9/11 Ten Minute Playwriting Contest

The 9/11 Ten Minute Playwriting Contest

Can you write a 10 minute play  about 9/11 before  Sat. 30th July 2011?

Think of 9/11 as a metaphor for Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East, USA, Pakistan, England, Syria, Israel, Kuwait, War, Peace, Muslims, Jews, Christians,Heathens, Chaldren, Sunni, Shiite, Oil, Koran, Bible, Torah, Bubba, God, Hillary, Mohammad, Buddha, Jesus, George W.,Osama, Obama, Sistanni, Saddam, 41, Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Powell, Chaney, Chalaba, Sadr, Blair, Rumsfeld, Pervez, Satire, Comedy,Drama, Prophet, Iran, Baghdad, Hezbollah, Ashura, CIA, Palestine, WMD, Scuds, Islam, Tribes, Taliban, McCain, ISI, Mullah, Al-Qaeda,Beirut, Crusaders, No-Fly Blacklist, Hamas, Sheiks, Clans, Occupation, Patriot Act, IED's, Congress, FBI, Northern Alliance, Mullah,Pentagon, Terrorists, Yeman, Bhutto, Guantanamo, Desert Storm, Jihad, Parable, Democracy, Imam, Persian Gulf War, NSA,Madras, Rendering, Rabbi, SaudiaArabia, Peshmerga, Sovereign Nation, Egit, Hijab, Together Forward, SERE, Surge, Arab, Kut, Gonzales,Law, Supreme's, Caliphate, Taiz,Love,Mecca, 5 Pillars, Mujaheddin, Coalition,Saladin,Condi, Barney, etc., etc. Can you write about  soldiers and civilians dying?     Non- partisan   1st prize $100, 2nd prize $25, 3rd prize $25, 4th - 1th prizes $10.

 

There will be 25 semi-finalists , then 10 finalists.

 The 10 finalists chosen by independent judges

 will  have a staged reading in Los Angeles on 9/11, 2011. 

 On 9/11 , independent judges will decide the #1 winner.  

  Semi-finalists and finalists will be notified.

          Submission Guidelines:  
1.      Play must be  Unpublished , unproduced and not have won any other contests. 
2.       No longer than 10 minutes 
3.         One page biography .
4.       Include Two copies of each script. 
5.          No e-mail scripts accepted. 
6.      Include brief character descriptions.
7.     A voluntary donation of 3 first class stamps from your country.
8.     Contest open to Earth Citizens, including Canadians and Mathematicians. 
9.     Deadline: Sat. 30th July 2011.

        Please mail to:  American Science Theatre

                                    Short Plays

                                    P. O. Box  291 460

                                    Los Angeles CA 90029   USA.

                                   ( Please, no  registered scripts).

                               www.americansciencetheatre.com

We are also looking for Plays/Screenplays , from 10 minutes to full length about science and/or scientists. Please mail to above address. Each writer will be contacted before we perform your script.

We  are also seeking Sponsors/Donations for productions. Interested? Any suggestions?  Please contact :john at  americansciencetheatre dot   com

Lynn Welsch tribute

By Karen Vocke and Ellen Brinkley

English faculty, area teachers and Third Coast Writing Project teacher consultants across southwest Michigan are saddened by the recent death of Lynn Welsch, a middle school English language arts teacher at Fennville Middle School. She retired from teaching at the Fennville Public Schools in June of 2010, after 31 years as a seventh grade language arts teacher.  

Lynn was a member of the Western Michigan University Third Coast Writing Project (TCWP)’s first Invitational Summer Institute in 1994 with Dr. Ellen Brinkley, director. Lynn continued to be an active participant.  Just a few days before she passed away, she was making plans to coordinate a summer workshop for TCWP on the topic of English Language Learners.  Lynn was a recent MAET graduate of our department.  As a part time instructor, Lynn taught ENGL 3770, Language and Literacy in the Multilingual Classroom.

A longtime advocate and teacher for for migrant and English Language Learners, Lynn focused on the needs of students in Fennville Public Schools whose families spoke little English and often moved away in the fall, returning in the spring. Too often these students were given worksheets and seated in the back of the room. Lynn worked with one of the National Writing Project (NWP)’s special divisions, the English Language Learners Network, to collaborate nationwide with other educators to learn about and to train other educatiors about approaches to teaching that were especially effective in working with English learners.

Lynn regularly lead conference sessions on ELL issues and served as a member of the leadership team for the National Writing Project’s English Language Learners Network. Lynn worked very closely as well with Dr. Karen Vocke on a research project on migrant education in southwest Michigan.  Lynn’s chapter on digital storytelling is featured in Karen’s book, Where Do I Go From Here? Meeting the Unique Educational Needs of Migrant Students (Heinemann, 2007).

A memorial service was held on June 17^th at the Fennville United Methodist Church where Lynn was a member. She is survived by her husband Douglas W. Welsch; son Justin and Sarah Welsch of Dimondale, MI; daughter Gwendolyn and Brian Lesperance of Okemos, MI; granddaughter Emma Lynn Welsch; mother Margaret AnnaLou Marek of Tinley Park, IL; sister Joan and Rollin Dilworth of Frankfort, IL; and her mother-in-law Ruth Welsch of Fennville, MI.

Tiffany on Shakespeare's Miracles

Grace Tiffany's "Shakespeare's Miracle Plays," a paper presented at last year's Medieval Congress, has been accepted for publication by the journal English Studies.

Hiscox publishes in The Writer's Chronicle

Elizabyth Hiscox, PhD student in English (Creative Writing/Poetry), recently published (together with C. Hogue and L. Roma-Deeley) "A Conversation with Martha Collins" in The Writer's Chronicle 43.6 (May/Summer, 2011), pp. 24-32.

A Special Issue of Comparative Drama

Comparative Drama Volume 44/45 • Winter/Spring 2010/11 • No. 4/1 was published earlier this month.

This special double issue, Translation, Performance, and Reception of Greek Drama, 1900–1960: International Dialogues, was guest edited by Amanda Wrigley who recently spoke at WMU as part of the Department of English's Scholarly Speaker Series.

The contents of this special issue include:

Essays
Greek Drama in the First Six Decades of the Twentieth Century: Tradition, Identity, Migration
Amanda Wrigley, guest editor

Toward a National Heterotopia: Ancient Theaters and the Cultural Politics of Performing Ancient Drama in Modern Greece
Eleftheria Ioannidou

Oedipus, Shmedipus: Ancient Greek Drama on the Yiddish Stage
Debra Caplan

‘The Kingdom of Heaven within Us’: Inner (World) Peace in Gilbert Murray’s Trojan Women
Simon Perris

Touring the Ivies with Iphigenia, 1915
Niall W. Slater

Is Mr Euripides a Communist? The Federal Theatre Project’s 1938 Trojan Incident
Robert Davis

Oedipus and Afrikaans Theater
Betine Van Zyl Smit

"Now the struggle is for all!" (Aeschylus's Persians 405): What a Difference a Few Years Make When Interpreting a Classic
Gonda Van Steen

Oedipus, Suez, and Hungary: T. S. Eliot’s Tradition and The Elder Statesman
Michael Simpson

Research Notes
African-American Classicist William Sanders Scarborough and the 1921 Film of the Orestia at Cambridge University
Michele Valerie Ronnick

Alberto Savinio’s Alcesti di Samuele in the Aftermath of the Second World War
Giulia Torello

Politics, War, and Adaptation: Ewan MacColl’s Operation Olive Branch, 1947
Claire Warden

Aristophanes and Douglas Young
C.W. Marshall

Afterword
Lorna Hardwick

Salisbury and Schulman join Advisory Board of Medievally Speaking

Eve Salisbury and Jana Schulman, both medievalists at Western Michigan University, have recently joined the advisory board of Medievally Speaking, the online review arm of Studies in Medievalism, the leading publication investigating the ongoing reception of the Middle Ages in postmedieval times. While Medievally Speaking draws from a vast pool of international scholars dedicated to the multilingual and interdisciplinary negotiation of medievalia, it is also firmly anchored in the English Department at WMU, with Richard Utz as editor and Mustafa Mirzeler, Eve Salisbury, and Jana Schulman as members of the advisory board.

Eve Salisbury studied English literature and language at the University of Rochester and the State University of New York at Geneseo and has taught at Eastman School of Music and Rochester Institute of Technology. At Western Michigan University, she teaches the works of late medieval poets—Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Gower, Christine de Pizan, and Marie de France—Middle English and Arthurian literature, Medieval Literary Theory, British Literature I, and Medieval Drama. She has also taught a graduate seminar on medieval marriage at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
Her publications include three volumes for the Middle English Text Series—The Trials and Joys of Marriage, Four Romances of England, and The Middle English Breton Lays—an edited collection, Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts, in which her essay on Chaucer's 'wife' and the law appears, and essays in journals such as Medieval and Early Modern English Studies, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, a monograph series (Speculum Sermonis), and special collections on medieval violence. She has written book reviews for Speculum and reviewed submissions for PMLA, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Chaucer Review, and Brepols. Her current research focuses on domesticity and the concept of the child in Chaucer's work as well as intersections of poetry, legal fiction, and historical documentation. Salisbury has presented her work in over forty conferences both in the U.S. and abroad. She has served as senior editor of Comparative Drama since 2003.

Jana K. Schulman studied medieval English, German, and Scandinavian languages and literatures at the University of Minnesota. At Western Michigan University, she teaches Old English (Introduction and Seminar), Old Norse (Introduction and Seminar), Medieval Literature, British Literature I, and Western World Literature, and her scholarship centers on law and literature in medieval Iceland and Anglo-Saxon England as well as on women and epic. She is the editor of The Rise of the Medieval World (Greenwood, 2002), co-editor of Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), co-editor of Beowulf at Kalamazoo: Essays in Translation and Performance (MIP, Forthcoming), and editor and translator of The Laws of Later Iceland: Jónsbók (A-Q Verlag, 2010). Her essays have appeared in Scandinavian Studies and the Germanic Review as well as in essay collections; she has reviewed publications for the Journal of English and Germanic Philology and Speculum. Schulman has been the recipient of a FRACASF grant from WMU (2003-2004), a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers (2001), and several Fulbright grants for research in Iceland.

Utz reviews Mapping Medievalism

Richard Utz recently reviewed: Kathryn Brush, ed., Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier. London, ON: Museum London & McIntosh Gallery, 2010.

In 2012 it will be 20 years that I attended my first Medievalism conference at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Then, as a European greenhorn who thought that growing up among the remnants of medieval architecture automatically conferred authority on me to speak of the Middle Ages, I voiced some glib doubts about the location for the conference among palm trees and close to Busch Gardens. The conference participants and their papers convinced me otherwise. In fact, ... READ THE FULL REVIEW.

Bonnie Jo Campbell ('98) publishes new novel

Nash in NYT on Judy Moody

Lonni Nash, author of American Sweethearts and expert on "tween girls," was recently interviewed for and then quoted in Pamela Paul's "Girls of a Certain Age Challenge Hollywood," an article examining the summer movie, Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer. Read the New York Times HERE.

KBAC Poets in Print: Adam Clay and Pablo Peschiera

Two WMU alumni will be reading at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center on Saturday, June 11, 2011, 7 to 9 p.m.

Adam Clay and Pablo Peschiera present readings from their work. Broadsides featuring their work created by KBAC artists Katie Platte and Jeremy Emmendorfer will be for sale and signing along with other works by the poets. This reading is free and open to the public. Refreshments are served. Doors open at 6:30. The reading begins at 7 p.m.

Adam Clay is the author of The Wash (Parlor Press) and A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World, which is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, The Laurel Review, and elsewhere. He co-edits Typo Magazine, and since 2008 has been the coordinator and editor of the Poets in Print series at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center.

Pablo Peschiera's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleaides, Shenandoah, Copper Nickel, and other places, and he writes and edits reviews for Diagram. He teaches at Hope College in Holland, MI, and he's currently reading Pinker’s The Language Instinct.

Kalamazoo Book Arts Center
Suite 103A, Park Trades Center
326 W. Kalamazoo Avenue
Kalamazoo, MI 49007

Students on the value of a humanities degree

Read the article in the Chronicle HERE.

Submission Opportunity

Wordriver Literary Review
Submission Guidelines for Volume IV

Wordriver is a literary journal dedicated to the poetry, short fiction and creative nonfiction of adjunct, part-time and full-time instructors teaching under a semester or yearly contract in our universities, colleges, and community colleges. Graduate student teachers who have used up their teaching assistant time and are teaching with adjunct contracts for the remainder of their graduate program are also eligible. We're looking for work that demonstrates the creativity and craft of adjunct/part-time instructors in English and other disciplines. We reserve first publication rights and onetime anthology publication rights for all work published. We do not accept simultaneous submissions. Submissions are accepted throughout the year.

Guidelines
All submissions must be sent by email as Word.docs. MS Word 2003 or earlier (no Vista) or .pdf files

Poetry: Maximum 5 poems (60 lines or less). Send all submissions as attachments in Microsoft Word format (see above) to one email. Include your name, address, phone number, and email address in the body of your email, as well as a short bio listing your university, college, or community college affiliation and your department and any previous publishing history. Do not put your name or personal information on your attachment(s). Send all poetry submissions to wordriver@unlv.edu (The subject line of your submission email should read: wordriverPoetrySub)

Short Fiction: Maximum 2 submissions (10 typed, double-spaced pages each). Send all submissions as attachments in Microsoft Word format (see above) to one email. Include your name, address, phone number, and email address in the body of your email, as well as a short bio listing your university, college, community college affiliation and your department and any previous publishing history. Do not put your name or personal information on your attachment(s). Send all fiction submissions wordriver@unlv.edu. The subject line of your submission email should read: wordriverFictionSub.

Creative Nonfiction: Maximum 2 submissions (10 typed, double-spaced pages each). Send all submissions as attachments in Microsoft Word format (see above) to one email. Include your name, address, phone number, and email address in the body of your email, as well as a short bio listing your university, college, community college affiliation and your department and any previous publishing history. Do not put your name or personal information on your attachment(s). Send all nonfiction submissions to wordriver@unlv.edu. The subject line of your submission email should read: wordriverNonfictionSub.

http://wordriverreview.unlv.edu

Utz reviews Die deutsche Griselda

Richard Utz recently reviewed Achim Aurnhammer and Hans-Jochen Schiewer, eds., Die Deutsche Griselda: Transformationen einer literarischen Figuration von Boccaccio bis zur Moderne. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010, for The Medieval Review. Read the review HERE.

English Co-Sponsors Medical Humanities Conference

Jason Skipper's Novel to be released this month

Jason Skipper's debut novel Hustle will be released on June 21, 2011. Set in Texas, the book chronicles the lives of three Southern men - an alcoholic ex-con man grandfather, his restless, philandering seafood salesman son, and his hopeful musician grandson - who struggle to make up for their past and somehow set course for the future. In the past, the grandfather has hustled for money; now he’s hustling for redemption. The son has hustled for women; now he’s hustling for love of a different sort. His son, Chris, is hustling to be a famous musician with enough money to solve his family’s unsolvable problems, though he knows neither hustling nor money is enough. Praised for its humor and honesty, this coming-of-age story explores the ways people struggle to fulfill their wants and desires—and what they are willing to sacrifice to feel free. Jason graduated from the PhD in English (Creative Writing) in 2005 and now lives in Tacoma, Washington, where he teaches creative writing and literature at Pacific Lutheran University. For more information, see: http://www.jasonskipper.com.