Spring 2009

Announcements

The spring semester brought with it good news for our faculty and our students.

The Eighth Annual Louisiana Conference on Language, Literature, and Culture was held at the Hilton Garden Inn on March 5-7. This conference, whose purpose is to foster communication across disciplines, was directed by Dr. Christine Devine. Other very active participants include Drs. Yung-Hsing Wu and Barbara Cicardo,and graduate students, Lindsay Mayo-Fincher, Allen Jones, Jennifer Page, Josh Caffery and John Ellis-Etchison.

Kate Bernheimer is the author of two novels based on German, Russian and Yiddish fairy tales, The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold (FC2) and The Complete Tales of Merry Gold (FC2). She is the author of a children’s book, The Girl in the Castle inside the Museum (Random House), and the editor of the literary journal Fairy Tale Review and of two essay collections, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales (Anchor/ Vintage) and Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales (Wayne State University Press). She is an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

Lesle Lewis, Professor of literature and writing at Landmark College, Putney, VT, has published two books of poems--Small Boat (2003), from University of Iowa Press (and winner of that year’s Iowa Poetry Award), and Landscapes I & II (2006), published by Alice James Books. Her poems and short fiction have also appeared in the following journals: American Writing, Pig Iron Press, Pleiades, American Letters and Commentary, Rain Dog Review, Northern New England Review, Old Crow, Barrow Street, Green Mountains Review, Mudfish, LIT, Double Room, The Massachusetts Review, Pool, Sentence, The Cincinnati Review, and Jubilat. Recent readings include appearances at the AWP Conference in Austin, TX, Odyssey Bookshop (Holyoke, MA), Ear Inn (NYC), University of Massachusetts Art Gallery and Jubilat/Jones Reading Series (Amherst, MA), Prairie Lights Bookstore (Iowa City, IA), Prose Poetry: The Second World Conference (Walpole, NH), Dianich Gallery (Brattleboro, VT), Northeast Modern Language Association Conference (Buffalo, NY), and the Renaissance Center (Amherst, MA).

Dr. Keith Dorwick: "The Magical Manufactured Landscapes of Oz": The cities of the early Oz books, infused with both wonder and horror, are characteristic of the tensions between magic and technology throughout Baum's work. Abandoned by the official government of Oz, their inhabitants put the "civilized" travelers from the Emerald City at risk from the illegitimate magic at the edges of this sometimes fearsome fairy country.

Dr. Clancy Ratliff: "Policing Miscarriage: Infertility Blogging, Rhetorical Enclaves, and the Case of House Bill 1677": Infertility bloggers, though more an enclave than a public sphere, intervened in proposed reproductive rights legislation in Virginia in January 2005. This presentation will describe infertility blogging's generic features and explore the case of House Bill 1677 with the rhetorical and political implications of its discussion in the blogosphere.