2008-2009 Edition
Summer is Icumen In 
is perhaps the oldest example of a traditional English round,
from a manuscript in the Reading Abbey. The composer
of this six-part polyphonic round written in Middle English
is unknown-- but it is thought to date back to 1260.
The mansucript resides at the British Library.
Summer is a-coming in,
Loudly sing, Cuckoo!
The seed grows and the meadow blooms
And the wood springs anew,
Sing, Cuckoo!
The ewe bleats after the lamb
The cow lows after the calf.
The bullock stirs, the stag farts,
Merrily sing, Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo, well you sing, cuckoo;
Don't you ever stop now,
Sing cuckoo now. Sing, Cuckoo.
Sing Cuckoo. Sing cuckoo now!
The seed grows and the meadow blooms
And the wood springs anew,
Sing, Cuckoo!
The ewe bleats after the lamb
The cow lows after the calf.
The bullock stirs, the stag farts,
Merrily sing, Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo, well you sing, cuckoo;
Don't you ever stop now,
Sing cuckoo now. Sing, Cuckoo.
Sing Cuckoo. Sing cuckoo now!
*
The Vegetable Air
by Cathy Song
The Vegetable Air
by Cathy Song
You’re clean shaven in this country
where trees grow beards of moss,
where even bank tellers
look a little like banditos ...
where trees grow beards of moss,
where even bank tellers
look a little like banditos ...
[Read more from web source: The Poetry Foundation]
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Letter from the Department Chair
Dear Alumni and Friends, After a seven-year hiatus, I returned to the office of department chair in summer 2008 when, after his two years in the chair’s position, Dr. David Metzger became dean of the Honors College. I am grateful to Dr. Metzger for his service to and leadership of the department between 2006-2008 and look forward to building on his good work.
Once again, it is my privilege to introduce this newsletter about achievements and activities in the department. In seven years (2001-2008), a lot changed; and in one year a lot more has changed. We now have 45 full-time faculty and 70-75 part-time instructors and graduate teaching assistants, making English the largest department on campus. With more than 300 BA majors and another 150 students in four different graduate programs, we have thriving programs. And by teaching courses that serve everything from General Education to Elementary Education Teacher Preparation to Women’s Studies, English accounts for more than 10 per cent of total enrollments on campus. It can truly be said that our department is at the core of the university.
As you know, this has been a challenging year for the university—and probably for you, too. During the financial crisis, we were asked to be prepared to give back teaching positions; other funding was reduced or eliminated. Thus, despite the large increase in student enrollment, we were facing having to deal with it with a reduced teaching staff. Fortunately, for this year at least, the prospect of federal stimulus money has reduced the severity of cuts. Not only will we be able to hold on to current teachers, but we have been able this year to replace those who have left or will be leaving the university. As I write this, we are still in the midst of hiring, but things look good for us to have several new faculty members in the fall.
One of those new people is Dr. Delores Phillips, a recent PhD from the University of Maryland. Dr. Phillips will be teaching new literatures in English, Anglophone writing outside of Britain and the United States. Another new hire is Dr. David Roh, who earned his PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Roh will be teaching contemporary American literature and digital humanities, a new field. We are delighted to have these two rising scholars join our department. We also welcome Ms. Beth Backes, who will teach linguistics and composition at the Virginia Beach campus. We are also in the final stages of hiring another person to teach digital journalism, a position that we share with the Communications department. Three other positions—a lecturer generalist, an assistant professor of rhetoric, and assistant professor in linguistics—are in various stages of the search process.
These hires mean that we must say goodbye to those they replace. Dr. Craig Stewart, a rhetorician, will be taking a new position at the University of Memphis, and Dr. Iryna Kozlova, a linguist, will be moving to Canada. I want to thank both of these fine scholars for their service to our department. In addition, I want to thank Ms. Farideh Goldin for teaching in the new literatures slot this year and Ms. Ashley Hall for filling the position in digital journalism. Ms. Hall will be leaving Old Dominion to complete her doctorate in English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In addition, we say farewell to Ms. Catie Berkenfield, a lecturer in linguistics at Virginia Beach, who will also be completing her doctoral studies, and Ms. Tracey Mershon, a generalist lecturer, who will still be teaching part-time for us but spending more time on her writing. The department is grateful to each one of them for their contributions to our programs.Over the last year, we have made a number of changes in the administrative personnel in the department. In August, Dr. Joyce Neff (former department chair) took over the leadership of our PhD program. In January, Dr. Joe Cosco became graduate program director for the MA in English. This summer, Dr. Joanne Scheibman will replace Dr. Janet Bing as GPD for the MA in applied linguistics, and Dr. Luisa Igloria will take over from Ms. Sheri Reynolds as program director of the MFA in creative writing. I cannot thank Professors Bing and Reynolds enough for their excellent stewardship of their programs. Dr. Bing was the founding director of the applied linguistics graduate program; its success is owed largely to her leadership. Professor Reynolds has run the MFA program with efficiency and aplomb. Fortunately, both will remain on the faculty doing what they do splendidly—teaching and writing.
The department has recently been the beneficiary of targeted financial gifts that will help us greatly in a couple of areas. A memorial fellowship dedicated to Robin L. Hixon has been established by her husband, James A. Hixon, to support faculty research in literature. The first recipient of the Hixon Fellowship is Dr. Imtiaz Habib, who will be working on a book connected to his research on race in early modern England. Next year’s fellow will be Dr. Edward Jacobs, who will use his funds to research a project on changes in the British newspaper over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The department is very grateful to Mr. Hixon for his establishment of this fellowship in honor of Robin Hixon, a great lover of literature.
In addition, we recently received word of a bequest to the department that will enable us to fund student scholarships. The Ralph Harrison Jackson and Clara Jackson Kingsbury Memorial Scholarship fund will support English majors with a 3.0 or better grade point average and who demonstrate financial need. Dr. Jackson attended Old Dominion more than fifty years ago and died recently, but he will not be forgotten as we move toward enabling worthy students to secure scholarship funding. I hope this will be first of other opportunities to provide financial aid to English majors, especially in this time of rising tuition costs.
In the meantime, The Scrivener contains the achievements of the department as well as alumni news. I hope that you will stay connected with us. Feel free to contact any department member, me included, if you have news of your life after graduation. We especially want to hear what people do for a living to help us answer that age-old question, What can you do with an English degree? We can do a lot, and the more we hear from alumni, the better.
Sincerely,
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PROGRAM & DEPARTMENT NEWS
PREVIEW of "WRITERS IN PEACE AND WAR" -
ODU's 32nd Annual Literary Festival (6-9 October, 2009)
MFA Creative Writing faculty Michael Pearson and Janet Peery, directors of the 2009 ODU Literary Festival, share with us an exciting line-up of writers under this year's festival theme,“Writers in Peace and War”.
Be sure to mark your calendars, invite your friends, students, and networks ~ and join us on campus for the following events (all events are on the ODU main campus in Norfolk, unless otherwise indicated):
Tuesday 6 October
11 am Norton Girault
2 pm Joyce Hoffmann / Panel Discussion7 pm Dalia Sofer
Wednesday 7 October
11 am Brian Turner
2 pm Jim Sheeler 7 pm Farah Nosh (Gallery Talk in Chandler Hall)
Thursday 8 October 10 am Al Arater (CoffeeHouse/Bookstore)
11 am Luisa Igloria
2 pm Helon Habila
7 pm Mark Bowden (Presidential Lecture Series; Webb Center)
Friday 9 October
11 am Jon Pineda2 pm Writers’ Workshop with Steve Almond (limited to 30 registrants)
3 pm Leslea Newman________________________________________________
Dismal History: Documentary on the Great Dismal SwampImage Source: http://tinyurl.com/qsr3wo
Imtiaz Habib, professor of English and recent recipient of the Burgess Research Award (the highest honor given to faculty in the College of Arts & Letters), and ODU English major Richard Green, have co-produced "Dismal History" -- a documentary on the subject of runaway slave populations living in the Great Dismal Swamp before the American Civil War.
The film was screened recently at Norfolk State University. Green handled most of the cinematography. Habib said, “With this film, we interrogate popular knowledge and popular history... [a] subject that historians have largely ignored and dismissed.” The film examines archaeological evidence suggesting that runaway slaves lived in the Great Dismal Swamp, a marshy region between southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, from as early as the 17th century.
“Dismal History” features interviews with archaeologists, researchers and scholars like Dan Sayers of the College of William and Mary, Cassandra Newby and Tommy Bogger of Norfolk State University, and Brent Morris of Cornell University.
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ODU English Department Rocks CCCC '09
Our English Department had a strong presence at the CCCC (Conference on College Composition and Communication) in San Francisco, 11-14 March 2009.
The following graduate students and faculty gave papers:
- Andrea Dace (doctoral student): “From Writers to Editors: Using Wiki Projects to Demonstrate Principles of Academic Writing in Introductory Science Writing Classes."
- Hannah Kimberley-Scialdone (doctoral student): “Cooking is for Girls?: The Case for Cookbooks as Technical and Scientific Writing.”
- Heather Lettner-Rust (doctoral student): “Making Transfer Visible: Case Study of a Civic Writing Seminar as General Education Capstone."
- Elizabeth Vincelette (doctoral student): "Vice and Advice: Technical Writing and the American Domestic Manual."Just before San Francisco, Elizabeth gave another paper at the Women in the Archives Conference at Brown University, March 5-7, 2009: "Independent Women: Recovery, Genre, and Identity in the Archive," based on her dissertation work.
- Katie Retzinger (doctoral student): “Immediacy, Desire, and the Other: MMORPGS and Constructions of Identity.”
- Jennifer Odom (doctoral student): "POST YOUR INFRINGEMENT HERE: The Breach of Copyright Law in Blogs."
- Leslie Norris (doctoral student): “Research Study: Multimodal Texts Help Basic Writing Students Create Effective Essays.”
- Joyce Neff (Professor and GPD for the PhD in English): “Staying or Leaving or Doing Both: Professional Commitments during Retirement.”
- Lindal Buchanan (Assistant Professor, English and Women’s Studies): “Making Waves: Rhetorics of Race, Pregnancy, and Civil Rights."
- Liza Potts (Assistant Professor, English): “Social Software Ecologies: A Fieldtrip into the Wake of Disaster.”- Kevin DePew (Assistant Professor): “Triangleman Meets Universeman: Resolving the Conflict from Using Rhetorically Grounded Triangulation to Study Distance Learning”
- Julia Romberger (Assistant Professor): “Rhetorics of Efficiency: Ideological Impacts on Technology Use, Institutional Decision Making, and Pedagogical Practice”
- Kathie Gossett (Assistant Professor): “Multimodal .WAVs: Basic Writers ‘Drop In’ on Freshman Writers”
- Megan Edwards and Ella Shaffer, both part-time faculty members and MA graduates of our program, gave their paper, "Intellectual Property and Copyrights for Non-traditional Compositions: Opening the Conversation for Instructors."
- Ashley Hall, who was a visiting lecturer in English and Communications this year, was unable to attend; but her film, "Camcorders - they aren't just for birthday parties anymore: What Protools Have to Do with Writing,” was shown at the same panel by Kathie Gossett.
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Congratulations to the 2008-09 ODU College Poetry Prize Winners
In 1955, The Academy of American Poets established its University and College Poetry Prize program at ten schools. The Academy now sponsors over 200 annual prizes for poetry at colleges and universities nationwide, and has awarded more than $350,000 to nearly 10,000 student poets since the program's inception. Many of America's most esteemed poets won their first recognition through an Academy College Prize, including Diane Ackerman, Toi Derricotte, Mark Doty, Alice Fulton, Tess Gallagher, Louise Glück, Allen Grossman, Jorie Graham, Kimiko Hahn, Joy Harjo, Robert Hass, Li-Young Lee, Brad Leithauser, J. D. McClatchy, Heather McHugh, Gregory Orr, Robert Pinsky, Sylvia Plath, Mark Rudman, Mary Jo Salter, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, George Starbuck, Mark Strand, and Charles Wright.
Three years ago, through the efforts of then Virginia Poet Laureate Carolyn Kreiter Foronda, the Poetry Society of Virginia arranged for the endowment of the Old Dominion University-Academy of American Poets College Poetry Prize
The winners in the undergraduate and graduate categories received certificates during the last MFA Creative Writing Program Poetry & Fiction Reading of the year in April:
Undergraduate Category
First Prize Winner: "Attention. Deficit. Bird," / William Meade Stith
First runner-up: "The Pictures On Your Walls" / Emily Bonner
Second runner-up (Tie): "Contemplating Nyx" / Ryan Glass and "The Morning After" / Sarah PringleGraduate Category
First Prize Winner: "Definitive" / Christian Anton Gerard
Second runner-up (Three-way tie): “Prahera” / Andrea J. Nolan “Frontiersmen” /
Christian Anton Gerard "Departure of a neighbor" / Zsuzsanna Basca Palmer
Christian Anton Gerard "Departure of a neighbor" / Zsuzsanna Basca Palmer
This year, poet Rick Hilles served as contest judge. Rick was born in Canton, Ohio and educated at Kent State, Columbia, and Stanford. His first poetry collection, Brother Salvage, won the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was named the 2006 Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord Magazine. In 2008, Rick received one of the prestigious Whiting Writers Awards. He was the 2002-03 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholar and has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, the Ruth and Jay C. Halls Fellow at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and the recipient of the Larry Levis Editors’ Prize from The Missouri Review. His work has appeared in Harper’s, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, Salmagundi, Field and Witness. He teaches in the MFA Program at Vanderbilt University.
Rick wrote: "One sign of a healthy creative writing program is when the work coming from it exhibits a wide range of styles and approaches to the art we love. Thus, I was thrilled to find such inspired and inspiring evidence of divergent sensibilities, of genuine individual voices,among this year’s submissions to the Academy of American Poets Prize. When work is this rich, and vibrant, and varied, as its benefactors, everyone wins. "The somewhat capricious nature of contests, of course, is that they also have specific winners. In the end, the poems that I chose were simply those whose pleasures and surprises—whose meanings and mysteries—stayed with me most, rewarding (even as they challenged) my various attentions."
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Writing Tutorial Services at the Norfolk main campus
At the beginning of the Fall 2008, Writing Tutorial Services (WTS) opened in its new location on the first floor of the Batten Arts and Letters Building (BAL 1002). The new location not only offers a bigger space which allows tutorials to be conducted comfortably, but it is more visible to the student population. Students who had used our services in previous semesters expressed their appreciation of the new space.
During the semester, WTS continued to provide quality writing advice to the campus population. With the diversity of expertise that the tutors—Victor Barrett, Brandon Geter, Chinchi Kungaa, Eric Obrynba, Chvonne Parker, Dana Staves, Randi Tucker, and Emily Louise Zimbrick—brought with them, WTS was capable of addressing many ODU students’ writing inquiries. Also, our graduate writing tutor, Erin Pastore guided many graduate students through their term papers, theses, and dissertations.
Throughout the semester, we continued our weekly workshop series. Each week we offered a workshop on a new topic from Understanding Audience to Plagiarism and Citations to Common ESL Errors. These workshops were well attended, often drawing fifteen to thirty students per session. We plan to continue the workshop series during the next school year and would be interested in topics that you want to see covered.
Finally, WTS, with the support of a Faculty Innovator Grant, tested the Macromedia Breeze software as a means of supporting our online tutorials. With this software we hope to expand our services to students at a distance and offer tutorials similar to those that we conduct face-to-face. Macromedia Breeze facilitates real-time video and audio conferencing while tutor and student look at the same document. While not all students will have the capability to take full advantage of the software’s features, we see this as a step towards incorporating distance students into the ODU culture. We will keep you updated on our progress. ( -Kevin DePew)
Writing Tutorial Services at the Virginia Beach Higher Education Center
The Writing Tutorial Service at the Virginia Beach Higher Education Center is proud to offer a tutoring service for ODU’s students at a location, which is convenient for those enrolled here. We offer all of the services provided by the WTS at the Norfolk campus, and our services are available to any who attend ODU regardless of where their classes are located. WTS strives to provide a learning experience for students to enable them to learn strategies to perfect their writing regardless of their current level. We accomplish these goals by providing tutorials which target global errors in grammar, mechanics, organization, adherence to guidelines specified by the APA and MLA, construction of the thesis sentence, etc. Students can bring us papers from any class in any subject at any point in the writing process, and we are glad to provide direction and assistance as well for students who do not speak English as their first language. Our ultimate goal is to equip students with the necessary means to correct their own papers and avoid making similar mistakes across multiple assignments. Even as we help the students, we enable them to improve their overall writing skills while maintaining their own unique voice. Comments such as “I’m feeling a lot better about this paper...your comments helped trim it down” (Sadie), “Oh yeah, that makes sense now” (Stacy), and “Just wanted to let you know I really appreciate your help and really have learned a lot ...You provided me with a lot of useful information” (Rachel) let us know that we are on the right track and that we are helping students.
This year, our numbers have nearly doubled, and we are proud to have been able to serve so many students. This increase in students is in part due to our online tutorial system. Because there is only one tutor (Helena Osborne) for this campus, the possible times that students can get their papers edited are reduced. In order to avoid turning away students, an online tutorial system was implemented to meet these increasing demands. Students from any campus can email a draft of an assignment and their assignment sheet to the tutor and get feedback without ever having to leave their homes. This means that students whose work and class schedule prohibit them from being able to meet with a tutor during office hours can still get their papers reviewed in a timely fashion. Several students have expressed appreciation and commented that this is a convenient, and in some cases, the only way for the tutorial to have been accomplished.
While we are excited about many of the changes we have made and the accomplishments we have achieved, we continue to strive to improve this service. We hope to continue working with professors at all campuses to get the word out about the existence of the WTS at the VBHEC. There is no way that we could help as many students as we do without the continued support and recognition from professors at ODU, and we hope to continue working with them at a heightened level to raise awareness about the services we provide. The Writing Tutorial Services at the Virginia Beach Higher Education Center is proud to serve the students and faculty of ODU, and we hope to continue to do so even more in the future. ( -Julie Manthey)
This year, our numbers have nearly doubled, and we are proud to have been able to serve so many students. This increase in students is in part due to our online tutorial system. Because there is only one tutor (Helena Osborne) for this campus, the possible times that students can get their papers edited are reduced. In order to avoid turning away students, an online tutorial system was implemented to meet these increasing demands. Students from any campus can email a draft of an assignment and their assignment sheet to the tutor and get feedback without ever having to leave their homes. This means that students whose work and class schedule prohibit them from being able to meet with a tutor during office hours can still get their papers reviewed in a timely fashion. Several students have expressed appreciation and commented that this is a convenient, and in some cases, the only way for the tutorial to have been accomplished.
While we are excited about many of the changes we have made and the accomplishments we have achieved, we continue to strive to improve this service. We hope to continue working with professors at all campuses to get the word out about the existence of the WTS at the VBHEC. There is no way that we could help as many students as we do without the continued support and recognition from professors at ODU, and we hope to continue working with them at a heightened level to raise awareness about the services we provide. The Writing Tutorial Services at the Virginia Beach Higher Education Center is proud to serve the students and faculty of ODU, and we hope to continue to do so even more in the future. ( -Julie Manthey)
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HIGH NOTES ~
Awards;
Tenure & Promotion;
Publications;
Publications;
Conferences & Presentations;
Scholarly & Related Activities - The Cambridge Scholars Press released Once Upon a Time: Myth, Fairy Tales, and Legends in Margaret Atwood's Writings (December 2008), edited by Sarah Appleton.
- The Washington Post published Michael Blumenthal’s essay “Learning to Speak Baboon” (19 October 2008). His seventh book of poems, And, was released by BOA Editions in early 2009. His poem "What I Believe" was the selected reading on Garrison Keillor's daily radio segment, "The Writer's Almanac," on 28 February.
- Matilda Cox , who coordinates Freshman Previews in Arts & Letters and is a recent MFA Poetry graduate, was admitted to the competitive Cave Canem Summer Writers' Retreat in Greensburg, PA (22-29 June 2009).
- Farideh Goldin published "My Iranian Sukkah" in Where We Find Ourselves: Jewish Women around the World Write About Home, edited by Miriam Ben-Joseph & Deborah Nodler Rosen; State University of New York Press, 2009. Her "My Hanukkah Gift" was featured in NPR’s Hanukkah Lights (December 2008). She will be guest editor and contributor for The Ghosts of our Mothers: Iranian Jewish Women Writers (NASHIM: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues; Brandeis University, August 2009). Goldin also gave two talks this spring: on March 19, “Iranian Jewish Women Immigrants in Los Angeles” at the University of Illinois in Chicago; and on March 24, as the keynote speaker at Moriah High School, Englewood, New Jersey.
-Lenore Hart's interview with Norris Church Mailer will be in the Fall '09 issue of Provincetown Arts.Lenore has begun a new novel (working title Nevermore) acquired by St. Martins' Press, about Edgar Allan Poe and Virginia Clemm. She was Visiting Fiction Writer at Elizabethtown College (PA) in 2008-2009.
- Luisa A. Igloria's tenth book, Juan Luna’s Revolver, received the 2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize for poetry from the University of Notre Dame Press; she read at the 2009 Sandeen Prize Series reading at the University of Notre Dame on 18 March. She published the following poems in the past year: "Fear Factor" (Pushcart Prize nomination) and "Email to the Tender Committee of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation" in the Pop Culture issue of Umbrella literary journal (Winter 2008); "The Gods Must Be Crazy" in the Humor issue of poemeleon (Winter 2008); "The Wives of Chang and Eng", "Garment" and "Mangkik" in The Poet's Picturebook; "Yo Yu" and "Christopher Reeve's Filipino Nurse" in the inaugural issue of Sweet. Luisa was the featured reader at Molly Malone's, hosted by Nina Corwin and Al DeGenova in Forest Park, IL in early February; she also participated in two panels at the 2009 AWP (Association of American Writers and Writing Programs) Annual Conference in Chicago: "Lyric Selves and Global Imperatives" with Honoree Fanone Jeffers, Andrew Kaufman, Christine Casson and Vivian Teter, and "Archipelagoes of Dust, Habitations of Language: Reiterating Landscape, History and Origin" with Grace Talusan, Marianne Villanueva, Angela N. Torres, and Karen Llagas.
- Joyce Magnoto Neff was named University Professor as of spring 2009. She led a workshop on Grounded Theory as research methodology (co-presented with Ph D student Beth Vincelette) at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (2-4 April, New Orleans). Joyce was also elected Assistant Chair of the National Consortium of Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric and Composition. Other presentations included a workshop on Writing Across the Curriculum to 30 faculty at Virginia Wesleyan College (16 April); with Kevin DePew, Matthew Oliver, and PhD students Cynthia Pengilly and Andrea Murphy - a panel titled “Academic applications of workplace software: Adobe Connect for tutoring, collaborative writing, and advising from a distance at the Computers and Writing Conference (June, University of California, Davis). Further, Joyce reports that the PhD English program is doing well, with a record number of applications for fall 2009. Five students from the first class (fall 2006) have passed their candidacy exams and started on their dissertations.
- Michael Pearson published Innocents Abroad Too: Journeys Around the World on Semester at Sea (Syracuse University Press, 2008); it was listed in the Denver Post City Bestseller List for February 2009. Mike has also published a number of essays: “Epilogue: Where Stories Come From and Where They Take Us,” The Literary Review Web, 3, Fall 2008, pp.41-51; “Western Dreams: Taos, Santa Fe, and Home,” The Literary Review Web, 3, Fall 2008, pp.29-40; “Burmese Days,” The Truth About The Fact: International Journal of Nonfiction, Volume III, Number 1,Spring 2008, pp.158-172 . He has been busy giving readings in local bookstores as well as in Denver, New York, and the Virginia Festival of the Book.
- Jeffrey Richards was awarded Honorable Mention for the Foerster Prize (given by the American Literature section of the Modern Language Association for the best article to appear in the journal American Literature during 2008). He published "Sati in Philadelphia: The Widow(s) of Malabar" in vol. 80, no. 4 of American Literature; a review of Tice L. Miller's "Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries" (Southern Illinois University Press, 2007) in vol. 42, no. 4 of Comparative Drama. Other publications include a review of Eliza Richards' "Gender and the Politics of Reception in Poe's Circle" (2004) in vol. 72, no. 1 of the South Atlantic Review; a review of Jill Lane's "Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895" (2005) in vol. 1, no. 1 of Ecumenica: Journal of Theatre and Performance [formerly Baylor Journal of Theatre and Performance". He also gave a paper, "Seeing the Unseen: Servitude and Stage in the Early Republic", at the Society of Early Americanists biennial conference in Hamilton, Bermuda.
- Sheri Reynolds released a new novel, The Sweet In-Between.
- Tim Seibles published three poems in Ploughshares this spring, and will have poems appearing in the new anthology Black Nature (a collection of nature poems by African American authors) from the University of Georgia Press. Tim read at the Russell Memorial Library with poets Jon Pineda and Dorianne Laux for the Chesapeake Poetry Festival; at Virginia Wesleyan College in April, and also in Boston for the 14th Annual Brookline High School Poetry Festival.
- David Pagano published “The Space of Apocalypse in Zombie Cinema” in Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead, ed. Marc Leverette and Shawn McIntosh (Scarecrow Press, 2008) and “Narrative Unreliability in Film and Literature” in Notes on American Literature; 16.2 (2007). 8-10.
- Michael Pearson published Innocents Abroad Too: Journeys Around the World on Semester at Sea (Syracuse University Press, 2008); it was listed in the Denver Post City Bestseller List for February 2009. Mike has also published a number of essays: “Epilogue: Where Stories Come From and Where They Take Us,” The Literary Review Web, 3, Fall 2008, pp.41-51; “Western Dreams: Taos, Santa Fe, and Home,” The Literary Review Web, 3, Fall 2008, pp.29-40; “Burmese Days,” The Truth About The Fact: International Journal of Nonfiction, Volume III, Number 1,Spring 2008, pp.158-172 . He has been busy giving readings in local bookstores as well as in Denver, New York, and the Virginia Festival of the Book.
- Janet Peery won the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction, and the 2008 WILLA Literary Award for her novel What the Thunder Said.
- Jeffrey Richards was awarded Honorable Mention for the Foerster Prize (given by the American Literature section of the Modern Language Association for the best article to appear in the journal American Literature during 2008). He published "Sati in Philadelphia: The Widow(s) of Malabar" in vol. 80, no. 4 of American Literature; a review of Tice L. Miller's "Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries" (Southern Illinois University Press, 2007) in vol. 42, no. 4 of Comparative Drama. Other publications include a review of Eliza Richards' "Gender and the Politics of Reception in Poe's Circle" (2004) in vol. 72, no. 1 of the South Atlantic Review; a review of Jill Lane's "Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895" (2005) in vol. 1, no. 1 of Ecumenica: Journal of Theatre and Performance [formerly Baylor Journal of Theatre and Performance". He also gave a paper, "Seeing the Unseen: Servitude and Stage in the Early Republic", at the Society of Early Americanists biennial conference in Hamilton, Bermuda.
- Sheri Reynolds released a new novel, The Sweet In-Between.
- Tim Seibles published three poems in Ploughshares this spring, and will have poems appearing in the new anthology Black Nature (a collection of nature poems by African American authors) from the University of Georgia Press. Tim read at the Russell Memorial Library with poets Jon Pineda and Dorianne Laux for the Chesapeake Poetry Festival; at Virginia Wesleyan College in April, and also in Boston for the 14th Annual Brookline High School Poetry Festival.
- Craig Stewart published the following articles: "Social cognition and discourse processing goals in the analysis of 'ex-gay' rhetoric" in Discourse & Society, 19, 63-83; and "Conversational argumentation in decision-making: Chinese and U.S. participants in face-to-face and instant messaging interactions" (co-authored with Setlock, L.D. and Fussell, S.R.) in Discourse Processes, 44, 113-139.
Student & Alumni News
Student & Alumni News
Shan-Estelle Brown is currently a 4th year doctoral student in Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. Her research area is medical Anthropology and her dissertation research investigates perceptions of risk and informed decision making regarding carrier testing for sickle cell disease in Guadeloupe, France. She teaches writing-intensive introductory Anthropology classes and work as a tutor at the University Writing Center. She is currently looking at prejudiced language in undergraduate student writing and strategies to help tutors help identify biases in students' papers. Findings in this research were presented, along with her colleague, Mandy Suhr-Sytsma, at the International Writing Centers Association conference in Las Vegas, Nevada in October 2008 and the University of Connecticut Freshman English Conference in March 2009.
After graduation in 2007, Kristen Davis taught Freshman and Sophomore English at Christopher Newport University. She is currently in the doctoral program in literature at West Virginia University, where she also teaches Composition 101 and 102. This summer she is doing an independent study course on Queer Gothic in Fin de Siècle Britain.
Eddie Dowe has two poems in Boiling River: “Burden” and “Dissolve.”
Applied Linguistics student Deborah Edds presented "Experiences with young Spanish as second language learners" at the Congresso Internacional de Estudos Lingüisticos e Literários na Amazonia; April 6-8, 2009. Universidade Federal do Pará. Belem, Pará, Brazil.
Joanna Eleftheriou received a "Shining Star Award" for her exemplary teaching in the previous year. Her nonfiction essay, "The Other Side", will appear in the Crab Orchard Review "Color Wheel" issue this fall.
Free Lunch awarded Christian Gerard its Rosine Offen Memorial Prize for his poem "First Time," which appeared in issue 39 of the magazine. Poetry East, Faultline and Phoebe recently accepted poems by Christian; he also has poems in Waccamaw, the new online journal out of Coastal Carolina University, and Orion magazine. For the second year, Christian was accepted at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference with a scholarship. He will begin the Ph.D. program at the University of Tennessee in the fall.
Norton Girault's story, "You Must Remember This," was published in a little magazine called The Wordstock Ten, which contains the ten finalists in the 2008 Wordstock Short Fiction Competition, judged by Ursula LeGuin. Another story, "Bum's Rush," was ccepted by The Rome Review published by George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Elif Guler is the recipient of the 2009 Sigma Tau Delta (International English Honor Society) Scholarly Paper Award for the paper she presented at the 13th Biennial National Conference of the Rhetoric Society of America in May (Seattle, WA): “Science and Reason in the Public Discourse of Kemalism: A Pentadic Analysis of Ataturk’s Speech on the 10th Anniversary of the Turkish Republic.” Elif also received the 2009 Sigma Tau Delta Regnery runner-up Scholarship. She presented “Choosing to Veil and its Implications for Women’s Identities in Contemporary Turkey: A Communication Theory of Identity Approach” at the 79th Convention of the Southern States Communication Association (Norfolk, VA; 1-5 April 2009) on a panel organized by Craig Stewart, who also presented a paper with Margaret J. Pitts from the Communication Department.
Katherine Jackson nominated English major Meredith Brier Lee for the Kaufman award, and Meredith was one of the ten finalists.
Bob Kunzinger’s (MFA Nonfiction ;04) essay "Sliced Bread" was listed in Best American Essays 2008 as one of the notable essays of 2007.
MFA Nonfiction graduate and English teacher James Lidington was awarded second place for The Agnes L. Braganza Award for Nonfiction on March 28 at Christopher Newport University’s 28th Annual Writer’s Conference. Lidington’s winning piece was “Hallways, Here We Come". Jay teaches British Literature and Journalism at Hampton Roads Academy.
Rania Mahmoud (M.A. English Literature '04) is now working on her Ph.D. at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her dissertation entitled "Mythologies of Revolution: Narratives of Egyptian Selfhood and British Imperialism, 1881-1952" explores the representation of Egypt's resistance to British colonialism. Focusing on Egypt's three revolutions, the first of which brought about the British occupation and the last of which ended it, Rania examines the competing nationalist and imperialist narratives of Egyptian revolutions in British and Egyptian film and literature.
One of Paula McMahon’s stories (MFA Fiction '09) won First Place in the 2009 fiction competition for Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, published by Fairfield University. Paula's story "The One That Got Away" received Honorable Mention in the AWP fiction competition. Go to the AWP website to see Paula representing ODU among the winners. Together with Andrea Nolan (MFA Fiction '09), Paula recently attended the Aspen Summer Words Conference.
Myreen Moore Nicholson (B.A.1962) also earned her graduate degree from ODU. While in school Myreen put her art background and English literature to effective use. Hired as the Norfolk William and Mary Library artist, she processed and recataloged books and set up the ODU archives. Additionally, she was newspaper Copy Editor, did the covers of the Student Directory and the stone lithography frontispiece for the yearbook. In 1969, she had an English minor for her Master's in Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After receiving the Master's, she worked for the downtown Norfolk Public Library system for twenty years, as head of the Model City Program; Art Librarian; and Research Librarian. In her career, she was also a certified English, art and media teacher, department head in a business college, and a hearing reporter for the City Planning Commission. She taught college English in South Carolina and for the Navy in Norfolk. She got her second master's with an English and art emphasis through the ODU Department of Humanities. A Civil Rights activist at ODU,she was one of only four Caucasians to attend the scheduled speech of Martin Luther King at the Norfolk arena. For a short time, she edited a Civil Rights newsletter. She gave a thank-you party at her home for the students who came here from Oregon the year of Mississippi Burning to register voters, as local residents were afraid to do so. A Poet-in-the-Schools for Virginia Beach, she has been included in more than a dozen books, and served as a top officer for the Poetry Society of Virginia for ten years. Serving on the staff of MidAtlantic Antiques Magazine for ten years, she also published an article on ODU's' first Black professor, artist Alex B. Jackson, in The Maine Antique Digest (June 2007). This year, she is mentioned again in the Marquis' Who's Who in America, considered the most legitimate reference biography. It is the only biography that was placed in the 2000 time capsule in D.C. Currently an art appraiser, Myreen uses her English background to write reports.
“Edges,” a nonfiction essay by Andrea Nolan (MFA Fiction '09) appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of Potomac Review.
A story by Eric Ramseier (2nd year MFA fiction) will appear in an upcoming issue of Stone’s Throw Magazine.
Jesse Scaccia (3rd year MFA Nonfiction) launched Teacher Revised, an education blog, this spring. The blog is a mixture of reflections on teaching practices and musings on all things ed-related: "real talk from real teachers".
Potomac Review published "Come In, La Bamba", a nonfiction essay by Anne Wilson (MFA Fiction, '04) in its Spring 2009 issue. Wilson’s poem “Warning to the Hunter” appeared in the June 2009 issue of Gargoyle.
“Save the Bay, Eat a Ray,” BC Wilson’s story on eating Chesapeake Rays, will appear in the summer edition of Edible Chesapeake magazine.
Seth Sawyers, an MFA Nonfiction graduate, just won a Writers at Work Fellowship.
Dana Staves (3rd year Fiction) won the graduate division of the ODU Women's Studies Essay Contest for her paper, "'Girls Like Us': Queering Fatness in Hairspray". Dana also received a competitive internship at the Provincetown Arts Center this summer.
Dana Staves (3rd year Fiction) won the graduate division of the ODU Women's Studies Essay Contest for her paper, "'Girls Like Us': Queering Fatness in Hairspray". Dana also received a competitive internship at the Provincetown Arts Center this summer.
Two recent graduates of the MA in Applied Linguistics have been accepted with funding into PhD programs in linguistics for the fall: Wan Vajrabhaya at the University of Oregon; and Randi Tucker at the University at Buffalo SUNY.
Mary Westbrook (3rd year MFA Fiction) will be attending the highly competitive Breadloaf Writers' Conference this summer.
Mary Westbrook (3rd year MFA Fiction) will be attending the highly competitive Breadloaf Writers' Conference this summer.
Thomas Andrew Yuill’s book of poems, Medicine Show, has been accepted by the University of Chicago Press.
