Newsletter: November 2022

Our monthly newsletter, published online, 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

DJ Lee’s book chapter “Wilderness” appeared in Nature and Literary Studies, ed. Peter Remien and Scott Slovic, Cambridge University Press (2022), pages 65-86.

DJ Lee’s poem “Rimrock to Riverside” was published in the anthology Windblown I, ed. Lis McLoughlin, NatureCulture (2022), page 30. NatureCulture also produced a video of Lee reading the poem.

Buddy Levy’s River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana and the Deadly First Voyage Through the Amazon (Diversion, New York) appeared in paperback on April 6, 2022. Levy wrote a new introduction for the book and appeared on the History Unplugged podcast on May 6, 2022.

Grant Maierhofer published two novels in 2022, The Compleat Lungfish (Apocalypse Party) and Shame (FC2/the University of Alabama Press) as well as a poetry chapbook, The Words (If a Leaf Falls Press), and will publish an experimental project in December with Inside the Castle press.

Cameron McGill released his new album The Widow Cameron. The digital album is available here and wherever you stream music. Vinyl pre-order is available here.

Allyson Pang’s article “Former MMA fighter turns to poetry” was published in AsAmNews on October 25, 2022.

Nishant Shahani’s article “Views from Above and Below: Bridging Scenes of Difference” was published in Journal of Visual Culture Volume 21 Issue 1 as part of a special volume on “Reparation and Visual Culture” edited by Gabrielle Moser and Adrienne Huard.

Nishant Shahani’s book chapter, “The Queer Politics of Abolition: Revisiting the Case of Latisha King” was published in an edited volume, Gender Utopias for a Post-Apocalyptic World (ed. Jorge León Casero).

Roger Whitson’s “Time Critique and the Textures of Alternate History: William Gibson’s Media Archaeology in The Difference Engine and The Peripheral” appeared in William Gibson and the Future of Contemporary Culture, edited by Mitch Murray and Mathias Nilges and published by the University of Iowa Press in 2021.

Roger Whitson reviewed Mike Goode’s “Romantic Capabilities: Blake Scott, and the New Messages of Old Media” in The Review of English Studies 73.3 (February 2022), and has a review of Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka’s The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies forthcoming in Theory, Culture, and Society.

Roger Whitson edits the public humanities project Gamers with Glasses, with Christian Haines of Penn State University, and published several articles in 2022 including “The Lonely Post-Industrial Wilderness in The Last of Us Part 2,” “Haunted Machines in Kentucky Route Zero,” and “Playing the Good Mother in Amnesia: Rebirth.”

Conferences, Readings, Workshops, Performances, and Presentations

Michael Delahoyde was invited speaker on the “Shakespeare Authorship Question” at West Bonner Library in the north Idaho town of Priest River.

DJ Lee participated in the Black Earth Institute’s Annual Retreat and Conference in Black Earth, Wisconsin, in October 2022.

Buddy Levy was an invited guest author for the Washington Carnegie Public Library Winter Reading Program on February 15, 2022. His book Conquistador was a featured book for the series.

Cameron McGill celebrated the release of his seventh studio album The Widow Cameron on Saturday, October 15, 2022. The release show took place at the Moscow Contemporary gallery. An east coast album release is set for Saturday, November 19 at the Rockwood Music Hall in NYC as part of the Underwater Sunshine Fest.

Nishant Shahani participated as a respondent in the Annual Conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the symposium “Hindu Economicus.”

Roger Whitson was invited to present “Computational Algorhythmics of the Analytical Engine: Ada Lovelace’s Notes to Luigi Menabrea’s ‘Sketch of the Analytical Engine’” on a special panel celebrating the 200th anniversary of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine at the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, on March 25, 2022.

Roger Whitson hosted a series of “William Blake Live” events early in the pandemic from March–June 2020. These have been archived by Romantic Circles as part of their Pedagogies Commons series. Presenters included Claire Colebrook, Elizabeth Effinger, and WSU’s own DJ Lee.

Teaching Highlights, Activities, and Innovations

English Club, along with advisor Colin Criss, met on October 27, 2022, for a party of Halloween treats, blood punch, and a scary movie. English Club is entirely supported by the Excellence Fund, the department fund that is made up entirely of alumni donations. To show their appreciation for alumni support, the English Club took a group photo.

Monthly Open Mic led by faculty advisor Linda Russo took place on October 6, 2022, with featured reader and Open Mic MC Jada Rome. Jada is a Comparative Ethnic Studies major and Creative Writing minor. The next Open Mic will take place on November 3 at 6 PM in the Bundy Reading Room and is sponsored by Brused Books in downtown Pullman.

The Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS), directed by Pamela Thoma, and LGBTQ+ Center co-sponsored the annual InQueery Symposium, held virtually on October 19, 2022, via Zoom. The theme was “Connecting Trans and Reproductive Justice,” featuring concurrent student research panels followed by keynote speaker Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson (Johns Hopkins University), a historian of transgender medicine, who delivered “DIY Lessons in Freedom: Tracing Histories of Abortion and Transition.” Read the Symposium program to learn more about the panels and watch the keynote presentation. WGSS is an interdisciplinary degree program distinct from English curricula that is now housed within the Department of English.

Linguistics Club met on October 21 and 28, 2022, to discuss: “Do synonyms really exist?” among other topics with advisor Michael Thomas.

“Art can take the risk of being wrong.” Just one in a string of life and craft gems from the brilliant mind of poet, essayist, and luminous human presence National Book Award finalist Roger Reeves, whose reading and conversation for the WSU Visiting Writers Series on October 3 at Chinook 150, was moving, benevolent, even holy. Catch the video livestream of Reeves’s reading on our YouTube channel.

Sam Roxas-Chua was the WSU Visiting Writers Series for a reading/performance on Tuesday, October 25, at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. He read from his poetry collection Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater, performed a song, gave a demonstration of his open-form calligraphy, and shared several time-lapse videos of his asemic writing practice. He also joined Linda Russo’s ENGL 452 class for a discussion with students on his asemic writing practice and poetics. Catch the video livestream of Roxas-Chua’s reading on our YouTube channel.

Awards, Honors, Prizes, Fellowships, and Grants

Buddy Levy flew to Los Angeles to be filmed on July 25, 2022, as an on-camera expert for the television series The UnXplained with William Shatner (History Channel/Netflix). Levy was interviewed for an episode on lost cities, based on his book River of Darkness and his knowledge of the search of El Dorado. The air date of the episode is to be decided, but will likely be December 2022.

Aaron Oforlea is teaching a medical humanities course to medical students at Columbia University titled “Race, Narrative, and Medicine: Descripting Non-Compliant African American Bodies” during the fall 2022 semester.

From the Chair’s Desk

We have had an exciting and productive fall, with many faculty book and article publications, conference presentations, an album release, a public humanities project, and an appearance on a television show. In October, our Visiting Writers Series hosted Roger Reeves, a finalist for the National Book Award, as well as Sam Roxas-Chua, who read from his poetry collection, performed a song, and demonstrated his open-form calligraphy. Last spring’s visiting writer, Beth Piatote, returned to WSU in person, reading from her short story collection, The Beadworkers at Neill Public Library’s “Everybody Reads” on November 1, and at Terrell Library on November 2. English Club had a Halloween Party featuring a scary movie, blood punch, and a photo shoot. Linguistics Club explored language every Friday at lunch, examining “crash blossoms” along the garden path, among other things. We are looking forward to our Festival of Lights celebration, which will be on December 13 from 12:30 to 2:00 PM.