Newsletter: October 2023

Our newsletter, published online during the school year, celebrates the latest publications, acceptances, projects, presentations, awards, accolades, teaching highlights, activities, and more of English faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates.

Publications, Exhibits, and Acceptances

Peter Chilson’s short story “The Activist” has been published in the current issue of the literary journal Courtship of Winds.

DJ Lee’s poem “Idaho Lake Fragments” was published in the Banyan Review’s Summer 2023 issue. The poem was reprinted in Red Door Magazine (Summer 2023, page 24), an arts and culture quarterly founded in New York in 2009 and currently based in Copenhagen, with correspondents in Australia, Mexico, Colombia, the US and various parts of Europe.

Michelle Lafrance and Melissa Nicolas’s edited collection, Institutional Ethnography as Writing Studies Practice was published by WAC Clearinghouse/University of Colorado Press.

Melissa Nicolas’s book chapter, “Cascading Texts and Cat’s Cradles: An Institutional Ethnographic Approach to Understanding the Textual Production of Unionized Labor” appeared in Sensemaking for Writing Programs and Writing Centers, edited by Rita Malenczyk, Utah State University Press.

Lauren Westerfield was interviewed in August for the Sapling, a newsletter affiliated with Black Lawrence Press, about Blood Orange Review. To quote from the interview: “Blood Orange Review is now one of the longest running digital lit mags on the scene. We’re proud of this fact: that the journal has survived, evolved, and thrived as a space for emerging voices and inclusive publishing over the past seventeen years. Most recently, we’ve renamed ourselves as “a journal of literature and art,” and our editorial team is working on some exciting new developments in terms of design and special projects (both digital and print) to further showcase our commitment to visual art alongside literary writing and publishing.”

Conferences, Readings, Workshops, Performances, and Presentations

Michael Delahoyde served as host and panel member of a Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable event in which three other speakers addressed “Mysteries of the First Folio.” This first collection of Shakespeare’s plays is celebrating its 400th anniversary this year.

A number of WSU English Department and Program Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies faculty and graduate students presented at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS) Conference, “Reclaiming the Commons,” in Portland, Oregon, July 9-12, 2023, including Linda Russo, Anna Bushy, Sezin Zorlu, John Hegglund, Donna L. Potts, Kirk McAuley, and DJ Lee.

Desiree Hellegers read on KBOO Radio from their essay “Victor Jara’s Hands: An Anti-fascist Memoir-Festo and Brief Personal History of Neoliberalism.”

In April, the interdisciplinary graduate social and environmental justice conference SJCON, which was sponsored by Vancouver Native Programs and the Collective for Social and Environmental Justice (CSEJ), and co-sponsored by the English and History Departments, and the David G. Pollart Center for Arts and Humanities along with 19 other units and organizations, drew 453 registrants from as far away as New Zealand and Japan. Excerpts from six conference panels aired on KBOO Radio in May and July with Julian Ankney, Director of Native Programs at WSU Vancouver hosting both radio shows.

Donna L. Potts and Jana Argersinger gave presentations on the panel “Women of the Palouse” on Tuesday, September 12, at Pullman’s Neill Public Library. The event was sponsored by the David G. Pollart Center for Arts and Humanities.

Jessie Padilla and Sezin Zorlu participated on the panel “Banned Books from Around the World” on Tuesday, October 3 in the Terrell Library Atrium (Pullman). The event was sponsored by the David G. Pollart Center for Arts and Humanities and organized by Nazua Idris.

Kate Watts and Sara Brock spoke on the Colleagues in Conversation panel on “Impacts of ChatGPT on Higher Education” on Friday, September 8 in the The Bundy Reading Room, Avery Hall.

Ashley Boyd gave a talk on the panel “Hisory in the Future” on October 4 in the Terrell Library Atrium (Pullman) as part of the Roots of Contemporary Issues Event Series coinciding with Banned Books Week. The panel was sponsored by The Roots of Contemporary Issues Program, The Department of History, WSU Libraries, and The George and Bernadine Converse Historical Endowment.

Peter Chilson hosted El Hadj Djitteye to visit English Department classes and give a presentation on October 3 in Bryan Hall 308 about the twin crises of environmental disaster and migration as part of the Foley Institute’s Fall Series on Climate. El Hadj Djitteye is the Executive Director of the Timbuktu Center for Strategic Studies on the Sahel in Africa.

WSU Research Week will be held October 16-20. Several English Department/WGSS faculty members will present, including Pam Thoma and DJ Lee. Thoma’s talk is part of the panel “Gender Gaps in Research, Research Funding, and the Workforce” Thursday, October 19, at 3:00-4:00 PM via Zoom. Lee’s talk is part of the panel “Entangled: Showcasing the Arts and Humanities through Art, Music, and Writing” on Wednesday, October 18, 12:00-1:00 PM in person in the Locker Gallery, Department of Art (Pullman) and via Zoom. “Entangled” is organized by Ashley Boyd as part of her fellowship in the Office of Research.

Teaching Highlights, Activities, and Innovations

Liz Siler and Donna L. Potts organized public readings of banned books on the Pullman campus on the mall at noon during the week of October 2-5 at the Bookman Statue in front of Terrell Library.

Grant Maierhofer and Lauren Westerfield have been participating in plans for a WSU Zine Community. The first meeting of this community took place on August 30 in the Arts Building Room #7062 (Pullman). The community includes folks in the English Department, Digital Technology and Culture, and the Department of Art, as well as librarians, LGBTQ+ Center staff, the David G. Pollart Center for Arts and Humanities board members, and Honors faculty.

The Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee (EDIC) held a Creating Accessible Presentations on September 6 and a Designing Accessible Syllabus workshop on October 4. Facilitators included Amy Heile, Rachael Wolney, and Sara Brock. The upcoming workshop is titled Creating Accessible Classroom on Wednesday, November 1, 12:10-1:30 PM.

Linguistics Club met in Avery Hall 110 on September 7 to discuss the tools available to annotate a multimedia datasets; on September 15 to discuss how writing systems get introduced and propagated in a society; and on September 22 to discuss naming practices and the relation between things named and the things themselves among other topics with advisor Michael Thomas.

Open Mic Club met on August 31 in the Bundy Reading Room to plan for the 2023-24 year with advisor Linda Russo. Future Open Mic events run from 6:00-7:30 PM on October 12 in the Bundy Reading Room and October 26 at Brused Books in downtown Pullman.

WSU English Department faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students participated in a nature journaling workshop and field trip called “Wander-Wonder-Draw-Write at Smoot Hill” on September 13. WSU’s Hudson Biological Reserve at Smoot Hill is one of the most significant remnants of the native Palouse plant community left in the region. The events, led by Dr. Lyn Baldwin, were sponsored by the WSU Departments of Art, Landscape Architecture, English, Horticulture, and School of the Environment in support of the interdisciplinary Certificate Program for Eco Arts and Public Engagement. Baldwin also gave lecture and reading called “An Unquiet Botany: Reconciling Plants and People with Story and Image.” Baldwin is an award-winning educator and plant conservation biologist who uses art and science to help mitigate society’s extinction of experience with the botanical world. She teaches botany, ecology and creative writing at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC. DJ Lee helped organize Baldwin’s visit.

The Department of English and the the David G. Pollart Center for Arts and Humanities will sponsor a Fall 2023 Webinar titled “Killjoys at Work” by renowned scholar of queer, feminist, and critical race studies Dr. Sara Ahmed. The webinar will take place Thursday, October 12, from 8:00-10:00 AM. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook (Seal Press) is her first trade book. Previous books published (all published by Duke University Press) include Complaint! (2021), What’s The Use? On the Uses of Use (2019), Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others (2006). She is currently writing A Complainer’s Handbook: A Guide to Building Less Hostile Institutions.

Donna Campbell will host visiting scholar Professor Melissa J. Homestead, University of Nebraska will present Editing Willa Cather’s Letters for Digital Publication on Monday, October 16 from 6:00-7:00 PM in the Bundy Reading Room. Dr. Homestead is Professor of English and Program Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln and author of The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis (Oxford University Press 2021).

WSU Visiting Writers Series, organized by Cameron McGill and Julian Ankney will welcome poet, essayist, and short-story author Bojan Louis on October 18 at 5:00 PM in the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and YouTube Live Stream. Visit the VWS Website for more information.

The Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS), directed by Pamela Thoma, is co-sponsoring with the LGBTQ+ Center the annual InQueery Symposium. This year’s theme is “After the Tipping Point: Trans Histories and Archives” to be held virtually on October 11, 2023, via Zoom. There will be student panels from 4:00-5:45 PM followed by a keynote address by Professor Hil Malatino, the Joyce L. and Douglas S. Sherwin Early Career Professor in the Rock Ethics Institute and Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Philosophy at Penn State University. He is the author of Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad (Minnesota 2022), Trans Care (Minnesota 2020), and Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience (Nebraska 2019), and co-editor of the t4t issue of TSQ alongside Cam Awkward- Rich and the “Care Ethics Otherwise” issue of Essays in Philosophy alongside Sarah Clark-Miller and Amy McKiernan. His essays have appeared in Hypatia, TSQ, Signs, and many other journals and edited volumes. He is a Lambda Literary Award finalist and recipient of the Publishing Triangle Award in Trans Literature. For more information and the Zoom link, consult the event’s website. A InQueery watch party will be held on the WSU Vancouver campus in VMCC 102Q at 4:00 PM. WGSS is an interdisciplinary degree program distinct from English curricula that is now housed within the Department of English.

Awards, Honors, Prizes, Fellowships, and Grants

Julian Ankney has been named a fellow of the “Poetry & the Senses” at the University of California, Berkeley. The program is grounded in the relevance and urgency of lyrical making and storytelling in times of political crisis, and the value of engaging the senses as an act of care, mindfulness, and resistance.

In May/June, Buddy Levy was a fellow at the Spitsbergen Artist Center (Svalbard, Norway), where he was doing research and drafting his forthcoming book Realm of Ice and Sky (St. Martin’s Press, 2024). During his time in Longyearbyen, Buddy gave a lecture at the Svalbard Museum.

Buddy Levy’s Empire of Ice & Stone (St. Martin’s Press, 2022) is a finalist in the 2023 Banff Mountain Book Competition, selected from 215 entries.

Buddy Levy received a Summer WSU Department of English Summer Research Fellowship (May-Sept 2023) in support of research for his forthcoming book Realm of Ice and Sky: Triumph, Tragedy, and the Largest Rescue in Arctic History.

In Spring 2023, Buddy Levy was nominated to and subsequently became a member (National Fellow) of the prestigious and venerable Explorers Club (NYC).

Melissa Nicolas and Anna Sicari’s edited collection, Our Body of Work: Embodied Writing and Teaching, received honorable mention for the 2023 Council of Writing Program Administrator’s Book of the Year Award.

From the Chair’s Desk

Dear all,

Our faculty, staff, and students had yet another productive year of teaching, research, and service. In Summer 2023, Colin Criss and I took Honors and English students on a second Study Abroad trip, which featured meetings with poets across Ireland. We were able to revive our chapter of the English Honor society, Sigma Tau Delta, and provide honorary memberships to the first eight students who signed up. Our English Club used funds to invite a Young Adult Fiction writer to present her work. Our interns for our undergraduate journal, LandEscapes, and our online journal, Blood Orange Review, were able to attend the conference of the Associated Writing Programs in Seattle, where they staffed a table to introduce participants to WSU’s publications and encourage submissions. In July, several faculty members and graduate students presented at the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment in Portland. Recently, we contributed funds for a beautiful art exhibit and reception featuring Ukrainian artists who arrived in Pullman earlier this year. Pat and Liz Siler helped organize it—with Liz supplying translations of the artists’ statements. We held various events for Banned Books week October 2-5, organized by Liz Siler and Nazua Idris, and featuring many of our faculty members and graduate students. All of the funds contributed by our alumni enriched the students’ educational experiences, enhanced their career opportunities; and made WSU more visible. Thanks to everyone’s support, we have accomplished a great deal.

Best,

Donna L. Potts