News

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

Fall 2025

Publications, Exhibits, & Acceptances

Cameron McGill recently had poems published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and Outskirts Literary. This past summer, he had a residency at the Port Townsend Writers Conference to work on his second poetry manuscript. Poems from the manuscript are forthcoming in Blackbird, Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, and Willow Springs. He was recently awarded an Idaho Commission on the Arts Literature Fellowship for 2026.

The paperback edition of Kirk McAuley’s latest book, The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing, 1704 – 1894, is due out in December.

DJ Lee’s poem “Improv” was published in the Fall 2025 issue of Thimble Literary Magazine (Vol 8, No 2) . It has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and will appear in the Pushcart Anthology.

DJ Lee’s poem “Suspects” was recently published in the literary journal Half and One.

DJ Lee has two publications forthcoming, including “Wenas Quartet” in On Resilience: Stories of Climate Adaptation Across Washington’s Landscapes, a collection commissioned by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and published by Writing the Land. The book features prose, poetry, and photos for each of Washington State’s 16 eco-regions. Lee also has “Breaking Trail” forthcoming in Wild Roof Journal.

Nishant Shahani’s essay, “To Desire Differently: Contagion, Occupation, and the Threading of Crises” was published in  Utopian Studies, 36 (1): 269–283, 2025. The special issue of the journal focuses on the theme of “Queer Utopias.” 

Conferences, Readings, Workshops, Performances, & Presentations

Michael Delahoyde presented “Oxford’s Backwords,” concerning Shakespeare’s seemingly inverted constructions, at the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship Conference. He addressed the Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable with “Face-Planting Queen Elizabeth,” regarding some problematic portraits.

Kirk McAuley delivered two conference presentations this summer: “Atmospheric Horror & the Indian Gothic: A Mcylelial View of Bithia Mary Croker’s Haunted Jungles,” Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), University of Maryland, July 8–11, 2025; and “Ecological Ruin in Charlotte Smith’s West Indian Gothic –The Story of Henrietta,” ASLE-UKI, University of Galway, Ireland, August 12–14, 2025.

Roger Whitson presented “Time Lapse and Time Travel: Operational Archives in HG Wells’s The Time Machine” at the 2025 conference of the Society of Literature, Science, and the Arts in Corvallis, OR, on August 22nd.

Roger Whitson gave an invited talk on “The Media Concept in Ada Lovelace’s Notes to ‘Sketch of the Analytical Engine’” for the “Time Machine Symposium” organized by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Goddard at the University of British Columbia on October 15.

DJ Lee and Roger Whitson presented “William Blake: Prophecy, Printing, Physics, Pilgrimage” at Lit on Tap at Jupiter’s Eye Book Cafe in Spokane on October 23. The talk and Q&A session was well attended.

Teaching Highlights, Activities, & Innovations

DJ Lee served as co-editor along with Rachel Sanchez and several others for the current issue of the international literary arts magazine About Place Journal, published by the Black Earth Institute. The issue, titled “ON FREEDOM,” received nearly 1,000 submissions. Lee and Sanchez, along with the other editors, also authored the “Editor’s Introduction” for this issue. Lee organized a literary reading featuring Washington state authors from the “ON FREEDOM” issue of About Place Journal, November 20 from 6:00-8:00 p.m. at Brandywine in Bellingham, Washington. Featured authors included Mita Mahato, Peter Chilson, Judy Kleinberg, Luther Allen, Sam Wallin, and Roger Gilman, with Lee serving as moderator.

DJ Lee has taken on a Program Director position with Molly Graham from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for the Oral History Association Conference, to be held in Portland, Oregon, in October 2026.

DJ Lee also served as art director on the 2025 Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest committee, a community poetry event in Bellingham, WA.

Pamela Thoma was invited by FemScouts, a group of undergraduate student leaders in WSU’s Women’s Center, as a guest speaker for their monthly group study session on September 29. It was a lively discussion of their reading for the evening: bell hooks’s Feminism is For Everybody, a classic in feminist theory published in 2000.

Awards, Honors, Prizes, Fellowships, & Grants

Kirk McAuley’s recent book, The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing, 1704 – 1894 (Edinburgh UP, 2024), was shortlisted for the 2025 ASLE-UKI book prize for best academic monograph in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities published at any time in 2023 or 2024.

Buddy Levy’s book Realm of Ice and Sky: Triumph, Tragedy, and History’s Greatest Arctic Rescue (St. Martin’s Press, 2025) was a finalist for the prestigious Banff Mountain Film and Book Award, in the category of Adventure Travel. The awards ceremony took place on Nov 6 in Banff, Canada at the 50th anniversary of the Festival Banff, an integral part of the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Here is the center’s mission statement: “Founded in 1933, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity is a learning organization built upon an extraordinary legacy of excellence in artistic and creative development. What started as a single course in drama has grown to become the global organization leading in arts, culture, and creativity across dozens of disciplines. From our home in the stunning Canadian Rocky Mountains, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity aims to inspire everyone who attends our campus – artists, leaders, and thinkers – to unleash their creative potential.”

Levy has won two previous Banff Centre Awards and been a finalist twice.