News

The Department of English is pleased to announce the promotion of two of our faculty members: Peter Campion to Associate Professor with tenure, and Katherine Scheil to Professor. Campion will publish his third collection of poetry, El Dorado, this October with the University of Chicago Press. Scheil published her second monograph, She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America (Cornell University Press) last fall, and has a third, The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway, in progress. Congratulations!

When Seattle native and fiction writer Ethan Rutherford moved to Minneapolis to attend the Creative Writing Program, he brought along a small career as singer-songwriter, with an album known, he thought, by few people outside his mother and sister. One night, at a Minneapolis coffee shop, he heard a stranger singing a familiar song, his song, a track from his CD. How could they not start a band together? Six years later, Pennyroyal (including MFA alum Jake Mohan, as drummer) is mastering its second album for September release. But back to the fiction: Rutherford graduated from the writing program and this spring published his acclaimed debut story collection, The Peripatetic Coffin (Ecco). For more about the book (and its mysterious title), read on. . . .

dislocate, the literary and arts magazine produced by English graduate students, celebrates its ninth issue, entitled Atlas of the Midwest. "A body is a country with borders in crisis," write editors (and MFA candidates) Jennifer Fossenbell and Nasir Sakandar. "Together we are always making, and these made things are maps of our many countries." Featured artists and writers in the issue include Barrie Jean Borich, Wing Young Huie, Ed Bok Lee, and Ernest Williamson III. Ask for a free issue at a Twin Cities independent bookstore.

The path from English into a career in advertising is one an increasing number of English majors make. It makes sense: As ad campaign creator Tina Karelson (MA '95, English; BA '85, English and journalism) notes, a copywriter or creative director has to think analytically about creative work, and write well--which pretty much defines the primary skills learned in English. Karelson is President of Creative (what Don Draper does) at Risdall Advertising Agency in New Brighton, Minnesota's seventh oldest advertising agency and, according to a 2013 Business Journal ranking, its seventh largest. This spring Karelson was honored as a CLA Alumna of Notable Achievement. Learn what she thinks of Mad Men. . . .

When May Lee-Yang (BA 2006) signed up for a class on Asian American drama from Professor Josephine Lee, "I didn't think of myself as a theater person," she says. Two years ago, she received a prestigious Bush Leadership Fellowship to begin planning the creation of a theater focusing on Hmong American stories. In between, she's written plays and performance art pieces produced at Mu Performing Arts, Intermedia Arts, and the Fringe Festival and was a two-time winner of the Playwright Center Many Voices Fellowship. She still thinks of herself as a "memoirist who makes a living doing theater." In the meantime, she's writing another play. What about? Read on. . . .

Matthew McGuire is a senior English and Philosophy double major who will publish a short story in the new issue of Ivory Tower, celebrated with a launch party Wednesday, April 24, from 7-10 pm in the Whole Music Club. The U's undergraduate literary and art magazine, Ivory Tower is edited and produced by students in a year-long English class. McGuire was a fiction editor for Ivory Tower last year, and his story "Silence Is Sexy" was accepted through this year's blind submission process. How does he begin writing something? "I get most of my story ideas from conversations with friends or bits of speech I overhear in public," he reveals. "Most pieces start with a voice, and then I try to experiment until I find something that works." Interview by Natalia Petkovich, originally for the Ivory Tower website. More...

For the second year in a row, writers in our graduate programs are publishing books while still students here, which is fairly amazing. Next week, in a 3 pm reading April 15, we celebrate three MFA candidates with books out or forthcoming: third-year Aaron Apps, who published Compos(t) Mentis (BlazeVOX) last fall; second-year Carrie Lorig, who will publish the chapbook nods. with Magic Helicopter Press in May and the chapbook prizePosession with Housefire Books this summer; and second-year Elisabeth Workman. Workman will publish her debut collection ULTRAMEGAPRAIRIELAND, in 2014 with Bloof Books. What is she feeling about that? "Ecstatic relief. (I've been holding it for so long and now can finally let it go.) And the ecstasy is that it's been embraced/accepted by my first choice for a home for the manuscript--the superlative Bloof Books." Workman, a native of suburban Philadelphia, has already authored several chapbooks. MFA candidate Nicky Tiso asks Workman the requisite five questions.

Regents Professor of English Patricia Hampl will be honored with the Dr. Matthew Stark Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Faculty Award April 17 at the College of Liberal Arts' Celebrate Faculty Excellence ceremony and reception, 3:30 pm in the Coffman Union Great Hall. The award recognizes Professor Hampl's distinguished writing, teaching, and service in this area, including her work with the Human Rights Program establishing the Scribe for Human Rights Fellowship, which supports an MFA creative writing student working with the Human Rights Program as a writer-in-residence. The Stark awards are based on a generous donation from Dr. Matthew "Matt" Stark, a former professor at the University of Minnesota and former executive director of the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union. Professor Hampl is the second English professor to be so honored since the Stark awards begin in 2009. Congratulations!

Charles Baxter is one of the most well-known--and admired--short story writers alive. Last year, he won the Rea Award for the Short Story, a prestigious prize judged by his peers. What you might not know is that for 20 plus years, he's been organizing and hosting literary readings to raise money for hunger relief in the U.S. His fifth annual Hunger Relief Benefit at the University of Minnesota takes place 7 pm, Tuesday, April 2, at McNamara Alumni Center. As becomes clear below, Baxter is not the type of writer who spends all his time focused on his fiction, although his healthy output of well-loved novels (such as Saul and Patsy) and collections (Gryphon was named a Notable Books of 2011 by The New York Times) might argue otherwise. The guy likes a challenge. This past fall he published his first memoir piece in an issue of Ploughshares edited by Regents Professor Patricia Hampl. "After being in a rollover accident and surviving it," he notes dryly, "I was ready to write about the experience." We feel lucky to (still) have Baxter here as the Edelstein-Keller Professor in Creative Writing. More . . .

Our annual First Books Reading takes place March 14, and we're delighted to host three first-time authors: Discover Award fiction-winner (and past 5 X Friday subject) Amanda Coplin, poet Shana Youngdahl, and the Twin Cities' own freelance writer and editor Elizabeth Foy Larsen. Larsen has been inspiring reviewers from New York to WIRED with last fall's Unbored: The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun (Bloomsbury), written with Joshua Glenn. Chock full of quirky activities, intriguing book lists, and savvy advice for kids, the book was vetted by Larsen's own children. What did they like that didn't make it in? Read on. . . .

The two winners of the 2012 Barnes & Noble Discover Awards are both Department of English alumnae. Cheryl Strayed (BA 1997) won for her memoir Wild (Knopf), and Amanda Coplin (MFA 2006) won for her debut novel The Orchardist (Harper). The awards, worth $10,000, were announced at a New York ceremony March 6. Strayed, who also majored in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, has been honored as a CLA Alumna of Notable Achievement. Coplin, a Gesell Award for Excellence in Fiction recipient while a student here, returns 7 pm Thursday, March 14, as part of the Creative Writing Program's First Books Reading at the Weisman Museum. Founded in 1990, Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers program promotes books of exceptional literary quality from authors at the start of their careers. Congratulations!

How did Angela Smith (PhD '02)--author of the new book Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema--get hooked on horror movies? It might have been an episode of Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense that she saw as a child. As befits a scholar (she's Associate Professor of English & Gender at the University of Utah), Smith has gone back to the episode ("Child's Play") as an adult. "The show seems very clichéd and campy now," she admits, "but I remember feeling absolutely terrified." What macabre story so disturbed the small Smith? Read on!

Senior Jared Anderson is a captain of the University of Minnesota swim team, currently ranked number 14 in the country. From February 27 to March 2, Anderson and his teammates competed in the 2013 Big Ten Men's Swimming and Diving Championships in Bloomington, Indiana, coming in fourth; Anderson took fifth in the 100 breaststroke. Both as a junior and a sophomore he received Academic All-Big Ten recognition. A double major (English and Journalism) with a minor in German, Anderson was awarded the Donald V. Hawkins Scholarship and Sharon Borine Scholarship from English. He blogged for GopherSports earlier this year about the swimming and diving team's training trip to Hawaii (give swimmers a day off, they go shark diving). Read on . . .

Professor Maria Damon has three text/textile pieces in the Katherine E Nash exhibit The Dance of Words, a group show of artworks that reference the use of text and calligraphic traditions found in many languages and cultures. The exhibit is up until March 15, 2013. . . . Professor Andrew Elfenbein has won an ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) Fellowship for 2013-14 for a project entitled "The Gist of Reading."

Seven of our graduate students in Creative Writing will be reading 7 pm March 1 at Magers & Quinn Bookstore. Poet Jennifer Fossenbell is one. In her middle year of the three-year Creative Writing Program, Fossenbell serves as the co-editor-in-chief (with Nasir Sakandar) of dislocate, the print literary magazine that has been edited, produced, and published by graduate students in the Department of English since 2005. Before she came to Minnesota, Fossenbell taught English as a foreign language in Ukraine and Vietnam and co-edited a literary anthology of international writing, Strange Roots: Views of Hanoi. She's also a member of the poetry promotion collective Our Flow Is Hard, involving four other graduate students, which is working to free readers from the well-manicured garden of poetry. How? Read on . . .

The scholarship of Professor Michael Hancher is referenced in The Times Literary Supplement review of the new edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. . . . Responding in part to the discovery of certain bones found buried under a British parking lot, Professor John Watkins looks at current U.S. foreign policy through the lens of Shakespeare & Richard III in Foreign Policy. He was subsequently interviewed on NPR about the story.

Assistant Professor Peter Campion will be publishing his third book of poetry, El Dorado, with the University of Chicago Press in October. He is interviewed about the book by poet Katie Peterson. Professor Ray Gonzalez will present his 12th book of poetry, Beautiful Wall, in 2014 with BOA Editions, publisher of five of his earlier volumes. Finally, Professor Julie Schumacher just sold a novel with the working title Dear Committee Members to Doubleday. This will be Schumacher's second novel for adults; she's published five for younger readers since her first adult novel, The Body Is Water (1995). Congratulations!

In the last decade, his seventh, social entrepreneurship innovator Jerr Boschee (BA English, 1966; MA, Comparative Literature, 1974) served as an adviser to England's Department of Trade and Industry Social Enterprise Unit, published his sixth book, trotted the globe giving master classes and presentations, was named three times to The NonProfit Times' "Power and Influence Top 50" list, and served as founding Chair of Encore! Service Corps International, which sends former Peace Corps Volunteers on short-term assignments in their areas of professional expertise. How did an English major arrive here? Read on . . .

As the president of the student group for English majors and minors, FUSE, Ana Bichanich continues a tradition of innovative programming that earned FUSE a Student Unions & Activities Tony Diggs Excellence Award. FUSE brings together undergraduate and graduate students in mentoring relationships and encourages students to learn more about their professors through informal lunches. More . . . .

Reina del Cid (BA '10) and the Cidizens are a folk rock band in the Twin Cities whose debut album, blueprints, plans, made radio station the Current's "Top 20 Local Releases of 2012." Reina (yes, her stage name) began her musical career while an English major at the U, posting YouTube videos popular enough to draw the interest of a major record label. As she told the Star Tribune, sticking to her studies felt right then, and now she's bringing literature influences to the music she makes with her bandmates. Or as she puts it, "I bring the words, and they bring the groove." More . . .

More than 20 years ago, he slammed at punk shows and poetry readings. Today, Arthur Schuhart (BA '87) is a dedicated English professor at a community college--which he characterizes as "the great transitional mechanism of American society." In between, he taught seventh graders in the Bronx as one of the first cohort of Teach For America recruits. Schuhart answers our queries about TFA, DCSlam, and his affection for military science fiction.

CLA's alumni magazine reach celebrates English BA alum and feminist writer Kate Millett, with contributions from Professor Emerita Toni McNaron and alums Arvonne Fraser and Jigna Desai. McNaron noted: "Millett's writings urged me to confront the classics, because she understood firsthand how limiting and debilitating it can be to an aspiring female undergraduate to keep studying ideas and works from theoretical positions that ignored characters and experiences like her own." In addition, books by English alums Amanda Coplin, Cheryl Strayed, and David Wojahn are reviewed in reach's "Bound to Please" section.

Our 5 X Friday series of interviews with alumni, faculty, and students continues with MFA alumna Amanda Coplin, whose debut novel The Orchardist hit the bestseller charts. Coplin talks about unconventional plots, violence, and the relationship between people and environments. More . . .

Associate Professor Tony C. Brown published his first book, The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage: An Enlightenment Problematic, with University of Minnesota Press. . . . Professor Maria Damon published a book of collaborative experimental poetry with Finnish artist Jukka-Pekka Kervinen entitled Door Marked X (cPress) . . . The scoop on the royal baby bump from an expert on British history and monarchy: Professor John Watkins gives a fun radio interview about the history of British monarchy and its political power, in light of the Duchess of Cambridge's pregnancy (WTIP-North Shore Community Radio).

For this week's entry in our 5 X Friday interview series, we check in with David Wojahn (BA '76), who this fall was awarded the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Wojahn's 2011 collection World Tree was honored as the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States the previous year. Born and raised in St. Paul, Wojahn confesses he sneaked into John Berryman's classes and helped stop traffic on Washington Avenue. Why? Read on . . .

After hosting award-winning Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah for three fall semesters, English bids farewell to the outgoing CLA Winton Chair with a celebration December 7 and 8: special staged readings of Farah's revised play A Stone Thrown at the Guilty. Acclaimed British theater director Irina Brown arrived November 28 and has been workshopping the play with Farah and actors drawn from the Twin Cities professional theater and Somali communities. During his time here Farah has taught classes, published a novel, given many readings and talks, including the fall 2010 CLA Commencement address, and written two plays. "I'm happy that I've been able to do these things," Farah says graciously. More . . .

Marquette University professor Sarah Wadsworth (PhD 2000) takes the mic in this week's installment of 5 X Friday, in which we pose five questions to Department of English alumnae/i, faculty, and students. Wadsworth recently published Right Here I See My Own Books with library scholar Wayne A. Wiegand, about an amazing 8000-volume library of women's writing gathered by women from all over the globe for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. More . . .

Our series of 5 X Friday interviews with alums, faculty, and students this week features Mark Baumgarten (BA 2001). Baumgarten works as editor-at-large for City Arts, a monthly magazine and online publication that covers arts and culture in Seattle, Washington, and the surrounding Puget Sound area. He just published his first book, a nonfiction account of influential independent music label K Records, this past summer. More . . .

This Friday's installment of 5 X Friday, in which we pose five questions to Department of English alumnae/i, faculty, and students, features PhD candidate Andrew Marzoni. The graduate student has his fingers in several pies here at Minnesota, but he's still looking for a sandwich (see below). He is the co-organizer of a popular new research group related to English, the Theory Reading Group. He contributes to the literary magazine of one of our BA alums. He serves as the research assistant to Somali author Nuruddin Farah, who in December completes a productive three-year residency as the CLA Winton Chair, hosted by English. And he recently published an essay, "Vengeance and Imitation in Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the Jewish Revenge Film," in the new volume Locating Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Kelli Marshall and Gabriele Malcolm (Cambridge Scholars, 2012). More . . . .

Our series of interviews with department faculty, students and alums continues with Andrew Nath (BA 1991), Executive Vice President at the Premier Bank in Maplewood, an 850 million dollar bank. The best part of his job? "Interacting with people to determine the issues that need resolution and working within a creative environment to solve those issues." Nath has high school-age children looking at colleges, and he says he's advocating for the U. More . . .

The Minnesota Daily newspaper's October 25 issue contains two feature articles with English connections. CLA Winton Chair Nuruddin Farah, hosted by English, is interviewed about his latest novel Crossbones and its backdrop of Somali turmoil; Farah is reading from the novel, released next week in paperback, Monday October 29 at 7 pm at the Loft Literary Center. PhD candidate Bomi Yoon graces the front page of the Daily--and is interviewed inside about her participation in the production "Under My Skin: Asian American Student Stories" performed Friday and Saturday October 26-27, 7:30 pm, in the Nolte Xperimental Theatre at Rarig. Recent BA alumnae Naomi Ko and Audrey Park are also interviewed for the story. The production is directed by Rick Shiomi, the artistic director of the award-winning Asian-American theater company Mu Performing Arts.

Professor Paula Rabinowitz stars in our third installment of 5 X Friday, in which we pose five questions to Department of English alumnae/i, faculty, and students. Professor Rabinowitz has been instrumental in bringing Australian National University scholar Ruth Barraclough to speak Monday, October 22, about the image of the factory girl in Korean literature. And Rabinowitz last summer published, with co-editor Cristina Giorcelli, Exchanging Clothes: Habits of Being II (University of Minnesota Press), part of a four-volume series deciphering how clothing and accessories offer cultural, political, and social meanings. More . . .

Here's our second installment of 5 X Friday: quick interviews with Department of English alumnae/i, faculty, students, and staff. Five questions (with answers!) posted on Fridays. Email sutt0063@umn.edu if you have comments. This week's subject is Esther Porter (BA summa cum laude, 2005), a former publicist for Coffee House Press who is now freelance editing. This fall she helped launch a new literary magazine, Revolver. More . . .

We are saddened to report the October 8th passing of Professor Emeritus Kent Bales, who served the Department of English for 41 years until his retirement in 2008. A graduate of Yale (BA) and Berkeley (PhD), Bales joined the English faculty in 1967 and went on to chair the department twice, as well as direct both undergraduate and graduate studies. He also served as chair of both the University's Senate Joint Committee on Faculty Affairs and Senate Joint Committee on Faculty Appointments. A scholar of American literature, he was well-known for his writing on Hawthorne. He is survived by his wife, Maria; daughter Liza (David) Lee and son Tom (Tiziana) Bales, five grandchildren and many other loving family members and good friends. A private celebration of his life will be held in the coming weeks. Memorials preferred to the Alzheimer's Association or the Sierra Club.

Today we initiate a new weekly series, 5 X Friday: quick interviews with Department of English alumnae/i, faculty, students, and staff. Yes, there are five questions. And interviews will be posted on Fridays. Easy! Email sutt0063@umn.edu if you have comments. Our first subject is Gerald Jay Goldberg (PhD 1958), who published his first book in 1962, and followed with eight more titles. In this his 83rd year, he authored a suspense/adventure novel with Nan Talese/Doubleday. We caught up him with him via email. More . . .

The Academy of American Poets has announced the winners of its annual major prizes, and David Wojahn (BA 1976) has been awarded the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, which honors the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States in the previous year. Of Wojahn's 2011 collection World Tree (University of Pittsburgh), judge Linda Gregerson noted: "Exquisitely cadenced, politically astute, large of heart, and keen of mind, these are poems of extraordinary moral penetration. They are also a joy to read." Wojahn will receive $25,000. The other judges were David St. John and current U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. Wojahn is a professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and serves as a member of the program faculty of the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of the Fine Arts. World Tree represents his eighth collection of poetry. He studied with Michael Dennis Browne while at the University of Minnesota.

Somali novelist and CLA Winton Chair Nuruddin Farah, who is housed in English during his time at the University of Minnesota, is interviewed at length in the Guardian (September 21 issue). This December Farah completes his three year term as the Winton Chair, but not before he celebrates the paperback release of his 2011 novel Crossbones (7:30 pm October 29 at the Loft Literary Center). He will also present the latest version of his play A Stone Thrown at the Guilty with staged public readings in late November/early December; he has been collaborating with Russian-via-Britain theater director Irina Brown, who has directed for the Royal National Theatre (Brown will be in attendance). In addition, he is teaching the English graduate seminar International Fiction Written in Second Tongues.

U.S. News & World Report published its 2012 rankings of graduate schools, and the University of Minnesota is ranked #13 among public and private universities in the Literary Criticism and Theory field within English. Congratulations to our impressive faculty and graduate students!

The winners of the 33rd Annual American Book Awards, sponsored by the Before Columbus Foundation, include MFA alumna Arlene Kim and BA alumnus Ed Bok Lee. Kim's debut poetry collection, What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2011. Lee's second collection, Whorled , was published in 2011 with Coffee House Press; it also won a 2012 Minnesota Book Award for poetry. There are 11 American Book Awards this year, across memoir, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. According to the Before Columbus website, the awards "were created to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America's diverse literary community." The American Book Awards will be formally presented October 7 at the University of California, Berkeley. Congratulations to Kim and Lee!

BA alumnus Sam Kean made the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list for the second time the week of August 12 with his second book The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code (Little Brown). His debut book The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements was a 2010 bestseller. Michael Schaub, on National Public Radio, raved, "Kean is one of America's smartest and most charming science writers, and his new book could be perfect for summer readers who prefer some substance with their fun." Kean was a double major in English and Physics. We interviewed him last summer.

The fall 2012 issue of the literary magazine Ploughshares was guest edited by Regents Professor and memoirist Patricia Hampl. The all-nonfiction issue features a rare nonfiction piece by novelist and Edelstein-Keller Professor Charles Baxter entitled "What Happens in Hell." Other writers represented include Phillip Lopate and Mary Gordon. The issue is available now.

Professor Paula Rabinowitz is the co-editor with Cristina Giorcelli of Exchanging Clothes: Habits of Being II (University of Minnesota Press), the second volume of a four-part series charting the social, cultural, and political expression of clothing, dress and accessories to decipher how materials offer meanings. This particular volume focuses on the "global exchange of material commodities across time and space but also of the ideas, images, colors, and textures related to fashion." Professor Rabinowitz recently blogged about a clothing exchange in the early '70s that still haunts her: the purchase of a couture Molyneux for $25.

MFA alumna Elizabeth Foy Larsen published an essay in the New York Times' Modern Love column on Sunday, August 5. "Untying a Birth Mother's Hands" explores the experience of meeting the birth mother of Larsen's adopted daughter in Guatemala. The decision to search for the birth mother was a fraught one, Larsen writes: "Most important, what if our daughter one day resented that we made such a colossal decision when she was too young to decide if an open adoption was right for her?" Larsen is working on a book about international adoption. In October, she publishes Unbored: The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun (Bloomsbury) with Joshua Glenn, with whom she writes a column at Slate.

The Twin Cities weekly newspaper Vita.mn, which is produced by the Star Tribune, announced the winner of their fourth Annual Summer Story Contest, and BA alumna Regan Smith ('09) took first prize, worth $750. The 260 entrants wrote 300-600 word short stories on the theme of the Seven Deadly Sins. Smith's entry, "Spud," explored sloth through the vehicle of an enslaved potato.

MFA alumnae Yuko Taniguchi ('01) and Katie Hae Leo ('09) were selected as two out of five 2012 Loft Minnesota Emerging Writers' Grant Winners. The winners receive grants of up to $10,000 and will also be provided with professional assistance "to develop and implement multifaceted plans for their artistic endeavors." The Loft received 200 qualified entries, which were narrowed down to 20 finalists. Leo is a playwright and essayist; Taniguchi, a poet and novelist. Congratulations!

Four books by English alumnae/i are featured in the summer issue of the CLA publication Reach: The latest collections by poets and BA alums Ed Bok Lee and Jim Moore are reviewed by MFA candidate Christine Friedlander and MFA alumna Molly Sutton Kiefer respectively. MA alumna Mary Francois Rockcastle's novel In Caddis Wood is reviewed by Reach editor Mary Pattock, and MFA alum Gayla Marty's memoir Memory of Trees by MFA alum Terri Sutton. Readers can get 20 percent off books reviewed in Reach's Bound to Please section at Coffman Bookstore (online as well).

Seeking to reacquaint Minnesotans with the U's impact on "every one of Minnesota's 87 counties," University President Eric Kaler published a July 2 opinion in the Star Tribune listing recent accomplishments. Second on his list is the granting this spring of the Rea Award for the Short Story to Edelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing Charles Baxter. Kaler goes on to mention an English alumnus: "In Minnesota, 'above average' is important, but with apologies to Garrison Keillor (class of '66), this university is excellent--and far better than many realize." Kudos to Kaler for celebrating the importance of English and the humanities along with the University's technological and scientific achievements.

On June 4, Oprah Winfrey's OWN network and O magazine kicked off Oprah's Book Club 2.0, a reading club built around online interaction. The first book chosen for the venture is by a BA alumna, Cheryl Strayed. An English and Women's Studies double major (1997), Strayed in March published Wild, a memoir of her 1995 solo hike of the Pacific Crest Trail. The book has received widespread praise--even bringing Dwight Garner of the New York Times to tears. On the Oprah's Book Club 2.0 website, Ms. Winfrey explains her choice: "It is just a wild ride of a read . . . . It is stimulating, it is thought-provoking, it is soul-enhancing. This book is about being brave when you didn't think you could be."

Zadie Smith, discussing her forthcoming novel NW, is among the writers presented for free this fall by the Department of English and the Creative Writing Program. Smith, the prize-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty, will give the Esther Freier Endowed Lecture 7:30 pm, Tuesday, October 23, at Coffman Union Theater. Other authors in the English@Minnesota Writers Series are: Antonya Nelson, short story writer and novelist (7 pm, October 16, Weisman Museum); poet Christopher Kennedy (7 pm, November 7, Weisman); and creative nonfiction writer Lia Purpura (7 pm, November 14, venue TBA), all sponsored by Creative Writing and the Edelstein-Keller Visiting Writer Endowment. Creative Writing also presents poets and professors Peter Campion and Ray Gonzalez reading at the Weisman 7 pm on October 4. All events are open to the public; no tickets necessary. See you there!

Check out the Spring 2012 Alumni Newsletter from the Creative Writing Program for news and features about alumni, current students, and faculty. The issue features interviews with Director Julie Schumacher, about her new book for young adults, The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls, and with Professor Charles Baxter, recent winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story. Finally, congratulations to this spring's graduates of the MFA program, who defended their creative theses earlier this month (photo left): Elizabeth Abbot, Lucas de Lima, Sarah Fox, Alex Grant, Amir Hussain, Chris Keimig, David Malley, Wahida Omar, Claire Stanford, Molly Sutton Kiefer, and Andrea Uptmor.

Edelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing Charles Baxter has won the 2011 Rea Award for the Short Story, given annually to a living American or Canadian writer whose published work has made a "significant contribution in the discipline of the short story as an art form." The Rea Award honors writers "for originality and influence on the genre," rather than any one collection or story. Baxter receives $30,000 and joins a list of acclaimed honorees including Alice Munro, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, and John Updike. The jurors this year were Lorrie Moore, Stuart Dybeck, and Bill Henderson. Baxter's latest book, the 2011 Gryphon: New & Selected Stories, was noted in the jurors' citation, which reads in part: "Charles Baxter is a writer of elegant sentences, an expert in the mechanics of dramatic narration, and a master of psychological exile, which is the unexotic but special terrain of the short story." Meanwhile, the Star Tribune named him "Best Novelist" in its May 16 Best of Minnesota section. (The Star Tribune also named MA alumna Erin Hart Best Mystery Writer and BA/MA/PhD alumna Joyce Sutphen runner-up to Robert Bly for Best Poet.) Congratulations!

Poet Marilyn Nelson (PhD 1979) in April received the Frost Medal, the Poetry Society of America's highest award. The Medal is presented annually for "distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry." Previous winners of this award include Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Marianne Moore, and Charles Simic, who was the 2011 recipient. Nelson reads in Minneapolis 7:30 pm May 21 at Plymouth Congregational Church.

Start your summer reading now! Associate Professor Katherine Scheil this spring published She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America (Cornell University Press, 2012), a fascinating look at how book clubs provided encouragement for female literary education during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--and a path into public life. This is Professor Scheil's third book. In May, Professor Julie Schumacher publishes her fifth book for younger readers, The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (Delacorte, 2012). She won a 2007 Minnesota Book Award for her novel The Book of One Hundred Truths.

Two PhD candidates were awarded Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships for 2012-13: Sunyoung Ahn (adviser: Tim Brennan) and Will Kanyusik (adviser: Siobhan Craig). In addition, six PhD and MFA candidates received financial support this summer through the Graduate Research Partnership Program: Sunyoung Ahn (advised by Tim Brennan), Sally Franson (Charles Baxter), Andrew Marzoni (Siobhan Craig), Caitlin McHugh (Katherine Scheil), Trenton Olson (Andy Elfenbein), and Kerry Voigt (Ray Gonzalez). In addition, the MFA program awarded CLA research/travel fellowships to Aaron Apps, Christine Friedlander, and Flor Lauria, while the PhD program awarded short-term research grants to Wes Burdine, Andrew Marzoni, and Davu Seru. Congratulations to all!

Garrison Keillor (BA '66), wearing his bookstore owner hat, is presenting "Honor Thy Mother," a free reading 3 pm, Sunday, May 13, with Regents Professor Patricia Hampl, Professor Julie Schumacher, MFA alumna Shannon Olson, and Keillor himself. The event, sponsored by Keillor's emporium, Common Good Books, takes place at Macalester College's Weyerhaeuser Chapel (St. Paul). Professor Hampl and Keillor were editors together at the University of Minnesota undergraduate literary magazine Ivory Tower. Keillor and Olson, the author of Welcome to My Planet: Where English Is Sometimes Spoken, once taught a class together on comedy writing at the U.

Professor Emeritus Norman Fruman, a member of the English faculty from 1978 to 1994, died April 19, at the age of 88 in Laguna Beach, California. Fruman was, as he told his friends, "famous and infamous" as the author of Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel (Braziller, 1971), which revealed that the English poet was a serial plagiarist. Fruman's book, described at the time as "relentlessly and devastatingly polemical and one of the most exciting I have read in years," by the New York Times critic, has been the focus of obituaries in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Star Tribune, and the Laguna Beach Patch. Fruman was also a combat platoon leader at the Battle of the Bulge and was afterward a German prisoner of war. He is survived by his wife of 53 years, Doris, three children, and four grandchildren.

Three English undergraduates are graduating this spring with Community Engagement Scholars Program recognition: Kari Eloranta, Abdiasis Hirsi, and Anna Kraemer. This honor recognizes that the students have performed 400 hours of community engagement addressing social issues and community needs throughout their undergraduate careers at the University of Minnesota. They also have completed reflections on those volunteer experiences, as well as a seminar and final project. The students receive recognition on their official transcripts and at commencement. The Department of English honored these students at our annual Campus Community Colloquium on April 30. Eloranta in addition received a University of Minnesota Alumni Association Student Leadership Award later that evening at the President's Student Leadership and Service Awards Banquet. Congratulations!

Ivory Tower, the literary and arts magazine created for and by undergraduates at the University of Minnesota, has won the Tony Diggs Innovation Award from the Student Activities Office. These Excellence Awards are intended to recognize student group achievements; the Innovation Award specifically recognizes student groups that have displayed innovation and/or fostered creativity through their program/events. Ivory Tower, which is edited and produced through the year-long English course Literary Magazine Production Lab, this year introduced the "Write and Return" program: circulating notebooks to encourage student writing and drawing on campus, as well as to boost submissions to the journal. Ivory Tower also helps organize the Writer's Block writing workshops, among other activities. The new issue of Ivory Tower is celebrated 7 pm, Wednesday, April 25, at the Whole in Coffman Union with readings, music, and art. Congratulations to the Ivory Tower staff and the writers and artists included in the 2012 Ivory Tower!

Cheryl Strayed (BA 1997) has been featured in Interview Magazine, Vogue Magazine, and the New York Times in the past month, after publishing the memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (Knopf). Strayed is the author of a 2005 novel, Torch. She also writes the advice column "Dear Sugar" in the online literary magazine Rumpus. She grew up in Minnesota and lives now in Portland, Oregon.

Second-year MFA Kate Johnston is the recipient of the Scribe for Human Rights Fellowship for 2012, a ten-week fellowship with the Human Rights Program at the University of Minnesota. Kate's project concerns Somali refugees in the Twin Cities and solitary confinement in Minnesota prisons. . . . PhD candidate David Moberly has accepted a Critical Language Scholarship from the US Department of State and will be traveling to Tangier, Morocco, to study Arabic in an intensive summer program. . . . PhD candidate John Pistelli has been offered a place at the NEH "Oscar Wilde and His Circle" summer seminar at UCLA, an award that comes with a $3900 NEH fellowship. Of the 16 Summer Scholars, only two are graduate students; the rest are faculty. . . . Congratulations also to MFAs Victoria Scher and Elisabeth Workman, recipients of Marcella DeBourg Fellowships for summer 2012, granted $1700 each to complete a writing project that gives creative expression to women's lives.

Last year, English undergraduate Michael Lee was named the 2011 Best Individual Poet at the national College Unions Poetry Slam, leading the University of Minnesota team to a fourth place finish. He also received a 2011 Verve Grant for Spoken Word Artists, the only spoken word grant in the country. And now, in collaboration with Runner Runner, a Minneapolis production company, he has made a stunning video of his elegiac spoken word poem "Pass On," which has been entered in the 2012 Vimeo online video awards. More . . .

Two English majors and one MFA candidate have been selected to receive a President's Student Leadership & Service Award this spring. English senior Kari Eloranta is actively involved with civic engagement and is the undergraduate Service-Learning Mentor for the English course, The Literature of Public Life (ENGL 1501W); she also coordinates the University YMCA's tutoring projects this year. English senior Echo Martin is the web editor for two English student publications, Ivory Tower and Parachute, and has been involved with service learning and the English major student group FUSE. Third-year MFA candidate Claire Stanford is involved with sustainable agriculture and youth farm work in the Frogtown neighborhood of Saint Paul. Only about 35 students--both undergraduate and graduate--are selected from across the University, approximately one-half of one percent of the student body, for exceptional leadership and service to the University of Minnesota and the surrounding community.

Three current graduate students in the Department of English are publishing books this year. PhD candidate Katie Robison was recently interviewed in the Minnesota Daily about her new debut young adult novel Downburst (Quil Books, Inc.). She is working toward a PhD in medieval and early modern literature. Meanwhile, MFA candidate Feng Sun Chen just published her first poetry collection Butcher's Tree with Black Ocean. MFA candidate Sarah Fox publishes Mother Substance, her second collection with Coffee House Press, next fall. The three authors will be reading from their respective books at 12:30 pm April 26, in Lind Hall 207A.

Congratulations to our 2012 Minnesota State Arts Board grant winners! MFA candidates Elizabeth Abbott, David Malley, and Andrea Uptmor received grants to support their creative work. Alumnae/i winners include Matt Burgess, Kathleen Glasgow, Brian Laidlaw, Heather McPherson, Margie Newman, Michael Opperman, and Holly Vanderhaar.

Professor Michael Hancher has been asked to serve a one-year term on the Faculty Consultative Committee of the Faculty Senate, which serves as the consulting body to President Eric Kaler and as the executive committee of the Faculty Senate. Professor Hancher finished a three-year term to this elected body in 2011.

Creative Writing Program faculty, students, and alumni are heading southeast next week for the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Chicago. Many are reading, participating on panels, and/or representing at the book fair, including Program Director Julie Schumacher and Professor Maria Damon. A sample listing here.

Novelist Nuruddin Farah, the College of Liberal Arts Winton Chair hosted by English, will receive a public staged reading of his latest play, A Stone Thrown at the Guilty, February 18 and 19 at 7:30 pm. The reading will be directed by University of Minnesota Assistant Professor of Theater Dominic Taylor, featuring a a cast of professional actors. The play is inspired by two historical uprisings in Somalia under British rule, during 1922 and 1939-40. The free event takes place at the Rarig Center Stoll Thrust Theatre; no tickets necessary.

Professor Nabil Matar will receive the 2012 Building Bridges Award from the Association of Muslim Social Scientists on March 28 at Cambridge University. The award is given in recognition of Professor Matar's pioneering scholarship on the relationship between Islamic civilization and early modern Europe, which has helped to raise awareness of the historical roots of Western perceptions of Islam. More on Professor Matar.

Minnesota Book Award finalists were announced Saturday by the Friends of the St. Paul Library, and finalists include books by alums Eric Dregni and Kevin Fenton (MFAs), Ed Bok Lee and Jim Moore (BAs), and Mary Rockcastle (MA). Congratulations!

Imagine Fund grant programs support projects in the arts, humanities, and design at the University of Minnesota. Every year, faculty awards support innovative research in these areas; this year 150 awards were given, for up to $5,000 each. Congratulations to English faculty recipients: Timothy Brennan, Lois Cucullu, Maria Damon, Genevieve Escure, Maria Fitzgerald, Nabil Matar, Paula Rabinowitz, Jani Scandura, and Katherine Scheil. In addition, Professor Maria Damon received a 2012 Imagine Fund Special Events Award to enable a visit from sound poet Jaap Blonk.

dislocate literary journal, run by Creative Writing Program graduate students at the University of Minnesota, is holding a contest for a graphic design intern. The winner receives $250 and the chance to layout issue 8 of dislocate. Any undergraduate or graduate student attending the U is welcome to apply, as long as s/he is proficient with InDesign software. Interested students should send examples of design work, including links to online portfolios, to dislocate.magazine@gmail.com with the subject line "Graphic Design Internship." Show us what you've got!

In a UMNews profile this week, Edelstein-Keller Professor in Creative Writing Charles Baxter talks about the pleasure of discovering fictional characters and the importance of fear and failure in fiction. "I'd say you need to be able to imagine, and want to imagine, what people do when things begin to go wrong," he notes. Baxter is the author most recently of the story collection Gryphon, which was named to the New York Times' "100 Notable Books of 2011" list. He is currently working on a collection of short stories based on virtues.

Distinguished McKnight University Professor John Watkins was interviewed regarding former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Meryl Streep's new biopic in the Star Tribune and on Fox 9's The Buzz show January 12 with Jason Matheson; he was also quoted in Minn Post. Professor Watkins' research explores sovereignty and queenship, as well as medieval and early modern diplomacy and political culture; he lived in England during the years Thatcher was Prime Minister.

Professor of English Michael Hancher will be the speaker at a Friends of the Libraries dinner 5 pm, Thursday, January 26, at the Campus Club. Professor Hancher, past president of the Dictionary Society of North America, will riff on questions that have long puzzled dictionary makers and dictionary users--the relationship of things, names of things, and pictures of things--and explore ways in which these puzzles just may become solvable with the migration of dictionaries from print to cyberspace. Tickets are $12.99 for students, $25.99 for adults. Reservations at 612-626-7788.

On Friday, January 20, the Friends of the Libraries will present "An Upson Song Cycle": the premiere performance of songs by composer Linda Kachelmeier based on poems by Arthur Upson, performed by local tenor Roy Heilman and accompanied by Mary Jo Gothmann. Assistant professor of creative writing Peter Campion will introduce and narrate the program. Poet Arthur Upson was a University of Minnesota student and English lecturer at the turn of the 19th century. Upon then-president Cyrus Northrop's request, Upson reworked the song "Hail! Minnesota," adding the second verse to what became the University hymn and later the official state song. His death in 1908 at age 31 cut short a literary career filled with promise. The free event starts at 7:30 pm in the Upson Room of Walter Library. Make a reservation online or call 612-624-9339.

"As the holiday season approaches and the Twin Cities strings up its lights," notes Professor and Chair Ellen Messer-Davidow, "English has plenty of dazzle to contribute to the festivities." For news about faculty, student, and alumnae/i accomplishments and awards, check out the winter 2011 alumni magazine, English@Minnesota. Professors Nabil Matar, Maria Damon, and Peter Campion are featured, along with lots more!

Charles Baxter's acclaimed collection Gryphon: New and Selected Stories was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2011 by the New York Times. Baxter is Edelstein-Keller Professor in Creative Writing. Congratulations!

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Peter Campion will be the first judge of Milkweed Editions' major new prize for poetry, the Lindquist & Vennum Prize. The prize awards $10,000 and publication for an unpublished manuscript from the Upper Midwest. The Lindquist & Vennum Foundation, sponsor of the award, was established by the Lindquist & Vennum law firm of Minneapolis. Submissions are open through the end of January.

Associate Professor Dan Philippon will be a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Turin and the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy from March through June 2012. Meanwhile he is serving this semester as a Senior Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. Congratulations!

For the fourth year, novelist and Edelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing Charles Baxter hosts the Creative Writing Program's Hunger Relief Benefit reading. The event features Creative Writing faculty, including Baxter, poets Peter Campion and Maria Damon, poet/flash fiction writer Ray Gonzalez, and novelist Julie Schumacher. Baxter is the author of Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (Pantheon, 2011) and The Soul Thief (2008), among other fictional works. His nonfiction includes The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot (2007), which won a Minnesota Book Award. The event is free with a suggested donation of $5.00. Proceeds will benefit Second Harvest Heartland, the Midwest's largest food bank. Sponsored by the Edelstein-Keller Visiting Writers Series.

In the fourth annual film series collaboration between the Walker Art Center and the University, Professor of English Paula Rabinowitz and Walker film curator Sheryl Mousley organized "And Yet She Moves: Reviewing Feminist Cinema," 15 films screening at the Walker November 4-20.This series was created in light of a broader resurgence of interest in women filmmakers of the '70s, and it includes films by Chantal Akerman, Bette Gordon, and Trinh T. Minh-ha, as well as the Walker's premiere theatrical run of Lynn Hershman Leeson's !Women Art Revolution. The students in Professor Rabinowitz's class Reviewing Feminist Cinema are currently writing about the films on the Walker's Film & Video blog.

Regents Professor and memoirist Patricia Hampl has teamed up with Human Rights Program director Barbara Frey to create "My Letter to the World: Narrating Human Rights," a series of free talks and panel discussions October 10 devoted to human rights and the personal narrative voice (whether in fiction, nonfiction, poetry). Panelists include two other University Regents Professors, Kathryn Sikkink and Elaine Tyler May, four memoirists and scholars from England, among them Annette Koback and Vesna Goldsworthy, and Azeri political blogger Emin Milli. Novelist and CLA Winton Chair Nuruddin Farah will also participate. The capstone event is the Department of English's Esther Freier Endowed Lecture in Literature, which will be given by Philip Gourevitch, author of the award-winning account of the Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families. Sponsored by the Creative Writing and Human Rights programs with English, all events take place in Coffman Union Theater and are open to the public.

Tumblr, meet the Department of English's Creative Writing Program. The new blog features an interview with freshly minted Minnesota State Poet Laureate Joyce Sutphen (BA summa cum laude 1982, MA in English & Creative Writing 1993, English PhD 1996). . . . In other Creative Writing news, Assistant Professor of Poetry Peter Campion was awarded the Poetry Magazine Editors Prize for Reviewing, for his September 2011 review of The H.D. Book by Robert Duncan.

Monica Nassif (BA 1982) was named 2011 University of Minnesota Entrepreneur of the Year at a McNamara Alumni Center reception September 8. Nassif is the founder of Caldrea, a luxury cleaning products line, and its offshoot the Mrs. Meyers' Clean Day brand. Her success, she says in an interview, grew out of an internship with Dayton-Hudson which her English adviser helped her acquire. After almost two decades as a brand-builder for prominent retailers and consumer product firms, she started a marketing communications business in Minneapolis, then initiated Caldrea in 1999.

The Creative Writing Program of the Department of English was ranked #10 in the Top Fifty MFA Programs in the United States, as compiled by Poets & Writers magazine. The annual rankings are based on such measures as funding, teaching load, and selectivity, as well as a poll of MFA program applicants. Creative Writing faculty have been awarded two Regents Professorships, seven Minnesota Book Awards, four Guggenheim Fellowships, and one MacArthur Fellowship. Program alumni and current students have published over 90 books. The rankings are published in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers.

Poet, critic, and editor Peter Campion joins the Department of English this fall as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing. Campion, winner of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, is the author of two collections of poetry, The Lions and Other People. Since 2007, he has served as the editor-in-chief of the journal Literary Imagination. He held the Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry from Stanford University and is the recipient of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as a Pushcart Prize. He received his MA in Creative Writing from Boston University and previously taught at Auburn University. Professor Campion will teach a graduate level poetry writing class this fall.

Governor Mark Dayton announced that Joyce Sutphen (English BA 1982, MA in English & Creative Writing 1993, English PhD 1996) will serve as the Poet Laureate for the State of Minnesota, following inaugural state Poet Laureate Robert Bly. In this role, Sutphen will promote and support poetry in Minnesota. "Joyce Sutphen is a talented writer and teacher who will be a great voice for poetry in Minnesota," Governor Dayton said. Sutphen won a Minnesota Book Award in Poetry for her third collection of poetry, Naming the Stars (Holy Cow! Press, 2004). Her latest collection is First Words (Red Dragonfly Press, 2010). She teaches literature and creative writing at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter.

Professor Paula Rabinowitz is the co-editor with Cristina Giorcelli of Accessorizing the Body: Habits of Being I (University of Minnesota Press, August), the first volume of a four-part series charting the social, cultural, and political expression of clothing, dress and accessories to decipher how materials offer meanings. Professor Rabinowitz recently blogged about the brisk market for fake brand clothing, officially sanctioned or otherwise--the celebration of the "knock-off of the knock-off"--in Shanghai, China, where she taught as a Distinguished Fulbright Lecturer in American Culture at East China Normal University this past spring.

English alumnus Nate Olson (BA 2010), who has been teaching English in Japan with the JET program, weathered the March earthquake in Hanamaki in the Iwate prefecture, 50 miles away from some of the worst tsunami damage. "A couple days prior to the quake," he writes us, "there was a magnitude 5 tremor which was the biggest earthquake I'd ever experienced. Everyone else at my school hardly batted an eye. . . . Then the big quake came [a magnitude 9]. The walls and light fixtures shook violently, books toppled off the shelves, and I said ten 'Hail Marys' and five 'Our Fathers' while waiting for the floor to collapse beneath me." The quake lasted six minutes. Olson marveled at the Japanese people's selfless and ordered response, observing that the teachers at his school visited each of their students' homes ("on spring vacation, no less!") to check on their well-being. "As an outsider, I was completely taken aback by the care I received from neighbors, coworkers, and even complete strangers following the quake."

Olson works as an ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) at two high schools, teaching a class ("Oral Communication") to 10th graders with little to no experience speaking English. At one high school, his students are university-bound with an "encyclopedic" understanding of English grammar; at the other, they know very little about the language. The difference in comprehension can be daunting: "In a given week," he describes, "I am by turns a fully-fledged teacher expected to design lesson plans around the intricacies of native English speech, and a glorified human tape recorder expected to entertain students with my 'foreignness.'" Yet the community spirit he witnessed after the quake and tsunami inspired him, and he plans to continue in the JET program, his teaching augmented with such activities as running an English club and helping a student prepare for a national English speech contest. Meanwhile, the ground shakes: amid the aftershocks was a magnitude 7 that knocked him out of bed. His thoughts are for those who have lost everything and still must stand on unsteady ground "constantly reminded of the cause of their misfortune."

Somali novelist and playwright Nuruddin Farah, who the Department of English is hosting during his three years as CLA Winton Chair, published an article in the July 29 Washington Post about the famine crisis in Somalia.

The summer issue of the University of Minnesota Alumni Association magazine Minnesota features four English alumnae. Kathleen Glasgow (MFA 2002), coordinator of the Creative Writing Program, won first place in the magazine's 12th annual fiction contest with her story "Leaving"; judge Ian Graham Leask (BA 1980, MA 1986) compared the story to "a tune in your head that won't go away." Six pages later, the three editors of the up-and-coming literary arts magazine Paper Darts are interviewed: Jamie Millard, Regan Smith, and Meghan Suszynski (all BA 2009) relate how their colorful glossy started out on home printers and a Singer sewing machine.

Somali novelist and playwright Nuruddin Farah, who the Department of English is hosting during his three years as CLA Winton Chair, describes the view from his window in the New York Times this past Sunday July 3. It is often an imaginary view, Farah notes, as he envisions a Mogadishu made up of past remembrances and current experiences, while he lives and writes far away in Cape Town, Newcastle, Minneapolis.

BA alumnus Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the Periodic Table of the Elements, just released in paperback, was publishing's sleeper hit of 2010: a science history that surprised its author as much as anyone by making the New York Times Bestseller List, primarily via word of mouth. But South Dakota native Kean, a 2002 summa cum laude double major in English and Physics, has fashioned a ridiculously readable collection of anecdotes about the elements, from hydrogen to ununbium. "I really think that the human mind works best through stories," notes Kean in an interview. More. . .

Copies of the 2011 Ivory Tower, the University of Minnesota's undergraduate literary arts magazine, flew out the door back in May. However, you can still view the journal, created by students in a year-long English class, online. Thanks to student initiative, the 2011, 2010, and 2009 issues are now also available via a free app for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch!

English faculty Tony C. Brown and Siobhan Craig have been promoted with tenure to Associate Professor in recognition of their outstanding research, teaching, and service. Professor Craig last year published Cinema After Fascism: The Shattered Screen (Palgrave Macmillan), and Professor Brown's book The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage: An Enlightenment Problematic is forthcoming. . . . Professor and former English chair Paula Rabinowitz has been elected to the University of Minnesota Senate. Congratulations to all!

The following PhD candidates were the recipients of awards from outside the University: Patricia Baehler, Thomas F. Wallace Fellowship for her dissertation "'Convey'd to Your Hand': The Delivery and Circulation of Letters in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 1684-1815" (adviser Brian Goldberg); Lelaine L. Bonine, Fellowship from the Japanese government to present "Master of (Global) Suspense: Digital Hitchcock and Cinephilia Gone Global," at the Nagoya American Studies Summer Seminar, Nanzan University, Japan (adviser Jani Scandura); Keith Mikos, National American Philosophical Society fellowship for summer research in Philadelphia for his project, "Magnification: Meaning, Metaphysics and the Microscope" (Scandura); Jessica Orton, spring Fulbright Grant to conduct research and teach in Rome, Italy; Davu Seru, Phillips Fellowship, Archie Givens Sr. Collection of African-American Literature and Life (adviser John Wright); Maurits Van Bever Donker, South African National Research Foundation Prestigious Doctoral Fellowship and Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change/Mellon Foundation Doctoral Research Fellowship (advisers Qadri Ismail & Tom Pepper). Congratulations to all!

The following PhD candidates in English were the recipients of University and department awards: Erik Carlson, Graduate School Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for his dissertation project "The Old English Language of Fear" (adviser Andrew Scheil); Elissa Hansen, Graduate School Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for her dissertation project "Signs of the Time: Temporality in Fourteenth Century English Contemplative Writing" (adviser Rebecca Krug); Josh Mabie, Consortium Fellowship, University Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment, and the Life Sciences (adviser Dan Philippon); Eric Brownell, Samuel Hold Monk Memorial Prize for Published Scholarship, for his article "Our Lady of the Telegraph: Mina as Medieval Cyborg in Bram Stoker's Dracula," Journal of Dracula Studies, 12 (December 2010), 29-51 (adviser Lois Cucullu); Emily Anderson, Garner/McNaron/Sprengnether Summer Fellowship in Feminist Literary Studies, for her project "Marrying Monsters, Becoming Bridezillas: The Reimagining of the Gothic in 21st Century Narratives of Marriage" (Cucullu); and Eun Joo Kim, Audrey Christensen Library Acquisition Prize (adviser Josephine Lee). Congratulations to all!

With spring arrives another crop of books from the Department of English's award-winning faculty. Professor Nabil Matar, recently named a CLA Scholar of the College, co-authored with Gerald MacLean Britain and the Islamic World: 1558-1713 (University of Oxford Press, 2011). . . . Professor Maria Damon published Postliterary America: From Bagel Shop Jazz to Micropoetries with the University of Iowa Press in April. . . . And Associate Professor Katherine Scheil co-edited with Randall Martin Shakespeare, Adaptation, Modern Drama: Essays in Honour of Jill Levenson (University of Toronto Press, 2011).

Professor Michael Hancher is the co-chair with Laura Gurak (Writing Studies) of the 2011-12 Institute for Advanced Study collaborative, "Digital Humanities 2.0." The collaborative seeks to advance artistic creation and scholarly research in the humanities by exploring digitization and Web 2.0 technologies. IAS provides workspace in Nolte Hall and financial support each year to groups of colleagues engaging in interdisciplinary projects.

MFA alumnus (and Department of English course coordinator) Michael Walsh (2006) won the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry for his debut collection The Dirt Riddles (University of Arkansas Press, 2010). Congratulations!

The recipients of the Graduate Research Partnership Program (GRPP) summer awards for 2011 are: Eric Brownell, "The Winking Portrait: Joseph L. Mankiewicz's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir as Postwar Pastiche" (Faculty sponsor: Lois Cucullu); Sarah Fox, "Mother Substance" (Madelon Sprengnether); Kate Johnston, "Silence(d): An Inquiry into Meditation and Solitary Confinement" (Ray Gonzalez); William Kanyusik, "The Problem of Recognition: The Disabled Male Veteran and Masculinity as Spectacle" (Siobhan Craig); Michael Rowe, "Affect, Ethic, and Intention in the Archive: The 'Project' of Djuna Barnes Nightwood" (Cucullu); Katie Sisneros, "Representations of the Ottoman Empire in English Ballads: The Caroline Period and the Battle of Vienna" (Nabil Matar). Congratulations!

Lightsey Darst (MFA 2003) received the Minnesota Book Award for poetry for her debut collection Find the Girl (Coffee House Press, 2010). The awards were announced April 16. . . . Three out of four 2011 McKnight Artist Fellowships for Writers went to MFA alumni: John Colburn, Ethan Rutherford, and Dominic Saucedo, who will each receive $25,000. . . . In other Creative Writing Program news, MFA candidate Colleen Coyne was awarded this year's Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize for Poetry. The reader was Garrison Keillor. She will receive $100 from the Academy and possible publication in the academy anthology. BA alum Jessica Mayer and current major Madeline Summers won honorable mentions. MFA candidates Andrea Uptmor and Wahida Omar received 2011 Marcella DeBourg Fellowships. These $1000 awards are given annually to graduate students whose writing gives "creative expression to women's lives." MFA candidates Sarah Fox and Chris Keimig were awarded residencies at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, MN, for July 2011. Congratulations to all!

Second year MFA candidate Alex Grant has been named as the first recipient of the Michael Dennis Browne Fellowship, created in honor of the long-time English professor who retired last spring. The summer Fellowship is to be awarded annually by faculty consensus to a poetry student in the first or second year of the Creative Writing Program, based on the progress the student is making in the Program and the achievement and promise of the work. There is no submission process. The Creative Writing Faculty noted in the announcement that Grant is "setting a bold standard, seriously pursuing novelties in voice and narrative matter, using a language that extends certain literary traditions while at the same time laying down hot new tracks. His poetry is ripe, rich and ambitious." Grant is also a musician. He is a graduate of Middle Tennessee State University where he majored in Recording Industry Production and Technology. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Scrambler, Forklift OH, and Gently Read Lit. He grew up in Carthage, Tennessee. Congratulations!

Alumna Lucille Broderson (BA 1937) is interviewed, along with her long-time teacher and editor Professor Emeritus Michael Dennis Browne, in CLA's REACH magazine about her second collection of poetry, You're Wearing a Blue Shirt the Color of the Sky: Selected Poems (Nodin). REACH also spotlights reviews of books by alums Matt Burgess and Elizabeth Bourque Johnson. . . . MFA alumnus Burgess, author of the acclaimed debut novel Dogfight, a Love Story, was interviewed this month in the Star Tribune, for the "My Minnesota" feature. . . . Distinguished McKnight University Professor John Watkins was quoted in a Star Tribune article about the American fascination with British royalty. Watkins is also interviewed on the University home page this week. . . . Finally Edelstein-Keller Professor in Creative Writing Charles Baxter's latest story collection Gryphon is reviewed by Claire Messud in the April 28 New York Review of Books.

English and Journalism double major Carrie Krueger has won a 2011-12 Selmer Birkelo Scholarship, given to 15 College of Liberal Arts students annually. The Birkelo Scholarship is worth up to $4000 according to need. The scholarships are awarded on the basis of academic merit, with particular attention paid to depth of study in the major, general breadth of coursework, and clarity of academic purpose. Congratulations, Carrie!

The Department of English regrets to announce that Joan Didion's lecture scheduled for April 13, 2011, has been canceled, due to health concerns. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey will give the spring 2011 Esther Freier Endowed Lecture in Literature April 27, 2011, at 7:30 pm in Coffman Union Theater.

Congratulations to MFA candidate Claire Stanford, who has been selected as the summer 2011 Scribe for Human Rights. Claire will work closely with the University's Human Rights Program during her ten-week fellowship, which centers around developing a creative writing program with a human rights emphasis at Gordon Parks High School in Saint Paul. Gordon Parks serves at-risk youth ages 16-21 in the Frogtown neighborhood. The Scribe for Human Rights is a joint initiative of the Creative Writing Program and the Human Rights Program.

English senior Lance Witzig has been named a President's Student Leadership and Service Award winner. Witzig is an English Undergraduate Studies peer counselor, as well as the President of Fellowship of Undergraduate Students in English (FUSE). He has also served as a TA for undergraduate classes and been involved with outreach for the Honors Program. He is set to graduate this spring with Community Engagement Scholars Program recognition, which represents 400 hours of community engagement work.

The co-editors of Twin Cities-based literary and art magazine Paper Darts met in the English editing class that creates the University's literary journal Ivory Tower. All English majors, Jamie Millard, Regan Smith, and Meghan Suszynski have published three issues now of Paper Darts since graduating in 2009. A launch for the third takes place Saturday, March 5 from 7-10 pm at Honey in NE Minneapolis, featuring readings by local writers John Jodzio, Matt Mauch, Michele Campbell, and Robert Voedisch, live music by local trio The Chord and the Fawn, and a digital art slideshow. The Star Tribune featured Paper Darts this Thursday.

Kate Hopper (MFA 2005) was featured in the Minneapolis Star Tribune February 13. Hopper teaches Mother Words, a class offered at the Loft Literary Center and online. Hopper also writes the Mother Words blog.

Peter Geye (BA 2000) has won the inaugural Independent Literary Award for fiction, a prize given by literary bloggers, for his novel Safe From the Sea. (The runner-up was Great House by Nicole Krauss.) "I'm bowled over," said Geye in an interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune. . . . MFA alumna Swati Avasthi won a CYBILS Award for Young Adult Fiction for her debut novel Split (Knopf). The CYBILS Children and Young Adult Bloggers' Literary Awards are given each year by bloggers for the year's best children's and young adult titles. Congratulations!

Three recent graduates of the PhD program published first books this past fall: Adam Barrows (PhD '06), The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature (University of California Press), Marcela Kostihova (PhD '04), Shakespeare in Transition: Political Appropriations in the Postcommunist Czech Republic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and Anca Parvulescu (PhD '06), Laughter: Notes on a Passion (Short Circuit/MIT Press, 2010). Parvulescu is featured in the Washington University in St. Louis Newsroom. Congratulations to all!

Four Department of English alums are finalists for Minnesota Book Awards: William Reichard (poetry, Sin Eater), Lightsey Darst (poetry, Find the Girl), Swati Avasthi (young people's literature, Split), and Matt Burgess (novel and short story, Dogfight, a Love Story). Winners will be announced at the 23rd Annual Minnesota Book Awards Gala on Saturday, April 16, in Saint Paul.

Professor Timothy Brennan received a Fall 2010 Grant-in-Aid of Artistry, Research or Scholarship from the Graduate School, for "Poets of Commodities: The Humanist Challenge to Economics." Congratulations!

Congratulations to Edelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing Charles Baxter, whose book Gryphon: New and Selected Stories received a lead review in the New York Times Book Review January 16. The reviewer, Joyce Carol Oates, writes, "Beneath the shadowless equanimity of Norman Rockwell's America . . . Baxter evokes something like the chilling starkness and human isolation of the work of Edward Hopper." Baxter talks about the new collection January 28 at 3 pm in Lind 207A.

Seven Department of English professors received $5000 Imagine Fund Awards for 2011. The Imagine Fund is a unique University of Minnesota system-wide program open to humanities, arts, and design faculty to support a range of projects and enhance the presence of these disciplines at the university. Congratulations to Timothy Brennan, Maria Damon, Qadri Ismail, Paula Rabinowitz, Jani Scandura, Omise'eke Tinsley, and John Wright.

Professor of English Nabil Matar was named College of Liberal Arts Scholar of the College, an award presented annually to acknowledge outstanding achievement by faculty in the college. Congratulations!

Professor of English Emerita Toni McNaron will lead a six-session monthly book club at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum with the focus, appropriately, on garden plots (that is, plots involving gardens). The Minneapolis Star Tribune features an interview with McNaron, who notes, "When you say 'garden,' white Western culture thinks of Eden. The garden is a mythic, iconic place." Authors will include Hawthorne, Silko, and Woolf, among others.

Professor of English Nabil Matar describes the upcoming international conference he is organizing, Shared Cultural Spaces: Islam and the West in the Arts and Sciences, on campus February 24 through 26. Matar received a $170,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund the conference, which will "explore ways that Muslim contributions to literature, science, art, and architecture have influenced and helped build the foundation for those disciplines in the West."

CLA Winton Chair Nuruddin Farah, who is being hosted by the Department of English, is featured in the December 13 New Yorker with an excerpt from his forthcoming novel Crossbones. The piece is entitled "Young Thing." Farah, a Somali who resides in South Africa, is the author of ten novels, a nonfiction book, and numerous articles and stories in English.

Associate Professor David Treuer reviews the new history The Killing of Crazy Horse by Thomas Powers in the Sunday December 12 Washington Post. "More than the story of Crazy Horse or the battles between two implacable foes," Treuer writes, "Powers gives us a portrait of a place - a portrait done in the blood of the heartland."

Department of English Course Coordinator Michael Walsh has received a CLA Outstanding Service Award. This recognition includes a monetary award and a certificate of appreciation, which will be presented by CLA Dean James Parente, Jr., at the CLA Staff Appreciation Ceremony on Tuesday, December 14, 2010. The ceremony takes place from 2:30 to 4:30 pm, in Memorial Hall at the McNamara Alumni Center. Outstanding Service Awards are intended to recognize employees and work groups who make outstanding contributions to the objectives of their units and/or the college, and who consistently achieve high performance in carrying out the responsibilities of their positions. Congratulations!

Due to inclement weather, we are canceling the celebration of Bram Stoker's Dracula set for Friday December 3. The event will be rescheduled for spring semester. So there are more than enough dark nights ahead to peruse the new edition published by Professor of English Andrew Elfenbein with Longman Cultural Editions.

Senior English major Moira Pirsch will be the student speaker at the December CLA Commencement ceremony, and CLA Winton Chair Nuruddin Farah, who is hosted by the Department of English, will be the CLA Commencement guest speaker. Congratulations!

Brooklynite Krauss, a finalist for a National Book Award for her latest novel Great House, stopped by Lind Hall to chat with students on Thursday Oct. 28. She talked about the freedom she finds in writing novels (she started out as a poet), allowing "willful uncertainty" to lead her to unexpected territory. "I give into accidents," she said. "I pursue them."

When Satty Flaherty-Echeverria came to Minnesota from the Yucatan, Mexico, to teach Spanish, she didn't know any English. Five years later, she graduated from the University of Minnesota with an Inter-College Program (ICP) degree combining her interests in Spanish, Portuguese, and English literature and culture with education. The College of Continuing Education Current relates her story.

Congrats to 2009 MFA alumnus Matt Burgess, whose debut novel Dogfight (Doubleday) was reviewed positively in the Sunday Oct 17 New York Times Book Review.

MinnPost's Book Club Club asked Edelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing (and fiction writer) Charles Baxter what books are in his hands right now. Meanwhile, Baxter reviewed Jonathan Franzen's Freedom for The New York Review of Books and Paula Fox's The Widow's Children in the fall issue of New Ohio Review.

Thank you to everyone who attended and donated at the Third Annual Benefit for Hunger last Wednesday, September 22. Your participation resulted in $1,500 being raised to help feed the hungry in the Twin Cities. Proceeds benefited Second Harvest Heartland, the Upper Midwest's largest food shelf. Thanks also to host Charles Baxter and our faculty readers: Madelon Sprengnether, Ray Gonzalez, Maria Damon, Maria Fitzgerald, and Patricia Hampl.

Professor of English Nabil Matar was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for a project entitled "Crossing Cultural Spaces: Islam and the West in Arts and Sciences." The grant will support an academic forum and program development workshop "exploring continuities between cultural and intellectual traditions in the Islamic worlds and Western civilization." Congratulations!

The department is proud to host poet Josie Rawson as the Creative Writing Program's 2010-11 Minnesota Writer of Distinction, made possible by the Edelstein-Keller Endowment. Rawson's latest book Unrest was published by Graywolf Press; her first book Quarry won the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and was published through the University of Pittsburgh. Rawson lives in Northfield, MN, and is a master gardener through University of Minnesota Extension. She also is a freelance art and book critic.

The Department of English announces a terrific line-up of literary authors reading and talking on campus this year through the English@Minnesota Writers Series, including those established (Joan Didion, Nuruddin Farah) and up-and-coming (D. A. Powell, Dan Chaon), with elder craftsman James Salter (pictured) the intriguing wild card. As always, all our events are free and open to the public; no tickets necessary!

Professor of English Julie Schumacher has been awarded a residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy for spring 2011. Schumacher plans to work on a collection of short stories, "Passengers."

The Department of English is pleased to announce that our Advisory Board member Paul Taylor has been honored with an Alumni Service Award from the University. Paul has participated in numerous committees for the University over decades of service; in his capacity as a founding member of the English Advisory Board, he has offered the department valuable advice and energy toward improving our community engagement as well as opportunities for students. In recent years, he has become a strong supporter of the undergraduate literary and art magazine Ivory Tower, which is created via a two-semester English course. The Paul and Lucienne Taylor Award financially assists English majors who have secured internships. All this, and he isn't even an English alum (his degree is in Economics). The award will be presented during Homecoming Week in September. Cheers to Paul!

Looking for a good book? Various English faculty, staff, and students describe what's on their bedside tables this summer. Recent MFA graduate Swati Avasthi, profiled in Metro Magazine about her new young adult novel Split, offers a couple YA suggestions. Professor Emeritus Michael Dennis Browne is looking forward to reading MFA alumna Francine Tolf's new memoir, Joliet Girl. Grow the list by sending your picks!

Congratulations to Professor Paula Rabinowitz, who will hold the Distinguished Fulbright Lectureship in American Literature in the People's Republic of China for Spring 2011 at East China Normal University in Shanghai.

From eclectic creative writing exercises to post-BA career assistance: Professor Julie Schumacher is profiled for the College of Liberal Arts website after this year receiving the Horace T. Morse - University of Minnesota Alumni Association Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education.

This spring, two professors and one long-time staff member retired from the Department of English. Thank you to all those who contributed to student fellowships and scholarships in their names. Donations to the new Edward M. Griffin Fellowship, in honor of Professor Griffin's 44 years of service, exceeded $25,000, which makes it eligible for the 21st Century Graduate Fellowship Match, a University program matching the student pay-out dollar for dollar, every year. Increased contributions to the Beverly Atkinson Scholarship for Non-Traditional English Majors, established in 2002, insure continued support for English undergraduates, even as Atkinson bids farewell after 37 years in undergraduate advising. And the Michael Dennis Browne Fellowship in Creative Writing, celebrating Professor Browne's 39 years of service here, is very close to meeting the $25,000 target for matching University funds. If you'd like to help meet that goal, or contribute to other funds, Give to English.

Edelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing Charles Baxter just won a Pushcart Prize for his story "The Cousins." The story, originally published in Tin House magazine, was also selected by Richard Russo to appear in The Best American Short Stories 2010. . . . Professor Nabil Matar has been awarded a Grant-in -Aid of Research, Artistry and Scholarship from the Office of the Vice President for Research for his project: "Annotated edition, introduction, and notes: Henry Stubb's An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism."

Associate Professor Katherine Scheil weighs in on the difference between "theater" and "theatre" for MPR News Q.

Christopher Austin, a 2008 student in Professor Geoffrey Sirc's ENGL1501W Literature of Public Life, had his final class project "Let's Talk - Girl Talk" published on-line in The Jump: Journal of Undergraduate Multimedia Projects. A professor at the University of Texas-Austin, where the journal originates, had come across the piece and contacted Professor Sirc to find Austin and obtain permission. The class project, outlined in The Jump, was to create a digital work about some aspect of public life. Austin's video tackles the subject of fair use in sampling popular music.

Since 2007, the Department of English and the University of Minnesota Press have collaborated on a publishing internship program in which two English majors serve as year-long interns at the UMN Press, working for a semester each in editorial and marketing/production. The students do a concurrent eight credit independent study with English faculty and receive a stipend. This spring the University of Minnesota Press hired 2008-09 intern Erin Warholm-Wolenhaus as editorial assistant. Warholm-Wolenhaus joins another former intern, Alyssa Lochner, at the Press; Lochner was hired in the Press' marketing department this winter (she wrote about the internship for English@MN). Congrats to both!

Congratulations to the following award recipients: Graduate School Best Dissertation Award in the Arts and Humanities: Elizabeth Weixel (PhD 2009), Assistant Professor of English, Western Kentucky University, "The Forest and Social Change in Early Modern English Literature, 1590-1700" (Adviser John Watkins). Graduate School Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships: Nicholas Hengen, "Texts as Tactics: A Literary Critical Politics" (Adviser Tim Brennan); Lucia Pawlowski, "High Theory, the Teaching of Writing, and the Crisis of the University" (Adviser Geoff Sirc); Lisa Trochman, "Fatal Femmes: Noir Anxiety and the Woman Criminal" (Adviser Paula Rabinowitz); Adam Schrag, "Surface to Surface: War, Image and the Senses in the Screenic Era" (Adviser Paula Rabinowitz). Graduate Research Partnership Program: Emily Anderson, "Monsters Without Voices: The Creation and Uses of Fear in Silent Horror Film" (Sponsor Lois Cucullu); Lelaine Bonine, "For the Love of Film: In Search of Hitchcock on the Secular Pilgrimage" (Sponsor Jani Scandura); Jonah Charney-Sirott, "Order of Call: Stories of Conscription" (Sponsor Julie Schumacher); Nicholas Hengen, "Weapons in the War: The U.S. Military's Literary Regime During World War II" (Sponsor Paula Rabinowitz); David Malley, "The Devil's Own: A Ballad for Albert Hicks" (Sponsor David Treuer); Eunha Na, "Ritual in Contemporary Theater: A Global Perspective on African American and Korean Theatres" (Sponsor Josephine Lee). Samuel Holt Monk Prize for Published Scholarship: Chris Kamerbeek, "Appearing Acts: Celebrity, Biography and Henry James's Ghosts of the 1890s." The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 42:2 (2009). Philanthropic Education Organization (PEO) Award: Molly Kiefer Gage, "Sorting Scraps: The Archive and the Future of Democracy" (Adviser Paula Rabinowitz). Jay and Rose Phillips Fellowship: Davu Seru. Ruth Drake Dissertation Fellowship: Ryan Cox, "Premonition of a Future Line We Will Be Writing: Politics, Language, and Identity in English Canadian Experimental Poetry" (Adviser Paula Rabinowitz).

Three recent (or forthcoming) PhD or MFA graduates have accepted tenure track positions: Madhurima Chakraborty, Columbia College, Chicago; Gregory Murray, Georgia Perimeter College; and Luke Pingel, St. Catherine University, St. Paul. Four recent PhD alumni/ae accepted visiting professor appointments: Laura Zebuhr, King's College, Halifax, Nova Scotia; Nick Robinette, Oberlin College; Renee DeLong, Normandale Community College; and Steve Healey, Michigan State University. In addition three others accepted multi-year post-doc fellowships: Lauren Curtright, Kathleen Howard, and Jennifer Miller. Congratulations to all!

English alumnus the Honorable James Rosenbaum (BA '66; JD '69) was recognized as one of 21 Alumni of Notable Achievement in the College of Liberal Arts in April. Senior U.S. District Judge in Minneapolis, Judge Rosenbaum will retire in August after 25 years on the bench. He plans to work on alternative dispute resolution.

Each year the University of Minnesota Graduate School recognizes the University's top recent PhD graduates by presenting "best dissertation" awards in four broad disciplinary areas. The recipients receive an honorarium of $1000. The department is proud to announce that Beth Weixel (PhD 2009) won the 2010 Best Dissertation Award in Arts & Humanities for "The Forest and Social Change in Early Modern English Literature, 1590-1700." Her adviser was Professor John Watkins. Weixel is currently assistant professor at Western Kentucky University.

Lauren Curtright (PhD candidate), who defended in April, was awarded the Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship at Georgia Tech, a three-year fellowship. Her dissertation adviser is Paula Rabinowitz. Jennifer Miller (PhD 2009) received the Lilly Postdoctoral Fellowship, a two-year fellowship at Valparaiso University. Her dissertation adviser was David Treuer.

Regents Professor Patricia Hampl collaborated with composer Alvin Singleton on the new piece Brooklyn Bones, premiering April 26, 2010, at Carnegie Hall. The composition, for which Professor Hampl wrote the lyric, is a eulogy for the 11,000 men and boys who died in horrid conditions on British Prison Ships harbored in New York City's East River during the Revolutionary War. The work is performed by choral group Cantori New York and orchestra and presented by America Opera Projects. Professor Hampl also wrote an essay about creating the text.

Mayor R. T. Rybak has proclaimed Friday April 23 Michael Dennis Browne Day in the City of Minneapolis. Professor, poet, and librettist Browne is retiring this spring after 39 years of service in the Department of English. He is honored the evening of the 23rd with a reception: email kglasgow@umn.edu for information or to contribute to the Michael Dennis Browne Fellowship for graduate students.

Novelist Richard Powers, our guest as the 19th Esther Freier Endowed Lecturer in Literature April 14, is interviewed on MPR about the scientific background to his latest novel Generosity: An Enhancement. For his Freier lecture, he will address "What Does Fiction Know?" 7:30 pm, Coffman Union Theater.

MFA alumna Gayla Marty published her memoir Memory of Trees this month with University of Minnesota Press, and she was interviewed in the Minneapolis Star Tribune Saturday April 10. Marty will read 4 pm April 13 at the University Bookstore in Coffman and, with Patricia Hampl, 7:30 pm April 22 at Common Good Books.

Professor of English Edward Griffin is retiring this spring after 44 years at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. A beloved teacher of both graduate and undergraduate students, Professor Griffin recently was pranked by an undergrad class, which then reported the joke to the Daily. (No joke: Griffin has won most every teaching award at the U: the University of Minnesota Award for Distinguished Contributions to Post-Baccalaureate Graduate and Professional Education, the CLA Arthur "Red" Motley Exemplary Teaching Award, and the Ruth Christie Distinguished Teaching Award in English.)

Professor Charles Baxter's short story, "The Cousins," which originally appeared in Tin House, has been selected by Richard Russo to appear in The Best American Short Stories 2010. . . . Congratulations to current MFAs Meryl DePasquale, Ben Doty, Swati Avasthi, and Shantha Susman as well as alums Mike Rollin, Emily Freeman, Katie Leo, Maureen Aitken, and Kathleen Glasgow, for winning 2010 Minnesota State Arts Board Grants.

Congratulations to John Watkins, who has been named a Distinguished McKnight University Professor. The goal of the program is to honor the University's highest-achieving mid-career faculty. The grant associated with the Professorship consists of $100,000 over five years. . . . Congratulations also to Julie Schumacher, who has received a Horace T. More-University of Minnesota Alumni Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate education. Check out professors Schumacher and Watkins talking about their teaching and writing on a new English web page of faculty video interviews. . . . And cheers to English undergraduate Moira Pirsch, who won a President's Student Leadership and Service Award for her wide-ranging activities at the University. Among other commitments, she is an English peer counselor, a Community Engagement Scholar, a UROP participant, and co-president of the student group Voices Merging, which is organizing the free national conference From Vices to Verses: A New Era of Hip Hop and Action April 9-11 here at the U.

Erik Carlson, a fourth-year PhD student in English, has won the John Leyerle-CARA Prize for Dissertation Research, a fellowship sponsored by The Medieval Academy of America. The fellowship goes to one student in an international competition and provides $1000 dollars to fund a research trip to use the collections at the University of Toronto. Erik will use the collections' Dictionary of Old English project for research related to his dissertation. His adviser is Andrew Scheil. . . . Kathleen Howard, who defended her dissertation "The Word Made Flesh: The Perception of Holiness in the Texts of Late Medieval and Early Modern Women in England" under the direction of Rebecca Krug in 2009, has just been awarded an ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship. She will be serving her appointment as a Visiting Assistant Professor at SUNY Stony Brook from 2010-12.

The Department is proud to present its first annual English Undergraduate Conference April 27 and 28. English majors will showcase their work, exchange ideas in a variety of formats, and engage in lively discussion with peers, instructors, and professors. Students will present critical essays or creative work they've produced in upper division courses as well as research for UROP, Directed Study, or other programs. All are welcome to attend!

Professor Ray Gonzalez publishes his third book this year, an anthology he co-edited with Robert Shapard and James Thomas. Sudden Fiction Latino: Short Short Stories From the U.S. and Latin America (W. W. Norton) features U.S Latino writers Sandra Cisneros and Junot Diaz alongside Latin American legends Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Bolano. . . . Professor Josephine Lee publishes The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado with University of Minnesota Press. Tracing the history of The Mikado's performances from Victorian times to the present, Professor Lee reveals the continuing viability of the play's surprisingly complex racial dynamics as they have been adapted to different times and settings.

Brooks Doherty (BA 2005 magna cum laude), dean of faculty at Rasmussen College in Brooklyn Park, calls for us to "embrace all forms of writing--even those we may not have mastered yet" (such as Twitter and Facebook) in a Star Tribune Commentary February 18. . . . Erik Storlie (BA 1962), who taught English, Composition, and Humanities for 30 years at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, talks about his second career as a teacher of meditation at the U's Center for Spirituality and Healing.

Professor Scheil talked with MPR about historical origins for the belief that productions of "the Scottish play" will be cursed. Possible causes include the occult content in the play, economics, and the play itself: "You know the play has a lot of violence and a lot of sword play. . . . And a lot of scenes in the dark, which increases the possibility for something to go wrong." A production of Macbeth opened last weekend at the Guthrie Theater.

Congratulations to 2010 SASE/Jerome Grant recipients Brian Laidlaw (MFA candidate), Margie Newman (MFA alumna), and Mike Rollin (MFA alumnus), who received between $2000-3000 as emerging writers.

Professor of English Ray Gonzalez, MA alumna (1992) Alison McGhee, and MFA alumnus (1998) Scott Muskin have been nominated for 2010 Minnesota Book Awards. Professor Gonzalez is up for his third Minnesota Book Award with the poetry collection Faith Run (University of Arizona Press). McGhee's Song of Middle C (Candlewick Press) is nominated for best children's literature, and Muskin's The Annunciations of Hank Meyerson, Mama's Boy and Scholar (Hooded Friar Press) for best novel and short story. Winners will be announced April 17.

Of the twelve 2010 SASE/Jerome finalists just announced, five are MFA alumni/ae or current candidates. Poetry finalists include alumnus Mike Rollin and current candidates Brian Laidlaw and Kevin O'Rourke. MFA alumnae Kate Hopper and Margie Newman are among the creative nonfiction candidates. The SASE/Jerome grants award up to $5,000 for emerging MN writers. Congratulations and good luck!

Associate Professor of English David Treuer has been named a "Top 'Under 40' Scholar" by Diverse: Issues In Higher Education Magazine in its annual edition recognizing rising stars in the academy. The January 7 Diverse profiles 12 under 40 American scholars "who are making their mark in the academy through teaching, research and service." Professor Treuer noted that the honor also goes to "my family, community, teachers, colleagues, and most of all, my students (who have asked and pushed and questioned all these years). I thank each and every one of them and am grateful for the chance to teach and learn." Professor Treuer won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007, among other awards.

Professor Gordon Hirsch contributes to a UMNews video about the University Libraries' Sherlock Holmes Special Collections, the largest archive of Holmes material in the world. Having, say, original copies of Holmes' stories in the Strand Magazine here on campus "gives a student a real connection to history," notes Hirsch, and an opportunity to make unexpected discoveries: "You can really see Victorian values and Victorian attitudes in the advertisements in this sort of popular journal." The archive also features a replica of Holmes' 221B Baker Street room on the fourth floor of Wilson Library, which students might compare against scenes from the new Sherlock Holmes movie starring Robert Downey, Jr.

Professor of English Ellen Messer-Davidow was awarded the Dr. Matthew Stark Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Faculty Award Sunday December 13 at the College of Liberal Arts Commencement. The award recognizes Professor Messer-Davidow's distinguished writing, teaching, and service in the areas of civil rights, public education, and social justice. The Stark awards were created this year, based on a generous donation from Dr. Matthew "Matt" Stark, a former professor at the University of Minnesota and former executive director of the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union. Messer-Davidow represents the award's first faculty recipient; English major Joshua Capodarco, honored at the same ceremony, is the second student recipient.

English faculty continue to publish at a brisk pace: Creative Writing Program Director Ray Gonzalez celebrated the release of Faith Run: Poems (University of Arizona Press) in September and Cool Auditor: Prose Poems (B.O.A. Editions) in November. . . . Professor John Watkins also published his second book of the year, Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age, co-authored with Carole Levin (Cornell University Press), following up on the co-edited volume Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (Oxford University Press). . . . Professor Dan Philippon edited a collection of articles from the popular DNR magazine Minnesota Conservation Volunteer entitled Our Neck of the Woods: Exploring Minnesota's Wild Places (University of Minnesota Press). . . . Finally Professor Maria Damon co-edited with Ira Livingston Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader (University of Illinois Press). Congratulations to all!

The MFA Program announces the recipients of new research fellowships for MFA students: Colleen Coyne (poetry), Claire Stanford (fiction), and David Malley (nonfiction). These fellowships of $1,000 go toward supporting the completion of the MFA thesis. . . . Brian Laidlaw was awarded the MFA Progam's first annual Book Arts Fellowship for his project, "Americana Mantra--Boxed Set." His proposal was selected from among several outstanding projects. There will be a public presentation of the project in the spring. . . . Colleen McCarthy (poetry), Sara Culver (fiction), and Priscilla Kinter (nonfiction) were nominated by the MFA program for the Associated Writing Programs' 2010 Intro Journals Project. Winners selected by AWP's panel of judges will have their writing published in participating journals such as Hayden's Ferry Review, Mid-American Review, and Quarterly West.

English senior Joshua Capodarco has won the College of Liberal Arts Dr. Matthew Stark Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Student Award, which was created based on a generous donation from Dr. Matthew "Matt" Stark, a former professor at the University of Minnesota and former executive director of the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union. The award recognizes a CLA student who has demonstrated "distinguished service, writing, teaching, involvement, or public leadership in one of more of the following areas: civil liberties, civil rights, public education and social justice." The honor is presented annually at the December CLA Commencement Ceremony and carries with it a financial award of $1000. Capodarco has an extensive background in service learning, taught English in Senegal (he wrote about it here), and is currently serving as undergraduate TA for the English course Literature of Public Life. Congratulations Josh!

Alumnus Garrison Keillor (BA 1966) stopped by the English course "Introduction to Creative Writing" last week and told students: "The world is waiting to hear from you. We're bored with our own generation." More....

Two English faculty contributed to A New Literary History of America, the well-reviewed Harvard University Press collection edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors which covers American culture since 1507 via literature (and blues and FDR's fireside chats, etc.). David Treuer was on the editorial board and contributed two essays, one on Longfellow's Hiawatha, and Paula Rabinowitz wrote about the aforesaid FDR.

The Department of English's Creative Writing MFA Program is ranked 14 in a listing of the top 50 MFA programs in Poets & Writers's November/December issue. The ranking is based on an on-line list maintained by poet Seth Abramson and based upon research and MFA applicant surveys. The top 20 ranking reflects the Program's (and the Department's) dedication to full-funding for each MFA candidate, the strength of its faculty (60 plus books published in a decade), and the impressive record of alumni accomplishments. Cheers!

Long-time Department of English lecturer Eric Daigre (PhD 2001) writes about literacy and service learning-oriented English courses for the new issue of Diversity & Democracy produced by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU). The article is entitled "Literature, Literacy, and Multiculturalism in the Expanded Classroom." . . . English professor David Treuer wrote the article "I'm Holding Out for an Anti-Hero" for the LA Times. . . . MFA alumna Laurie Lindeen offers a music-influenced craft essay in Columbia College's literary journal Fictionary.

Five current or recently graduated English BAs contributed to the August-September issue of Alive Magazine, a national publication by and for young women that kicks the usual "celebrities, sex, and dieting" content to the curb. Two are Alive interns who wrote and/or designed for the issue: Regan Smith (BA '09) and undergraduate Meghan Hanson. Former Alive intern Jamie Joslin Millard (BA '09) is now Alive's development director. Spring '09 graduates Allie Riley and Derek Swart also wrote for the issue. All but Riley were members of the 2009 Ivory Tower staff, Hanson as co-Editor-in-Chief; Riley published a poem in the latest Ivory Tower, which is the undergraduate literary magazine of the University of Minnesota created by a year-long English course.

Geoffrey Sirc (PhD 1985) is now serving as the interim chair of the Department of English. Professor Sirc is the author of English Composition as a Happening (Utah State University Press, 2002) and, with Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, and Cynthia L. Selfe, Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition (Utah State UP, 2004). He joined the Department in 2006 from the University of Minnesota General College. Former chair Paula Rabinowitz wrapped up her three-year term at the end of June. The Department offers our thanks for her dedicated service! . . .Thank you also to Professors Lois Cucullu and Julie Schumacher, who finished their terms as Director of Graduate Studies and Director of the Creative Writing Program, respectively. Professor Ray Gonzalez takes over as the Director of the Creative Writing Program. Regents Professor Madelon Sprengnether is Director of Graduate Studies.

The Dirt Riddles, a debut collection of poetry from Michael Walsh (MFA 2006), won the inaugural Miller Williams Poetry Prize from the University of Arkansas Press and will be published in 2010. His fiction can be found in the 2008 anthology Fiction on a Stick (Milkweed Editions). . . . Matt Burgess (MFA 2009) will publish his debut novel Dogfight with Doubleday in fall 2010. . . . Lightsey Darst (MFA 2003) publishes her first full-length collection of poetry Find the Girl with Coffee House Press in spring 2010. Her chapbook Ginnungagap is available now from Red Dragonfly Press. . . . Erin Hart (MFA 1995), the author of Lake of Sorrows and Hallowed Ground, presents the new mystery False Mermaid (Scribner) in spring 2010. Congratulations!

Dislocate, the international literary magazine edited and produced by MFA graduate students in the Department of English, presents its fifth issue available at bookstores and online. The Transitions issue celebrates creative work from writers and artists on the subject of political, social, geographic and cultural transitions. The journal includes acclaimed authors Kevin Wilson, Peter Johnson, Nin Andrews, Todd Boss, and poetry by Haitian poet Jacqueline Beaugé-Rosier, published for the first time in English and French.

Edelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing Charles Baxter publishes a review of Katherine Anne Porter's Collected Stories and Other Writings (Library of America) in the June 11 New York Review of Books. "There has been a tendency among quite a few of Porter's critics," Baxter writes, "to criticize her life instead of her work and to give it low marks." While acknowledging the flatness of her novel Ship of Fools, Baxter compares her best short stories to Tolstoy's, "unsurpassed in American literature in their genre."

Three English BA graduates are among 14 University of Minnesota students (10 undergraduate and four graduate) who received Fulbright grants for 2009-10 to pursue graduate study in a foreign country. Daniel Groth, a 2009 summa cum laude candidate for a bachelor's in English, has been awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Grant to South Korea. Groth will assist in an English language classroom in a secondary school. Groth's long-term plans include medical school, and he intends to learn about South Korea's health care system. Carmen Price, a 2008 summa cum laude graduate in English and German studies, has received a Fulbright Full Grant to Germany. At the Free University of Berlin, Price will take graduate-level courses on intercultural education and will conduct research on German educational initiatives aimed at increasing immigrant and minority representation in higher education. She will also volunteer as a tutor in the community. Jenna Rose Smith, who graduated in 2007 with a bachelor's in English and studies in cinema and media culture, has been awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Grant to South Korea. Smith will assist in an English language classroom in a secondary school, and will pursue her interest in Korean language and film. Smith also plans to volunteer with a community organization serving people with disabilities. Congratulations!

The Graduate School awarded Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships for 2009-10 to the following four English PhD students: Sara Cohen, Molly Kelley Gage, Kevin Riordan, and Sharin' Schroeder. The Graduate School also awarded Thesis Research Grants to PhD students Amy Griffiths, Nicholas Hengen, and Laura Zebuhr. . . . The Graduate Research Partnership Program Fellowships were awarded to: Sara Cohen, Molly Kelley Gage, Eun Joo Kim, Joshua Mabie, Edward McPherson, Joshua Morsell, Joshua Ostergaard, Kevin Riordan, Maurits Van Bever Donker, Jewon Woo, and a DOVE GRPP to Davu Seru. . . . The first Garner-McNaron-Sprengnether Fellowship for summer research was awarded to Renee DeLong. The Ruth Drake Fellowship was awarded to Anne Roth-Reinhardt. The recipient of the 2009 Samuel Holt Monk Memorial Prize for Published Scholarship is Emily Anderson. . . . Adam Schrag has received the Graduate School’s Leonard Film Fellowship. Steve Healey will teach next year at Michigan State University as the CIC Postdoctoral Fellow. The two winners of the Audrey Christensen English Library Acquisition Prize are Sunyoung Ahn and Gregory Murray. Congratulations to all!

MFA candidates Colleen Coyne and Sheena K. Fallon each received a Gesell Summer Residency (two weeks) at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota. . . . Winners of the Marcella DeBourg Fellowships ($1000) this year are Coyne and Eric Brownell. The fellowships are offered annually to Department of English graduate students interested in "giving creative expression to women's lives." Congratulations!

On Thursday May 7, English professor Julie Schumacher, the outgoing director of Creative Writing, was a guest on MPR's Midmorning show talking about the emerging writers who may be the next literary stars. Among her recommendations: Wells Taylor's short story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Kao Kalia Yang's memoir The Late Homecomer, and Karen Russell's collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.

Daryl Parks (BA honors 1994) was profiled in the Star Tribune Wednesday feature "Professor's life took dramatic turns; now he guides others." After his BA, Parks earned two more degrees at the University of Minnesota (MEd and PhD) and now is associate professor of literature and language at Metropolitan State University. . . . Adjunct assistant professor of English Michael Tortorello, who teaches Introduction to Editing, on April 1 started writing a gardening blog for the New York Times. . . . The Ivory Tower undergraduate literary and arts magazine (see above) is featured in the Minnesota Daily.

Brian Malloy (MFA 2006) won the Minnesota Book Award for young people's literature for his novel Twelve Long Months (Scholastic). The awards were announced Saturday April 25 at the 21st Minnesota Book Awards gala event in St. Paul. Malloy is currently teaching Introduction to Creative Writing for the Department of English. This year's nominations for the Minnesota Book Awards included books from three Creative Writing professors (Julie Schumacher, Charles Baxter, and Ray Gonzalez), two MFA alumni (Laura Flynn and Malloy), two MA alumna (Margaret Hasse and Alison McGhee), and one BA alumnus (Tim Nolan)

The 2009 Gesell Award winners in creative writing are: Josh Morsell, Creative Nonfiction (Honorable Mention: Heather McPherson); Matt Burgess, Fiction; and Brian Laidlaw, Poetry. . . . First-year PhD student Donald Swanbeck (medieval field) won two of the very competitive FLAS fellowships to study Arabic during summer 2009 and academic year 2009-2010. . . . The 2009 ArtWords: Writing at the Weisman Contest winner, Graduate Category, is Brian Laidlaw for "Persephone Creates the Seasons," based on "Cross with Red Heart" by Georgia O'Keeffe. The Undergraduate Category winner is Misha Levchenko for "Justification for the Existence of Liars" based on "World's Fair Mural" by James Rosenquist. . . . Undergraduate Studies student engagement research assistant and English major Josh Capodarco won a President's Student Leadership Award, presented to approximately one-half of one percent of the student body for their exceptional leadership and service to the University of Minnesota and the surrounding community. Congratulations to all!

Charles Baxter's story, "Royal Blue," which appeared in the Spring 2008 American Scholar, has been nominated for a National Magazine Award. The winners will be announced at an event at New York's Lincoln Center on April 30. . . . Congratulations to MFA candidates Shantha Susman and Katie Leo, who were awarded this year's Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize in Poetry. The judge was poet Kathleen Jesme. Leo, who won the 2009 Scribe for Human Rights Fellowship, summarizes her activities in the Human Rights Program Update February issue.

The Imagine Fund Annual Awards this year became available to University of Minnesota faculty for research in the arts, design, and the humanities through a generous grant from the McKnight Foundation and new internal reallocations from the University of Minnesota Graduate School and the Office of the Vice President for Research. Of the 217 awards representing $651,000 in support, 16 awards went to English faculty. Our 2009 winners: Timothy Brennan, Tony C. Brown, Michael Dennis Browne, Evelyn Ch'ien, Siobhan Craig, Lois Cucullu, Maria Damon, Genevieve Escure, Ray Gonzalez, Michael Hancher, Qadri Ismail, Ellen Messer-Davidow, Paula Rabinowitz, Katherine Scheil, Charles Sugnet, and Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley.

English department staff member Mona Fattah has been accepted into the Occupational Therapy Masters Program within the Center for Allied Health Programs (CAHP). She was able to complete the prerequisite coursework through the Regents Scholarship Program.

Regents Professor Patricia Hampl's "The Dark Art of Description" has been selected for the anthology Best American Essays 2009. The essay was formerly published in the spring 2008 Iowa Review. . . . A story by third-year MFA candidate Ethan Rutherford was chosen for Best American Short Stories 2009. "The Peripatetic Coffin" first appeared in the spring 2008 American Short Fiction, which is currently featuring the story online.

Professor Josephine Lee has received an Outstanding Contributions to Postbaccalaureate, Graduate, and Professional Education Award, one of eight recipients across the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. The award ceremony will take place April 27 at the McNamara Alumni Center. Professor Lee previously won the Horace T. Morse-Minnesota Alumni Award for Outstanding Contribution to Undergraduate Education in 2002-03.

MFA alums and an MFA candidate won three of seven 2009 SASE/Jerome Awards, sponsored by the Jerome Foundation, which grant up to $3,000 to emerging Minnesota writers. The winners: poet Michelle Matthees (MFA 2001), novelist Scott Muskin (MFA 1998), and current fiction third year Ethan Rutherford.

Madelon Sprengnether, who was named Regents Professor in 2008, is featured in UMNews. The interview tracks her interests from Shakespeare to current theories on memory. "I've been lucky to be at a university, in a department, and in a particular moment of time when I could follow my interests," she notes. Regents Professor Sprengnether is currently writing a book-length memoir titled My Ghostly Stepfather.

Kate Hopper (MFA 2004) contributed the entry "Afraid to Love Her Preemie" to the New York Times blog Motherlode February 12. Hopper writes frequently about mothering, writing, and teaching on her own blog Mother Words and teaches writing at the Loft Writing Center in Minneapolis.

Professor Michael Dennis Browne's oratorio with composer Stephen Paulus To Be Certain of the Dawn is now out on BIS Records. . . . Professors Ellen Messer-Davidow and David Treuer are featured in the winter 2009 issue of the CLA magazine Reach. . . . English is one of seven University departments system-wide to win a $10,000 Engaged Department Grant from the Office of Public Engagement. The grants are meant to advance the integration of public engagement into department research and teaching. . . . Screenwriting instructor John Olive opened a new play Pharaoh Serket and the Lost Stone of Fire at Seattle Children's Theatre. . . . Professor Charles Baxter's novel The Soul Thief is out in paperback.

Professor Julie Schumacher's novel Black Box has been named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and an ALA Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers. . . . Nominations for Minnesota Book Awards include three Creative Writing professors (Schumacher, Charles Baxter, and Ray Gonzalez), three MFA alumni (Laura Flynn, Joe Hart, and Brian Malloy), two MA alumna (Margaret Hasse and Alison McGhee), and one BA alumnus (Tim Nolan). . . . MFA alumna Flynn, author of the memoir Swallow the Ocean, also took home a "Keeper" award in late January from Metro magazine. . . . 2009 SASE/Jerome finalists include MFA alums Michael J. Opperman, Scott Muskin, Margie Newman and Michelle Matthees, as well as current MFAs Libby Edelson and Ethan Rutherford. Congratulations to all!

PhD candidate Steve Healey published part of his dissertation project in the February issue of Writer's Chronicle. His article is entitled "The Rise of Creative Writing and the New Value of Creativity." Healey will be presenting "The Creative Writing Boom and the Poetics of Post-Industrial America" as part of our eNow! "Poetics, Politics, and Place" series February 23 at 2:30 pm in Lind Hall 207A. . . . Professor Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley was chosen a Spring 2010 Institute for Advanced Study Faculty Fellow for her project “Water, Shoulders, Into the Black Pacific."

The staff of the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis now counts three English alums on its nine-person staff, including President and Director Judi Dutcher (BA 1984). Curator of Russian Art and Artifacts Maria Zavialova received her PhD in English and Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society in 2008, and Misha Dashevsky (BA 1999) serves as assistant to the President. The stunning exhibit Transcendent Art: Icons from Yaroslavl, Russia winds up on Saturday January 24: 54 icons painted in the 17th and 18th centuries are on display, on loan from the Yaroslavl Art Museum. Upcoming exhibits include Russkiy Salon: Select Favorites and Newly Revealed Works, opening February 2, and Postage Stamps: Messengers of the Soviet Future, opening March 7.

Poet Alex Lemon (MFA 2004) is featured in the January issue of Esquire magazine. He is one of seven men whose job it is, write the editors, to "make sense of the world and make us laugh, think, and question our way to a little bit of wisdom . . . and a sharp sense of winter style." Lemon's "from Halleluja Blackout" (title poem of his latest Milkweed collection) was chosen by Charles Wright for the Best American Poetry 2008 anthology. A memoir from Scribner is forthcoming.

English and philosophy senior Sarah Choy was honored at the 2008 Equity and Diversity Breakfast November 20 at the McNamara Center with a $1000 Sue W. Hancock SEED of Change Award. The awards go to students engaged with issues of equity and diversity through outstanding academic achievement and activism. Choy is involved with the English Undergraduate Studies Committee, Minnesota Rainbow Alliance for the Deaf, and Mu Daiko Theater. Along with her major coursework, she has taken American Sign Language classes. "Although my main fields of study are English and Philosophy," notes Choy, "I find myself pouring a lot of my energy into the American Sign Language Department as a tutor. A few years ago, my mother found herself on her way to Deafness which drove me to learning the language; the University has given me the skill to communicate with her."

Department of English faculty have produced a bounty of books this fall. Professor Timothy Brennan published Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz (Verso), which "shows how the popular music of the Americas — the music of entertainment, nightlife, and leisure — is involved in a devotion to an African religious worldview that survived the ravages of slavery and found its way into the rituals of everyday listening." Professor Andrew Elfenbein's Romanticism and the Rise of English (Stanford University Press) "points to new directions in literary criticism by arguing for the need to reconceptualize authorial agency in light of a broadened understanding of linguistic history." Professor Ray Gonzalez published his third collection of nonfiction essays, Renaming the Earth (University of Arizona Press), reflecting on the American Southwest, where he was raised. Finally, Professor Nabil Matar's Europe Through Arab Eyes, 1578-1727 (Columbia University Press) "assembles a rare history of Europe's rise to power as seen through the eyes of those who were later subjugated by it." Congratulations to all!

The cover story of the November Mpls St. Paul Magazine lists the 75 "Best Brains" in the Twin Cities, one of which belongs to English professor and poet Maria Damon. Editors Brian Lambert and Bill Swanson talk about the feature. . . . English professor and Creative Writing Program director Julie Schumacher visited the Today Show on October 28, updating her New York Times "Modern Love" article about the mothers support group she found when her family battled a daughter's clinical depression. Schumacher has received excellent notices (starred review in Publisher's Weekly, Booklist, etc.) for her latest book for younger readers, Black Box, about a girl whose sister is hospitalized for depression.

English Professor Emeritus Peter Firchow died October 18, 2008. A member of the Department for 40 years, Professor Firchow focused on British literature in his teaching and extensive writing. In the last year he published two books, Modern Utopian Fictions from Wells to Murdoch and Strange Meetings: Anglo-German Literary Encounters from 1910 to 1960 (both Catholic University of America Press). "Above all, he was a tremendous scholar," notes Professor Emeritus Peter Reed, in a Star Tribune obituary. He is survived by his wife Evelyn, a professor of German at the University, and daughter Pamina.

Adjunct Assistant Professor Debra Blake published her first book Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History and Art with Duke University Press in October. Blake is currently teaching the second Survey of American Literatures and Cultures class and Literacy and American Cultural Diversity for the Department of English.

An entertaining aside in the New York Times Style magazine "Fall Travel" edition cites Professor David Treuer along with FlatPak house architect Charles Lazor as evidence of the Twin Cities' healthy intellectual climate. The article, about up-and-coming second tier cities, names Minneapolis-St. Paul the "new New York."

Every year English professor and Creative Writing Program core faculty member Michael Dennis Browne lends his cabin compound in the north woods to MFA graduate students in creative writing. The 2008 "Cry of the Loon Retreat," which took place in late September, is documented in photos by MFA candidate Molly Sutton Kiefer.

MFA candidate Benjamin Arda Doty was shortlisted for Ireland’s Sean O’Faolain Short Story Prize. The winner is Julia Van Middlesworth. Doty was one of nine runners-up, chosen from over 700 entries. Doty's fiction and poetry have appeared in a number of literary journals. He spoke with Pike Magazine about being recognized for his work in Ireland.

eNow! co-sponsors a rare appearance by poet, essayist, and translator Nathaniel Tarn at the Twin Cities Book Festival 11:30 am Saturday October 11, 2008. A respected anthropologist as well as a writer, the poet weaves "mythology and philosophy, nature and science, and anguish and love into a moving exploration of what it means to be human." Free and open to the public.

Robert Meeropol, younger son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, visits the Department of English amid new revelations and renewed commentary about his parents' participation in espionage in the early '50s and their execution. In his talk October 6, at 4:30 pm, Meeropol will address these developments in addition to speaking on literary representations of the Rosenbergs, such as E. L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel. Meeropol is the author of We Are Your Sons: The Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (1975) with his brother Michael, and An Execution in the Family: One Son’s Journey (2003). There will be a reception for Meeropol at 3:30 pm before the talk. Lind Hall, 207 Church St. S.E., Minneapolis (lecture in room 150; reception in room 207A).

Department of English professor and Creative Writing Program chair Julie Schumacher has received the first College of Continuing Education Distinguished Educator Award. CCE Dean Mary L. Nichols cited Schumacher as a "firm champion of CCE programs in other parts of the University" and noted her "extraordinary history" of participation with CCE programs Compleat Scholar, U Reads, College in the Schools, and the Split Rock Arts Program. On October 23, 2008, Schumacher will be presented with a plaque and a $2000 award at the annual CCE Celebration in Coffman Union. Schumacher also celebrates the publication of Black Box (Delacorte), her fourth novel for young readers, on Friday September 19 at 7 pm at the Loft Literary Center.

The Department of English welcomes LaRose Davis, who won the prestigious Graduate School Postdoctoral Fellowship and chose to be housed in English. Davis comes from Emory University where her work has centered on African American and American Indian literary and cultural intersections. Olabode Ibironke will be our CIC Postdoctoral Fellow: He has a doctorate from Michigan State University and specializes in African literary history and postcolonial literary theory. Jan Hein Hoogstad is a visiting assistant professor fall semester from the University of Amsterdam; he is teaching Medial Operations: Sound, Music & Digitality. Other visiting adjunct faculty include Debra Blake, Joe Hughes, Tim Jones, Emily Swanson (PhD 2008), and Michael Tortorello. Finally our CIC Fellow from last year, Dan Mrozowski, who students voted "best lecturer of 2008," returns this year to teach a variety of courses on American literature and literary theory.

The Department of English's continuing website feature 5 Questions + spotlights New Yorker Amy Shearn (MFA 2005), who publishes her debut novel How Far Is the Ocean From Here? in August 2008 with Shaye Areheart/Random House. Read more.

PhD candidate Ann Pitugshatwong will defend her dissertation on Friday, September 5 from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. in Lind Hall, Room 202. Her dissertation is titled "Crossing Boundaries: Domestic Fiction and Nineteenth-Century Women's Travel Narratives." All are welcome to attend.

Professor Julie Schumacher wrote the "Modern Love" column in the Sunday, July 6, 2008, New York Times. Schumacher, the director of the Creative Writing Program, will in September publish Black Box, her fourth novel for juvenile readers. Her last such book won a 2007 Minnesota Book Award.

The University of Minnesota Board of Regents named professor Madelon Sprengnether one of four new Regents Professors. The designation is the highest level of recognition given to faculty by the University. Sprengnether, a core faculty member of the Creative Writing Program, has published poetry (The Angel of Duluth), memoir (Crying at the Movies), and criticism. She won a 2003-04 University award for Distinguished Contributions to Post-Baccalaureate Graduate and Professional Education. She joins Tom Clayton and Patricia Hampl as Regents Professors within the Department of English; the only other University department with three Regents Professors is Chemical Engineering.

Associate professor David Treuer is interviewed by American Public Media's Krista Tippett about his recent project, with brother Anton Treuer, compiling the first practical grammar of the Ojibwe language. Professor Treuer describes an unfolding experience of how language forms what makes us human. Some memories and realities, he has found, can only be carried forward in time by Ojibwe. The radio show, part of the series Speaking of Faith, which broadcast in the Twin Cities Sunday, June 22, on KNOW 91.1 FM is now available on-line.

PhD candidate Mitch Ogden will defend his dissertation "Refugee Utopias: (Re)Theorizing Refugeeism through the Cultural Production of the Hmong Diaspora" at 10 am June 26, 2008, in Lind 207A. Ogden examines how Hmong magnetic media (audio and video cassettes) shape a novel concept of homeland, how the many competing Hmong writing systems challenge and uphold cultural and political ideologies, and how a burgeoning literary movement reflects the energy of a dynamic global diaspora. Throughout, he proposes that the persistent cultural image of refugee-as-perpetual-victim be updated, expanded, and discarded in favor of a view that acknowledges the vibrant, creative force of cultural production that animates contemporary refugee communities.

Lois Cucullu (English) and John Campbell (Psychology) share the "Best DGS" award for 2008. A special committee appointed by the dean of the Graduate School selects the recipients. Each receives a $1,000 honorarium and a plaque. There will be a reception to honor the award winners at a celebration on Wednesday, May 14, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. in the Upson Room of Walter Library.

English Literature PhD and Creative Writing MFA defenses are taking place through May 23. PhD candidate Sara Berrey will defend her dissertation at 8:45 am May 14 in Lind 202, followed by PhD candidate Jean Jacobson 1 pm May 23 in Lind 207. MFA candidates defend their creative theses in Lind 207 as follows. May 12: Emily Bright at 1:30 pm. May 13: Phillip Fuller at 9 am; Karen Ahn at noon; and Andrew Luckham at 2:30 pm. May 14: Karen Stout at 10 am; Ann Linde at noon; and Nathan Slawson at 2:30 pm. May 15: Brett Gastineau at noon. May 16: Tara DaPra at 9 am; Jake Mohan at 2:30 pm. For more information, contact the Graduate Studies and Creative Writing Program offices.

A new volume of LUNA: a journal of poetry and translation has just been released. Edited by professor Ray Gonzalez and MFA alum Alex Lemon, the issue features the work of Robert Bly, Jaswinder Bolina, Juan Felipe Herrera, Major Jackson, George Kalamaras, Alessandra Lynch, Simone Muench, Joan Murray, Craig Morgan Teicher, translations of Luis Cernuda (by Ruben Quesada) and Nguyen Do (by Nguyen Do and Paul Hoover), and much more. Please visit LUNA for ordering information.

Assistant professor Siobhan Craig received the Ruth Christie Distinguished Teaching Award for English for 2008-10. The Ruth Christie prize is decided by undergraduate student voting.

The Department of English MFA / Dislocate Reading Series holds its final 2007-08 event Tuesday, April 29th at 7 pm in Lind Hall 150. Edelstein-Keller Professor in Creative Writing Charles Baxter will read, along with MFA candidates Matthew Burgess, Thomas Cook, and Emily Freeman.

Help celebrate the 2008 issue of the Ivory Tower! You are invited to the launch party of the undergraduate art and literary magazine on Friday, April 25 from 7 to 9 pm in room 120 of the Elmer L. Andersen Library (located on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota). The evening will feature readings of several chosen submissions, live music, and the awarding of $100 for the winning entries in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art. A dessert reception will follow.

The 2008 Minnesota Book Awards were announced at a gala award ceremony Saturday, April 12th in St. Paul, hosted by Cathy Wurzer of Minnesota Public Radio. Edelstein-Keller Professor in Creative Writing Charles Baxter won the Award for General Nonfiction for The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot (Graywolf Press), which the judges termed an "absolutely stellar explication of texts." Regents Professor Patricia Hampl won the Award for Memoir & Creative Nonfiction for The Florist’s Daughter (Harcourt), described by the judges as "eloquent, bittersweet and consistently well-written." In addition, 2006-07 Edelstein-Keller Minnesota Writer of Distinction Deborah Keenan won the Award for Poetry for Willow Room, Green Door (Milkweed Editions) and spring 2003 Edelstein-Keller Minnesota Writer of Distinction Wang Ping won the Award for Novel & Short Story for The Last Communist Virgin (Coffee House Press).

Congratulations to MFA candidates Emily Freeman and Shantha Susman, who are first and second place prize winners (graduate student category) in this year's ArtWords contest. They will read their work at the ArtWords and ArtSounds Program and Reception 7 pm April 16 at the Weisman Museum. Come hear them read their work at the Weisman on April 16. This is the 10th anniversary of the ArtWords program, in which students write short poems, prose, and (now) musical compositions in response to work in the Weisman's galleries. Reception follows.

Department of English professor Andrew P. Scheil's book The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England (University of Michigan Press, 2004) was awarded the Medieval Academy of America’s 2008 John Nicholas Brown Prize for a first book in the medieval field judged to be of outstanding quality. The award was presented at the 83rd Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, Vancouver, B.C., April 3-5, 2008. The award citation read, in part: "Scheil adds considerable nuance to our understanding of the place (imaginary or otherwise) of Jews in Anglo-Saxon England. However, this study makes a contribution beyond the confines of the Anglo-Saxon period, addressing in detail the function and character of medieval exegesis, of the dialectics of religious thought, and of hermeneutics more generally." Professor Scheil has also received a Solmsen Fellowship for academic year 2008-2009 at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The GSO and the Nineteenth-Century British Subfield Symposium takes place Saturday, April 5, from 8 am to 4 pm in Lind Hall 207A. Graduate students from our department and from the University of Wisconsin-Madison will present papers, including: Kate Hannah, "Threats to Masculine Roles, Male Poets, and the Production and Performance of Poetry in the Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson"; Brenda Helt, "The Victorian Violet Soul: Homospirituality before 'Homosexuality'"; Heather McNeff, "Invitation and Anxiety in the Early Poetry of William Jones"; Sunyoung Ahn, "Liberty and its Use in J.S. Mill's 'On Liberty'"; and Sharin' Schroeder on Lewis Carroll. The Medieval & Early Modern Research Group holds its annual colloquium with guest speaker Katherine Zieman from the University of Notre Dame on Friday, April 11, starting at 11 am in Nolte 235. Graduate students and topics are: John Sievers, "Dryden's Battle with Music in King Arthur: The Bracegirdle Hurdle"; Christopher Flack, "'Mearcstapa': The Acculturation of the Liminal"; and Lindsay Craig, "Damned by Saints Praised: The Old Woman's Invocations in Le Roman de la Rose."

Brown University professor Nancy Armstrong presents "Gender Must Be Defended" as the 45th Joseph Warren Beach Lecture in Literature 7:30 pm Wednesday, April 9, at the Weisman Museum. Professor Armstrong is visiting as part of the spring 2008 Department of English series Impacts: Feminist Theory and British Literary Studies. Professor Armstrong is the author of How Novels Think: British Fiction and the Limits of Individualism (Columbia University Press, 2005); Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Harvard University Press, 1999); and Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford University Press, 1987). Her fields of interest include 18th-and 19th-century British and American fiction, empire and sexuality, narrative theory, critical theory, and visual culture. Reception to follow.

Congratulations to the recipients of 2008 Gesell Awards in Fiction, Creative Nonfiction and Poetry, given to MFA candidates within the Creative Writing Program. Luke Pingel won for poetry, with Jim Novak as honorable mention. The co-recipients for creative nonfiction are Wilson Peden and Katie Leo, with Holly Vanderhaar as honorable mention. Ethan Rutherford won the fiction award, with Laura Owen as honorable mention. The judges were poet Eleanor Lerman, creative nonfiction writer Fenton Johnson, and fiction writer Jim Shepard.

The Department of English welcomes prospective graduate students March 26-30. Events scheduled include a faculty roundtable, library visit, tour of the Twin Cities, and meeting with graduate students. We look forward to meeting you!

The Esther Freier Endowment presents Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, speaking 7:30 pm, Wednesday, March 26, at the Ted Mann Concert Hall--a free event and open to the public. No tickets necessary. Parks is the author of Topdog/Underdog, Venus, and In the Blood. The Framing Suzan-Lori Parks series, presented with the Department of Theatre, Frank Theatre, the Playwrights' Center, and McKnight Special Events, concludes Tuesday, April 1, with a discussion of Parks' place in the history of African American theater. Panelists include e. g. bailey, Pamela Fletcher, Josephine Lee, Alexs Pate, and Dominic Taylor (7:30 pm, Cowles Auditorium).

English faculty Charles Baxter and Patricia Hampl are finalists for 2008 Minnesota Book Awards: Baxter in the General Nonfiction category for The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot (Graywolf), and Hampl in Memoir and Creative Nonfiction for The Florist's Daughter (Harcourt). Other finalists include Eireann Lorsung (MFA '06) for Music for Landing Planes By (Poetry), William Reichard (PhD '97) for This Brightness (Poetry), and Joni Tevis (Edelstein-Keller Discovery Fellow 2003-2005) for The Wet Collection (Memoir and Creative Nonfiction). Winners will be announced April 12, 2008.

English professor and chair Paula Rabinowitz will be honored February 13 as the 2008 CLA Dean's Medalist. Rabinowitz will present the address "Chairs: Frida's Hair/Vincent's Ears" at the program, which begins at 3 pm, in Cowles Auditorium. The CLA Dean's Medal was created by an anonymous donor to reward a faculty member's excellence in scholarship or creative activity. Rabinowitz is Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities.

Carol Bly, St. Paul essayist, fiction writer, teacher, and inspiration to many, died December 21 of cancer at age 77. Bly served as a Department of English Minnesota Writer of Distinction in 1998-1999: She taught Topics in Advanced Creative Writing: The Literary Essay, did a public reading at the Weisman Museum, and served as a thesis advisor. Among Bly's many celebrated books are: Beyond the Writers' Workshop: New Ways to Write Creative Nonfiction (Anchor Books), My Lord Bag of Rice: New and Collected Stories (Milkweed Editions), and Letters from the Country (University of Minnesota Press). Bly will be honored from 2 to 5 pm on Feb. 10 at Hamline University's Sundin Music Hall, 1536 Hewitt Ave., St. Paul. A program will begin at 3 pm.

Two graduate students are published in the Winter 2007-08 Rain Taxi Review of Books: Nick Hengen reviews Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism in the print edition, and Ryan Cox interviews legendary Canadian poet Steve McCaffery in the on-line issue.

Two of the Department of English's literary magazines have revamped their websites. Dislocate was founded as a new media journal of the arts in 2001 by students in the MFA program in Creative Writing. In 2004-05, Dislocate established itself as a print journal. . . . The Ivory Tower is the literary and art magazine created by undergraduates in a year-long English course. In various guises, the Ivory Tower has published University of Minnesota undergraduate art, photography, prose, and poetry since the 1950s. . . . In addition, new poetry reviews from our graduate students can be found on the Luna site. Luna: a Journal of Poetry and Translation is edited by professor Ray Gonzalez.

"from Hallelujah Blackout," by alum Alex Lemon, will be included in the 2008 edition of Best American Poetry, selected by Charles Wright. Alex's chapbook Abracadaver is in the most recent issue of Black Warrior Review. Another chapbook, At Last Unfolding Congo, was just released by horse less press. . . . Alums Michael Seward, Jay Orff, and Kate Hopper received 2008 Minnesota State Arts Board Grants. . . . Alums Laura Flynn, Rachel Moritz, and Charlie Conley received SASE Emerging Artist Fellowships for 2008. Alum Carla-Elaine Johnson was a finalist. . . . Alum Karen Rigby has a poem forthcoming in Black Warrior Review.

MFA candidate Dhana-Marie Branton (nonfiction) received an SASE Emerging Writer Fellowship and a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant for 2008. MFA candidates Emily August (poetry) and Emily Freeman (fiction) were finalists for the SASE fellowship. . . . MFA candidate Laura Owen (fiction) received a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant for 2008 and was also a finalist for the SASE fellowship. . . . MFA candidate Katie Leo-Keast received a Cultural Collaboration Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board in collaboration with Stages Theatre Company in Hopkins. She has been commissioned to adapt the children's book Baseball Saved Us. The book is about Japanese internment camps, and the grant will enable Katie to travel to LA and conduct archival research at the National Japanese American Museum. . . . MFA alum Amanda Fields has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her short story "Boiler Room," featured in the Indiana Review.

Regent Professor Patricia Hampl's fifth memoir, The Florist's Daughter, was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2007 in the Sunday Book Review.

Professor Madelon Sprengnether will read from her poetry in the Carol Connolly S.A.S.E. Intermedia Arts reading series on Tuesday, December 18, 7:30 pm, University Club, 420 Summit Ave., St. Paul; 651-222-1751. Other writers in this holiday celebration reading include: Patricia Barone, Jill Breckenridge, Candy Clayton, Phebe Hanson, Freya Manfred, Cynthia French, and "Minnesota Rollergirl" Dottie Hazard.

Current MFA candidates Kevin O'Rourke (poetry), Jake Mohan (nonfiction), and Philip Fuller (fiction) will read Tuesday, December 4, at 7 pm, along with Creative Writing Program Director Julie Schumacher, who will unveil a new story. Lind 150, Taylor Library. . . . MFA alum Margie Newman reads with Sandra Benitez and Donna Trump in a Loft Mentor Series Reading 7 pm Friday, November 30, at Open Book (1011 Washington Ave. S., Mpls.). . . . MFA alum Eric Dregni presents a reading, quiz and slide show regarding his books Midwest Marvels and Weird Minnesota at Common Good Books (Selby & Western, St. Paul) at 7 pm, Saturday, December 1. . . . MFA alums Amanda Coplin and Susan Taylor read at the Happy Gnome (498 Selby Avenue, St. Paul) Tuesday, December 4 at 5 pm.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon will talk about "The Eternity of the Poem" this Wednesday November 28, at 7:30 pm, in Coffman Theater. Muldoon is most currently the author of the collection Horse Latitudes. In a recent interview, he states, "All my books are potboilers." The Esther Freier Endowed Lecture is free and open to the public and will be followed by a book-signing and reception.

Last summer, Michael Tisserand (B.A. ’92) published Sugarcane Academy, about his family's experiences in the post-Katrina diaspora. On Sunday, November 25 at 7 pm, Magers & Quinn will host a reading and celebration with Tisserand, featuring the band The Southside Aces and a brief slideshow of the New Orleans photos of David Rae Morris (also a U of M grad). We recently interviewed Tisserand in our Alumni & Community website pages.

Brooks Doherty (BA Honors magna cum laude 2005) is co-founder and managing editor of the new Twin Cities-based on-line arts journal Pike Magazine. Pike's stated mission is to bring to public notice those artists, writers, and musicians for whom "art swims in their marrow. They must create it. They must share it or fold." The November issue notably features six poems from Paul Muldoon, who will be our Esther Freier Endowed Lecturer on Wednesday, November 28, at 7:30 pm in Coffman Memorial Theater. Doherty also contributes to the lively Pike blog, which has name-checked professor Michael Dennis Browne, among other University of Minnesota references.

Melinda Braun (BA 2006) has published Luella (Savage Press), a children's picture book about a young duck and the family dog she takes as her mother. . . . Leigh Herrick (BA 1988) publishes two of her poems in Cost of Freedom: The Anthology of Peace and Activism (Howling Dog Press).

The Department of English's eNow! series of faculty and graduate student presentations continues with a special program on language: English associate professor Evelyn Ch'ien addresses the question "Is English Getting Weirder?" with reference to novelist Juno Diaz, visiting professor Steven Winduo reads his poems in the Tokpisin Pidgin language, and Linguistics and Cognitive Science graduate student Ellen Lucast explores "What Do You Know? Theory of Mind in Communication." All welcome. Refreshments! Monday November 19, 2:30 pm, Lind Hall 207A.

English graduate students have organized a November 16-18 conference here about fantasy literature featuring keynote speakers Neil Gaiman, author of the Sandman series of graphic novels, and Jack Zipes, noted UM scholar of fairy tales and folklore. Other featured authors are Patrick Rothfuss, Pamela Dean, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, and many local fantasy writers including MFA alumna Haddayr Copley-Woods.

The oratorio To Be Certain of the Dawn, by composer Stephen Paulus and Department of English professor Michael Dennis Browne, is nearly sold out for its single performance at Orchestra Hall on Tuesday, February 12, with the Minnesota Orchestra. The orchestra has announced tickets for the dress rehearsal, at 10 am that day. The Minnesota Orchestra debuted the oratorio two years ago at the Basilica of St. Mary and will be recording it for Bis Records after the February performance. Music director and conductor Osmo Vanska talks about the work.

Congratulations to associate professor Andrew Scheil, who received a McKnight Presidential Fellowship. The Fellowship recognizes promising faculty who recently gained tenure and the rank of associate professor. The awards include three years of research support. Scheil is currently on sabbatical with a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.

Professor Patricia Hampl marked the publication of her fifth memoir The Florist's Daughter at the Fitzgerald Theater on October 7; the event will be broadcast on MPR. Also on the 7th, the New York Times ran a rave review describing The Florist's Daughter as "Hampl’s finest, most powerful book yet."

Off the Shelf: A Book Discussion Series with English@Minnesota invites alumni to join University of Minnesota English professors in good conversation about books. We will be reading works from visiting writers, department faculty, and playwrights who are being produced on local stages; the monthly series features books by Paul Muldoon, Patricia Hampl, Charles Baxter, and Shakespeare, among others. The play readings will include a field trip to the theatrical production. All discussions free (theater tickets purchased by individual). Advanced registration necessary: see schedule and registration information.

The Department of English announces a new website feature, 5 Questions +, in which we offer up the requisite number of queries to an alumnus or alumna of our B.A., M.A., or Ph.D. programs. Our first Q & A spotlights former New Orleans resident Michael Tisserand (B.A. 1992), who recalled some advice from English professor Michael Dennis Browne while writing his second book, Sugarcane Academy. The memoir follows Tisserand's family and friends in the post-Katrina diaspora, as they set up a one-room schoolhouse for their evacuated children. Read more.

Edelstein-Keller visiting professor Charles Baxter has earned a mention in imdb.com: his 2000 novel Feast of Love has been made into a film which opened late September. In an interview with UMNnews, Baxter calls the Robert Benton-directed film starring Morgan Freeman " a reasonably good movie."

PhD candidate Mitchell P. Ogden is a recipient of the Harold Leonard Memorial Fellowship in Film Study for 2007-8. As part of the fellowship, he is headed to Thailand at the end of September for three weeks with Hmong American filmmaker Moua Lee on Lee's film shoot there.

Julie Gard (MFA 2000) has published her first book with Finishing Line Press: Obscura: The Daguerreotype Series, a collection of prose poems. . . . The documentary film Arid Lands by Josh Wallaert (MFA 2007) has just been released on DVD by Bullfrog Films. . . . Pudding House Press published the chapbook Glances Back by MFA candidate Emily Bright. . . . A long poem by Shana Youngdahl (MFA 2006) entitled Donner: A Passing has been accepted for publication as a chapbook with Finishing Line Press. Congratulations to all!

Among the research and creative collaboration groups chosen by the Institute for Advanced Study for 2007-08 support was the Performance and Social Justice Collaborative, convened in part by English professor Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley. With choreographer Ananya Chatterjea, the group fashioned Pipaashaa, extreme thirst, an Ananya Dance Theatre performance debuting September 6-9 at the Southern Theater. Pipaashaa, extreme thirst, explores the impact of environmental degradation in the lives of communities of color across the divides of North and South.

MFA candidate Emily Freeman (fiction) and MFA alumna Margie Newman (nonfiction) have been selected for the 2007-2008 Loft Mentor Series. The Mentorships, presented by the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, offer advanced criticism and professional development opportunities to twelve writers a year. Three MFA alumni were finalists: Marge Barrett, Wendy Fernstrum, and Jennifer Johnson.

Danika Stegeman (BA 2005 summa cum laude) makes her publication debut with the poem "Here, 1,475' above the Ocean" in The Denver Quarterly (Vol. 41:4). Stegeman is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at George Mason University. . . . Sam Kean (BA 2002 summa cum laude) wrote "Uncommon Reading," about common-reading programs for freshmen, for the September Writer's Chronicle. Kean also contributes to The Chronicle of Philanthropy and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Edelstein-Keller Visiting Professor Charles Baxter will discuss his new book The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot (Graywolf Press) at Magers & Quinn Bookstore, Thursday, August 9, at 7:30 pm. The book inaugurates a Graywolf series on the "art of writing" which Baxter will edit.

English/Theater student Colin Waitt performs in Bards, a Fringe Festival comedy presented August 3 through August 12 by Four Humors Theater. Bards follows spies Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare on a dangerous mission for the Queen. Four Humors Theater was founded by University of Minnesota students. All involved with the production are either past or current students. All performances are at the Southern Theatre on the West Bank.

Timothy Sweet (PhD 1988) was awarded the 2006 Richard Beale Davis Prize for his article "'What Concernment Hath America in These Things!' Local and Global in Samuel Sewall's Plum Island Passage." The Davis Prize honors the best article published in Early American Literature in a publishing year. Sweet is Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of English at West Virginia University.

William Reichard (PhD 1997) reads from his latest poetry collection This Brightness (Mid-List Press) at 8 pm July 20 and 21 at Patrick's Cabaret. Reichard also joins Eireann Lorsung (MFA 2006) at BirchBark Books 7 pm July 26 for a reading. Lorsung's debut poetry collection music for landing planes by (Milkweed) was published this past spring.

The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, an international organization with more than a thousand members, meets on the UMTC campus July 10-14. The SHARP conference is offering a selection of public events which do not require registration, from a Thursday talk by novelist and BirchBark Books owner Louise Erdrich to a Saturday panel on "Publishing Here and Now." See details at right or the full list of open admission events.

On Tuesday, July 10, Professor Thomas Augst will discuss Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States, an essay collection he co-edited which was just published by the University of Massachusetts Press. A reception and book signing will follow his talk; 3-5 pm at the central Minneapolis Public Library, 300 Nicollet Mall.

Professor Maria Damon will lead a discussion series entitled "Your Heart's Desire: Sex and Love in Jewish Literature" through July at the Highland Park Branch of the St. Paul Public Libraries. Damon, who won a 2006-07 Graduate and Professional Teaching Award, presents works by Philip Roth (July 3), Grace Paley (July 10), Shmuel Yosef Agnon (July 17), Abraham B. Yehoshua (July 24), and Rebecca Goldstein (July 31). To register contact Alayne Hopkins at (651) 366-6488 or alayne@thefriends.org.

Eric Dregni (MFA '07) will be reading and offering travel tips from his books Weird Minnesota and Midwest Marvels June 25 at the Brooklyn Park Library, June 27 at the Maple Grove Library, and July 9 at the Ridgedale Library, all at 7 pm. Interviewed by the Minnesota Daily about Weird Minnesota, Dregni noted, "We can't be proud of having the Colosseum or the Eiffel Tower, but we can be proud of a talking Paul Bunyan."

MFA candidate Emily August and 2001 MFA alumnus Michael Seward are among the readers at "OUT @ the Library," a special PRIDE event featuring "some of the finest GLBT writers in the Twin Cities." The reading, presented by the Carol Connolly GLBT Reading Series and part of a continuing library exhibit, will take place 7 pm Wednesday, June 27 at the Minneapolis Central Library, 300 Nicollet Mall.

Laurie Lindeen (MFA ’04) celebrated the release of her debut memoir Petal Pusher: A Rock and Roll Cinderella Story June 16 at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul. Lindeen, whose book follows her from teen music fan to musician in the band Zuzu’s Petals, was interviewed by Current personality Mary Lucia. She also read from her book and performed with the reunited Zuzu’s Petals. Other musical guests included Lori Barbero (former Babe in Toyland), Mark Olson (former Jayhawk), and Paul Westerberg (former Replacement). The performance was aired on the Current (89.3 FM) Sunday June 24. Lindeen will read at the Edina Barnes & Noble July 10 at 7:30 pm.

Medievalist George Shuffleton visits the Department of English this fall semester from Carlton College, where he is assistant professor of English. Shuffleton will teach ENGL 8110-001 Popular Literature of Late Medieval England. He has a particular interest in Chaucer, Langland, and Gower, and his current research focuses on the relationship between miscellany manuscripts and Middle English poetry.

On Sunday June 3, the Washington (D.C.) Times raved about Eireann Lorsung's poetry collection Music for Landing Planes By, out this spring on Milkweed Editions. Wrote critic Michael Brendan Dougherty: "The lyrical nature of her composition and the surprises that hang at the end of her verses make this assortment of delights eminently re-readable." Lorsung is a 2006 MFA. . . . Steve Healey (PhD candidate) will read his poetry at Minneapolis' Opposable Thumbs Bookstore June 8 at 7:30 pm. Also in Minneapolis, Haddayr Copley-Woods (MFA 2000) will read her fiction at Dreamhaven Books June 28 at 6:30 pm.

The Fantasy Matters Conference, set for November 16-18 at the University of Minnesota, is looking for paper, panel, and author reading submissions by June 15. This conference takes the position that fantasy literature plays an important role not only in popular culture, but also in the realm of literature itself. Scholars of fantasy literature at any level (fan, undergraduate, graduate, or professional) are invited to submit abstract proposals of 250 words. Keynote speakers will be Neil Gaiman, author of the Sandman series of graphic novels, and University of Minnesota professor Jack Zipes, noted scholar of fairy tales and folklore. The Name of the Wind author Patrick Rothfuss will be a featured reader, among others.

The May session class ENGL3020 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes presents student research projects on the final day of class, Thursday, June 7, from 10 am to noon. Instructor Kate Hannah's undergraduates have been investigating topics in the Sherlock Holmes Collection at Andersen Library. Among their featured findings: "The Women of the Sherlock Holmes Canon," "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and His Reading Public," and "Sherlock Holmes and Forensic Science." Interested parties are welcome to attend. Room 120B, Andersen Library. Meanwhile the University of Minnesota Showboat Players present Sherlock's Last Case from June 15 to August 25; and the University co-sponsors the Sherlock Holmes convention Victorian Secrets and Edwardian Enigmas here July 6-8.

Associate professor Rebecca Krug has won the College of Liberal Arts Arthur "Red" Motley Exemplary Teaching Award for 2006-07. She joins six active English professors with this distinction. The award recognizes faculty "who inspire and care, who make themselves approachable, who show an interest in individual students' well-being and in programs for the benefit of students generally, who give of themselves generously in advising, counseling, and directing projects, and who create an active classroom atmosphere." Krug is a medievalist who this past year taught The Story of King Arthur and Women in the Middle Ages. Congratulations Professor Krug!

The Department of English is proud to host poet, scholar and teacher Steven Winduo in 2007-08. Winduo lectures in literature and language at the University of Papua New Guinea. He has published two poetry collections: Lomo'ha I am, in Spirit's Voice I Call (1991) and Hembemba: Rivers of the Forest (2000). Windou is the founding editor of Savanna Flames: A Papua New Guinea Journal of Literature, Language, and Culture. For fall, he will teach the undergraduate classes Analysis of the English Language and Literacy and American Cultural Diversity.

The Department of English undergraduate literary magazine Ivory Tower launched its 2007 issue with two readings at semester's end. The first, on April 27, brought a packed house to the Weisman Art Museum. After student contributors read, the Ivory Tower editors took the stage to announce the winning entries in each category. Becky Lang's "Cocoa Season" won for fiction; Luci Kandler's "History of a Lake at Night" won for creative nonfiction; Erica Niemiec's "Convergences and Crossings" won for poetry; and Angie Myhre's "Believer" won for art. Congratulations to the staff and all contributors!

The Department of English regularly offers courses in film studies. A website set up this spring by Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature for the first time rounds up current classes in cinema studies across the University. The website also profiles faculty with major research interests in film, including English professors Siobhan Craig, John Mowitt, Paula Rabinowitz, and Jani Scandura. The site lists University film collaboratives as well as online resources. This fall's English course offerings in cinema: Craig's The Western, Charles Sugnet's Fiction, Film, & Video from Emerging Nations and African Cinema, Jack Zipes' Fairy Tale Films and the Brothers Grimm and Transformations of the Fairy Tale, and Screenwriting.

Professor Matar, hired under the Presidential Initiative on Arts and Humanities, will call the Department of English home starting next fall. Matar's research and writing focus on 16th- and 17th-century interactions between Europe, especially England, and the world of Islam. He will be teaching the English graduate level course Britain & Islamic Mediterranean: 1588-1713, which will trace the intellectual and historical contacts between early modern England and the Muslim Mediterranean through drama, travel literature, captivity accounts and theological polemic. Among his numerous publications are Britain and Barbary: 1589-1689 (University Press of Florida, 2005) and Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (Columbia University Press, 1999). Matar received his PhD at the University of Cambridge. He was Professor of English at the Florida Institute of Technology.

Congratulations to Graduate Research Partnership Program awardees and their faculty mentors: Lauren Curtright (John Wright); Mitch Ogden (Jigna Desai); Ethan Rutherford (Julie Schumacher); and Lisa Trochmann (Paula Rabinowitz). . . . Graduate School Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships were granted to Becky Peterson, Stoyan Tchaprazov, Elizabeth Weixel, and Maria Zavialova. . . . This year's Charles Christensen Library Acquisition Prize went to Lindsay Craig and Lucia Pawlowski. . . . Congratulations also to Arlene Kim and Emily Bright, recipients of the Academy of American Poets' James Wright Prize for Poetry.

Two English majors were selected for the 2007-08 Selmer Birkelo Scholarships, which honor 14 high achieving students in the College of Liberal Arts: Libby Issendorf, who is double majoring in English and Journalism, and Amanda Steepleton. Congratulations also to our other 2007-08 English scholarship and award winners.

Professor Julie Schumacher won a Minnesota Book Award for her young adult novel The Book of One Hundred Truths (Delacorte). Awards were announced May 5 in St. Paul. Other Creative Writing professors who have been honored with a Minnesota Book Award include Michael Dennis Browne (twice), Ray Gonzalez, Patricia Hampl, and David Treuer.

Regents professor Patricia Hampl was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Hampl is one of only two new fellows elected for accomplishment in the writing of literature.

Poet and fiction writer Cheri Johnson (MFA 2005) was one of four Minnesotans granted $25,000 McKnight Artist Fellowships through the Loft Awards in Creative Prose. Novelist Jane Hamilton judged submissions for the 2007 fellowships. Johnson also has been awarded a seven-month fellowship (in fiction) to the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown for 2007-2008.

Emily August won a Steven J. Schochet GLBTA Studies Award for Excellence in Creativity and Scholarship, which is administered by the GLBTA Programs Office. August will be recognized at the Lavender Graduation Ceremony Thursday, May 3rd.

Assistant professor Tony C. Brown and associate professor Andrew Scheil received National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships for the academic year 2007-08. They also both received supplemental College of Liberal Arts Research grants.

Congratulations to the following graduate students for securing tenure-track academic positions: Rachel Mordecai, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Amherst, MA); Alex Mueller, SUNY-Plattsburgh (Plattsburgh, NY); Ariane Balizet, California Lutheran University (Thousand Oaks, CA); Karen Steigman, Otterbein College (Columbus, OH); and Marie-Therese Sulit, Mount Saint Mary College (Newburgh, NY). David Wehner, who has been a Post-Doctoral Associate at the Center for Teaching and Learning here at the U, has accepted a tenure-track position at Mount Saint Mary's University (Emmitsburg, Maryland). In addition, Robert Stark will be visiting assistant professor at Marquette University (Milwaukee, WI).

Congratulations to Professor Shirley Garner upon being awarded the Mullen/Spector/Truax Women's Leadership Award for this year. Currently associate dean of the Graduate School, Professor Garner served from 1996 to 2000 as chair of the Department of English, which she joined in 1970.

Dislocate, the literary journal produced by English graduate students, releases its third issue with a party 7:30 pm Tuesday April 17 at the Ritz Theater, 345 13th Ave. NE, in Minneapolis. Local poets Jon Vick, Matt Rasmussen, and Portland writer Erin Ergenbright will read. The Ivory Tower, the undergraduate literary magazine and English course, hosts a launch party for their 2007 issue at 6 pm on April 27 at the Weisman Art Museum, Dolly Fiterman Riverview Gallery. Creative Writing chair and professor Julie Schumacher will speak, along with journal contributors and editors.

Kelly Hulander read her paper "'[Her] Kindness...Was Inexhaustible': Condescension and Entitlement vs. Cross-Class Friendship in British New Woman and Socialist Fiction" at the 2007 British Women Writers Conference, University of Kentucky in Lexington, this April. Chris Kamerbeek's article "Parks and Wreck: Anxiety and Amusement at Turn-of-the-Century Coney Island," will appear in the forthcoming Summer 2007 issue of Popular Culture Review. Gregg Murray presented: “‘(The Joking Voice, a Gesture I Love)’: Familiarizing Discourse in Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Manuelzinho’� at the PCA/ACA Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, April 2007; “I Say No More and Walk Barefoot: Feet in Jean Genet’s Le Miracle de la rose� at the Graduate Symposium in Romance Languages at the University of Minnesota, March 2007; and “Historicizing Elizabeth Bishop’s Hierarchical Distance in Brazil� at the Red River Graduate Student Conference in Fargo, North Dakota, February 2007.

This week the Creative Writing Program celebrates its 10th year of awarding the Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing. For information about this week's "Writers at Work" afternoon panels and the April 13 gala, see "Events".

Josh Wallaert will be on hand for the Minnesota premiere of his film Arid Lands 7 pm Thursday April 12 at the Bell Auditorium. Arid Lands is a prize-winning documentary that focuses on land use around the Hanford nuclear site in southeastern Washington state. Wallaert, who co-directed, will discuss the film with University of Minnesota geographers Bruce Braun and George Henderson.

Associate Professor of English David Treuer received a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship for work on a non-fiction book about contemporary reservation (American Indian) life. This year Treuer also received a McKnight Presidential Fellow Award from the University and an NEH Fellowship to work on preserving the Ojibwe language. Last August he published the novel The Translation of Dr. Apelles and the collection of critical essays Native American Fiction: A User's Manual.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters announced that Charles Baxter received the Award of Merit for the Short Story, which grants $10,000 and a medal to an outstanding short story writer. The academic year 2007-08 will be Baxter's third as Edelstein-Keller Visiting Professor in the Creative Writing Program of the Department of English; the novelist and short story writer is the author of The Feast of Love.

Professor Maria Damon received the University of Minnesota Distinguished Teaching Award for Outstanding Postbaccalaureate, Graduate, and Professional Education for 2006-07. This award recognizes faculty members for excellence in instruction, instructional program development, intellectual distinction, advising and mentoring, and involvement of students in research, scholarship, and professional development. English professors Madelon Sprengnether, John Mowitt, Edward M. Griffin, and Tom Clayton are previous winners of this award.

Michael Kleine (PhD 1983) is publishing Searching For Latini (Parlor Press), a book about Brunetto Latini, the teacher of Dante. A composition scholar and a poet, Kleine "argues that Latini should be rescued from obscurity, not only because of the literary status of his student but also because of Latini’s promotion of Ciceronian rhetoric during the dawn of the Renaissance and the relevance of his work to contemporary teachers of writing." Kleine is a professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Ellen Messer-Davidow was selected to be a Residential Fellow at the University of Minnesota Institute for Advanced Study for the fall of 2007. . . . Katherine Scheil will be a McKnight Summer Fellow for the summer of 2007. . . . Natasha Tinsley received funding for one year from the President's Faculty Multicultural Research Award for her proposal "Desiring the Blue Lagoon: Sea Crossings and Fluid Identities in Caribbean Literature."

MFA candidate Emily Bright's first chapbook of poetry will be published by Pudding House Press in summer 2007. Bright plans to graduate in 2008.

Shaye Areheart Books, a division of Random House, will publish MFA alumna Amy Shearn's debut novel, How Far is the Ocean from Here? in summer 2008. Shearn received her MFA in 2005.

The Department of English welcomes back to the University of Minnesota Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah, who was a visiting writer in 1988, and Minnesota writer Louise Erdrich, who delivered the Joseph Warren Beach Lecture in Literature here in 1996. Farah and Erdrich met recently at a conference and discovered they had much to discuss, a conversation they will continue with this unique dialogue and reading, 3:30 pm Sunday March 4 at Cowles Auditorium. Farah will be interviewed on National Public Radio's Morning Edition February 23.

Alumna Lauren Fox published her first novel Still Life With Husband on Knopf this month, and on February 16, the New York Times gave it a thumbs up. Reviewer Michiko Kakutani names Fox "a delightful new voice in American fiction," describes her as a blend of Lorrie Moore and Roz Chast, and continues: "Ms. Fox, who earned an M.F.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1998, has an uncanny ability to capture the absurdities of her heroine’s pastel-colored life in Milwaukee, and to map the darker emotional landscape she inhabits."

Congratulations to Associate Professor Katherine Scheil upon being awarded a 2007 BSA (Bibliographical Society of America) Fellowship, "which supports bibliographical inquiry as well as research in the history of the book trades and in publishing history." As professor Scheil outlined in the February 2 ENow! program on archives, she is currently researching the history of reading Shakespeare, especially within women's reading groups in the 18th and 19th centuries.

MFA candidate Josh Wallaert and his co-director Grant Aaker received the "People's Choice" award for their documentary Arid Lands at the Wild and Scenic Environmental Film Festival in Nevada City, CA. The film looks at people who live near the Hanford nuclear site in southeastern Washington and follows the changes to the desert landscape brought about by nuclear industry, housing development, and irrigated agriculture. The documentary, which premiered at Wild and Scenic, has been invited to the Eckerd College Environmental Film Festival in St. Petersburg, FL, in February, and will be screening in April in the Bell Auditorium's "Science on Screen" series.

Laura Flynn (MFA '06) will publish her memoir Swallow the Ocean with Counterpoint Books in early 2008. Flynn was featured in the summer 2006 issue of English at Minnesota as the first Scribe for Human Rights. While she held the Scribe Fellowship, Flynn worked with the Human Rights Program at the U to research and write a story about immigrants detained in Midwest jails on immigration charges. Her memoir, based on her MFA thesis, focuses on Flynn's experience growing up in San Francisco with a mother suffering mental illness.

English Emeritus professor Archibald Leyasmeyer serves as a primary source for a new Minnesota History article about the late Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson (Fences, The Piano Lesson) and his relationship with the Minneapolis Playwrights' Center. Leyasmeyer was board president when Wilson, who had moved to St. Paul from Pittsburgh, received a Jerome fellowship at the Playwrights' Center for 1980-81; in the article, Leyasmeyer recalls this choice as "one of the greatest decisions of my life." That year, Wilson wrote Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.

On January 26, English professor Siobhan Craig will moderate as pioneering American avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger introduces and discusses his original films Fireworks, Rabbit’s Moon, Scorpio Rising, and Kustom Kar Kommandos. These are new 35mm blow-up restorations recently released by the UCLA Film and Television Archives. Professor Craig is currently teaching Anger in her undergraduate class The Split and Sutured Self, which focuses on subjectivity in literary, cinematic and theoretical texts from the 20th and 21st centuries. She and Anger will speak 7:30 pm at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis.

Erin Altemus, MFA '07, traveled to Northern Ontario last summer to meet members of First Nation communities and record their stories. As she writes in M, Altemus canoed the lakes and rivers of the boreal forest, visiting communities along the way. Her trip was made possible by a Judd Fellowship.

Fiction writer, critic, and social activist Tillie Olsen died January 1, 2007. Olsen visited the Department of English to read from her short story collection Tell Me a Riddle. Another visit came in 1986 on the 100th anniversary of Emily Dickinson's death. Invited by Professor Toni McNaron, Olsen spoke to undergraduates at length about Dickinson. "She was fascinating because she had read the poems so carefully and knew them so intimately," remembers McNaron. "She also talked about the value and distinct privilege of having solitude, since matters of class were always front and center with Olsen." Olsen's 95th birthday would have been January 14th. Her family has requested that everyone touched by her work "gather with friends in their homes or libraries or bookstores and read her work aloud."

The following students won CLA grants to support the research and professionalization of graduate students in English: Mitchell Odgen, Becky Petersen, Liz Hutter, Elizabeth Weixel, Sara Berrey, Stoyan Vassilev Tchaprazov, Karen Steigman, Nicholas Hengen, and Adam Schrag.

The VG/Voices from the Gaps website, housed in the Department of English, was named “Best Educational Resource on the Web� this fall by StudySphere. VG is an international website focused on women writers and artists of color. Its trans-national academic community includes students, teachers, artists, and scholars.

The new memoir by Regents Professor Patricia Hampl was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2006. Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime (Harcourt) is, according to Kathyrn Harrison in her New York Times review, "a paean to the act of seeing, celebrating our capacity to be transformed by the truths art holds, recognizing them as . . . holy."

Lightsey Darst (MFA 2003) and Karen Rigby (MFA 2005) received $20,000 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Poetry.