Witschi publishes major contribution to Literature and Culture of the American West

Nic Witschi is the editor of A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West. Like other volumes in the Blackwell Companions Literature and Culture Series, the volume presents a comprehensive picture of a clearly defined topic, here the wide range of cultural expressions originating in the west. For full information about the volume, see Blackwell's WEBSITE. Here is the table of contents:

Note on Contributors.
Part I: Introduction.
1 Imagining The West (Nicolas S. Witschi).
Part II: Regions and Histories.
2 Exploration, Trading, Trapping, Travel, and Early Fiction, 1780-1850 (Edward Watts).
3 Worlds of Wonder and Ambition: Gold Rush California and the Culture of Mining Bonanzas in the North American West (Peter J. Blodgett).
4 The Literate West of Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (Tara Penry).
5 A History of American Women's Western Books, 1833-1928 (Nina Baym).
6 Literary Cultures of the American Southwest (Daniel Worden).
7 Literary Cartography of the Great Plains (Susan Naramore Maher).
8 The Literary Northern Rockies as The Last Best Place (O. Alan Weltzien).
9 North by Northwest: The Last Frontier of Western Literature (Eric Heyne).
10 Chronotopes of the Asian American West (Hsuan L. Hsu).
11 African American Literature and Culture and the American West (Michael K. Johnson).
12 Mythical Frontiers: Manifest Destiny, Aztlán, and the Cosmic Race (John L. Escobedo).
13 Writing the Indigenous West (Kathleen Washburn).
14 Framing Class in the Rural West: Cowboys, Double-Wides and McMansions (Nancy Cook).
15 Postcolonial West (Alex Hunt).
16 New West, Urban and Suburban Spaces, Postwest (Krista Comer).
Part III: Varieties and Forms.
17 What We Talk about When We Talk about Western Art (Brian W. Dippie).
18 "All Hat and No Cattle": Romance, Realism, and Late-19th-Century Western American Fiction (Gary Scharnhorst).
19 The Coyote Nature of Cowboy Poetry (Barbara Barney Nelson).
20 "The Wind Blew Them Away": Folksinging the West, 1880-1930 (David Fenimore).
21 Autobiography (Gioia Woods).
22 Housing the American West: Western Women’s Literature, Early Twentieth Century and Beyond (Cathryn Halverson).
23 The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree: Western American Literature and Environmental Literary Criticism (Hal Crimmel).
24 Detective Fiction (Nicolas S. Witschi).
25 The American Western Film (Corey K. Creekmur).
26 Post-Western Cinema (Neil Campbell).
Part IV: Issues, Themes, Case Studies.
27 America Unscripted: Performing the Wild West (Jefferson D. Slagle).
28 Revising Public Memory in the American West: Native American Performance in the Ramona Outdoor Play (Karen E. Ramirez).
29 Omnimedia Marketing: The Case of The Lone Ranger (Chadwick Allen).
30 The Nuclear Southwest (Audrey Goodman).
31 Ranging Over Stegner’s Arid West: Mobility as Adaptive Strategy (Bonney MacDonald).
32 The Global West: Temporality, Spatial Politics, and Literary Production (Susan Kollin).
33 Tumbling Dice: The Problem of Las Vegas (Stephen Tatum and Nathaniel Lewis).
Index.

English Department sweeps University-Wide Graduate Awards

Three English Graduate Students, Bonnie McLean, Renee L. Gardner, and Chad Sweeney have been announced as winners of the University-wide Graduate Teaching Effectiveness Award (McLean, Gardner) and the University-wide Graduate Research and Creative Scholar Award (Sweeney). Thus, the department wins more Graduate Awards this year than any other unit at WMU. 

Bonnie McLean is a second-year MA student in literature and language. She has taught English 1050 (Thought and Writing) and English 1000 (The Writing Process). She currently serves as Assistant Director of Developmental English, a program for students whose writing needs special attention before they may succeed on WMU’s degree programs. In her nomination letter, Jax Gardner, the Assistant Director of First-Year Writing, states: “I have personally watched Bonnie volunteer for countless professional development activities, not the least of which included a semester-long commitment to the First-Year Writing Professional Learning Community. . . . Bonnie is a caring and compassionate instructor and her students are lucky to have her influence during such a formative time in their college experience.”    

Renee Lee Gardner is a third-year PhD student in literature and language. She has taught Literary Interpretation, Good Books, and Literature and Culture of the United States. In his nomination letter, Dr. Jon Adams describes Renee as a “natural teacher,” a “superb instructor,” and “quite frankly, a star,” who is worthy of winning “the accolades of her department and institution.” Dr. Adams’ observation of Renee’s teaching praised the level of “comfort, camaraderie, and shared sense of purpose” that she achieves in her classroom, as well as the “unbelievable advancement as a respondent to students’ comments.”

Chad Sweeney is a third-year PhD student in Creative Writing, with an emphasis in poetry. Amazingly, Chad has already published five books of poetry—three of them with nationally recognized presses during his time at Western Michigan University. Chad has also signed another three books into contract to be published in the next two years, including translations of Pablo Neruda and Iranian poet H. E. Sayeh. Chad’s work has been featured in Best American Poetry 2008 and on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. Dr. Nancy Eimers writes that Chad’s poems “are truly original, their perceptions new-paint-fresh and their leaps so arresting and absolutely unexpected they create almost an ache of loveliness…. It will not surprise me if, in the next few years, Chad begins to assume a national profile as a poet."   

Campus Beet café initiative

Campus Beet student-led café initiative to host open house

Contact: Maia Hausler; 517-974-1959; maia.c.hausler@wmich.edu

The Campus Beet, a registered student organization at Western Michigan University, will hold an open house to showcase their dream for a student-led sustainable café. Free locally sourced food and entertainment will be available from 5:00-8:00PM on April 8 in the East Ballroom of WMU’s Bernhard Center.  This public event will feature locally sourced delicious food options prepared by students, musical performances by Taylor Clark and a WMU jazz quartet, spoken word by WMU’s Onomatopoeia and other writers, a student art show, and a community art project led by the I.D.E.A Association. The Interior Design Student Organization is creating an atmosphere that reflects the vision of the Campus Beet Café.  

The vision of the Campus Beet is to offer fresh, delicious, and ecologically sound food, to build the local economy and to support the WMU community. The café will provide space to cultivate growth and expression, while offering an opportunity for student leadership experiences. This open house is brought to you by The Campus Beet, the Interior Design Student Organization, I.D.E.A. association, Onomatopoeia, The Student Garden Organization, the WMU Dietetics Interns, and the WMU Office for Sustainability.

To find out more, visit http://thecampusbeet.wordpress.com, or email campusbeet@gmail.com.

WMU Office for Sustainability

1903 West Michigan Ave

Faunce Student Services Building

Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5286

Ph: (269) 387-0943

Fax: (2690 387-0944

www.wmich.edu/sustainability

Poet and Prose Writer Richard Katrovas Reads His Work: Spring 2011 Gwen Frostic Reading Series

We welcome you to join us for our fourth reading of the Spring 2011 Gwen Frostic Reading Series. We’re honored to have poet and prose writer Richard Katrovas read his work on Thursday, March 31st. The reading will take place at the WMU Bernhard Center, Room 105-107, starting at 8:00 PM. We look forward to seeing you there.

Staci Stutsman Honored as Presidential Scholar 2010-2011

The title of "Presidential Scholar" is the highest honor Western Michigan University can bestow upon a student. Each department at Western selects such a student. Our No. 1 student this year is Staci Stutsman: She was nominated by several faculty members. One places her "in the top 1% of undergraduates and graduate students with whom I have worked over the last fourteen years."  Staci's accomplishments include an eagerness to engage theory in her work with literature, an ability to organize and lead as a teaching assistant, and a willingness to use archival material from the rare book room for scholarly projects.  Yesterday evening, President John Dunne recognized her and 44 other Presidential Scholars during a ceremony at the Fetzer Center. Her faculty mentor, Dr. Gwen Tarbox, and department chair Richard Utz accompanied her to the event.

Laureate Release Party

Join The Laureate Release Party on Wednesday, April 13, from 7-9 PM in the Lee Honors College lounge.  A handful of our authors will be reading their work, there will be food and drink, and we are giving away free copies of The Laureate 2011.

Prof. Minnick on "American English by the Numbers"

Goliardic Society Lecture

2010-2011 English Awards

English Department Celebrates Achievements

On Friday afternoon, about 100 students, parents, alumni/ae, emeriti/ae, staff, and faculty gathered at the Bernhard Center for the department's Annual Awards & Recognition Ceremony. Guests included Provost Tim Greene, Dean Alex Enyedi, and 2009-2010 Distinguished Alumnus Karl Sandelin. 2010-2011 Distinguished Alumnus Dave Dempsey, now a policy advisor for the International Joint Commission/Commission mixte internationale, an independent bi-national organization to help prevent and resolve disputes about the use and quality of boundary waters in Canada and the United States, spoke on the topic of "Wielding English for a Sustainable Future."

Bradburn's Mind Emerges

Beth Bradburn contributed a chapter to The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English, edited by David Herman and now available from the University of Nebraska Press. The volume analyzes strategies for representing consciousness in narrative from 700 to the present. Bradburn's chapter, 1620-1700: Mind on the Move, shows how four seventeenth-century narratives build on the metaphorical projection of mental processes as movements in space.

Emeritus Professor, Rollin Douma, dies at 70

Dr. Rollin Douma, a Professor of English who held a variety of administrative posts at the University, recently passed away at the age of 70. Most recently, he served as associate vice president for Academic Affairs from 2003 until his retirement in 2006. Previous positions included interim dean of the College of Education; dean of the Graduate College from 1994 to 1997; interim dean of the Graduate College from 1992 to 1994; and associate dean of the College from 1979 to 1992. Active on numerous University committees and task forces, Dr. Douma served as editor of the University catalogues for over twenty years. For a full obituary, please see the Kalamazoo Gazette.

Susie Bright@U of M

Susie Bright: Big Sex Little Death
The Origins of the Sex-Positive Feminist Movement

Sponsored by the University of Michigan Institute for Research on Women and Gender
March 21, 2011 (Monday)
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
LOCATION: Angell Hall - Auditorium B

How did a Hollywood high school revolutionary on the FBI's list—who came to Detroit at 17, got arrested as a "menace to society," and spearheaded a front-page, radical trade-union movement— end up founding the legendary lesbian sex magazine, On Our Backs, and transform into the nation's first "Sexpert"?

Susie Bright was raised in California, where she joined a notorious high school underground newspaper, The Red Tide— the last days of the New Left and the first days of women’s/sexual liberation. After leading student-walkouts and mass disruption all over LA’s school district, there was only one thing left to do: Move to Detroit.

Bright’s bleeding-edge experiences in the late 70s, from Highland Park to Clark Park, are a climax of her story— and she looks forward to revisiting the scene of the crime!

Returning to the West Coast in the 80s, Bright uncovered the erotic forensics of the then-unspoken-of sex trade, old-school porn, founded On Our Backs (the first and last all-women’s sex magazine) and the genesis of the feminist sex-positive movement.

If you’re still standing here to talk about any of it— or you’re focused on what the international sexual revolution and activism looks like today, come meet Susie and talk about what the next radical-sex game-changer is going to look like.

This event is part of the LGQRI series and is co-sponsored by the Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop “Doing Queer Studies Now.” Common Language will be on hand to sell books.

Update on Salisbury

Eve Salisbury just published a review of Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing and Household in Medieval England, ed. Maryanne Kowalski and P. J. P. Goldberg in the April issue of the Journal of English and Germanic Philology. She recommends the volume as provoking "a reconsideration of the place of domesticity in history, literature, law, archaeology, and the everyday experiences of actual medieval people." Salisbury is currently working on an essay (provisionally entitled "Chaucer and the Poetry of Abduction") for a collection edited by Andreea Boboc and Kathleen Kennedy, Theorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England, contracted with Brill.

Schweitzer and Triezenberg presented at Michigan Academy Conference

Graduate students Ilse Schweitzer and Chris Triezenberg gave a workshop-style Powerpoint presentation about their English 3110 class last fall at the Michigan Academy Conference at Saginaw Valley State University last Friday, March 11, entitled "Advocating for Mother Earth: Uniting 21st Century Technologies, Local Resources, Art, and Activism to Explore Our Place in Nature."

Wardrop to Speak on Civil War Nursing Narratives

Dr. Daneen Wardrop, recipient of the College of Arts and Sciences Gender Scholar Award for 2011, will present "Civil War Nursing Narratives" at 3:00, March 17 at The Oaklands.

English Course Descriptions for Summer and Fall

Thanks to Scott Slawinski, English course descriptions for most classes are up for Summer and Fall 2011, giving students an opportunity to make informed decisions:

Undergraduate Summer I/II  -- Undergraduate Fall
Graduate Summer I/II -- Graduate Fall

come one, come all

Grad student wins Kennedy Center playwriting award

Grad student wins Kennedy Center playwriting award

A Western Michigan University graduate student has won a coveted award for playwriting from the Kennedy Center and will take part in two intensive, resident playwriting workshops.

Mikala Hansen, a master's student studying playwriting and a graduate assistant in the Department of English, has won the Kennedy Center: The National Association of Partners of American Theatre Annual Playwriting Excellence Award for her full-length play, "Viking-American." Hansen will spend a week at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and a week at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas as part of an intensive program in writing for stage and screen.

Read more at WMU News

Gwen Tarbox Named 2011 Sigma Tau Delta Faculty Honorary Inductee

The Alpha Nu Pi chapter of the Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society is pleased to announce that Dr. Gwen Athene Tarbox has been voted the chapter's 2011 Faculty Honorary Inductee. Honorary membership recognizes outstanding faculty and staff for their commitment to excellence in teaching, research, and service. Dr. Tarbox joins 57 undergraduate and graduate students who will be inducted next Sunday, March 20, in the largest induction class in chapter history.

Please join us in congratulating Gwen on this well-deserved honor!

We hope to see all of you next Sunday at 3 p.m. in 3025 Brown for the Spring 2011 induction ceremony and reception.

Sigma Tau Delta Induction Is Sunday, March 20

Sigma Tau Delta's Spring 2011 Induction

Sunday, March 20, 2011
3-5 p.m.

3025 Brown Hall

The Alpha Nu Pi chapter of the Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society invites faculty, staff, students, families, and friends to the Spring 2011 induction and reception. A record 60 new members will be inducted, all of whom will receive lifetime memberships to Sigma Tau Delta free of charge, thanks to generous donations from faculty, staff, alumni, and friends as well as support from the WMU Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Please scroll down for the list of inductees and join us next Sunday to welcome them and to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the first Sigma Tau Delta induction at WMU. Since March 2006, the Alpha Nu Pi chapter has grown to nearly 300 active and alumni members and has been nationally recognized as one of the most active, vital chapters in the country.

Spring 2011 Sigma Tau Delta Inductees:

Aly, Hanan

Bajdo, Diana

Barnes, Sara

Brandt, Courtney

Brimhall, Traci

Burpo, Katie

Brockway, Grace

Cahn, Elissa

Charnley, Kassie

Christian, Laura

Church, Kayla

Cornelius, Jessica

Deal, Holly

Dennis, Jeffrey

Dodson, Micaela

England, Andrea

Evans, Kelly

Fiddler, Benjamin

Freitas, McKaley

Gietzen, Christian

Hammon, Christine

Hollenbaugh, Ian Benjamin

Holwerda, Anna

Howard, Krystal Jo

Hovey, Amanda

Hulsey, Amanda

Jennings, Brandon

Khalil, Dina Anwar

Krasnicki, Shannon

Landers, Tammy

Leffler, Nicole

Livingston, Kenneth

Lohr, Brandon David

Lukshaitis, Margaret

Martin, Elizabeth

McLean, Bonnie

Michaels, Chelsea

Pelto, Travis

Pehrson, Joseph

Pender, Jena

Peters, Ashly

Rice, Jonathan

Root, Erica

Rozek, Sarah

Samuelson, Phillip

Scott, Emily

Schaefer, Alyssa

Shelley, Kathryn

Sieber, Jennifer

Sing, Yee Wen

Smith, August John

Snyder, Rebekah

Springsteen, Alana

Stahl, Tyler

Svikiz, Andis

Szejbach, Michelle

Walsh, Kerry

Wethy, Jade

Wiley, Alyson Paige

Witte, Alexa

The department's next Scholarly Speakers Series lecture will take place on Thursday, March 17.

Dr. Dorothy Noyes, folklorist and professor of English, Comparative Studies, and Anthropology at Ohio State University, will speak on "Fairy-tale Economics: Scarcity, Risk, Choice" at 7 p.m. in Room 3025 of Brown Hall. She will discuss how the Western fairy tale, which was initially formed in a world of scarcity, persists in industrial and capitalist societies, largely because it stages the still uncertain fortunes of the individual.

Also, on Friday, March 18, at noon, in Bernhard Center 204, Professor Noyes will host a globalization brown-bag discussion based on her soon-to-be-published paper "Heritage, Legacy, Zombie: Burying the Undead Past."

At this Friday event, lunch will be provided courtesy of the Haenicke Institute for Global Education. If you plan to attend, please rsvp to michelle.metro-roland@wmich.edu. Her paper is available to be read ahead of time at http://www.wmich.edu/english/scholarly/.

A specialist in the history of folk voice, particularly in the Romance-speaking Mediterranean, Noyes is director of the Center for Folklore Studies and research associate at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, both at OSU. She has contributed articles to numerous prestigious journals and been an executive board member for both the American Folklore Society and Société Internationale d'Ethnologie et de Folklore. Her Fire in the Plaça: Catalan Festival Politics After Franco won the 2005 Book Prize of the Fellows of the American Folklore Society.

Noyes' visit to WMU is cosponsored by WMU's Haenicke Institute for Global Education, Africana Studies Program, Department of Anthropology, and Lee Honors College.

For more information, contact Dr. Anthony Ellis, Department of English, at anthony.ellis@wmich.edu or (269) 387-2606.

The Poets in Print Reading Series

The Poets in Print Reading Series at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center Welcomes poets Hadara Bar-Nadav and L.S. Klatt on Saturday, March 12, 7 to 9 p.m.

Hadara Bar-Nadav's first book of poetry A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (Margie/Intuit House, 2007) won the Margie Book Prize. Her second book The Frame Called Ruin is due out from New Issues in 2012. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
www.hadarabarnadav.com

L. S. Klatt's poetry has appeared recently in the Cincinnati Review, Boston Review, and Drunken Boat. His new collection, Cloud of Ink, was awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize and will be published by the University of Iowa Press this coming March. His first book, Interloper, won the 2008 Juniper Prize.

MLive: Interview: Poet L.S. Klatt discusses his work, crossing the 'frontiers of consciousness'

Utz invited to write on Medieval Afterlives

Richard Utz has accepted an invitation to write an essay for a volume on Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture: Fascinations and Fantasies, edited by Gail Ashton and Daniel T Kline and contracted to be published in Palgrave Macmillan's New Middle Ages series. Utz's essay will focus on the afterlife of the Robin Hood figure in French television series in the 1960s. 

Poet Nancy Eimers Reads Her Work: Spring 2011 Gwen Frostic Reading Series

We welcome you to join us for our third reading of the Spring 2011 Gwen Frostic Reading Series. We’re honored to have poet Nancy Eimers read her work on Tuesday, March 15th. The reading will take place at the WMU Bernhard Center, Room 105-107, starting at 8:00 PM. We look forward to seeing you there.

Berlant & Halberstam at EMU/Narrative Theory Dialogue

Failing to be Subjects: On Queerness and Negativity

A JNT Dialogue

JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory
www.emich.edu/english/jnt

For additional information, please contact: jnt@emich.edu



Location:



Eastern Michigan University

Student Center Auditorium

900 Oakwood St.

Ypsilanti, Mi 48197



Date: March 15, 2011



Time: 6-7:30 pm



Refreshments follow in Student Center Art Gallery.


Speakers:

Lauren Berlant and Jack Judith Halberstam

Lauren Berlant bio:

Lauren Berlant is the George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago, where she teaches about the intimate public spheres that cross over politics and the ordinary in mass societies. She is author of a national sentimentality trilogy that spans the U.S. 19th century to the present: The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (1991); The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008); and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997). Her next book, Cruel Optimism (2011) looks at the affective components of contemporary intimate publics transnationally, and focuses on the fate of the good life fantasy that accompanies the current capitalist collapse. Other works on public spheres as affect worlds include Our Monica, Ourselves (with Lisa Duggan); the much-anthologized "Sex in Public" in Critical Inquiry (with Michael Warner); as well as two essay collections, Compassion (2004) and Intimacy (2001).


Jack Judith Halberstam bio:

Jack Halberstam, formerly Judith Halberstam, is Professor of English, American Studies, and Ethnicity and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Halberstam works in the areas of popular, visual, and queer culture with an emphasis on subcultures. Halberstam's books include Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters(1995), the ground-breaking Female Masculinity (1998), as well as a co-authored photo/essay, The Drag King Book (1999), and a co-authored anthology, Posthuman Bodies (1995). The latest book, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), theorizes queer reconfigurations of time and space in relation to subcultural scenes and transgender visibility. Halberstam regularly publishes journalism in venues like BITCH Magazine and The Nation, and has just finished a book titled The Queer Art of Failure due out next year from Duke University Press. Halberstam is working on two other books now, one on "Bats" and another on children and the Holocaust.


Talks include:

Lauren Berlant, "Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin"

“Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin" uses Scott Heim's novel and Gregg Araki's film of AIDS, abductions, and the paranoid 90s to think about how to think about underperformed emotion: Berlant's paper gathers up many traditions, from twentieth century avant-gardes through trauma, punk, and indie casualness, to consider the ways in which affective activity appears as inexpressive form, form providing a holding space in the absence of knowing how or wanting to respond to the urgencies of the moment (the historical moment, the sexual moment, the intimate moment, the moment where survival time is always being apprehended, absorbed, and encountered).

Jack Judith Halberstam, "Unbecoming"

Building here on the work of feminists like Saidiya Hartman and Saba Mahmood and locating a queer femininity that refuses resistance and reshapes the meaning of the political in the process, Halberstam's paper offers up in the Bersani tradition narrated and extended by Heather Love in her book Feeling Backward, a queer theory of masochism and negative affect that revels in failures, builds around an anti-heroic, disintegrating subject and in the process recasts the project of thinking sex and gender. Halberstam charts a genealogy of an anti-social or anti-humanist or counter-intuitive feminism that arises out of queer, post-colonial, and Black feminisms and that thinks in terms of the negation of the subject rather than her formation.

New Issues Poet featured on PBS

Here is some news on Khaled Mattawa, who is a professor at the University of Michigan and author of Tocqueville, a book of poetry published by WMU's New Issues Press in the fall of 2010.

Khaled read in the Spring 2009 Gwen Frostic Reading Series. The book's cover, featured on the PBS interview, was designed by a WMU student Josh Tabbia (now graduated) at the Design Center.

"Benghazi-Born Poet Mattawa Reflects on Growing up Under Gadhafi"
Jeffrey Brown talks to Libyan-born poet Khaled Mattawa about life under Moammar Gadhafi and the recent crisis in his homeland.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june11/libyapoet_03-02.html

The day before, Jeffrey Brown interview Khaled for Art Beat on PBS:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2011/03/conversation-khaled-mattawa.html

Gordon Nominee for PEN/Faulkner Award

2011 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD NOMINEES ANNOUNCEDhttp://www.penfaulkner.org/news/news/2011_PENFaulkner_Award_for_Fiction_Nominees_Announced

Washington, DC— Judges have selected five books published in 2010 as finalists for the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, America's largest peer-juried prize for fiction.  The nominees are Jennifer Egan for A Visit From the Goon Squad (Knopf);  Deborah Eisenberg for The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Picador); Jaimy Gordon for Lord of Misrule (McPherson & Co.);  Eric Puchner for Model HomeBrad Watson for Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives  (W.W. Norton).  The announcement was made today by the directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, Susan Richards Shreve and Robert Stone, Co-Chairmen. (Scribner).

The judges—Laura Furman, William Kittredge, and Helena Maria Viramontes—considered approximately 320 novels and short story collections by American authors published in the US during the 2010 calendar year. Submissions came from over 125 publishing houses, including small and academic presses. There is no fee for a publisher or writer to submit a book.

The winner, who will receive $15,000, will be announced on March 15; the four finalists will receive $5,000 each. In a ceremony that celebrates the winner as "first among equals," all five authors will be honored during the 31st Annual PEN/Faulkner Award ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library, located at 201 East Capitol Street, SE on Saturday, May 7, at 7pm.  Tickets are $100 for the reading ceremony and buffet dinner, and can be purchased by phoning the Folger Box Office at (202) 544-7077 or online at www.penfaulkner.org.

Perryman-Clark on feminism and rhetoric & writing studies

Staci Perryman-Clark, WMU's Director of First-Year Writing, appears in a recently published essay on the status of feminism in Rhetoric and Writing Studies. Access the article at Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society.

Writing Centers Association Conference @ WMU

On March 3-5, the 2011 East Central Writing Centers Association Conference, which will be on our WMU campus from March 3-5. Here's the link to all the program information: http://www.ecwca2011atwmu.com/index.html
WMU community members are welcome to attend any of the session without charge; however, the non-profit conference cannot provide free meals to those who are not presenting.  (Free free, however, to come have Danish æbleskiver with us in 1343 Ellsworth Hall Thursday night and to have a mini-bagel and coffee from our breakfast snacks Friday or Saturday).