Dr. Robert Luscher will present a keynote address entitled “Down The Road from Winesburg: The Spatiotemporal Aesthetics of Contemporary American Regional Short Story Cycles” at an international conference in Leuven, Belgium, on Cycles, Recueils, Macrotexts: Theorizing the Short Story Collection, May 22-24, 2012.
Dr. Susanne Bloomfield presented "Elinore Pruitt Stewart, Western
Adventurer" at the Making of the Great Plains Interdisciplinary
Symposium sponsored by the Center for Great Plains Studies and the
Homestead National Monument of America on March 30, 2012.
Allison
Hedge Coke was a panelist on "Gender/Race/Sexuality: Undressing the
Contemporary Poem." Split This Rock. Washington, DC. March 23, 2012.
Panel: Jan Beatty, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Natalie Diaz, and Lee Ann
Roripaugh.
Allison Hedge Coke was a panelist on "(We) Who Would Be Free:
Environmental Activism." Split This Rock. Washington, DC. March 23,
2012. Panel: Melissa Tuckey, Homero Aridjis, Allison Hedge Coke, and
Sherwin Bitsui.
Allison Hedge Coke was on a reading panel for "Sing: Poetry from
the Indigenous Americas." Native
American Literature Symposium. Lincoln, Nebraska. March 29, 2012.
Sherwin Bitsui Moderated, with Simon Ortiz, Brandy McDougall, and dg
okpik.
Allison Hedge Coke read from "Sing: Poetry from the
Indigenous Americas." Nebraska Book Festival, Lincoln, Nebraska. March
30, 2012. Allison Hedge Coke and Travis Hedge Coke.
Allison Hedge
Coke presented "Performing Collective Memory." Indigenous Book
Festival. University of New Mexico. Albuquerque, New Mexico. April 12,
2012. Allison Hedge Coke and Hon. James Bartleman, and Beverly Singer,
moderator.
Allison Hedge Coke presented the Keynote Address.
Indigenous Literatures Festival. University of Hawaii. Honolulu, Hawaii.
April 14, 2012.
Allison Hedge Coke presented a
Featured Reading. Salina Spring Poetry Reading Series. Salina, Kansas.
April 24, 2012.
Allison Hedge Coke was
awarded the following grants for the Literary Sandhill CraneFest &
Retreat: $4,023.00 grant from the Nebraska Arts Council; $1,500.00 grant
from the Nebraska Humanities Council; and $500.00 from the Kearney Area
Community Foundation.
Allison Hedge Coke presented "A Willow's Whisper" at the Irish & Native Poets Panel at the Glucksman Ireland House New York University on February 16, 2012.
"Sing You Back" was the title of Allison Hedge Coke's Keynote for the Conference on Native America: Indigenous Self-Representation in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands on February 24, 2012.
Allison Hedge Coke participated on several panels at the Associated Writing Programs Annual Conference--(Panelist) "Writing the Middle East, Crossing Genre, Crossing Borders," (Chair & Panelist) "Rivering: A Reading Contemplation," (Organizer) "Indigenous-Aboriginal American Writers Caucus," (organizer) a panel on her recently released edition: Sing: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas"--and a reading "Coffee House Press Presents Working Words: Working Class Writers Read in Chicago" on February 29-March 4, 2012.
Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, edited by Allison Hedge Coke, is listed on the Critical Mass Small Press Highlights of 2011 as written by board member Rigoberto González. "This ground-breaking collection gathers voices “descending from antediluvian inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere” to showcase the modern preoccupations (and influences) of contemporary indigenous poetry. Hedge Coke reaches as far north as Alaska and as far south as Chile, shaping a cliché-shattering body of literature written in English, Spanish and a range of indigenous languages. From Marcie R. Rendon (White Earth Anishinabe): “Rock and roll beats/ Juxtaposed on jingle dress songs...Sugar Ray shuffle/ Muhammad Ali...My medicine dance/ Was a warrior dance."http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/small-press-highlights-of-2011
Allison Hedge Coke's new volume of poetry, Effigies II, will be released by Salt Publications, UK & Global in May 2012. Her previous collection, Effigies, was released in Spring 2009. Effigies was released in Spring 2009.
The Los Angeles Review of Books has just reviewed Sing, edited by Allison Hedge Coke. In addition, the North American Review (oldest literary magazine in the U.S.) currently has a review of her Blood Run. [http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/13252273302/memory-may-not-sustain]
Dr. Robert Luscher has just published "Marriage, Memory, and Mortality: John Updike's Enduring Legacy in Short Fiction" in the premier issue of the John Updike Review 1.1 (2011). He has also been invited to contribute a critical article in John Updike Remembered, forthcoming from the University of Alabama Press.
Allison Hedge Coke is the newly appointed Contributing Editor for Black Renaissance Noire Magazine, NYU. 2011.
Hedge Coke presented the Conference Keynote for the Indian Youth Suicide Conference at Marquette University. Performing additional university classroom visits during her stay in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. October 2011.
Hedge Coke presented featured a reading & workshop at Woodland Pattern Literary Center. Her stay included additional Public School workshops through the center, during her stay in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. October 2011.
Hedge Coke was a three time featured panelist at the South Dakota Book Festival in Deadwood, South Dakota. October 2011.
Allison Hedge Coke performed a featured reading with Ishmael Reed and Jeffrey Allen at New York University in New York, New York. November 2011.
Hedge Coke performed a Featured Panel with Ofelia Zepeda titled “Claiming Territory” at the Claiming Ground Conference hosted by the Pima County Arts Council in Tucson, Az. November 2011.
Hedge Coke moderated the official book launch reading for Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas at the University of Arizona Poetry Center in Tucson, Az. November 2011.
Hedge Coke performed a Featured Talk & Reading for the MFA Program Visiting Writer Series & the Diversity Provost Lecture Series CalArts Institute in Valencia, California. 2011.
This fall,the journal Explorations in Renaissance Culture will publish Dr. Marguerite Tassi's article titled "Wounded Maternity, Sharp Revenge: Shakespeare's Representations of Queens in Light of the Hecuba Myth." She will also be presenting a paper for the Medieval-Renaissance Studies Program at UNL titled "Proof and Consequences: Women as Ministers of Revenge in The Merry Wives of Windsor."
Dr. Megan Hartman's article,“A Drawn-Out Beheading: Style, Theme, and Hypermetrics in the Old English Judith,” has just been published in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology (110.4). She will also be presenting “Oral Formulas and Sententious Expansion in Old English Wisdom Poetry” at Proverbia Septentrionalia: Uses of the Proverb in Medieval Cultures of Northern Europe in Saskatoon, Canada.
Dr. Robert Luscher has recently presented at two conferences. He presented “Tracks of His Ancestors: Personal Archaeology in John Updike’s Later Pennsylvania Stories” at the 1st Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Reading, PA, and “(Re)closure in the Short Story Sequence: Revisiting the Reservation in Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” at the International Conference on the Short Story in Toronto. He has also published several articles: “John Updike” in the Blackwell Companion to the American Short Story; an entry on John Updike’s "Bech: A Book" in the 4th edition of Masterplots; a reprint of his article "The Pulse of Bloodline" in Vol. 137 of Short Story Criticism; and “(Re)closure in the Short Story Sequence: Vietnam Redux in Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain” in Short Story (7.1).
Dr. Susanne Bloomfield participated in a Roundtable titled "Transcending Place and Time: The Power and Perils of Onlilne teaching" at the Western Literature Association conference held in Missoula, MT. this October.
Chadwick Allen's article, "Serpentine Figures, Sinuous Relations: Thematic Geometry in Allison Hedge Coke's Blood Run," published in American Literature (December 2010) has won the Don D. Walker Award given annually by the Western Literature Association for the best essay published on Western American literature during the previous calendar year.
Dr. Martha Kruse was awarded the prestigious Pratt-Heins Award for Service to the University of Nebraska-Kearney. In addition to several several terms on the Faculty Senate, including a term as president, she has been active on major university committees, especially the General Studies committee, and serves an important role as liason with the College of Education.
Sing, a multilingual collection of Indigenous American poetry, has just been released from the University of Arizona Press. Sing gathers more than eighty poets from across the Americas, covering territory that stretches from Alaska to Chile. Professor Allison Hedge Coke edited this collection that features contributors Sherwin Bitsui, Travis Hedge Coke, Natalie Diaz, Mariah Gover, Simon Ortiz, Layli Long Soldier, Laura Tohe, Orlando White, Steven Yazzie, and Ofelia Zepeda. Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate, writes, "Many of the poems in this ambitious collection remind us why we read poetry at all—to be returned to the elemental, to relish the beauty of repetition and variation, and to hear the cries of singular voices, here marginalized because of their native culture but also because of the daring announcement of their individuality."
Dr. Michelle Beissel Heath has been awarded a summer RSC grant to research at the Library of Congress as well as a Helm Fellowship to support her research of 19th and 20th century collections of games and children’s literature in the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington. In addition, in June she presented “Re‐taming the Rebellious Child?: Re‐writing the 19th Century Girl in Timothy Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and Jacqueline Kelly’s The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate" at the Children's Literature Association Annual Conference in Roanoke, VA.
Childhood in Edwardian Fiction: Worlds Enough and Time edited by Adrienne E. Gavin and Andrew F. Humphries and published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010 has won the inaugural Children's Literature Association Edited Book Award 2011. Dr. Michelle Beissel Heath's article "Playing at House and Playing at Home: The Domestic Discourse of Games in Edwardian Fictions of Childhood" is published in this award-winning collection.
Dr. Marguerite Tassi has just published Women and Revenge in Shakespeare: Gender, Genre, and Ethics with Susquehanna University Press and Associated University Presses. A surprising number of Shakespeare's female characters respond to moral outrages by expressing a desire for vengeance. Tassi counters longstanding critical opinions on revenge: that it is the sole province of men in Western literature and culture; that it is a barbaric, morally depraved, irrational instinct; and that it is antithetical to justice. Tassi offers countless persuasive examples from Shakespeare's plays that reveal women's profound concerns with revenge and justice, honor and shame, crime and punishment. In placing the critical focus on avenging women, this book significantly redresses a gender imbalance in scholarly treatments of revenge, particularly in early modern drama. Drawing upon literary prototypes from ancient and medieval sources, the philosophical tradition of virtue ethics, and ethnographic studies, Tassi uncovers morally purposeful, even heroic, functions in women's vengeance, showing in many cases how a passion for justice underlies the motive of revenge.
Dr. Barbara Emrys has just published Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel by MacFarland Press. Wilkie Collins was one of the most popular novelists during England’s Victorian era. While Collins scholarship has often focused on social issues, this critical study explores his formal ingenuity, particularly the novel of testimony constructed from epistolary fiction, trial reports, and prose monologue. His innovations in form were later mirrored by Vera Caspary, who adapted The Woman in White three times into contemporary fiction. This text explores how the formal dialogue between Collins and Caspary has linked sensation fiction with noir thrillers and film noir.
Allison Hedge Coke has been awarded a Lannan Residency Fellowship for May and June 2011 at Marfa, Texas. The Lannan Residency Fellowship provides uninterrupted writing time for poets, writers, essayists, scholars, curators, as well as indigenous, environmental and social justice activists. Candidates for the residency program are selected through an internal nomination process. Unsolicited applications are not accepted. Hedge Coke has additional residencies scheduled at Weymouth Center for Arts & Humanities and at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Retreat Center in Nebraska City.
Hedge Coke has several poems in new publications, including: LoveRiseUp, Benu Press, in The Willow's Whisper: A Transatlantic Compilation, from Cambridge Scholars Publishing, in Caliban Online #3, in Political Affairs Magazine, and in an edition of the North Carolina Literary Review, also featuring critical review of her work in a feature focus on North Carolinian environmental writers, including photographs of her as a field worker and fisher. New prose publications include: Bombay Gin and The Florida Review. The Gallery Show "P3" in the Washington Pavilion, showed a collaborative effort of Blood Run impressions, by poet Hedge Coke, "Carcass" and painter Ceca Cooper. Her poem "Street Confetti" is a portion of the Tunnel of Oppression at Creighton University this spring/summer. Diversity Works of New School University in conjunction with AmerInda Theater, recently commissioned "Ridge Notes" for performance in New York City. Hedge Coke also has a film critique article forthcoming in Seeing Red with Michigan State University.
Hedge Coke has recently presented at Macalester College/Minneapolis Institute of the Arts Museum, Politics & Prose and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC, the John G. Neihardt State Historic Site, and in "Confluences" the featured opening of the NU No Limits! Conference of Ecofeminism and Artful Healing and opened the poetry plenary at the UNK James E. Smith Conference on World Affairs. Hedge Coke recently presented her seventh program lecture and seventh reading performances for the NU MFA Program at the LIED Center, Nebraska City, and will return this summer to continue as core faculty and UNK program liaison, where she will present a critical theory lecture on Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody and perform a reading from her new work in progress as her eighth presentation residency in the program. Hedge Coke presented in two panels at AWP in DC: Narrative Stance in Memoir and the Language of Conservation (scheduled for permanent podcast). She organized and coordinated the Indigenous Writers Caucus at AWP and hosted the Platte Valley Review book table and UNK recruitment at AWP, simultaneously. She is presenting this month in the Wine, Writers, & Song Festival, Free Range Reading, in Brownville, Nebraska; in Wordfest Poetry Festival in Asheville, North Carolina; and has recently been invited to perform and present in Ireland at Waterford Technical Institute and in Liverpool, England. Hedge Coke recently served as final judge for Poetry Out Loud, State Finals in Lincoln Nebraska and is judging a national poetry prize currently. She has just wrapped up the fourth annual Literary Sandhill Cranefest after releasing the Winter 2011 Edition of Platte Valley Review.
The work of Professor Allison Hedge Coke has received more recent critical attention in two recent peer-reviewed journals. In the December issue of American Literature, Chadwick Allen published “Serpentine Figures, Sinuous Relations: Thematic Geometry in Allison Hedge Coke’s Blood Run.” Penelope Kelsey and Cari M. Carpenter co-authored "'In the End, Our Message Weighs’: Blood Run, NAGPRA, and American Indian Identity,” published in the Winter 2011 issue of American Indian Quarterly. Blood Run has been listed several times on the UK Bestseller Salt List and on the US Poetry Foundation Bestselling American Poetry List. The volume continues to be regularly reviewed by several journals, including a new review by senior editor Vince Gotera in the Winter 2010/2011 edition of North American Review. And, after years of lobbying for the protection of Blood Run, some of the poems Professor Hedge Coke composed during the process proved to be the breakthrough testimony that compelled the Game, Fish, & Parks Commission to come to a unanimous vote in favor of acquisitioning and preserving the South Dakota side of the site. Now as a direct result of the publication of her book, Blood Run, Blood Run Native American Historical Site is being is being proposed as a state park to preserve and protect the sacred site. In addition, two new poems by Hedge Coke, "Carcass" and "Noodling," are now published in the new online version of Caliban.
The NET Television program “Carl Sandburg: Prayers for the People” won an Emmy Award for “Best/Arts/Entertainment Program/Special” at the 2010 Heartland Regional Emmy Awards announced July 18 in Denver and Oklahoma City. The hour-long high-definition NET Television Production, filmed at the Merryman Performing Arts Center in Kearney, gives the opportunity to rediscover Carl Sandburg’s work, especially as he celebrated the great expanse of the prairie and its people. The stage performance was conceived and written by UNK English Dr. Kate Benzel. Featured performers in the program are Chuck Peek, UNK professor emeritus; Ted Kooser, former U.S. Poet Laureate; and Mike Adams who arranged the songs from Sandburg’s The American Songbag.
Dr. Martha Kruse presented a paper titled "The Child Reader as Performer and Audience" in October at the Western Literature Association Conference in Prescott, Az.
Dr. Susanne Bloomfield presented "Literature Circles as Performance in Teaching Ethnic American Literature" at the Western Literature Association Conference held in October in Prescott, Az.
Dr. Michelle Beissel Heath presented “Cooks and Queens and Dreams: The South Seas as Fairy Islands of Fancy” at Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States (VISAWUS) annual conference in Honolulu, HI in October 2010. In November, she will be in Montreal, Canada, to present “Playing with the Numbers: Child Crowds, Child’s Play, and Mary Augusta Ward’s Milly and Olly" at the North American Victorian Studies Association.
Allison Hedge Coke is newly included on the representational decade of American Poetry and an invitational Q & A responder as to what makes American poetry on the Poetry Society of America website. Her poetry is also newly included in representational American Poetry on the Poetry Foundation website. Hedge Coke was recently selected, from over a thousand speakers presenting on 300+ panels, during the 2010 Associated Writers & Writing Programs annual conference (between 8,000 and 10,000 in attendance), as a selected speaker to record to represent what AWP, as a conference and program, has to offer in the permanent archive of podcasts. Of her presentations, Hedge Coke chose the UNK Literary Sandhill Crane Panel which is newly available as podcast here. Hedge Coke has been named Honorary Chair to the literary mentorship for homeless project with Writers Garret in Dallas where she spent UNK Fall Break (2010) working with homeless people and providing mentorshops for mentors in training. She has been invited to the board of Word Fest Poetry Festival and is currently serving on the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts board. Hedge Coke continues to be a nominator/facilitator for the UNPFII panel on Indigenous writers and literature and just completed three years of service to the International Society for the Study of American Women Writers board. Hedge Coke was also recently featured at the South Dakota Book Festival (panel with Jimmy Santiago Baca & Jim Reese and Harvest of Words reading with David Allen Evans, Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, Patrick Hicks, and others) and at the Southeast Indian Writers Gathering in Cherokee, North Carolina, where she read. Hedge Coke recently provided writing workshops to the federal prison at Yankton, South Dakota and to the Brady Academy of Incarcerated Youth (Custer, South Dakota). Hedge Coke was also recently named Distinguished Emeritus Fellow of the Black Earth Institute, where she served as fellow for three years.
Hedge Coke has published new fiction in Indian Country Noir, Akashic; new poetry and nonfiction in The Manner of the Country: Living and Writing the American West, collected by Russell Rowland and Lyn Stegner, University of Texas Press, and new poetry and nonfiction in Kenyon Review. She has a couple of dozen other poems recently published in Writing the West Anthology, Salish Kootenay College; The People Who Stayed, University of Oklahoma Press; A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry, Edited by Stacey Lynn Brown and Oliver de la Paz; Harvest of Words, Augustana College Press; Working Words, Coffee House Press (alongside writing by Guthrie, Dylan, and many other writers representing labor); and several video features on Emory's Southern Spaces: Poets in Place, as recently filmed in North Carolina. The Emory University project was filmed during her annual Writing Residency Fellowship with Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities in Southern Pines, North Carolina, where Hedge Coke was working on a novel and finalizing a new volume of poetry. Hedge Coke has a new book due out with University of Arizona Press, Sing: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas (2010), the first anthology of its kind, a multilingual edition of over seventy Indigenous poets of the Americas, as follow up to the (similarly focused) To Topos International: Ahani collection she edited (2007).
Dr. Robert Luscher presented a paper at the 1st Biennial John Updike Society Conference, held in Reading. PA, where Updike was born & near which he lived the formative years of his youth. His paper was entitled “'Tracks of His Ancestors': Personal Archaeology in John Updike’s Later Pennsylvania Stories.” Among the highlights was a family panel with Updike's first wife and three of his four children, a panel of high school classmates, and an address by author Ann Beattie, who gave a great talk on Updike's fiction. It was the first major gathering of critics and readers to discuss Updike's work since his death in 2009. Dr. Luscher is a member of the editorial board of the new John Updike Review.
Dr. Michelle Beissel Heath presented a paper, "Oh, Golly, what a Happy Family!: Politics, Play, and the Extra-Literary Lives of Allan Ahlberg's, Florence Upton's, and Enid Blyton's Children's Book Series" at the international Conference of Children's Literature in Ann Arbot, MI, in June 2010.
Dr. Marguerite Tassi was presented the Mortar Board Teaching Award for 2009. In addition, she gave a keynote address, “Wounded Maternity, Sharp Revenge: Shakespeare’s Representation of Margaret and Tamora in Light of the Hecuba Myth,” for the Queen Elizabeth Society at Exploring the Renaissance 2010, An International Conference, held at Corpus Christi, Texas, March 18-20, 2010.
Dr. Robert Ficociello has just published "Steinbeck's Civil War: War as Peace in the American 1930s" in The Grapes of Wrath: A Re-Consideration edited by Michael J. Meyer.
Dr. Susan Honeyman's book, Consuming Agency in Fairy Tales and Folk Literature has just been published by Routledge.In this book Honeyman looks at manifestations of youth agency as depicted in fairy tales, childlore, and folk literature, investigating the dynamic of ideological manipulation and independent resistance as it can be read or expressed in bodies, first through social puppetry and then through coercive temptation (our consumption replacing the more obvious strings that bind us).
Dr. Robert Luscher received a Student Life Partnership award from the UNK Division of Student Life for his work with the Thompson Scholars learning Community in his first year as Faculty Director of that program, which provides academic and co-curricular support from UNK residents of the Susan Thompson Buffet Foundation scholarship.
Michael J. Johnson has just published a novel, The Bastards Club, about Eric Darius, whose go-nowhere life is interrupted when he is drawn into a secret club, where the game of chess goes off the board and becomes a deadly reality.
Dr. Robert Luscher presented a paper, “John Updike’s Early Stories: The Sequences/ Cycles Within,” at the American Literature Association Symposium on American Fiction in Savannah in October 2009. Luscher organized the two sessions on Updike for this conference as an inaugural venture for the new John Updike Society, which was formed in May 2009.
Dr. Susanne Bloomfield presented "Elia Pettie and the Travel Narrative" at the Western Literature Association Conference in Spearfish, South Dakota, in October 2009.
Allison Hedge Coke's twelfth book publication (seventh edited edition) was just published by Salt Publishing, through the Earthworks Series. Effigies:An Anthology of New Indigenous Writing, Pacific Rim, 2009, is a gathering of four chapbooks by emerging Native (women) poets dg nanouk okpik, Cathy Tagnak Rexford, Brandy Nalani McDougall, and Mahealani Perez-Wendt.
Nyla Ali Khan's book, Islam, Women, and the Violence in Kashmir: Between India and Pakistan (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2009), is now in print.
Allison Hedge Coke is serving as Summer Research Faculty Mentor for TA Laura Jensen's Project in Painting & Poetry and is Faculty Mentor for Anna Carr's Honors Fellow Project in Photography and Poetry. Hedge Coke spent a Fellowship Residency at the Weymouth Center for Arts & Humanities, in May-June 2009. Her Recent Publications include: "Rainmaker" in Political Affairs Magazine. July 2009. "Ghost Deer" in Smithsonian NMAI Magazine, 2009. and "Philosophy" and "Platte Mares" in Talking Stick, Amerind, in Summer 2009. The National Council of Teachers of English recently ran a video performance of "Sorrel Run" and a video conferencing segment allowed Hedge Coke to act as featured panelist during the "Who Speaks for the Dead" Panel at West Virginia University. Recent Reading Performances include: Featured Readings with Jan Beatty in Ann Arbor at Shaman's Drum and, in Detroit, at the Scarab Club; Featured Presentations for both the Native American Center and the Women's Conference at the University of Idaho; and she performed as a Featured Poet at the International Poetry Festival of Resistance at the University of Toronto. Hedge Coke was recently awarded a $6000 artists grant from the South Dakota Arts Council to develop her poem "The Year of the Rat" into a symphony score with Brent Michael Davids, a Stockbridge Mohican, Grammy Award winning composer. She has been invited to select, aquisition, and edit two new literary series. Both series had their initial releases recently: Bone Light and Effigies.
Dr. Martha Kruse has been chosen for the Academy for Teacher Excellence awarded by the College of Education for her outstanding contributions to the preparation of new teachers. Her role as teacher/educator extends to all areas of teaching, scholarship, and service.
Dr. John Damon has been promoted to professor, Dr. Nyla Khan has been promoted to Associate Professor, and Julie Flood has been promoted to Senior Lecturer.
Dr. Susan Honeyman's book, Consuming Agency in Fairy Tales and Folk Literature is scheduled for release in November 2009 from Routledge. In this book Honeyman looks at manifestations of youth agency (and representations of agency produced for youth) as depicted in fairy tales, childlore, and folk literature, investigating the dynamic of ideological manipulation and independent resistance as it can be read or expressed in bodies, first through social puppetry and then through coercive temptation (our consumption replacing the more obvious strings that bind us). Reading tales like Hansel & Gretel, Pinocchio, Tar Baby, and Popeye, Honeyman concentrates on the agency of young subjects through material relations, especially where food signifies the invisible strings used to control them in popular discourse and practice, modeling efforts to come out from under the hegemonic handler and take control, at least of their own body spaces, ultimately finding that most examples indicate less power than the ideal holds.
Allison Hedge Coke's recent readings include the Rivers Series at Macalester College and the Third Thursdays at MONA. She participated in three panels at AWP, including Poet as Oracle (with her think tank, Black Earth Institute); Cultural Duty (with the UniVerse of Poetry group); Brain Power: Creative Process Post-Brain Injury (chair) and signed books for Coffee House Press, the University of Nebraska Press, and the Low-Residency MFA Program. She also organized and hosted an off-site reading of fifteen Indigenous writers at the Trickster Gallery for the Chicago American Indian Center. In St. Paul, with former Senator Mark Dayton and explorer Will Steger, she participated in a panel on Environmental Policy, speaking to her work with Blood Run and eco-ethos. During the winter break she taught in the Stories from the Maize Program for Reservation Youth and lectured, read, hosted workshops, and mentored in the Low-Residency MFA of the University of Nebraska cohort (UNO/UNK).
Hedge Coke's recent publications include: “We Were in a World.” in Sentence Magazine. Dean Rader, Guest Ed. 2009. [Prose Poetry.] "The Wailing Room." in Kenyon Review. Simon Ortiz, Ed. Kenyon College. 2009. [Poetry.] "Summer Fruit" and "Pando." in Black Renaissance Noire. Quincy Troupe, Ed. NYU. 2009. [Poetry.] "The Wailing Room" and "N8V Ed: Leyef @ Aiye'." in Black Renaissance Noire. Quincy Troupe, Ed. NYU. 2009. [Surrealism/Nonfiction Essay. Memoir Excerpt.] "Deep Creek." in Kenyon Review. Simon Ortiz, Ed. Kenyon College. 2009. [Nonfiction Essay.] "On Drowning Pond." in Indian Country Noir. Sarah Cortez & Liz Martinez, Ed. Akashic Books. 2009. [Fiction.] She also released the debut volume in the series she is selecting and editing for Red Hen Press, Bone Light, by Orlando White, while participating at AWP, in Chicago. She also received a second 2009 Pushcart nomination for 2008 publications; this one from the Pushcart Board.
Dr. Nyla Ali Khan will present "Women and the Violence in Kashmir: Between India and Pakistan," at the Seventh Annual Kent Estes Justice for All Conference, "Embracing Diversity." University of Nebraska-Kearney, Feb. 13, 2009 at 10:40 am in the Ponderosa Room.
Dr. Nyla Ali Khan has just published an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Islam, Women, and the Violence in Kashmir, in Confluence, a South Asian Affairs News Magazine.
Marguerite Tassi has received a contract with Susquehanna Universiry Press and Associated University Presses for her book called Shakespeare's Female Avengers: Gender, Genre, and Vengeance. In addition, her article entitled "What Maria Wills: Revenge Comedy in Twelfth Night" has just been published in The Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal, and her review of Rupert Goold's British production of Macbeth starring Patrick Stewart has been published in Shakespeare Newsletter.
Dr. Marguerite Tassi was invited to Montpellier, France, to present a paper entitled "Enraptured by Images: Eros, Violence, and Myth in Macbeth" at Universite Jean Valery Montpellier III as part of a conference. The University and the Institut de Rechercher sur la Renaissance, l'Age Classique et les Lumieres sponsored a conference on "Interacting with Eros: Erotic Mythology in Early Modern Drama and Renaissance Literature and the Arts."
Allison Hedge Coke's Lincoln Center Reading from The Perfect Man is a designated PEN American Center 2008 Audio Year Highlight: Allison Hedge Coke.
Allison Hedge Coke"s work "Sway Value" has been nominated by XCP for a Pushcart Prize.
Dr. Don Welch, former Reynolds Chair at UNK has recently published a collection of poems, "When Memory Gives Dust a Face," his most personal and more closely autobiographical work to date. Lewis-Clark Press/Sandhills Press is the publisher, and current Reynolds Chair, Allison Hedge Coke hosted a Reading Performance, Reception, and Book Sale December 1, 2008, at MONA.
Amanda Granrud, Director of UNK’s Writing Center and Lecturer in English, recently traveled to Las Vegas, Nevada, where she presented a talk on group tutoring with international students. The conference included presentations, discussions and posters on assessment, diversity, tutor training, and the relationships between and among the writing center, composition classes, library services, academic tutoring, first year program, and other academic entities.
Allison Hedge Coke gave September Readings at Wayne State and Northeast Community College. In October, in addition to the Nebraska Book Festival, she will read on October 11 for the Bowery Poetry Project, Manhattan with LaTasha Diggs. On October 14, she will read from Naeem Murr's work in the Lincoln Center as a PEN America Presenting Judge for the Beyond Margins Award Ceremony. She will also read November 5 at Oxnard Community College, work with incarcerated youth in South Dakotathrough ArtsCorr on November 10-12 , and read on November 18 at the State University of New York at Fredonia. On December 3, she will travel to Los Angeles to attend the Awards Ceremony for PEN USA, for whom she served as a judge, for the PEN Poetry Award.
Dr. Susanne George Bloomfield and two graduate students travelled to Boulder, Colorado, October 1-4, 2008, where the three presented papers. Dr. Bloomfield and Carrie Crockett presented collaborative papers on Elia Peattie's utopian works, and James Hawley presented a paper on Rudolfo Anaya.
Allison Hedge Coke had two presentations, a creative reading and a critical talk, and four signings at the South Dakota State Book Festival, and Susanne George Bloomfield presented on a panel on biography at the Wyoming Equality State Book Festival. Both will also be reading from their published works at the Nebraska Book Festival on October 18, 2008.
Dr. Kate Benzel has been awarded the Martin Distinguised Professorship in the Department of English. This endowed chair has a three year, renewable term.
Dr. Dion Cautrell and Dr. Samuel Umland have recently published the Freshman Guide to Composition with Fountain Press. This handbook will be required of all UNK freshman in the UNK composition program and includes helpful tips about the writing community at the universitry and basic writing guidelines.
Susanne George Bloomfield was awarded the Pratt-Heins Foundation Faculty Award for Outstanding Scholarship and Research.
Dr. Robert Luscher was appointed Director of the Thompson Scholars Learning Community, designed to enhance the learning and living experience of UNK Students who have been awarded a scholarship by the Susan T. Buffett Foundation.The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation provides scholarships for tuition and fees up to $3,200 per semester and a textbook allowance of $400 per semester for undergraduate students attending Nebraska public universities, colleges, or community colleges. These funds are available to the extent that tuition, fees and books are not already covered by other grants or scholarships. http://www.unk.edu/acad/gradstudies/index.php?id=35428
Allison Hedge Coke has just published her poem "Wokiksuye" in the anthology, Poetry of Recovery, published by Sante Lucia Books, Tom Lombardo Editor, August 2008. Upcoming publications include "Cotton" in Many Mountains Moving and "Snowblind I-29 SD" and "Midlothian Foxgloves," Digital Photo Poetics, in Future Earth Magazine, Also forthcoming in the fall Connecticut Review is a special section dedicated to the May Soul Mountain Residency of poets Allison Hedge Coke, LeAnne Howe, Santee Frazier & Lara Mannin the fall. Hedge Coke has eight new poems in the edition, including: “Soul Mountain,” “Hatchlings,” “Five Poets Fox Hunt Foxwoods: a Griswold Reading,” “Spider Sleek Straddling Dream,” “Eightmile,” “Peanut Pond,” and “In the Year 513" along with poetic works from LeAnne Howe, Lara Mann and Santee Frazier, art from America Meredith, and three equine images from the Digital Photo Poetics series Hedge Coke is compiling this calendar year (TBA). An interview with all four poets is also scheduled for the accompanying radio podcast. Hedge Coke's recent biographical article on Reynolds-UNK Sandhill Crane Fellow, Mohawk Poet & Professor, James Thomas Stevens is also forthcoming from Greenwood Publishing in an encyclopedia on American poets & writers. Se will also be giving several readings. View her schedule on the Reynolds Web Site.
Allison hedge Coke has been commissioned to give the Paul Hanley Furfey Lecture for the Association for the Sociology of Religion on August 1st in Boston. The title of her keynote lecture is "Principle."It will be published in the association's annual review and will become a part of the ASR collections (available through JUSTOR).
UNK alum Jeffrey Leever, who graduated with an English major in 1994, will speak to faculty and students on Friday, April 27th at 2:00 in the Thomas Hall Atrium. From ad writing and slogans to authoring mystery novels, discover some of the ways an English degree can help prepare you for a creative writing career. Jeffrey will discuss his latest book, advertising agency work, and more. Will include a Q & A. He will sign books as well as participate in a book signing at Hastings at 5. p.m.
A Charlotte, North Carolina interview by Dr. Ellen Arnold, Dr. Susan Gardner, and Ursula Couch regarding the poetry and nonfiction of Allison Hedge Coke will run in the Mississippi Quarterly this month and is the onset of an invitation to perform a featured reading at the Southern Literature Conference. Hedge Coke will perform with LeAnne Howe (Mikko Kings) at William and Mary College on April 18.
Charles Fort's poem is a finalist in the Mississippi Review Annual Poetry Contest and will be published in the Special April 2008 Prize Issue.
Archivist and film historian David Del Valle in collaboration with Professor Sam Umland have published Nevermore: The Edgar Allen Poe Films of Roger Corman, a film by film analysis of Corman's Poe-inspired films. The book may be purchashed online through Tomahawk Press.
Reynolds Chair Allison Hedge Coke has had a Creative Prose/Surrealism piece, "Grizzled," accepted for publication in the journal Bombay Gin from Naropa University and a critical essay accepted by XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. In addition, in April she will be a facilitator at the United Nations Forum IIPF Panel in New York, and she will present the Keynote Address at the Indigenolus Studies Conference at Oregon State University/University of Oregon in May. For this summer 2008 she has been awarded a full residential fellowship at Hawthorden Castle in Midlothian, Scotland.
Allison Hedge Coke with present one of the keynote addresses at the North Dakota Conference on the Northern Plains April 25-26 in Sioux Falls,SD. Sponsored by the Center for Western Studies of Augustana College, the conference will examine literary and historical responses to river culture in the plains region.
It has been a year since the performance of "This Unsafe Star: The Story of Emmett Till" took place at the Lied Center for Performing Arts. The play was written by Chris Maly, UNK alumni. Since the performance, an apology was made to the Till family in the courthouse where Emmet Till's murderers were acquitted. In addition, Maly has been named the recepient of the National Educaton Association's H. Councill Trenholm Memorial Civil and Human Rights Award to be presented in Washington D.C. this July.
Allison Hedge Coke, Reynolds Chair, has been awarded the 2008 Writer of the Year Award from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers for Blood Run as well as the 2008 Journal Issue of the Year Award for To Topos: Ahani: Indigenous American Poetry.
This January Susan Honeyman presented "Trick or Treat? Inversion Ritual, Passive Consumerism, and Halloween Lore" at the International Conference on Children's Literature and Culture: Metamorphic Spaces in Jyvaskyla, Finland. She reported that the countryside was beautiful!
In addition to having a nonfiction essay and two poems published in the Spring 2008 Yellow Medicine Review of Southwest Minnesota State University, Allison Hedge Coke will be appearing in several venues this spring. She will be in California at the Rancho Mirage Public Library with Margarita Luna Robles and Juan Felipe Herrera reading and discussing their works on January 24, 2008. She will also be hosting the Indigenous Poets Reading in NYC on Thursday January 31st at 9:00AM, reading and presenting in the NY Public School System for PEN America, presenting on the Environmental Writers Panel at AWP, and reading at the Bowery Poetry Club with the book party for Letters to the World.On February 10, Hedge Coke will be reading with Floyd Skloot at the Ruskin Arts Center in Los Angeles, and then on February 18 at the4th Annual Symposium on Wildness, Wilderness, & the Creative Imagination in Iowa, where she will bejoining other fellows from the Black Earth Institute think-tank, to present a literary panel on the oracle of the environment.
Susan Honeyman has just been elected to served on the Nebraska Humanities Council, which is also a part of the Great Plains Alliance, composed of 5 state humanities councils.
Allison Hedge Coke has had two books accepted for publication for release in 2008:Effigies (Editor of poetry collection) with Salt Publications and From the Fields (Editor) California Poets in the Schools Press. The last is an anthology of poetry from California youth living on the agricultural plain, including work from migrant workers and other fieldworkers. In addition, Hedge Coke has been invited to facilitate the panel on literature and publication at the International Indigenous People's Forum of the United Nations in April 2008.
Two English graduate students recently won Thesis awards. Jillian Tangeman was awarded the Best Thesis, College of Fine Arts & Humanities with her work, “Borders Advocating Agency: A Critical Examination of Fatima Mernissi's Dreams of Tresspass and Sara Suleri's Meatless Days."Brittany Svoboda received Honorable Mention with her theiss, “Virginia Woolf: Innovations in Biography.”
Charles Fort has two books forthcoming from two presses: Red Hen will publish his New and Selected Poems and Backwaters will publish his third prose poem sequence (with elements of fiction and creative non-fiction) titled Mrs. Belladonna’s Supper Club Waltz.
The University of nebraska Press published in September 2007 Adventures in the West: Stories for Young Readers edited by Professor Susanne George Bloomfield and Graduate Student Eric Reed. The anthology contains turn-of-the-century stories by Western authors such L. Frank Baum, Mary Austin, and Charles Lummis. Each story has background contextualization and includes original illustrations.
The English department has awarded a total of $17,767 in scholarships to 28 undergraduate English majors and a total of $3,894 in scholarships to 2 graduate students.
Imene Belhassen was inducted yesterday into the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi. She joins other English majors and graduate students Rebecca Addy, Jennifer Bienhoff, Erica Chu, Kristen Day, Taffnee Faimon, Jodi Garrelts, Nicole Hansen, Jessica Isaac, Laura Logan, Anne Nagel, Eric Reed, Lubna Samha, Justin Sevenker, Melanie Spilinek, Heather Stauffer, and Jillian Tangeman as well as faculty Kate Benzel, Mike Benzel, Susanne Bloomfield, Richard Jussel, Martha Kruse, Rob Luscher, and Charles Peek.
Elissa Martin's project for Student Research Day, "American Literature and the Era of the Salem Witch Trials," was awarded First Place in the Undergraduate Student Poster Awards for the College & Fine Arts & Humanities on April 6, 2007. Elissa's project, based on her chronology time line poster for Dr. Robert Luscher's ENG 352A course last fall, provided a visual survey of the history of the Salem Witch Trials, and the literature associated with this period both during the trials and in more recent years, specifically in the areas of adolescent literature and historical fiction. Her project featured a segment on Ann Pudeator, a relative of former Reynolds Chair Don Welch who was falsely accused and hanged as a witch on September 22, 1692. Pudeator’s name was later cleared when Welch’s uncle went to the Massachusetts legislature and requested a bill to clear her name; however, the bill was not passed until August 28, 1957, almost 265 years later.
Nicole Hansen received the Mary Jane and William R. Nester Student Leadership Award. Chancellor Kristensen stated that the award goes to students "who have demonstrated exemplary service, character and leadership while excelling academically during their college career." Only 12 awards are given each spring to selected graduating seniors.
Celeste Lempke and Mike Springer attended the Sigma Tau Delta convention in Pittsburgh, where Celeste both presented and chaired a panel. The UNK chapter won the award for the best t-shirt (designed by Celeste)!
The English Department was recently honored at the UNK Assessment Awards luncheon which was held to recognize departments, programs, and individuals who have contributed to the student assessment process at UNK. The English Graduate program received merit for the Most Improved Assessment Reporting while English Composition was recognized for its exemplary efforts in collecting and reporting student performance data for their General Studies courses. Senior Vice Chancellor Finnie Murray spoke on the importance of assessment for accreditation and for the success of the university.
Mary Dixon, (MA UNK) who recently received her MFA from Notre Dame, has published her article, “Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas by Mari Sandoz: Historiography, A Philosophy for Reconstruction,” in the Winter 2007 edition of Great Plains Quarterly.
This Unsafe Star: The Emmett Till Story, a play written by Chris Maly, one of our graduates who now teaches at Lincoln High School, will be staged at the Lied Center in Lincoln on February 18, 2007, as a part of Black History Month. This production will be the first high school play performed at the Lied other than those staged in the past as UNL-sponsored high school thespian events. Wheeler Parker, who know the young African American tragically killed in Mississippi,while growing up in Chicago, will speak at the beginning of the performance.
Kim Elliott (her director, Susan Honeyman) received the award for the Outstanding Thesis at UNK, and Pam Vap (her director, Charles Fort) for won Best Thesis in Fine Arts and Humanities. Kim's thesis on Orhan Pamuk will be entered in the regional MAGS competition.
The English Department has been honored with the Jane Pope Geske Award from the Nebraska Center for the Book. Members of the department will be attending the luncheon and awards ceremony in Lincoln on Sunday, November 5, 2006, to accept the award for their contributions to promoting Nebraska literature.
The English Department has joined forces with the Nebraska Writers Guide in hosting their annual fall conference. This collaboration will provide an opportunity for writers from all over Nebraska to come together, learn, and share. This year's program, scheduled for October 27-28, 2006, will include concurrent sessions on writing, publishing, and manuscript design. Saturday's featured speaker will be Julie Hotham discussing freelance manazine writing, and in the evening cowboy poet R.P. Smith will be featured at the Poetry Slam and social.
Impertinences: Selected Writings of Elia Peattie, A Journalist in the Gilded Age by Susanne George Bloomfield and published by the University of Nebraska Press was named the WILLA Literary Award winner by the national association Women Writing the West in the Other Nonfiction category.
Dr. Charles Peek was awarded the 2005 Leland Holdt/Security Mutual Life Distinguished Faculty Award. Dr. Peek, who has just returned from a Fulbright Fellowship in China, was the former chair of the English department and specializes in Faulkner studies. He is also active in the Nebraska Center for the Book and the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Foundation, serving as president for both organizations.
Ndeye Fatou Ba has won the Best Master's Thesis at UNK award for her excellent study of Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter. Her thesis advisor was Liz Peck. The competition this year was fierce; there were also excellent theses in history and biology. The committee was especially impressed with the linguistic and multicultural elements of the thesis, as well as the groundbreaking critical approach in which Ndeye bridged the gap between highly literate Euro-centric readers and an orally informed Afro-centric text.
English theses, both critical and creative, have been consistent winners in the UNK competition for many years now. Over the past few years, students who have won Best Thesis include Jay Garrison, Mary Dixon, and Connie Piper. We've had both a critical (Connie) and creative (Mary) thesis go on to the regional competition, and now Ndeye's thesis will be entered in the MAGS regional competition. It should be noted as well that Wendy Fleisner won an Honorable Mention one year.