Good News 2016-2017

John (JP) Midkiff was accepted into the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program to study creative nonfiction at Reinhardt University in northern Georgia.

Susan K. Will’s nonfiction short “Coal Dirt” has been accepted for publication in the July issue of Adelaide Literary Magazine.

Sarah Canterbury’s essay “The Books I Never Read” has been accepted for publication in the September issue of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

Kayla Queen Dyer’s nonfiction short “Heavy Fruit” has been accepted for publication in the next issue of So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art.

Dr. Robert Ellison has received a grant from the West Virginia Humanities Council. The grant will bring scholar and writer Marc Saperstein who will participate in the first Sermon Studies conference, giving a keynote address on rabbinic preaching in Nazi Germany.

Marshall Sigma Tau Delta members Katie Norman, Kathryn Thompson, Kayla Queen-Dyer, Lydia Cyrus, Sarah Canterbury, Lauren Mendez, Susan Kay Will, and Amanda Schwartz all attended and presented at the Sigma Tau Delta annual conference (in Louisville, KY). A number of these students presented their papers or creative work, originally prepared for Marshall English Department classes. Two of these students, Kayla Queen-Dyer and Amanda Schwartz, were awarded Isabel Sparks President’s Awards for  best presentations by active student and alumni members at the Sigma Tau Delta International Convention. Kayla won first place for her creative nonfiction piece “A Field of Queens” (written for ENG 379 with Dr. Joel Peckham), and Amanda won third place for her creative nonfiction piece “Photogenic Ovaries” (written for ENG 493 with Dr. Rachael Peckham).

Visiting Assistant Professor Dreama Pritt‘s proposal was accepted for a chapter in the book Teaching the Whedonverses.

Visiting Assistant Professor Forrest Roth will be on the Creative Writing: Prose panel at the MMLA Conference in Cincinnati in November. The panel, led by Robert Miltner at Kent State, will focus on flash fiction, prose poetry and hybrid forms.

Visiting Assistant Professor Cody Lumpkin‘s poem “Heavy Winter Coat” has been published in RHINO. His poem “Jellyfish” has been accepted for publication by Tar River Poetry.

Visiting Assistant Professor Sarah Chavez received the 2017 Faculty Women of Color Award in recognition of her promotion of multicultural understanding and gender equality at Marshall and in the greater Huntington community.

Professor John Van Kirk‘s short story “Bear Country Blues” appears in Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods, an anthology of fiction and poetry by West Virginia writers, published by WVU’s Vandalia Press. The story was first published electronically in Best Short Stories from the Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2015.

Assistant Professor Eric Smith’s review of Christopher Bakken’s poetry collection Eternity & Oranges is a featured review in the most recent issue of Pleiades Book Review (14.1).

Assistant Professor Hilary Brewster has been accepted to the 2017 Women in Comedy Festival in Boston, under the genre “storytelling.” She’ll be performing the piece she wrote for Marshall’s Monologues event last year.

Visiting Assistant Professor Sabrina Jones’s article “Language is Power: Personal, Cultural, and Political Empowerment in the College Composition Classroom” will be published in the Spring 2017 issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Literacy Innovation.

Sermon Studies, the online peer-reviewed journal edited by Dr. Robert Ellison, has published its first article and held a launch party in the Drinko Atrium, Wednesday, March 8.

Lauren Tussey (MA, 2015) has been chosen as a participant in Emerge Kentucky 2017. Emerge Kentucky is a non-profit organization that has trained and recruited 140 Democratic women to run for public office since its founding in 2009.

Visiting Assistant Professor Rachel Rinehart has been selected by Peter Everwine as the winner of the 2016 Philip Levine Prize, which is sponsored by Fresno State University and comes with a $2000 honorarium. Her poetry collection The Church in the Plains will be published by Anhinga Press.

Dr. Hilary Brewster’s essay “Traveling int he Time of Trump” will appear in Guide to Kulchur Issue #9.

Dr. Allison Carey’s book manuscript, Doubly Erased: LGBTQ Literature in Appalachia is under contract with West Virginia University Press.

Professor John Young has an essay on Passing in the MLA Approaches to Teaching volume on Nella Larsen, and Dr. Young’s book on Tim O’Brien’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center, How to Revise a True War Story, is due out from the University of Iowa Press in January 2017.

Visiting Assistant Professor Margaret Sullivan’s article “To See My Home Before I Die: The Trip to Bountiful, Memento Mori, and the Experience of Death” has been accepted for publication by the Journal of Religion and Film.  It will be published in their April 2017 issue.

Dr. Jana Tigchelaar‘s review of Archives of Desire: The Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism, by J. Samaine Lockwood appears in the Fall 2016 issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature.

Dr. Mary Moore, who retired from Marshall last year, has won the 2016 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize for her poetry manuscript, Flicker. It is her second full-length collection.

Dr. Rachael Peckham‘s essay, “In Patches: Of Fog and Flying” won the Special Issue Feature Award from Crab Orchard Review, which comes with a monetary prize and publication in the magazine. Dr. Peckham’s summer research project, an article called “‘Welcome to Hell’: Writing Parents, Parenting Writers,” has been accepted at Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, and will be featured in their special 10th anniversary issue.

Instructor Nathan Rucker’s short story, “Rashomon,” appears in the most recent issue of Crack The Spine.

Fatmawati Akhmad, a rising Graduate Assistant in our MA program, has been invited to attend a Fulbright Enrichment Seminar in Atlanta on the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. The seminar is hosted by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) as part of its flagship Fulbright Program.

Visiting Assistant Professor Kristin Steele presented “Hidin’ in the Heels: Invisible Disability, Femme Queerness, and Code-Switching in Appalachia.” on the “Women in Literature” panel at MMLA.

Dr. Kristen Lillvis presented “The Not-So-Alien Experience: Using Science Fiction to Teach about Race” at MMLA. Her co-edited collection, Community Boundaries and Border Crossings: Critical Essays on Ethnic Women Writers, is set to be available Dec. 15.

Visiting Assistant Professor Dr. Daniel Lewis recently presented on two panels at the Midwest Modern Language Association conference. The panels were: “Two Nations Which Ought to Love Each Other”: Trollope, Canada, America, and Masculinity and Porous Borders and Leaky Bodies in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors Trilogy.

Visiting Assistant Professor Rachel Rinehart has had three poems accepted by Prairie Schooner: “Wherever the Carcass,” “Augury,” and “After Easter, 1865.”

Instructor Dreama Pritt has been named Assistant Dean of the Governor’s School for the Arts to be held at MU in June 2017.

Congratulations to Hannah Leport (BA – Creative Writing, 2014), who has been accepted into the Marshall University Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine, and will enter the program in Fall 2017. According to Hannah, “I truly am thankful for my educational background in English, because I not only stood out as an applicant, but also have communication skills that will allow me to build a great foundation with patients as a medical student, and later, physician. I also want to say thank you to Dr. Peckham. She so kindly wrote a letter of recommendation on my behalf, and I am truly grateful for her support.”

Dr. Joel Peckham’s creative nonfiction work Body Memory will be released next month by New Rivers Press. Joel also two poems forthcoming in The MacGuffin and will be the featured author in the spring issue of Jelly Bucket, Eastern Kentucky’s national literary journal.

Four English faculty have been nominated for teaching awards. Dr. Hilary Brewster has been nominated for the Pickens-Queen Teaching Award, Dr. Kelli Prejean and Professor John Van Kirk have been nominated for the Reynolds Teaching Award, and Dr. John Young for the Hedrick Teaching Award.

Joan Allen, award-winning actor, read Visiting Assistant Professor Daniel O’Malley’s story “Bridge” at an NPR event in New York on October 4, to honor The Best American Short Stories of 2016.

Dr. Allison Carey recently published an essay, “Reading on the (Home) Front: Teaching Soldiers’ Dime Novels,” in the latest volume of the Modern Language Association’s Options for Teaching series of books: Teaching the Literatures of the American Civil War (2016), edited by Colleen Glenney Boggs.

Dr. Rachael Peckham‘s essay, “The Aviatrix: A Study” won the Orison Books Anthology Award in Non-Fiction, and her prose poem “The Flock” was selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the 2016 1/2K Prize winner from Indiana Review.

Jessica DeLong (MU graduate student) presented “Pocahontas Sings Postcolonialism” at the Children’s Literature Association 43rd Annual Conference, held in Columbus, OH, June 2016.

Erica Law (M.A. 2015, PhD candidate at Ohio State University) presented “Pocahontas (1995): An Examination of Orientalism and Post-Colonialism” at the Children’s Literature Association 43rd Annual Conference, held in Columbus, OH, June 2016.

Dr. Walter Squire presented “The Grotesque Body in Animated Children’s Television” at the Children’s Literature Association 43rd Annual Conference, held in Columbus, OH, June 2016.

Instructor Wendi Kozma‘s story “Rain’s Coming” appears in the latest issue of Flash Fiction Magazine.

Visiting Assistant Professor Dr. Forrest Roth‘s novel Gary Oldman Is A Building You Must Walk Through, which was a semi-finalist for the 2015 Noemi Press Book Contest in Fiction, will be forthcoming from What Books Press in Fall 2017.

Dr. Kristen Lillvis‘s book Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination will be published by the University of Georgia Press in 2017.

Three Marshall University English department alumni–Sabrina Jones (B.A., 2004; M.A., 2010), Steven Smith (M.A., 2015), and Nathan Rucker (M.A., 2016) presented at the 14th International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities. For more information about their presentations, click here.

Katie Brogan (MA, 2016) published “The Librarian and the Necromancer” (as Kathleen Brogan) in the most recent issue of Chantwood Magazine.

Visiting Assistant Professor Sarah A. Chavez’s essay “The Female Body at the Front of the Room” recently appeared on the website for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.

Visiting Assistant Professor Cody Lumpkin is the featured poet in the most recent issue of Grand Central Review.

Amber Wright (MA, 2016) has an essay, “Rooted,” forthcoming in the Anthology of Appalachian Ecocriticism and Nature Writing, forthcoming in 2017.

Dr. Timothy Burbery, Dr. Robert Ellison, Dr. Jill Treftz, Dr. Jana Tigchelaar, Dr. Rachael Peckham, Dr. Joel Peckham, and Prof. Eric Smith have all been selected for summer research awards from the College of Liberal Arts.

Dr. Sarah Chavez will pilot a new summer continuing education class entitled “What the Literati Read” starting this June. More information is available here, or by calling 304.636.2330.

Steven Smith (M.A. 2015) will enter the PhD program in English at North Carolina State University.

Dr. Jane Hill received the Women of Marshall award for administrators from the Women’s Studies program.

Current English major Ally Lawhorn has an essay forthcoming in Thoreau’s Rooster.

Visiting Assistant Professor Brooks Rexroat was recently named a Fulbright Scholar to Russia. More information about Professor Rexroat and this opportunity can be found here.

Daniel Lassell (M.A. 2013) has a poem, “Hospice,” in the new issue of WOLVES magazine.

Hannah Kittle’s (M. A. 2016) braided essay “Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down” was accepted for publication at Lalitamba: a Journal of International Writings for Liberation.

Undergraduate English Major Ginger Jackson has won the Editor’s Prize at the undergraduate writing journal Thoreau’s Rooster for her essay “Notes Surrounding My Mother,” judged by Bill Roorbach.

Four English Department colleagues brought home a combined six awards at this year’s General Faculty Meeting. Dr. David Hatfield received the Faculty Distinguished Service Award, Dr. Carrie Oeding received the Pickens-Queen Teaching Award, Instructor Anna Rollins received the Council of Chairs Excellence in Teaching Award, Dr. Kristen Lillvis and Anna Rollins (with Mitchell Sharman) received the Hedrick Program Grant for Teaching Innovation, Dr. Kateryna Schray received the Hedrick Faculty Teaching Fellow Award, and Dr. Kristen Lillvis received the John & Frances Rucker Graduate Advisor of the Year Award.

On Thursday, April 21st and Friday, April 22nd, a number of English majors presented original critical and creative work at the MU College of Liberal Arts 16th Annual Research and Creativity Conference. Students from the English Department presented on a number of panels, including: Writing Voice, Grief, Child and the Classroom, featuring presentations by Donna DeRosa, Lydia A. Cyrus, Hailey Hughes, and Stephanie Trupo. Faith, Magic, and Motherhood: Examinations in Popular Culture, featuring presentations by Joshua Knight, Hailey Bibbee, and Alexa Antill. Hybrid Texts: Analysis and Creation, featuring presentations by Angelina Mingo and Hailey Hughes.

Assistant Professor Walter Squire’s article “Chalk: Overwriting the Savior Narrative” appears in Exploring Teachers in Fiction and Film: Saviors, Scapegoats and Schoolmarms, edited by Melanie Scoffner and published by Routledge.

Current students Hailey Hughes, Ginger Jackson, and Amanda Schwartz each have essays forthcoming in Thoreau’s Rooster. These three essays have also been named finalists for the journal’s grand prize in creative non-fiction, judged by Bill Roorbach.

Andrea Fekete, a Marshall alum and former instructor in the Department, has been named the 2016 Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow for residency at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, fully funded by the MAAF.

Assistant Professor Jana Tigchelaar served as the Editorial Advisor for Layman Poupard Publishing’s series Short Story Criticism. Dr. Tigchelaar’s entry on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “A New England Nun” includes an annotated bibliography, selected secondary sources, and a biography of Freeman. 

Visiting Assistant Professor Daniel O’Malley‘s story “Bridge,” which appeared originally in Alaska Quarterly Review, was selected by Junot Diaz for inclusion in the Best American Short Stories of 2016 anthology.

Dr. Kristen Lillvis has won the John & Frances Rucker Graduate Advisor Award.

Instructor Anna Rollins has won an award for the contributions of contingent faculty.

Dr. Carrie Oeding is the winner of this year’s Pickens-Queen Award for outstanding contributions at a teacher, writer, and scholar.

Dr. Kristen Lillvis and Instructor Anna Rollins (along with Dr. Mitch Scharman from Geology) have been named winners of a Hedrick Program Grant for Teaching Innovation for next year to continue their research into the use of rubrics and prompts to improve science writing.

Visiting Assistant Professor Brooks Rexroat‘s story “All That Water” will appear in ‘Everywhere Stories Vol. II: Short Fiction from a Small Planet’, an anthology forthcoming from Press 53.

Happy Publication Day! Dr. Tony Viola‘s novel, The Art of Death, is now available for purchase.

Visiting Assistant Professor Sarah Chavez is featured in the Spotlight Series at The The Poetry. You can also read an interview with Sarah here.

Instructor Abby Daniel will present at two conferences in March 2016. Abby will present “Power Shifted through the Maternal Monstrous and Powerful Blood of the Dragon: An Examination of Daenerys Targaryen’s Subversion of Political Roles in Westeros” at the American Comparative Literature Association 2016 National Conference, Harvard University and “The Stunted Power Dynamics of the Beloved Other: An Exploration of Tyrion’s Lannister’s Subversion of Othering and Chivalric Honor” at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association 2016 National Conference in Seattle. 

Cody Huffman, an undergraduate student at Marshall, had his story “Absent Taiga” accepted for publication by Water Soup, a print and online literary journal that publishes the work of college students.

Three English Department faculty members—Assistant Professor Kristen Lillvis, Instructor David Robinson, and Assistant Professor Walter Squire—conducted a round table session titled “Teaching Difficult Topics through Octavia Butler’s Texts” at the inaugural Octavia E. Butler Conference, which took place at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, Feb. 26-28.

Dr. Tony Viola‘s novel The Art of Death is forthcoming from Midnight Frost Books.

Visiting Assistant Professor Brooks Rexroat‘s debut novel, Pine Gap, is forthcoming from Peasantry Press.

Heather Ward (MA, 2016) will present a portion of her thesis at the Charlotte Brontë: A Bicentennial Celebration of her Life and Works Conference in Hampshire, England in May.

Steven Smith’s article “Animal Agribusiness and the Pre/Posthuman Condition” has been accepted for publication by The International Journal of the Humanities: Annual Review.

Dr. Timothy J. Burbery has been invited to contribute a chapter on ecocriticism and the Bible to the Oxford University Press Handbook on The Bible and Ecology.

Tanya Bomsta’s (MA, 2013) essay “The Archaeologists” is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, and her essay “Sanitary Engineering” is forthcoming in Pleiades. Her essay “Erosion” was recently listed as a Notable in Best American Essays 2015.

Visiting Assistant Professor Forrest Roth has a new short story, “A Bad Vase Does Not Break,” in The Stockholm Review of Literature.

Assistant Professor Joel Peckham has a new poem, “Storage,” in the most recent issue of The Southern Review.

Amanda Rivera (BA English/Classics) has been accepted into the post-baccalaureate program in classics at William & Mary.

Mitchell Lilly‘s “Edgar Allan Poe’s The (Unnatural) Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” appeared in Poe Studies, and his article “Trauma, Memory, and Imagination in Paul Hornschemeier’s Mother, Come Home” is forthcoming from ImageText: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies.

Jamie Weaver’s (MA, 2011) poetry collection, Hard Rain, Hard Wind, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2016.

Visiting Assistant Professor Sarah A. Chavez‘s first full-length poetry collection, Hands That Break & Scar is forthcoming from Sundress Publications.

Current MA candidate Jess DeLong will present “Pocahontas Sings Post-Colonialism” at the 43rd Annual International Conference of the Children’s Literature Association in June 2016.

Rajia Hassib’s (MA, 2012) essay, “The Pain-Streaked Optimism of an American Muslim” appeared in The New Yorker in December.

Dr. John Young‘s book, How to Revise a True War Story: Tim O’Brien’s Processes of Textual Production has been accepted for publication by the University of Iowa Press in the New American Canon series in Contemporary Literature and Culture.

Dr. Robert Ellison, Director of the Marshall University Center for Sermon Studies, has launched Sermon Studies, a new scholarly journal housed in the Center. The journal is currently accepting manuscripts for review.

Assistant Professor Joel Peckham will publish two books in 2016: a new collection of essays, Body Memory from New Rivers Press, and a scholarly monograph, Outraged and Amazed: William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! from Cambridge Scholars.