Newsletter: October 2022

Our newsletter celebrates the latest publications, presentations, awards, teaching highlights, activities, and more of English faculty, graduate students, alumni, staff, and undergraduates.

Publications, Exhibits, and Acceptances

Michael Delahoyde’s article “On Being Wrong,” based on the former common reading has been reprinted in a Shakespeare essay collection. His article “Unfinished Oxfordian Research into Venetian Art” was published in a Shakespeare newsletter.

Will Hamlin’s co-edited collection of essays, Shakespeare and Montaigne, was published earlier this year by Edinburgh University Press.

Leeann Hunter published “Honoring Others While Honoring Ourselves: Affective Labor and Mentoring Programs” in Affective Labor and Alt-Ac Careers, edited by Lee Skallerup Bessette, published by the University of Kansas Press in 2022.

DJ Lee published the personal essays “Rewilding the Salton Sea” (April 2022) and “Tree Housing” (September 2022) on the Black Earth Institute’s quarterly blog. Lee also published “A Different Kind of Knowledge” in The Keats-Shelley Journal, volume 70.

Buddy Levy’s forthcoming book Empire of Ice & Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk received a strong review in the September 12 issue of Publisher’s Weekly. “Thrilling . . . Full of evocative descriptions, harrowing action scenes, and incisive character sketches, this is a worthy addition to the literature of Arctic exploration.”

Grant Maierhofer published The Compleat Lungfish.

Billy Merck‘s three-part essay about American Soccer coaching legend Clive Charles was published this summer in Howler, with the third part being published this last week.

Melissa Nicolas and Anna Sicari’s co-edited book Our Body of Work: Embodied Administration and Teaching has just been published by Utah State University Press.

Aaron Oforlea and DJ Lee’s article “(Un)freedom” has been accepted for the volume Race and Romanticism to be published by Cambridge University Press.

Donna L. Potts’s presentation on “The Lost Women” will be published in the Bunchgrass Historian.

Pamela Thoma published the volume Approaches to Teaching the Works of Karen Tei Yamashita, co-edited with Ruth Y. Hsu, in late 2021. With 26 contributor essays, and several chapters on contexts, materials, and scholarly dialogue authored by either Thoma or both Thoma and Hsu, the volume is part of the Approaches to Teaching World Literature series published by the Modern Language Association of America.

Pamela Thoma also published in fall 2021 “Contemporary Asian American Women’s Popular Literature and Neoliberal Form” in Asian American Literature in Transition, 1996- 2020, edited by Betsy Huang and Victor Román Mendoza, for Cambridge University Press.

Lauren W. Westerfield‘s essays and poems have recently appeared in FENCE, Seneca Review, and Opt West.

Conferences, Readings, Workshops, Performances, and Presentations

Peter Chilson introduced and led a discussion of the film Timbukto by Abderrahmane Sissako at the Cascade Festival of African Films at Cinema 21 in Portland, Oregon, September 15. The event was a benefit for the Ko-Falen Cultural Center.

Michael Delahoyde presented on assorted Shakespeare topics to various reading clubs online through the summer who also adopted his Oxfordian edition of Twelfth Night, and on “Counterfeit Christians in Oxford’s Anti-Comedy The Merchant of Venice” at the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship Symposium. He accepted an invitation to join the board of the Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable. And he presented “Subtler Scents in Oxford’s The Taming of the Shrew” at the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship Conference this month.

Will Hamlin gave talks in April at the annual Shakespeare convention (Jacksonville, FL) and in May at two conferences on Anglo-French literary relations during the sixteenth century (Reims and Paris).

Alexander Hammond (Emeritus) presented “WSU’s Palmer C. Holt Poe Source Collection: Findings and Research Potential” in April 2022 at the Poe Studies Association Conference in Boston. The paper reports on his department-supported bibliographical work in the Manuscript, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC) in the Holland Library.

Leeann Hunter presented a paper on “Learning from the Buffalo: Indigenous Stories of Abundance and Sustainability” at the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference on March 26, 2022.

Aaron Oforlea and DJ Lee participated in an intensive writer’s workshop with other national and international scholars through Rutger’s University from January to May 2022.

Donna L. Potts presented “The Lost Women of the Library” at the Pullman Depot Heritage Center on September 15 at the Neill Public Library, celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. The library was founded by six members of the Association of University Women. Although they were purportedly “lost to history” in an era when women were identified publicly only by their husbands’ names–W. C. Kruegel, John Fredrick Bohler, H. V. Carpenter, Homer Dana, and C. N. Curtis–they had considerable accomplishments of their own, as community activists, librarians, high school teachers, and professors. The women established the library initially for children–likely because they had their own children, nieces, and nephews in mind. Archival research uncovered hundreds of photographs and sketches of the women, their families, and their houses in Pullman. In commemoration of their “Silver Tea” fundraiser for the library, there was a Silver Tea featuring cookies of the era. Funds went toward a bronze plaque, which features the women’s names (Charlotte Malotte, Ida Hatz, Maggie Staley, Olive Davis, Mary Smith, and Hope Simpson), and will be hung in Neill Public Library. “Lost Women of the Library” was the subject of a podcast sponsored by the library.

Teaching Highlights, Activities, and Innovations

Leeann Hunter was invited to present a talk at the ELEVATE (Engage Learners, Enhance Voices, Advance Teaching Excellence), the inaugural annual conference on teaching excellence at WSU on August 16, 2022; her talk was titled, “A Pedagogy of Unknowing.”

Linda Russo led the collaborative celebration, “In Flower Community: Poems and Musical Improvisation for Native Plants along the Missouri Flat Creek on Grand Avenue Greenway near Downtown Pullman” September 11 and 18. The event was sponsored by Humanities Washington, WSU College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Music, and Eco Arts on the Palouse.

Liz Siler and Donna L. Potts organized several events during Banned Books Week, including a panel discussion on September 21 and an Open Mic on Terrell Mall on September 22 and 23, where people read selections from banned books. Donna Potts read from Maus by Art Spiegelman; Bryan Fry read poetry from Etheridge Knight; RJ Murphy read from 1984 by George Orwell; Kim Pedersen read poetry from A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein; Shuvro Das read from The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison; Laura Kuhlman read Howl and Other Poems by Alan Ginsberg; Nazua Idris read The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and Beloved by Toni Morrison; Liz Silerread The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. Other books that were read included The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Charlotte’s Web, Invisible Man, The Grapes of Wrath, Anne of Green Gables, and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

Awards, Honors, Prizes, Fellowships, and Grants

Aaron Oforlea was recently elected to the Executive Committee and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee of The International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN). Oforlea was also appointed Chair of the English Curriculum Committee of the College Language Association (CLA).

Lauren W. Westerfield was a recent recipient of the Idaho Commission for the Arts & National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature. Her hybrid memoir, Depth Control, won the 2021 Stillhouse Press Experimental Prose Prize, and her essay “A Kind of Chrysalis” was a finalist for the 2022 Iowa Review Creative Nonfiction Award.

Lauren W. Westerfield also completed a second Writer-In-Residence fellowship at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, NE in May 2022, and began the Fall 2022 semester in a new role as Editor-in-chief at Blood Orange Review.

From the Chair’s Desk

Banned Books Week is held nation-wide on the last week in September. Whatever our differences—in discipline, track, rank, genre, or literary period—all of our faculty, staff, and students are here because of a shared love of language, writing, and reading. For Banned Books week, we had a panel discussion in the WSU Library Atrium featuring Dan Owens, Director of Neill Public Library; Erica Nicol and Emily Cukier from WSU Library; and Rachael Wolney, a PhD student who has taught Young Adult Literature in the English Department at WSU. We had an Open Mic on Terrell Mall on September 22 and 23, which was an opportunity for people to read selections from banned books.

Liz Siler was hugely helpful in coordinating the event, establishing excellent rapport with students, and reading various banned books. Liz writes, “We had over 100 students, staff, and faculty stop by in two days. We received so many positive comments that I am willing to entertain the suggestion that we should do this regularly, once a month, on the Mall or the Holland Library atrium at noon for an hour or two — just to keep the conversation alive.” If you are ever near the Bookman in front of the library during the last week in September, stop by and read for us!

We are all excited about the return of face-to-face conferences, several of which are nearby. Many of our creative writing faculty members plan to attend the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Seattle, where they will promote our excellent creative writing program as well as our journal, Blood Orange Review. DJ Lee just got a contract for The Edge Is What We Have: Awe and Wonder in a Dimming World. Melissa Nicolas, in Rhetoric and Composition, published Our Body of Work: Embodied Administration and Teaching. Grant Maierhofer published The Compleat Lungfish. Seven of our faculty members were promoted recently: Desiree Hellegers (Tenure-Track Full Professor), David Martin (Teaching Associate Professor), Johanna Phelps (Tenure and Promotion), Pavithra Narayanan (Tenure-Track Full Professor), Nishant Shahani (Tenure-Track Full Professor), Pam Thoma (Tenure-Track Full Professor), and Patty Wilde (Tenure and Promotion).