Publications and Activities
Fall 2017
Publications and Other Announcements
Drew Attana's short story, "Loose Leash" was published in the December 2017 issue of the online journal Arcturus. Drew is a Ph.D. candidate in our department, and his fiction, poetry and nonfiction has appeared in journals such as Phoebe, GulfStream, Cargo, and others.
Dr. Lucy Biederman has published a poem, "I Guess This is What I've Spent My Life Doing," in the December issue Masque and Spectacle: An Arts and Literary Journal. Dr. Biederman, a graduate of our program, is a lecturer at Case Western Reserve University.
Jacob Brewer, a Ph.D. candidate, has published a short story tiled "Enoch's Mule" in the winter 2018 issue of the journal The Hunger.
Clinton Craig, a Ph.D. candidate, has published a short story tiled "1984" in the winter 2018 issue of the journal The Hunger.
Brooke Larson, a Ph.D. candidate in our program, has published four poems, "Mother and Pother," "Another Timeline Grandma," and "Kakekotoba in Kennebunk, Maine," in the journal Foothill.
Writer-in-Residence John McNally is currently touring to promote his new book, The Boy Who Really, Really Wanted to Have Sex: The Memoir of a Fat Kid." The book gives readers a look at McNally's working-class childhood in Midwestern America. You can read "A Conversation with John McNally" at Dana King's blogspot, One Bite at a Time.
Jude Marr, a Ph.D. candidate, has several poems published in the online journal Nice Cage, Issue 005 ("White Feminist Dis-Integration," "When the Power Goes Out" and "Accommodation Under a Failed Regime") and in Panopoly, A Literary Zine ("Intersection, Midtown Atlanta").
Dr. Dayana Stetco's play, The Registry, was performed on Saturday, January 6 at the Acadiana Center for the Arts. Its cast included graduate students from the UL English Department, including Jenny Robertson, Krista DeBehnke, Drew Attana, Jeanna Mason, Ashley Pelletier, and Jude Marr. Sound was by Joe Dinallo and lights was by Jamie Gomez. You can read Dr. Stetco's director's notes at her blog for The Milena Theatre Group. Dr. Stetco is the Head of the English Department.
Dr. James McDonald, a Professor in our Composition and Rhetoric program, was honored at the University's annual Holiday Dinner for 30 years of service to the University.
Dr. Leah Orr, who teaches in our Literature Program, recently published Novel Ventures - Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690-1730. Pat Rogers from the University of South Florida comments that the book is "An important and trail-blazing study, devoted to matters such as the shape and methods of the publishing industry; anonymous authorship; reprinted fiction; foreign fiction in translation; work 'with a purpose,' including religious and allegorical works; and stories for entertainment, including criminal and amorous fiction. Here Orr offers a sustained argument that challenges orthodoxy at almost every turn, taking on the most influential accounts of fiction in the period. The scholarship is well nigh impeccable." Congratulations to Dr. Orr.
Denise M. Rogers has four poems published in The Journal of College Writing, vol 13. They are "An Idea of North," "The Word for When," "Louisiana Snowfall," and "From a City Girl, to Han Shan, Somewhere on Cold Mountain." Ms. Rogers is the Director of the UL Writing Center and a Master Instructor in the department.
Leigh Camacho Rourks, a Ph.D. candidate in our program, has two new pieces published. One is a poem entitled "Apollo and Daphne," published in Penn Review, and the other an essay, titled "A Disorder of Written Expression," published in TriQuarterly.
Gigantic Sequins: a literary arts journal, edited by Ph.D. candidate Kimberly Ann Southwick, made the list of Entropy's Best of 2017 Presses, Magazines, Publishers and Journals. She also has a poem in Tendernessyea ("What Can Happen in a Second").
Dr. Matthew Teutsch, a graduate of our program, has been awarded a Fulbright to teach American Literature at the University of Bergen in Norway for the 2018-2019 academic year. Dr. Teutsch publishes frequently; his article "Cartoonist Jackie Ormes' Commentary on Black Life" can be found on the Web page Black Perspectives, published by the African American Intellectual History Society.
Dr. James Tolan, a graduate of our program, was remembered in this In Memoriam 2017 video from The Academy of American Poets. Dr. Tolan, author of several books of poetry and a teacher of creative writing at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, died on March 8, 2017.
Jennifer van Alstyne's article, “Wives and Daughters: Social Acceptance and Agency in Chapman, Jonson, and Marston’s Eastward Ho,” appears in Appositions: Studies in Renaissance/Early Modern Literature & Culture, vol. 10, no. 1, 2017. She also has a review of Shara McCallum's Madwoman in Rain Taxi, vol. 22, no. 3. Also, she has published a number of poems this year in The Maynard, The Mad City Review, Qu, The Citron Review, and others. Jennifer is a graduate fellow working on her Master's degree in English.
Dr. John Vanderslice, a graduate of our program, was interviewed about his new book, The Last Days of Oscar Wilde, for Dab of Darkness Book Reviews. You can read the interview at Dab of Darkness. The Last Days of Oscar Wilde is available on Amazon and through other booksellers.
Summer 2017
Publications and Other Announcements
Dr. Lucy Biederman, a graduate of our program, has won the VIne Leaves Press Vignette Collection Award for her book, The Walmart Book of the Dead, based on the Egyptian Book of the Dead but telling the story of people trapped forever inside a Walmart. Dr. Biederman has also seen publication of her article "A Promise Song: Ernest J. Gaines's Early Fictions and the Community of Black Women Writing" in Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. 49, No. 1.
Josh Capps, Director of the Acadiana Writing Project, and Dr. Toby Daspit, Associate Professor in the College of Education held the 2017-18 National Writing Project SEED Invitational Leadership Institute to Invest in Developing New Teacher-Leaders during the week of June 12th. The Institute provided professional development training to 12 high school and middle school teachers, who participated in over 15 intensive creative and critical writing exercises, which they then used with students during the following week during the "Gear Up -- Improving the Blank Page" Institute (week of June 19th). The teachers will continue to use these exercises with students in writing clubs throughout the year. But that's not all. During the week of June 25th, Josh and Toby held the 2017 National Writing Project Advanced Institute to scale up the college-ready writers program. The goal was to help teachers prepare students for college by teaching argumentative writing that utilizes non-fiction sources. So, they had a very productive summer, enriching the writing lives of both teachers and students.
Danny Garrett, a new graduate student in our program, published an interview piece with White House correspondent April Ryan in the Summer issue of the National Association of Black Journalists Journal.The article is titled "Enduring Excellence: April Ryan is Slaying the White House Beat." Click here to read the article.
Rebecca Hazelwood's essay "What Seems to Be the Problem Officer?" was published in Guernica on June 5, 2017. She is a Ph.D. student in English and has had essays appear in the magazines December, Anthropoid, Hobart, and other journals and magazines.
Dr. Shelly Ingram's article, "Postmodern Storytelling in John Dufresne's Louisiana Novels" appears in the 2016 Louisiana Folklore Miscellany XXVI.
Dr. Clare Manes's article "Reading Ivan Turgenev with Ernest J. Gaines: Analyzing Fathers and Sons and Catherine Carmier" appears in Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. 49, No. 1.
Jennifer Morrison's article, "The Politics of the Plate: Foodways and Southern Culture in Ernest Gaines's 'Of Love and Dust'" also appears in 2016 Louisiana Folklore Miscellany XXVI.
Elizabeth Oxler's article, "I Understand Somewhere It Has Rained: Patricia Smith's Writing of Katrina" appears in the 2016 Louisiana Folklore Miscellany XXVI.
Dr. Matthew Teutsch's article "Mr. Joe Lewis, Help Me: Sports in the Fiction of Ernest Gaines," has been published in the most recent issue of MELUS (the journal of The Society of the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literatures). Dr. Teutsch is graduate of our program and a former interim director of the Gaines Center here at the University of Louisiana. He is currently a faculty member at the Auburn University.