News

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.

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.

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.

The annual Department of English end of the year Commencement Celebration takes place Friday, May 9, from 4:30-6:30 pm in Lind 207A. All graduating senior English majors, scholarship recipients, faculty, grad students, staff, and family members are invited to celebrate. There will be excellent food, a small ceremony, and plenty of socializing.

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.