English Department: News

2008-2009

Joe Powell has received a 2009 NEA Poetry Fellowship of $25,000.

Terry Martin has poems forthcoming in three literary journals, Oregon East, Cascade, and The Great American Poetry Show. In October she presented a session at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle titled "Call and Response: Poetry and The Gift Exchange." In December she will be the featured reader at the Allied Arts Poetry Series.

Ray Hall's book, An Ethnographic Study of Afro-Mexicans in Mexico’s Gulf Coast: Fishing, Festivals, and Foodways has been published by the Edwin Mellen Press.

Bobby Cummings presented a paper at the National Council of Teachers of English conference in San Antonio

George Drake's essay "Ritual in Joseph Andrews" has been published in the collection Henry Fielding in Our Time, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Nov. 2008.

Toni Culjak has had a paper accepted for the International Conference of Americanists in Mexico City next July.

Liahna Armstrong presented her paper "Vertigo Forever: Reverberations of Hitchcock's Masterpiece" at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association (RMMLA) convention in October.

Melissa Johnson presented her paper “Notorious Woman: Sex, Death, and the Restoration of Ingrid Bergman’s Femininity in Alfred Hitchcock’s film noir” at RMMLA.

Charles Li has two articles in the collection Studies in the History of the English Language IV: Empirical and Analytical Advances in the Study of English Language (2008). The first is entitled "Metrical Evidence: Did Chaucer Translate The Romaunt of the Rose?" and the second is "Trochees in Iambic Meters: Assumptions or Evidence?"

Lila Harper's scholarly edition of Edwin Abbott's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions will be published by Broadview Press in Fall 2009. Her article "Clues in the Street: Sherlock Holmes, Martin Hewitt and Mean Streets" will appear in the first 2009 issue of The Journal of Popular Culture.

Joe Powell's Fish Grooming and Other Stories was one of five finalists for the 2008 Washington State Book Awards in the Fiction category.

Christine Sutphin's scholarly edition of Frances Trollope's The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, or Scenes on the Mississippi will be published by Pickering and Chatto in December.

Lisa Norris read from a short story on a panel of creative writers at the Western Literature Association Conference in Boulder, Co, on Oct. 1. She presented her research for "Imagining Nora: A Historical Novel-in-Progress" as part of the CAH Speaker Series on Oct. 28th.

2007-2008

Charles Li recently returned from a trip to China, where he presented a paper at the Conference of Phonetics in Beijing as well as seven long academic presentations to five universities in five different cities. He assures us that he was not close to the earthquake's epicenter, though he did feel it.

Karen Gookin received the College of Arts and Humanities Outstanding Non-tenure Track Faculty Teaching Award for 2007/08.

Lisa Norris received a CAH Summer Creativity Grant Award for 2008.

Chris Schedler received a CAH Summer Teaching Grant Award for 2008.

Paulus Pimomo's Practical and Illustrative English-Japanese Dictionary, co-authored with Hidemi Masamura, was published earlier this year by Shogakukan Inc., a premier publisher in Japan. It is a 700-page dictionary of English usage (words, idiomatic phrases, and sample sentences along with explanations in Japanese) specifically aimed at speakers and writers of English as a second language. This is the second of two volumes he has co-authored with Professor Masamura. Paulus continues to write a monthly column for the on-line news magazine Kuknalim.com.

Judith Kleck's collection of poems entitled Culling the Petals will be published in mid-July by Finishing Line Press.

Lila Harper's paper on "G. H. Lewes, George Eliot, and the Medusa at the Seaside" has been accepted for a Victorian Studies Division panel at MLA. This will be the second year in a row that Lila has presented at MLA--not an easy thing to do. Her essay "The Starfish that Burns: Women's Descriptions of Jellyfish" is forthcoming in the collection Forces of Nature (Cambridge Scholars).

George Drake's essay,"‘Fanciful Devotion': Ritualization in Walter Scott's Old Mortality," has been accepted by Studies in Romanticism. He also presented a paper on "Gothic Irony in The Minstrel and The Old Manor House" at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference in March.

Sura Rath has been elected Vice-President of the Rocky Mountain MLA, which means means a 3-year commitment as VP, President, and Past President. The RMMLA is the regional branch of the Modern Language Association for Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, eastern Oregon and Washington, western Texas, and the western Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta.

Joe Powell's collection of short stories, Fish Grooming and Other Stories, has been published by March Street Press. Recently, he delivered his paper, "On the Newest Bees in Darwin's Garden," as the Victor J. Emmett Memorial Lecture at Pittsburg State University. The Emmett Memorial Lecture is delivered each year by the author of the best essay on a literary topic published by The Midwest Quarterly. Powell's winning essay was entitled "Honesty, Elegance and the Ragged Edge," which appeared in the fall 2007 issue.

Lisa Norris's essay "Claim Jumpers" was published in Segue 6.1 (Fall 07), an online literary magazine published by Miami University Middletown. Her essay "Idaho Yahoo" appears in the Fall 2007 issue of Fourth Genre.

Terry Martin has published poems in the most recent issues of "Flyway," "Gertrude," "Rosebud," "Stringtown," "Buckle" and "Windfall." This summer, she gave public readings from her new book of poems, The Secret Language of Women in Gig Harbor in July and at Hedgebrook on Whidbey Island in August. In 2007-2008, she will be reading at Northwinds Art Center in Port Townsend in December, at Soulfood Books in Renton in January, at CWU as part of the Lion Rock Reading Series in February, and at A Room of One's Own Book Store in Madison, WI in April.

Bobby Cummings presented at the 2007 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Annual Convention in November. She was a participant in the roundtable session "Conversations about Promising Practices for Working with African American Leaners."

Our department was well represented at the Rocky Mountain MLA Annual Meeting in Calgary, Alberta, October 3-7.

• Liahna Armstrong, current President of RMMLA, presented a paper, "China's Gong Li: Feminine/Feminist Icon," participated in a creative writing workshop along with mystery writer Elizabeth George, and chaired three sessions, including Modern Film, The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, and Australian Film and Literature.
• Sura Rath presented a paper on "Allegories of Fashion in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction"
• Melissa Johnson, now a Lecturer in our department, was scheduled to present a paper and chair a session, but was unable to attend because of a family emergency.

Chris Schedler presented a paper entitled "Immigrants at the Gates: Social Borders and Global Suburbs in The Tortilla Curtain" at the American Studies Association Conference in Philadelphia, PA, October 11-14, 2007.

Charles Li presented a paper at the Studies in the History of the English Language Conference, held at the University of Georgia at Athens Oct. 4-6. In a debate that has spanned decades, if not centuries, his paper took the position that Chaucer's verse is footed rather than unfooted. Charles reports that a leading scholar in the field, who has argued the opposite position in numerous books and articles, conceded that Charles's argument and evidence were convincing and that the debate is now settled. Charles is to be congratulated not only for advancing scholarship, but for what seems an almost unprecedented development in the history of our field: changing another scholar's mind.

Christine Sutphin presented a paper entitled "Avenging Women: Frances Trollope's Anti-Slavery Fiction" at "Imagining Transatlantic Slavery: A Conference to Mark the Abolition of the Slave Trade in Britain and the United States" in Chawton, England, March 16-17, 2007. Her scholarly edition of Trollope's The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, or Scenes on the Mississippi has been accepted for publication by Pickering and Chatto.