UWM english news

Winter 2013

Wed, 08 May 2013 10:07:23 -0500

Winter 2013:

We begin 2013 with our first redesign in decades. Take a look, and read Ann Fabian on the sad life of pioneering herpetologist Mary Cynthia Dickerson and Zhanna Vaynberg on growing up between cultures, along with fiction by Cody Peace Adams, Kim Adrian, Morris Collins, Jen Fawkes, Stephanie Friedman, and William Kelly Woolfitt; a review of Witold Gombrowicz by Piotr Florczak; and poetry by Marianne Boruch. From the Desert Wars,â is a special section of startling and deeply felt poetry written by American soldiers fresh from Iraq and Afghanistan,âtrying to make sense of things,â including work by Benjamin Busch, Clint Garner, Bruce Lack, Hugh Martin, and Patrick Whalen.

Congrats to alum Zhanna Vaynberg, who has six essays in the new MQR!

Announcing the student project showcase for Cultures and...

Wed, 08 May 2013 10:06:30 -0500

Announcing the student project showcase for Cultures and Communities core course Art 150, “Multicultural America”!

Many of CC’s core courses feature innovative opportunities for students to complete projects through which they reflect on the combination of community engagement, academic study, and critical self-exploration that make the course unique. Art 150 students use a variety of media for their projects, which will be on view May 14 in a showcase at the Library Learning Commons classroom A. Stop by!

Composition Forum tomorrow!

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:00:44 -0500

Composition Forum tomorrow!

Alumnus Chris Fink to read from his wonderful debut fiction,...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Alumnus Chris Fink to read from his wonderful debut fiction, FARMER’S ALMANAC, Friday, April 26!

From the Boswell Books site:

Chris Fink, author of Farmer’s Almanac: A Work of Fiction
Friday April 26, at 7:00 pm

“Farmer’s Almanac is one of the most evocative collections I’ve read on the limitations and hard pleasures of small-town rural life, and manual labor. Chris Fink writes beautifully about characters who, when set upon by the limitations of where they live, adapt, and then discover that every so often, as a reward, the world will open up to them.”—Jim Shepard, author of You Think That’s Bad

In Chris Fink’s debut work of fiction, America’s rural core is cracked open to reveal moments of stark beauty and cruelty. Farmer’s Almanac—a new Midwestern Gothic—is an imaginary handbook for rural living, as timeless and essential as its namesake. But this is no American pastoral. Fink’s vision is more Orwell than Rockwell. Not since Winesburg, Ohio has a book so thoroughly plumbed the Midwestern character. A despairing farmer milks a dead cow, a baseball phenom chooses between the diamond and the dairy barn, and in the back of the school bus, a young girl fights back against her tormentors. Farmer’s Almanac reports the news from mythical Odette County, Wisconsin, where the milk prices keep falling, and the forecast is not good.

About the Author: Chris Fink is a professor at Beloit College in Wisconsin,where he teaches literature, creative writing, and journalism. He is the editor of the Beloit Fiction Journal.

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For more, see this excellent interview with the author himself…

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, a lecture by Dr. Jeanne Theoharis

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 15:33:30 -0500

Please join us for The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, a lecture by Dr. Jeanne Theoharis, author of the newly released biography from Beacon Press

Date: Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Time: 3:00-3:50 p.m.
Place: Englemann Hall, Room 105, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2033 East Hartford Ave., Milwaukee, WI

Sponsored by The American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin and the following UWM departments or programs: Cultures and Communities, Women’s Studies, History, Africology, English and the Student Union Programming and Union Socio-Cultural Programming.

When Rosa Parks died in 2005, she became the first woman and second African American to lie in honor in the Capitol rotunda, where forty thousand Americans paid tribute to her passing. Yet, argues professor Jeanne Theoharis, Parks’s iconization by a nation eager to place the civil rights movement firmly in the past, has reduced her contributions to a single act on a bus, rather than a lifetime of political service. “Theoharis details Parks as a radical, independent, careful and lifelong activist who has been unfairly frozen in a single time and place: 1955 Montgomery. [She] liberates Parks from this singular moment and finally asks the questions that previous journalists and scholars seemed insufficiently curious to ask. And the answers will surprise readers,” writes Melissa Harris-Perry, Host of MSNBC’s “Melissa Harris-Perry.”

Jeanne Theoharis is professor of political science at Brooklyn College of CUNY. She received her AB in Afro-American studies from Harvard College and a PhD in American culture from the University of Michigan. She is the author or coauthor of six books and numerous articles on the black freedom struggle and the contemporary politics of race in the United States.

Prof. Barrett Kalter wins 2013 Research in the Humanities Award

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 15:22:00 -0500

Specifically, Prof. Kalter was honored for his book, “Modern Antiques”; the award will be presented in the fall here on campus.

The award itself, in the words of the Graduate School, “recognizes a publication that serves as testimony to the author’s comprehensive grasp of the subject(s) of inquiry and research and, in turn, outstanding scholarship. The faculty member will have demonstrated outstanding research in the Humanities and will have made substantive contributions to humanistic thought through a monograph or other scholarly work published during the two years prior to the award year. In each odd-numbered year, the Graduate School solicits nominations of Humanities faculty members in the Departments of Africology; Art History; Communication, English; Foreign Languages and Literature; French, Italian, and Comparative Literature; Linguistics; History; Philosophy; Spanish and Portuguese for the award.”

Congratulations, Prof. Kalter!

UWM Women’s Studies Program Feminist Lecture Series...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:44 -0500

UWM Women’s Studies Program Feminist Lecture Series Presents:
Evelyn Alsultany
“Arabs and Muslims in the Media after 9/11: Patriotic Arab Americans, Oppressed Muslim Women and Sympathetic Feelings”
Friday, April 19, 2013
1:30pm – 3pm
Greene Hall

Evelyn Alsultany is an Associate Professor in the American Culture Program at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 (2012) and co-editor of two books, Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging (2011) and Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora (2013). Professor Alsultany is guest curator of the Arab American National Museum’s online exhibit, Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes.
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This talk is part of the UWM Arab and American: Literature/Media/Gender/Cultural Politics lecture series (English, Women’s Studies, Cultures and Communities, Center for 21st Century Studies, History, Comparative Ethnic Studies, Geography, Comparative Literature) and sponsored by the UWM Women’s Studies Program, the William F. Vilas Trust Fund, and UWM Department of Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies. This event is free and open to the public.

For more information contact the Women’s Studies Program at 229-5918.

CCR's Spring Contributor Spotlight

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:44 -0500

Friday, April 19, 7pm
Greene Hall

We’ll have two awesome readers, and there will be sneak peek readings of some of our favorite poems from the upcoming issue. The bios of our readers are posted below, in case they are useful:

RICHIE HOFMANN is a 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellow and an MFA student in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. His poems appear or are forthcoming in cream city review, Ploughshares, the New Republic, Poetry, and the New Yorker. His poetic sequence, “Old World Elegy,” winner of the Memorious Art Song Contest, in a setting by composer Brian Baxter, will premiere at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago in May 2013.

GREG WRENN’S first book of poems, Centaur, was selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2013 Brittingham Prize and was published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

Born and raised in northeast Florida, Wrenn is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and a recipient of the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America as well as the Margaret Bridgman Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His work has appeared in New England Review, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. A graduate of Harvard University and Washington University in St. Louis, he is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.

Tutors Research: Within Writing Centers and Beyond

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:20:01 -0500

Wednesday, April 17, 4:30-6:30 pm Curtin 175
UW-Milwaukee & Marquette University’s Writing Center Tutors present, “Tutors Research: Within Writing Centers and Beyond”

Outstanding Writing Center tutors (including English grad student Amy Zandler) will discuss their recent work, nationally recognized at the Conference on College Composition and the Nat’l Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing. Sponsored by UWM’s Writing Center and the Milwaukee Writing Center Consortium.

Contact Margie Mika for more info. (mmika@uwm.edu)

Dan Schultz, author of Dead Run at Boswell Books tonight!

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 12:01:21 -0500

(7p @ Boswell Books)

Evoking Jon Krakauer, Dead Run is the extraordinary true story of desperado survivalists, a brutal murder, and vigilante justice set against the harsh backdrop of the Colorado wilderness.

On a sunny May morning in 1998 in Cortez, Colorado, three desperados in a stolen truck opened fire on the town cop, shooting him twenty times; then they blasted their way past dozens of police cars and disappeared into 10,000 square miles of the harshest wilderness terrain on the North American continent. Self-trained survivalists, the outlaws eluded the most sophisticated law enforcement technology on the planet and a pursuit force that represented more than seventy-five local, state, and federal police agencies with dozens of swat teams, U.S. Army Special Forces, and more than five hundred officers from across the country. Dead Run is the first in-depth account of this sensational case, replete with overbearing local sheriffs, Native American trackers, posses on horseback, suspicion of vigilante justice and police cover-ups, and the blunders of the nation’s most exalted crime-fighters pursuing outlaws into territory in which only they could survive.

About the Author: Dan Schultz is an award-winning writer and journalist. He received his M.A. in journalism from the University of Minnesota and worked as a reporter and feature writer for daily newspapers in Minnesota and Oregon, covering crime stories before he began writing for magazines and television. After living in Aspen, Colorado, for several years, he and his wife, Lynda, now split their time between their Chicago home and the Colorado mountains.

MONDAY AND TUESDAY! 2nd Annual Literature and Cultural Theory Lecture: Frances Ferguson

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 21:12:53 -0500

Each year Plan A invites one lecturer to speak at UWM. Don’t miss out on the exciting events planned for the month of April featuring this distinguished and accomplished guest. All are welcome to attend.

Frances Ferguson teaches at the University of Chicago. She is the Senior Editor of ELH: English Literary History for The Johns Hopkins University Press. Her research interests include the literary field of the eighteenth century and Romanticism as it altered over a period of a hundred years or so (the rise of criticism and reviewing, the changes in the relationship between poetry and the novel); the history of reading and practical criticism; the rise of mass education; the importance of Dissent in educated and educational thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has written three books (Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit, 1977; Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation, 1992; and Pornography, The Theory, 2005) and is currently working on a book-length study of the rise of mass education and how it affected our conception of both individuals and society entitled Designing Education.

Schedule:

Brown bag lunch discussion Monday, April 15 at 2:00 pm in Curtin 939

Background reading: Frances Ferguson, “Writing and Orality around
1800: ‘Speakers,’ ‘Readers,’ and Wordsworth’s ‘The Thorn’”

Available here: http://www4.uwm.edu/c21/pdfs/events/ferguson_writingorality.pdf

Tuesday, April 16, 2 pm, 2nd Annual Literature and Cultural Theory Lecture Curtin Hall 368

“When We All Became Writers (around 1800)”

Abstract: In the late eighteenth century education began to move away from an emphasis on oratory to an emphasis on writing. We tend to associate this shift with an increasing movement away from face-to-face contact and toward the printed page and to think it demanded heightened attention to clarity. It involved those things, but others as well. The lecture will trace some of those others, and will particularly try to explain why rewriting had the prominence it did.

Rebecca Dunham wins Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 10:47:23 -0500

Hot off the presses (actually, the press release):

Milkweed Editions is pleased to announce the winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry

Author Rebecca Dunham of Bayside, WI wins the second annual, regional prize

Dunham’s ‘Glass Armonica’ to be published by Milkweed Editions in December 2013

This second-annual Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry will be awarded to Rebecca Dunham , Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Five finalists were selected by the editors at Milkweed Editions and the winner was chosen by independent judge G.C. Waldrep. The prize consists of $10,000 and publication of the book Glass Armonica.

“Dunham’s searing third collection glows like a magma vent underwater. These exquisitely crafted poems offer a prismatic portrait of the female body in the act of being touched: the eponymous vessel, half-filled with water, that sounds when struck. Dido is here, and Elizabeth Bishop; Lavinia Dickinson and Gertrude Stein; Daphne du Maurier and the women treated for ‘hysteria’ by 19th-century male physicians. In the title sequence—a sonnet crown—the speaker recalls being sexually molested at summer camp when she was ten, and the long legacy of silence that particular touch evoked. Here is photography and the speculum, the unpeeling and the razor held to the skin, the braiding of hands and ‘the bandage lovingly applied.’ Dr. Franz Mesmer plays his star female patient ‘like a glass armonica, pull[ing] tone upon / tone from her, for hours.’ ‘Not beauty,’ these lush yet styptic poems remind us, but ‘ravaging need / —its strange and sudden // promise’ flayed, ‘field / of loosestrife threshed to a fine flame.’” — G.C. Waldrep

Rebecca Dunham was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and has earned degrees in English and creative writing from the University of Virginia, Hollins University, George Mason University, and the University of Missouri. She is the author of two collections of poetry, The Miniature Room (2006 T.S. Eliot Prize winner; Truman State University Press), and The Flight Cage (Tupelo Press, 2010). Her chapbook, Fascicle , was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2012. In 2005-6 Dunham was the Jay C. and Ruth Halls Fellow in Poetry at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and in 2007 she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. The title poem for her collection Glass Armonica won the 2012 So to Speak Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared widely in such journals as The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, AGNI, Colorado Review, FIELD, Crab Orchard Review, TriQuarterly , and The Antioch Review. She is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she teaches in the doctoral creative writing program.

This year’s other finalists were Michael Bazzett of Minneapolis, MN; Oliver Bendorf of Madison, WI; Amy McCann of Minneapolis, MN; and Angela Voras-Hills of Madison, WI.

A Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry reception and reading will be held at Open Book ’s Target Performance Hall in Minneapolis upon publication (full details to follow). The reception will be free and open to the public.

Milkweed Editions and the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation announced the establishment of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry in 2011. This annual regional prize awards $10,000 as well as a contract for publication to the author of the winning manuscript.

Finalists for the prize are selected by the editors of Milkweed Editions. The winner is selected by an independent judge. This year, the judge was G.C. Waldrep.

G.C. Waldrep is the author of four full-length collections of poetry, most recently Archicembalo (Tupelo Press, 2009), winner of the Dorset Prize, and Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (BOA Editions, 2011), a collaboration with the poet John Gallaher. He is also the author of four chapbooks, most recently “St. Laszlo Hotel” (Projective Industries, 2010) and “Susquehanna” (Omnidawn, forthcoming 2013). With Ilya Kaminsky he co-edited Homage to Celan (Marick Press, 2011), and with Joshua Corey he co-edited The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta, 2012). His work has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, and the Poetry Society of America. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, PA, where he teaches at Bucknell University, edits the journal West Branch, and serves as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review.

Poets currently residing in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, or Wisconsin are eligible to be considered for the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry. Manuscripts must be complete, previously unpublished, book-length collections. Only hard copy submissions are accepted. There is no entry fee. For complete eligibility and submission guidelines, please visit www.milkweed.org .

Milkweed Editions is one of the nation’s leading independent publishers, with a mission to identify, nurture and publish transformative literature, and build an engaged community around it. The Lindquist & Vennum Foundation was established by the Minneapolis-headquartered law firm of Lindquist & Vennum, PLLP, and is a donor-advised fund of The Minneapolis Foundation . This partnership between Milkweed Editions and the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation celebrates poets for their artistic contributions, and brings outstanding regional writers to a national stage.

2nd Annual Literature and Cultural Theory Lecture: Frances Ferguson

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 18:29:40 -0500

Frances Ferguson teaches at the University of Chicago. She is the Senior Editor of ELH: English Literary History for The Johns Hopkins University Press. Her research interests include the literary field of the eighteenth century and Romanticism as it altered over a period of a hundred years or so (the rise of criticism and reviewing, the changes in the relationship between poetry and the novel); the history of reading and practical criticism; the rise of mass education; the importance of Dissent in educated and educational thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has written three books (Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit, 1977; Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation, 1992; and Pornography, The Theory, 2005) and is currently working on a book-length study of the rise of mass education and how it affected our conception of both individuals and society entitled Designing Education.

Schedule:

Brown bag lunch discussion Monday, April 15 at 2:00 pm in Curtin 939

Background reading: Frances Ferguson, “Writing and Orality around
1800: ‘Speakers,’ ‘Readers,’ and Wordsworth’s ‘The Thorn’”

Available here: http://www4.uwm.edu/c21/pdfs/events/ferguson_writingorality.pdf

Tuesday, April 16, 2 pm, 2nd Annual Literature and Cultural Theory Lecture Curtin Hall 368

“When We All Became Writers (around 1800)”

Tomorrow at noon: T. Scott McMillin will host a brown bag lunch...

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:00:32 -0500

Tomorrow at noon: T. Scott McMillin will host a brown bag lunch to discuss the subject of his recent book Rivers: Flow and Reflection in American Literature (Iowa 2011). McMillin is a professor of 19th C. American literature and environmental studies at Oberlin College, and has written widely on American literature and the environment. The lunch will be Thursday, April 4 12-1:30 in AUP 146 (SARUP Resource Center)

McMillin also will appear the next day at the C21 Contested Ecologies symposium: http://www4.uwm.edu/c21/pages/events/abstracts/13spring/contested.html

For details, contact Manu Sobti (UWM, Architecture) at sobti@uwm.edu

Arthur Sze reading tomorrow night!

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:00:31 -0500

Arthur Sze reading tomorrow night!

The Journal Sentinel does a excellent preview of...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 07:41:30 -0500

The Journal Sentinel does a excellent preview of Thursday’s Boudreaux visitor, Arthur Sze…

Justin Replogle

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 07:04:15 -0500

The department is sad to announce that Emeritus Professor Justin Replogle passed away March 25 in Hawaii after a long battle with Parkinson’s. Prof. Replogle was the author of a well-received book on Auden, a past chair of the department, and, according to Merry Weissner-Hanks’s history, one of the minds behind the founding of the Center for 20th Century Studies. His wife to say that he “suffered for over 20 years with Parkinson’s disease. Having both a strong constitution and a strong will he persevered for many years and continued his love of reading all the while.” A brief Journal-Sentinel obituary is here: http://bit.ly/10rMLqr.

Content as Business Assets talk TONIGHT at 630p in Holton...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 00:00:41 -0500

Content as Business Assets talk TONIGHT at 630p in Holton 180…

ATTENTION MAJORS: PLEASE TAKE NOTE OF THIS RECENT EMAIL FROM...

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 21:37:58 -0500

ATTENTION MAJORS: PLEASE TAKE NOTE OF THIS RECENT EMAIL FROM ENROLLMENT SERVICES. “When you register for classes or make changes to your registration using your online Panther Access to Web Services (PAWS) account, you are making a financial commitment to UWM. Beginning with summer 2013, all students will be required to sign the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Educational Services Credit Agreement before registering for classes. The agreement is available from the Finances section of your PAWS Student Center (Home Page) and can be signed electronically. [SEE GRAPHIC ABOVE FOR HELP.] Even if you have signed a paper copy of the agreement previously, you will need to sign the electronic version before you will be allowed to register for classes. However, you will only need to sign the electronic version of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Educational Services Credit Agreement once unless the terms of the agreement change. Please note, this requirement does not replace the existing minimum payment requirement (fall and spring semesters only) to prevent cancellation of classes. Please direct questions to the Bursar Office, bursar@uwm.edu or 414/229-4914.”

Eat Local::Read Local Kick-off Reading tomorrow night at...

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 00:00:30 -0500

Eat Local::Read Local Kick-off Reading tomorrow night at Trocadero (1758 N Water St.) at 6:30p. Eat up, read up and happy Poetry Month to you all!