Nine students from Xi’an International Studies University (XISU) in Xi’an, China have joined our M.A. in English Composition, Applied Linguistics & TESL Concentration and are just starting their third quarter here at CSUSB.  The students were celebrated at a special English department reception on October 25, 2011, with words of welcome from President Albert Karnig, Dean Eri Yasuhara, and Professors Rong Chen and Sunny Hyon. (Click on the photo for a larger image).

The students:

Pan Jing

Shan Wen

Yang Hui

Tong Yao

He Lingjing

Wen Ying

Jiang Ziyi

Zhang Shishi

Zhang Jin

Prof. Sweeney has also organized a monthly reading series for the MFA students, on the first Sunday of each month, upstairs at the Royal Falconer Pub in Redlands. The first event on April 1 will feature the dynamic fiction of Tim Manifesta and Melissa Sonico and the inimitable poetry of Angela Thomson-Brenchley. You can find more details on our events page.

And MFA students Melissa Haklitch, Christopher Shaw, Andre Katkov, Shali Nicholas, Angela Thomson-Brenchley, and Nikia Chaney participated in the CSUSB Research Competition. Both Nikia and Angela were selected to represent us at the Twenty-Sixth Annual CSU Student Research Competition at California State University, Long Beach on May 4 and May 5. Nikia will present “Thump: A Creative Project of Poetry,” and Angela will present “Imprint Split: The Lyric Speaker’s Perception of the World.”

We’re sad to report that we’ll soon be saying goodbye to Kevin Moffett, who is headed to the University of Vermont at Burlington. Prof. Moffett joined the department in 2007; he has served as Fiction Coordinator of the MFA program and helped to shepherd it into being. His latest collection of short stories, Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events has just been published by Harper Perennial. We wish Kevin and Corinna all the best in their new home.

First, congratulations to alumna Judy Holiday (MA ’06) who defended her PhD dissertation at Arizona State University on February 27 and is now “Doc Holiday”!  Her dissertation is entitled Reframing the Problem of Difference: Lillian Smith and Hierarchical Politics of Difference, and her ASU committee consisted of  Maureen Daly Goggin (chair), Elenore Long, and Keith Miller.  We wish all the best to Judy on her newly-minted PhD.

And hearty congratulations also go to alumna Jasmine Lee, who earned her MA last year with a dual concentration in composition and literature.  She has been accepted into the PhD program in English at UC Irvine and awarded the Regent’s Fellowship ,which means five years of  support in the form of tuition remission, teaching stipends, and  fellowship funds, with total support coming to over $150,000. She’s shown here enjoying her first cup of coffee on her first trip to New York.

Still more good news about our alumni:

Congratulations to Robert Jiles, (BA ’09, English)  just finished his MA In Africana Studies at Cornell University, where he had a full fellowship. The title of his completed MA thesis is “Hip-Hop’s Politics of Sexuality: The Language of Black Masculinity & Same Sex Desire.” Robert applied to PhD Programs and so far has interviews at Northwestern for their PhD In Performance Studies and at the University Maryland PhD Program in Gender Studies.

And Katie Rugh, who took English MA Courses as a post-bac, was accepted into the English PhD program at the University of Virginia with a full fellowship and started there in fall 2011. Her main focus is Medieval Literature and she is working as a graduate assistant for the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive.

Another post  is coming soon with faculty news.  Alumni and students, if you have news to share, we’d love to hear it–go ahead and brag–and if you’re still in the area, don’t forget to check our events page.

Former English Department chair Harry Hellenbrand has been named interim President at CSUN, where he has served as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs since 2004 Congratulations to Harry, who’s remembered here with considerable fondness and left us a long-lasting supply of good stories. And here is a link to a video featuring him speaking on “Mapping and Mending the American Mind.”

Jackie Rhodes has two new works: “Queer Rhetoric and the Pleasures of the Archive” at Enculturation), and a companion piece, a 17.5-minute video essay (“Queered”) at Technoculture. A third publication, “Installation, Instantiation, and Performance” just appeared in the inaugural issue of CCC Online. All were co-authored with Jonathan Alexander (UC Irvine).  And she’s sporting a new chapeau, purchased at a street market in Aix-en-Provence where she and spouse Aurora Wolfang are spending the year.

Jim Brown reports that The Los Angeles Diaries will be going into its fourth printing soon, with the new edition including a foreword by Jerry Stahl. The memoir will also be published in France by 13e Note Books this summer, and Brown will be on tour there in early September. And this month marks the release of an anthology he co-edited with novelist Dianna Raab, called Writers on The Edge: 22 Writers Speak About Addiction and Dependency. He also served as a Writer-in-Residence over the winter break at UC Riverside’s Low-Residency M.F.A. Program in Palm Springs.

Faculty and alumni presenting papers and chairing sessions at the 109^th meeting of PAMLA (Pacific Ancient and Modern Languages Association) at Scripps College in Claremont, November 2011 included Jean Arnold, Bruce Golden, Jennifer Keys, Chad Luck, Jessica Lewis Luck, David Marshall, and Frances Suderman, speaking on topics ranging from “Regression in Bringing Up Baby” (Bruce Golden) to “Larry Eigner’s Non-Euclidean Poetics” (Jessica Lewis Luck).

And in addition to contemplating classic screwball comedy, Bruce Golden is back on campus teaching Shakespeare’s comedies and histories, while Peter Schroeder is teaching the history of the English language.

Diane Adams (MA ’11) is now teaching three courses here at CSUSB, Children’s Literature (ENG 320) and two humanities courses. She has two new children’s books forthcoming: I Want to Help will be out in Fall 2012 with PeachTree Publishers and Two Hands to Love You will be out in Spring 2013 with Chronicle Books.

Angela Bullard (BA ’01, MA ’05) completed her PhD at Texas Christian University (TCU) this spring with a specialization in the early modern period. Angela’s dissertation is entitled The Cultivation of Bodily Self-Experience in the English Early Modern Literary Garden.

Chris Claro, (BA’06) was accepted into the MA program in English Literature at California Baptist University with a $5,000 a year institutional scholarship.

Dee Dee Hernandez (BA ’07, MA ’11) will be teaching composition as a part-time instructor at Mt. San Jacinto Community College, at their Menifee Valley campus.

James Ducat (MA ’08) has also been teaching composition at Mt San Jacinto, and tells us “I also continue to teach English full time at Beaumont High School. I am an MFA candidate in creative writing at Antioch University, Los Angeles, and have published poems in Four and Twenty Magazine and Specter Magazine.”

Pazuzu, Ancient Sumerian demon king of evil wind

We’ve managed not to blow away in the epic wind storm Southern California and the always-windy Inland Empire have experienced this week, and want to interrupt the push towards finals week and the end of Fall quarter 2011 to share some great news.

We heartily congratulate Dave Carlson,  who just learned he will be the recipient of an NEH Long Term Award for Faculty.  The grant extends from July 2012-June 2013, with a stipend of $50,000. His grant-winning project is  a book-length manuscript, “The Discourse of Sovereignty in American Indian Print Culture.”

The  book will  provide a critical overview of the various ways that contemporary Indian writers in the United States are imagining their communities as “indigenous nations” through competing discourses of sovereignty.  It will first address the role of an ever-expanding and diversifying Indian print culture in this imaginative process (the creation of an indigenous “public sphere” centrally focused on questions of sovereignty).  Building on this foundation, the balance of the book will consist of Carlson’s own close readings and analyses of a range of contemporary literary and critical texts representing a variety of practical responses to the call for an indigenous-nationalist literature.

As he will demonstrate, owing to the complex history of settler colonialism in the United States and to the still precarious legal and political status of native peoples in this country, native scholars and writers have understandably embraced a variety of definitions of sovereignty and indigenous “nationalism.”  But while this diversity of thought in the present-day discourse of sovereignty in Indian country does appear to have great advantages (allowing indigenous peoples to explore and test a range of strategies for decolonization), Carlson will argue that those apparent advantages are often not being fully capitalized upon.  Indigenous writers engaged in various versions of literary nationalism may find their projects greatly enhanced by better theorizing the ways in which literary forms and imaginative representations of indigenous subjectivity both open up and foreclose specific political possibilities.  Each specific model of indigenousness being deployed in literary nationalist works carries its own political and legal implications.  A failure to fully recognize and account for those implications can lead artists and critics into debilitating contradictions or ideological dead ends.  On the other hand, a full accounting of the inter-penetration of legal and literary models of “nation” will enable indigenous writers and critics to produce a more potent “discourse” of sovereignty.

Carlson joined the English Department in 2001, coming to us with a PhD from Indiana University.  His research and teaching interests include Colonial and Early National American Literature, American Indian Literature, and Science Fiction.  His previous publications include Sovereign Selves: American Indian Autobiography and the Law (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005).

Please invite your students to hear Sandra Alcosser read her wonderful poems in Professor Best’s English 170 class on Monday, November 21 at 5:00 pm in UH 106. Nancy has invited this nationally known poet to share poems from her collection, “Except by Nature.” Seating is limited so please call or email Professor Best if you are inviting your whole class to attend this poetry reading. (909 537-5845 or nbest@csusb.edu)

Sandra Alcosser is the author of Except By Nature (Graywolf Press, 1998), which received the Academy’s 1998 James Laughlin Award and was selected by Eamon Grennan for the 1997 National Poetry Series; Sleeping Inside the Glacier, a collaboration with artist Michele Burgess (1997); and A Fish to Feed All Hunger (1993), which was selected by James Tate to be the Associated Writing Programs Award Series winner in poetry. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Yale Review. She is currently a professor of poetry, fiction, and feminist poetics at San Diego State University.

Nancy Best’s novel, Breath-hold, led her to underwater research and photography on diving expeditions all over the world. It also gave her the opportunity to work with some of the world’s most renowned dolphin researchers and marine biologists. Her underwater photos have been in numerous exhibits, including the upcoming Water Colors, Images from the Deep exhibit at SBVD early next year. She has received a Lovett Merit Award for Fiction and a California Arts Council Residency, and she has also been nominated for Best Emerging American Voices. Besides publishing in local literary magazines, she has a non-fiction piece anthologized by the academic press Camden House in their selection of writings Encountering Disgrace, and she has also edited a book on John Grisham for Greenhaven Press. She will be reading a short excerpt from her novel.

Annie Buckley is an artist and writer and most recently, the author of Psychic Outlaws, a novel published by the Luckman Gallery at Cal State Los Angeles in 2010. The Luckman Gallery also sponsored an exhibition of new works by 19 Los Angeles-based artists inspired by the novel. She is also the author of a book of short stories, Navigating Ghosts, published in 2007 as part of Nothing Moments, an interdisciplinary project in art, literature, and design that included a traveling exhibition and a series of 24 books distributed by Ram Publications. Her newest project, a picture book integrating yoga and ecology, she wrote and illustrated using a fusion of digital and hand-cut photo collage. The Breathing Bridge is due out from Brighter Books of Canada in December 2012.

Stephen Lehigh completed his Ph.D. in British and American Literature in 2011 at the University of Utah, finishing his Dissertation: “Recovering Romantic Theory:  The Unsayable and Illegible in Coleridge and Shelley.”  Recently, he presented a conference paper entitled, “Making Space and Giving Time: Temporality, Calculation, and Poetic Composition in Shelley’s Defense of Poetry.” He teaches literature and creative writing courses at CSUSB and currently edits the student-run literary magazine, Badlands, at the Palm Desert Campus. In his spare time, he tries to write, and he will be reading from his manuscript, Hard Rain.

Paula Priamos’ writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, Orange Coast Magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. An excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, The Shyster’s Daughter (Etruscan Press) was recently published in ZYZZYVA literary magazine. Her memoir will be Etruscan Press’ lead title in Spring 2012, and she will be reading from the chapter titled “The Insanity Defense.”

Jennifer K. Sweeney’s second poetry collection, How to Live on Bread and Music, received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Perugia Press Prize, and was later nominated for the Poets’ Prize. Her first book, Salt Memory, won the Main Street Rag Poetry Award. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Award from Passages North and two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg awards.  Her poems have been translated into Turkish and published widely in literary journals including American Poetry Review and Poetry Daily. She lives in Redlands, CA with her husband, poet Chad Sweeney and their son, Liam.

Corinna Vallianatos’ short story collection, My Escapee, won the 2011 AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press in fall 2012. Her stories have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s, A Public Space, The Gettysburg Review, The Cincinnati Review, Epoch, and elsewhere. She will be reading from her novel-in-progress, tentatively entitled Flock.

A big welcome to her new job to Sunny Hyon, who is taking on the big task of chairing our big department.  Prof. Hyon received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1995, and her B.A from UC San Diego in 1989. She joined the department’s faculty in 1994, and among many other distinctions, served as Graduate Coordinator for our M.A. in English Composition and was awarded the University’s “Golden Apple” award for excellence in teaching in 2007.

Although he’s now stepped down as department chair, Juan Delgado will stay busy serving as both Interim Associate Chair for the next few quarters, and as Director of the MFA program. Pictured with him at our department retreat on September 15 is Prof. David Marshall, earning congratulations for being newly tenured and promoted to associate professor.

Congratulations also go to our own Prof. Kim Costino, who is now director of the Teaching Resource Center (TRC), where we’re sure she’ll do a fantastic job.

And congratulations on their new posts to David Carlson (taking over from Sunny Hyon as Graduate Coordinator of the M.A. program) and new Associate M.A. Grad Coordinators Mary Boland (Composition) and Caroline Vickers (Applied Linguistics and TESL).

More faculty, graduate student, and alumni achievements will  follow very soon–and remember to send us your news to share.