News
Creative Writing alum receives award
10/2009
Rajiv Joseph, a 1996 Creative Writing graduate now working as playwright, received a $50,000 Whiting Writers’ Award for 2009. The award recognizes “writers of exceptional talent and promise in early career.” Read more about the award here, or read a recent English department profile of Joseph here.
English faculty, Ph.D. student featured in MQ article
10/2009
An article in the October issue of Miami Quarterly examining international student life at Miami features Literature Professor Nalin Jayasena and Literature Ph.D. candidate Elham Shayegh. Read the article.
Anderson awarded NSF grant
10/2009
English Professor and Howe Writing Center Director Paul Anderson, with colleagues in Engineering, was recently awarded a $157K grant from the National Science Foundation for “CPATHII: Incorporating Communication Outcomes into the Computer Science Curriculum.”
Miami University Press releases new titles
9/2009
The Miami University Press, an English Department initiative, recently added three diverse new titles to its catalog. The Guide to the Flying Island was chosen as the winner of the Press’s 2008 Novella Contest; Creative Writing Assistant Professor Joseph Bates was the final judge. Performing Worlds into Being: Native American Women’s Theater is the result of a 2007 conference held at Miami. Kelli Lyon Johnson, Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean of Miami's Hamilton campus, was one of the book’s three editors. Virgil's Cow is a book of poetry edited by Miami University Press Editor, Professor of English and College of Arts and Science Associate Dean Keith Tuma.
William Howe publishes translanations one
7/2009
“Dickinson said that it’s poetry if you feel as though the top of your head were taken off. But what if it’s the whole head, down to the shoulders?” So begins K. Silem Mohammad’s review of Visiting Assistant Professor William Howe’s latest poetry offering, which you can find here. Also look for Howe’s translanations two from Slack Buddha Press and Five for Bern, a series of five chapbooks from No Press in 2009.
Keith Tuma’s The Paris Hilton published
7/2009
Behind the powerful cover image of Keith Tuma’s The Paris Hilton lies a chapbook of 32 squibs and epigrams, published by Critical Documents in July. Of his work, Tuma says, “It’s bad form to talk about one’s own poems, and poems are never about or worth anything in particular, like jingles in a mud pie, or a furlough from respectable speech. But Paris Hilton as media phenomenon contemplated beside economic meltdown might be relevant.”
Steven Lansky’s poetry goes from radio to the page
6/2009
Eleven Word Title for Confessional Political Poetry Originally Composed for Radio was published this summer by Seaweed Sideshow Circus, a Wisconsin-based press and a project of MU graduate Andrew Milam. Visiting Instructor Steve Lansky says of his work, “The poems blended some literary tropes reminiscent of the Beats, and Uncle Walt, mixed with observations on, and comparisons between the magical natural beauty of the north woods and lake region of Ontario, combined with the sounds and scenes of inner-city Cincinnati.” Most of the poems were written in the 1990s, and many were read on “Night Music,” a three-hour weekly radio program Lansky hosted on 89.7 WNKU. E-mail sscircus@aol.com for ordering information.
Laura Mandell to chair MLA committee
5/2009
Professor Laura Mandell has been selected to chair the Information Technology Committee of the Modern Language Association; she was recently quoted in an article in Inside Higher Education on tenure in a digital era.
Martha Schoolman earns Humanities Fellowship
5/2009
Assistant Professor of Literature Martha Schoolman has been awarded a one-year fellowship from the Society of the Humanities at Cornell University to complete the manuscript for her book project titled American Abolitionist Geographies. Schoolman is among six Society Fellows who will each receive $45,000 stipends. Read more about the fellowship here.
Ann Updike chosen for summer research at Newberry Library
5/2009
Ann Updike, a Miami Composition and Rhetoric Ph.D. student, has been selected to participate in the Graduate Student Summer Institute sponsored by the Newberry Consortium of American Indian Studies (NCAIS). She will attend a 4-week graduate seminar, including independent research, at the Newberry on the topic “Native Representations: From Colonialism to Sovereignty” led by Dr. Jean O’Brien and Dr. Scott Stevens.
Margaret Luongo selected for OAC residency
5/2009
Margaret Luongo, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, has been selected as the Ohio Arts Council Creative Writing Resident at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The OAC’s Individual Artist Residency Program was established in 1989 to give artists opportunities to develop new work and ideas in a creative atmosphere.
The Fine Arts Work Center was founded in 1968 by a group of eminent artists and writers. It is an internationally known art center and the oldest continuous art colony in North America. The Center has offered studio space to artists since 1914 and has hosted many well known American artists, writers and poets.
Performance videos available online
5/2009
Videos from the recent Translating Cultures Latina/o Writer’s Festival, as well as other recent performances sponsored by the department, are available on Meshworks and YouTube. Thanks to Creative Writing graduate assistant Quincy Jones for posting these videos.
Stefanie Dunning book examines representations of interracial desire
4/2009
Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture analyzes representative works of African American fiction, film, and music in which interracial desire appears in the context of same sex desire. In close readings of these “texts,” Associate Professor Stefanie K. Dunning explores the ways in which the interracial intersects with queerness, blackness, whiteness, class, and black national identity. She shows that representations of interracial desire do not follow the logic of racial exclusion. Instead they are metaphorical and anti-biological. Rather than diluting race, interracial desire makes race visible. By invoking the interracial, black gay and lesbian artists can remake our conception of blackness.
Kay Sloan, Dorothy Maxwell Goepel receive Ohio Arts Council awards
4/2009
Kay Sloan, professor of English, and Dorothy Maxwell Goepel, who earned a Miami master’s degree in English with a concentration in creative writing, have been awarded Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council. The award to each is $5,000.
Sloan, who supervised Goepel’s master’s thesis, says receiving the OAC the same year as her student “makes the award more deeply rewarding for me, personally.”
Individual Excellence Awards are peer recognition of creative artists for the exceptional merit of a body of work that advances or exemplifies the discipline and the larger artistic community. These awards support artists’ growth and development and recognize their work in Ohio and beyond in 13 different disciplines. The process is competitive: only about 8 percent of applicants are granted awards.
Sloan, who joined Miami’s faculty in 1984, will use the fellowship to complete research and writing of a collection of interlocking stories set in New York between the 1930s and 1970s.
Goepel’s award supports her non-fiction work, a collection of remembrances of her deceased parents, whom she recalls as a walking contrast in ethnicity and culture, as well as the key place of her youth, a Mexican American neighborhood on the West Side of San Antonio, Texas.
Yu-Fang Cho publishes in two journals
4/2009
English and Women’s Studies Assistant Professor Yu-Fang Cho has recently been published in two journals. “Domesticating the Aliens Within: Sentimental Benevolence in Late-Nineteenth-Century California Magazines” was published in the March 2009 issue of American Quarterly; “‘Yellow Slavery,’ Narratives of Rescue, and Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton’s ‘Lin John’ (1899)” appears in the Journal of Asian American Studies April 2009 issue.
Creative Writing alum moves into spotlight
4/2009
Animals Out of Paper, a play by 1996 Creative Writing graduate Rajiv Joseph, has received three nominations for the 2009 Lucille Lortel award, including one for outstanding play. You can read about it in the New York Times or the Lucille Lortel website. Read more about Rajiv here.
Madelyn Detloff publishes Persistence of Modernism
3/2009
Modernism is commonly perceived as a response to the cataclysmic events of the early twentieth century. To what extent then can we explain its continued persistence? In The Persistence of Modernism: Loss and Mourning in the Twentieth Century, Madelyn Detloff argues for modernism’s relevance to our own age, a time of escalating loss, retribution, and desire. Some of the social formations that inspired modernist cultural production—xenophobic nationalism and imperial hubris—are still with us. Writers such as Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, who saw themselves as outsiders with a precarious sense of belonging to their dominant culture, are, Detloff claims, still able to give us insight into our contemporary narratives of loss, recovery, memory, and nation. Detloff extends her conceptualization to include current writers like Pat Barker and Hanif Kureishi, who have taken up the modernist thread in their own work; the result is an ambitious study that will appeal to all students and scholars of modernism. For more information, visit the publisher’s website.
Professors’ collaboration featured in Chronicle of Higher Education
1/2009
A project by Creative Writing professors William Howe and cris cheek seeking “radically inclusive” input on the inauguration of Barack Obama has been featured in the “Wired Campus” column of the Chronicle of Higher Education. The blog, titled “Post_Moot,” seeks “passionate, off-the-cuff, provocative, oblique, creative, thick descriptive and off-the-wall contributions.” Read the column here, or visit the blog here.
Mary Jean Corbett book explores 19th-century sexual ethics
11/2008
In nineteenth-century England, marriage between first cousins was both legally permitted and perfectly acceptable. After mid-century, laws did not explicitly penalize sexual relationships between parents and children, between siblings, or between grandparents and grandchildren. But for a widower to marry his deceased wife’s sister was illegal on the grounds that it constituted incest. That these laws and the mores they reflect strike us today as wrongheaded indicates how much ideas about kinship, marriage, and incest have changed.
In Family Likeness, Professor Mary Jean Corbett shows how the domestic fiction of novelists including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Virginia Woolf reflected the shifting boundaries of “family” and even helped refine those borders. Corbett takes up historically contingent and culturally variable notions of who is and is not a relative and whom one can and cannot marry. Her argument is informed by legal and political debates; texts in sociology and anthropology; and discussions on the biology of heredity, breeding, and eugenics. In Corbett’s view, marriage within families—between cousins, in-laws, or adoptees—offered Victorian women, both real and fictional, an attractive alternative to romance with a stranger, not least because it allowed them to maintain and strengthen relations with other women within the family.
Kay Sloan edits POW collection, contributes to fiction anthology
11/2008
Not Without Honor: The Nazi POW Journal of Steve Carano, edited by Professor Kay Sloan and published by the University of Arkansas Press, threads together the stories of three American POWs in World War II. The men record their air battles and escape attempts, yet in their most gripping accounts, these POWs ruminate on psychological survival. The sense of community they formed was instrumental to their endurance. Not Without Honor allows the reader to journey with these young men as they bore firsthand witness to the best and worst of human nature. The narratives take the reader deep behind the notorious wire fence surrounding the prison and into the world where men clung to their humanity through humor, faith, camaraderie, daily rituals, and even art.
Sloan’s short story “Occasion for Repentance” was included in the recently released anthology Christmas Stories from the South’s Best Writers.
John Tassoni co-edits composition book
11/2008
Professor and Director of Composition John Tassoni has co-edited Composing Other Spaces, a book of essays describing composition theory and practice, documenting ways the politics of place inflect key concepts in the field and exploring the intersections among composition’s real and imagined geographies.
Susan Morgan book garners international attention
10/2008
Bombay Anna: The Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of the King and I Governess by Miami Distinguished Professor Susan Morgan has been reviewed by the national and international media, including:
- The New York Times, October 10
Read the review here - The Vancouver Sun, August 23
Read the review here - Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National show “The Ark” (author interview), August 17
Read the transcript of the interview here
Jacquelyn Rahman publishes articles, is elected to committee
9/2008
Jacquelyn Rahman, Assistant Professor and Director of the Linguistics Program, has published two articles. Both articles appear in American Speech, a journal of the American Dialect Society.
“An Ay for an Ah: Language of Survival in African American Narrative Comedy.” This article analyses the indexical relationship between salient linguistic features and survival strategies displayed by characters in narratives by socially conscious African American comedians.
“Middle-class African Americans: Reactions and Attitudes toward African American English.” This paper examines the linguistic strategies employed by middle-class African Americans in constructing an appropriate presentation of self for professional and social environments, where conflicting linguistic norms may prevail.
The Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America has elected Jacquelyn Rahman to a three year term of membership on a standing committee.
LuMing Mao, Morris Young co-edit volume
9/2008
LuMing Mao, professor of English and director of graduate studies, and Morris Young, associate professor of English, have co-edited a volume of essays, Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric, which examine broadly the histories, theories, and practices of Asian American rhetoric, situating rhetorical work across the disciplines where critical study of Asian Americans occurs: Asian American studies, rhetoric and composition, communication studies, and English studies.
Margaret Luongo publishes book of short stories
9/2008
Creative Writing Assistant Professor Margaret Luongo has published her first collection of short stories. The sixteen stories in If the Heart Is Lean etch sharp portraits of people in odd and sometimes surreal situations who thus have the opportunity to view their lives from a unique perspective. Other stories touch upon issues of identity, following characters who find themselves in the wrong places, or who find themselves too late. Through compact, tightly woven prose, vivid imagery, and a variety of arresting narrative techniques, If the Heart Is Lean zeroes in on the humorous and painful lives of people who are mysteries to themselves.
Segue Issue 7 now online
8/2008
Miami University–Middletown’s online literary journal is now available. Get it here.
Scholarship winners announced
5/2008
Congratulations to the 2008-2009 Department of English scholarship recipients:
- Terry and Chris Baehr Scholarship
Lisa Dunn - Craver-Overton Scholarship
Whitney Graham - Robert Kettler Memorial Scholarship
Alex Turvey - Bill Moeller Scholarship
Harrison Townsley - Gordon & Mary Wilson Scholarship
Ashley Calhoun
Ellison Hitt
Spotlight on Technical & Scientific Communication programs
8/2007
Miami University has focused on the Technical and Scientific Communication program on its Web site. See the profile on director Jean Lutz and the feature on the program’s Senior Capstone experience.
Latest issue of OxMag now online
5/2007
In this issue:
- An essay by Norman Ball
- Fiction by Andrew Ervin, Thaisa Frank, and M.O. Walsh
- Interviews with Chris Bachelder, Ernest Gaines, and Curtis White
- Poetry by Dan Bourne, Mez Breez; Erich Haught; Rita Kiefer; Ric Royer; and The Sonneteers (new media).
OxMag has some cool new features, including a News/Update section (OxBlog), a links page, and space for readers to post comments on published work—a feature intended to encourage online discussion of writers’ work and the writing process. Check it out at http://community.muohio.edu/oxmag
Administrative Changes in the Department
5/2007
In August, Professor Kerry Powell will assume duties as Acting Chair of the department, Professor Michele Simmons will begin a term as Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies, and Professor John Tassoni will begin a term as Director of College Composition. Thanks to outgoing Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies, Professor William Hardesty, and outgoing Director of College Composition, Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, for their work on behalf of the department.
Segue Issue 5.2 released
12/2006
The online literary journal of Miami University Middletown is now available, just in time for your holiday reading pleasure.
Breast cancer anthology published
10/2006
Students and faculty in the Creative Writing Program at Miami University-Middletown have published an anthology benefitting breast cancer research.
$10.5 million gift to enhance teaching of writing at Miami
9/2006
Roger and Joyce Howe of Cincinnati have given a $10.5 million gift to the Miami University campaign For Love and Honor designed to make Miami the nation’s best university at teaching undergraduates how to write.
English studies in a digital age
8/2006
Writing has changed dramatically in the last ten years. See how Miami is keeping up.
Professor Kate Ronald receives honors
8/2006
Kate Ronald, Miami’s Roger and Joyce L. Howe Professor of English, has been awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award for Excellence in Graduate Instruction and Mentoring. The award was presented at commencement on Friday, August 18.
more>>
Miami graduate Evan Kuhlman discusses his new hybrid novel, Wolf Boy
6/2006
Evan Kuhlman discusses his hybrid debut novel, Wolf Boy in an interview by Steven Paul Lansky, first published in CityBeat.
Wolf Boy is Evan Kuhlman's first novel. A blend of fiction and comics, the work explores the death by car crash of Francis Harrelson, a college student who is on his way to a symposium about mushrooms...
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Four Miami students awarded Fulbright grants
6/2006
Four Miami University students have been awarded Fulbright grants for graduate study and research abroad in the 2006-07 academic year.The students are among more than 1,000 selected from across the country. They include Christopher Michel, a master’s student in English.
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Oxford Magazine // Issue XX
5/2006
Oxford Magazine issue XX is now out! Featuring new writing by Lisa Jarnot, Anne Germanacos, Simon Perchik and more, plus an interview with Esquire editor and MU Alum Adrienne Miller!
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2006 Department of English Awards
5/2006
The Department of English is pleased to announce the 2006 Department of English Awards...
more>>
Segue Issue 5.1
5/2006
We're celebrating our fifth anniversary a little early this year (see below) with new clothes for our web site and a special anniversary issue. Issue 5.1 features new translations by Christopher Kelen of the Tang Dynasty Chinese poet Meng Jiao, an essay by Kelen about his poetry translation project, and highlights from all our past issues. Appearing in mid-May, 2006.
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Kay Sloan receives New Women's Voices Award
5/2006
Kay Sloan, Miami University professor of English, has received the "New Women's Voices" award for her chapbook, The Birds are on Fire. Finishing Line Press, presenter of the award, will publish the poetry book this month.
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Miami graduate wins PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers
4/2006
Christopher Coake, who received his M.A. in Fiction from Miami, returned in spring 2005 as the creative writing judge and is now an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, was named the 2006 winner of the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers ($35,000)
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Morris Young awarded 2006 CCCC Outstanding Book Award
3/2006
The Conference on College Composition and Communication has awarded Professor
Morris Young the 2006 CCCC Outstanding Book Award for his book Minor
Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship...
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GSA Travel Fund Increase
2006
The reimbursement amount for the GSA travel fund has been raised to $300 per student, per academic year. This is effective immediately and is reflected in the new, updated reimbursement forms, now available for download.
James Reiss wins Ohioana Helen and Laura Krout Memorial Poetry Award
2005
Linda Hengst, executive director of the Ohioana Library Association, has
announced the recipients of the 2005 Ohioana Awards. "These outstanding
individuals represent the very best of Ohio’s literary, musical and
artistic talent," she said. "We are proud to have the opportunity
to honor them in this way..."
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Stefanie Dunning wins Joe Weixmann Award
2005
Professor Stefanie Dunning's essay “‘Ironic Soil’: Recuperative Rhythms and Negotiated Nationalisms,” published in African American Review 39.1-2, has been selected as the first winner of the Joe Weixlmann Award for the Year's Best Essay in 20th-Century African American Literature in African American Review.
Summer Scholars
We are pleased to announce the Undergraduate Summer Scholars for 2005,
as well as the English majors who are among the new Members-in-Course elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
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Coffee 101
1/2005
by Pam Marks
reprinted courtesy of the Cincinnati Enquirer
OXFORD - They're unlikely entrepreneurs, not just because they're students but also because they're literature majors.
Yet when Miami University seniors Liz Snyder and Nicole Ayres opened Kofenya in September, they had what they
thought was a strong business plan: creation of a place that matches students' tendency to hang out with their
need for caffeine.
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Tim Melley receives CAS Outstanding Professor Award
2004
Professor Tim Melley has won the College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Professor Award.
Eric Goodman wins Book of the Year Award for Child of My Right Hand
2004
Professor Eric
Goodman's novel, Child of My Right Hand, won ForeWord Magazine's
2004 Silver Book of the Year Award for Gay/Lesbian Fiction...
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Jeff Sommers receives E. Phillips Knox Teaching Award
2004
Jeff Sommers, professor
of English at Miami Middletown, was named a recipient of the E. Phillips
Knox Teaching Award at the university's Dec. 17 commencement...
more >>