction. Doctoral student Annie Christain spent her winter break as an intern at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. She reports: "I've been making posters to promote events, attending poetry readings, reading my own poetry at open mics, and doing miscellaneous poetry-related tasks too mysterious and breath-taking to mention." PhD student Dan Jones will present a paper at the Twentieth-Century Literature Conference in Louisville, KY in February. A paper by PhD candidate Jennifer Moskowitz has been accepted for presentation at the American Literature Association meeting in San Francisco in May. In November, Brian Twenter, a doctoral student, presented a paper called "A Good First Step: The Importance of Reaffirming Native Cultures" at the Sixth Annual Native American Symposium in Durant, OK. Faculty Accomplishments
Ed Allen's sonnet collection, 67 Mixed Messages, was published this month by Ahsahta Press. The movie Easy Six, which is based on Ed's novel Mustang Sally, has been released on DVD as Easy Sex. Grieving on the Run, a short story collection by Brian Bedard, has won the 2005 Serena McDonald Kennedy Award for short fiction from Snake Nation Press. The award includes a $1,000 cash prize and publication of the book. The collection will be published some time after July 1, 2006. Brian also gave a presentation on "Writing the Prairie from the Masculine Perspective" at the Festival of the Book in Deadwood, SD in September. In December Amanda Emerson completed her first marathon, in four hours and thirty-eight minutes. "Digging to India: Modernity, Imperialism, and the Suez Canal," an article by Emily Haddad, appeared in the latest issue of Victorian Studies (47.3). The Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004 has been given to Lee Ann Roripaugh's second book of poems, Year of the Snake. Lee will travel to Atlanta in March to receive her award. One of Lee's short stories, "Amphibious Life," has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the editors of North American Review. She has poems in the most recent issues of Mid-American Review and BLOOM. Another poem, "Things That Cause a Feeling of Chagrin," has been accepted for publication by Cream City Review, and three poems ("Snow Country," "Loneliness," and "Nostalgia") have been accepted for inclusion in an anthology, Under the Rock Umbrella: Contemporary American Poetry by Poets Born Between 1955-1971, edited by William Walsh and forthcoming in 2006 from Mercer University Press. Her poem "Loneliness" has been accepted for on-line reprint in The Melic Review. Excerpts from Professor Emerita Norma Wilson's book The Nature of Native American Poetry are included in Our New Mexico: A Twentieth-Century History, edited by Calvin A. Roberts and published this month by the University of New Mexico Press. Norma also reports that The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature, to which she contributed an essay, has been exceptionally well received. Nancy Zuercher presented a paper, "Navigating the Sea of Information: Orienting and Empowering Student Research in Advanced Composition," at the Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities in Honolulu in January. Dennis Sjolie presented "Phrase and Clause Grammar Tactics for the ESL/ELL Writing Classroom" at the same conference. Alumni Activities
At the Midwest Modern Language Association conference in Milwaukee in November, John Nelson (PhD) presented a paper called "The Novel as Insurrection: The Role of Individual and Collective Memory in James Welch's The Heartsong of Charging Elk." John also read from his memoir manuscript at the Hometown Holiday celebration in Howard, SD. Ashley (Miklos) Atteberry (MA) is the mother of Michael Joseph Atteberry, born December 31. "Our hands and hearts are full," she says. Leslie Erickson (MA) has two publications in the pipeline. Her book Re-Visioning of the Heroic Journey in Postmodern Literature: Toni Morrison, Julia Alvarez, Arthur Miller, and American Beauty, will be published this spring by Edwin Mellen. An essay entitled "In the Shadow of Salome: Woman's Heroic Journey in Julia Alvarez's In the Name of Salome" will be included in a volume forthcoming from Peter Lang. Leslie teaches at Western Iowa Technical Community College in Sioux City. Debra Faszer-McMahon (MA) is a PhD candidate in Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Irvine. Stephanie Lawyer (MA) has been living in Indianapolis and will attend the Indiana University Law School there next fall. Melinda Obach (MA) reports: "I am living in Madison, WI, where I run the After School program for Hawthorne Elementary School. I love the work that I do, even though I am humiliated at chess by a bunch of second-graders on a regular basis." Melinda is also teaching Creative Writing I via correspondence for USD. Jenny White (MA) gave birth to Margaret Claire Baloun (known as Maggie) on November 25. Jenny has been doing freelance writing for a higher education consulting firm called The Lawlor Group. Erin (Yoeger) Wolfe (MA) now lives in Decatur, GA, where she is doing massage and working as an on-line teaching assistant for the University of Maryland's University College. Vanessa Gorden completed her MA in English and graduated from the USD Law School with Sterling Honors in May. She passed the South Dakota Bar Examination in July and this fall began working for Kennedy, Rokahr, Pier, and Knoff, a law firm located in Yankton, SD and Hartington, NE. She has also recently won a poetry award from the South Dakota State Poetry Society and had poems published in the last two issues of the Society's magazine, Pasque Petals. Jennifer (Conrad) Miller gave birth November 27 to her second child, a daughter named Reily. Amanda Sides is on her way to the Netherlands, where she will work for the next year as an au pair for a family with four children. Amy (Larson) Smith also has a new baby, her first, named Raegan. Amy teaches English, Speech, and Spanish at Parker High School in Parker, SD. [The editor can't help noticing that five new English majors have been born since the last newsletter. It's been a rich few months.] Melissa Van Vuuren has accepted a faculty position as English Librarian at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA. She starts work this week. VLP News Desk
Annie Christain was the featured poet at first VLP Poetry Slam of 2006. The next slam, coming up February 23, will be the final event in the VLP's annual Poetry Festival, this year featuring poets Jim Coppoc and Pen Pearson. For more information or to register, go to http://www.usd.edu/orgs/projlit/poetryfestival/. The VLP’s Holidays-on-Ice contest winners will be announced in February, with the winning entry to be published in the 2006 edition of the VLP magazine. Judges are Annie Christain and Lee Ann Roripaugh. The VLP Writers Group continues to meet regularly. For information about upcoming meetings, contact Jake Mailander at jmailand@usd.edu. Dakota Writing Project
Michelle Rogge Gannon and her University of Sioux Falls co-director Greg Dyer conducted the second leg of the Dakota Writing Project's electronic writing marathon during the month of January, with a group of DWP teachers from around the state participating online. This time around, they explored wiki, a type of collaborative writing (see www.pbwiki.com); instant messaging; del.icio.us, a website bookmarking system (see http://del.icio.us/); and digital storytelling. The teachers experimented and wrote, using the form of technology specified. Then they met online at Tapped In (http://tappedin.org) for a discussion of the technology and its possible uses to strengthen writing and learning in the classroom. Contributions
David and Deanna Knudson and the Sioux Falls Community Foundation contributed generously to the Dorothy Baisch Selz Endowment. We thank them. For their kind contributions to the Gladys Hasse Poetry Endowment, our thanks to John and Ellen Buchanan of Iowa City, IA, David Grothe and Margaret Hasse of St. Paul, MN, Paul Hasse of Vermillion, and Stanley and Ann Nelson of Shawnee Mission, KS. We are grateful as well to Susan Wolfe for her support of the English Graduate Scholars Fund and to Anita Bahr and Harry Thompson for their contributions to the English Department Memorial Endowment. |
