Check out the interview published by VCU News with MFA Faculty fiction writer, Clint McCown, about his latest novel, Haints.
The circumstances of the novel are also the circumstances of my birth. A real-life tornado destroyed my hometown of Fayetteville, Tennessee on leap day, 1952, one week before I was born. Miraculously, only one person was killed . . .
Clint McCown
http://news.vcu.edu/news/QandA_with_Clint_McCown_author_of_Haints
Cristina Stanciu is the recipient of a VCU Center for Teaching Excellence Small Grant Program award for Digital ethnic literary history at VCU: The Classroom Archive Project (CAP).
Transforming Scripture: An Interview with Katherine Clay Bassard is now available as streaming audio at the Things Not Seen website. Things Not Seen: Conversations about Faith and Culture airs on KWAM 990 am Memphis.
The following description of the interview comes from the program’s website
Katherine Clay Bassard appreciates the interpretive opportunities that come from reading the Bible when the pieces don’t quite fit together into a smooth narrative. ”After quite a few years of really studying the Bible and of living with the Bible, as a book, I have come to understand that there are both egalitarian strains in the Bible, and there are more hierarchical power dynamics, and they are laid, in some senses, side by side” . . .
Bassard explores these frictions of reading in the history of African American interpretations of the Bible. Both in the Christianity of ante-bellum slaves, and especially in the growing interpretive voice of African American women writers, these power dynamics of hierarchy and liberation have proved a fertile soil for deep and fruitful theological reflection.
http://www.thingsnotseenradio.com/1215-transforming-scriptures/#.UH8Z-m_A9qE
Just in the nick of time, I’ve learned that Kathy Bassard’s radio broadcast on “With Good Reason” will air
Saturday, Feb 11 on WCVE 88.9 FM at 4:30 p.m. &
Sunday, Feb. 12 at 7 p.m.
Monday, Feb. 13 at 12:30 a.m. on WAMU 88.5 FM.
Kathy will talk about her essay in The King James Bible after 400 Years (Cambridge UP, 2010).
People can also listen online at: http://withgoodreasonradio.org/2012/02/the-magna-carta-online/.
Good going, Kathy– Congratulations. We’ll tune in.
Terry Oggel
Chair, VCU Department of English
Blackbird was the featured journal in Poetry Daily on Thursday, Oct. 20, 2011.
The featured poem was Patty Crane’s translation of Nobel Prize receipient Thomas Tranströmer’s “Som Att Vara Barn” (“Like Being a Child”). This poem, part of Tranströmer’s manuscript Sorgegondolen (Sorrow Gondola) published in Blacbkird v10n1, also is available at Poetry Daily’s archive in Swedish and English.
You’ll find Crane’s entire translation of Sorrow Gondola and the entire manuscript in Swedish in Blackbird v10n1.
Blackbird congratulates Tomas Tranströmer, the recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature.
As poet Jean Valentine notes in her “Letter to Tomas Tranströmer” (Blackbird v10n1)
your poems are receptive, tuned in certainly to the political and historical life grinding and haunting around us, but without an agenda. Motherly and fatherly: ‘Come in, let’s listen together.’ Your voice is both friendly and vulnerable. Nonviolent, holding no one off. Passionate, like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, you are a force for openness. Your silences are like silences in music, like negative space—time notation, notation of depth.
Tomas Tranströmer is the author of nineteen collections of poetry in his native country of Sweden and is widely recognized as one of the country’s leading poets. Patty Crane’s new translation of his work, Sorgegondolen (Sorrow Gondola), appears in the v10n1 issue of Blackbird.
http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v10n1/poetry/transtromer_gondola/transtromer_suite_page.shtml
Late July, the VCU Department of English migrated its English News blog from Moveable Type to Word Press, the platform recently adopted by VCU.
The new address for the English News blog is http://wp.vcu.edu/english
MFA alumn and former Blackbird Associate Editor Tarfia Faizullah’s poem “En Route to Bangladesh, Another Crisis of Faith“ is featured on Poetry Daily for May 28, 2011.
The poem first appeared in The Massachusetts Review.
MFA student Ross Losapio was named the 2011-2012 associate editor for Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts having previously served two semesters interning as a copyeditor. Losapio is the tenth individual named to this position; he will receive and manage all submissions, act as primary contact to contributors, and work with other editors to coordinate content and production tasks, for Blackbird v10n2 and v11n1.
The Public Work of Rhetoric: Citizen-Scholars and Civic Engagement (University of South Carolina Press, 2010), edited by James M. Ackerman and VCU Department of English faculty member David Coogan, has had an immediate influence on scholar-citizens. At the University of Pittsburgh, students have taken the book’s message to heart and, focusing on the sub-title, they have started an initiative to create civic engagement opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students throughout the university.
Coogan’s book emphasizes the role of rhetorical practices in civic and social environments. Its eighteen essays, one of them written by Coogan on Sophists for Social Change, challenge some of the traditional views about rhetoric in academia and public life.
It was about two years ago that we learned that MATX student Lee Bloxom had won a Virginia Foundation for the Humanities grant for her work on oral narratives from Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
Now she has sent us a link to VFH’s notice of her project, Eastern Shore Stories, with clips and photos. Currently, VFH is featuring Lee’s grant project on its website. http://www.virginiafoundation.org/grants/featuredgrant.html
Randy Jones (MFA poetry, 1989) recently completed a slide show featured during Black History Month for the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.
The show presents text and images relating the history of a “reconstruction-era chapel, built after the Civil War in rural Rockingham County” in the community known as Old Athens and later Zenda, Virginia.
In addition to being this show’s creator, Randy is also the contact person for the Virginia Department of Historical Resources for anyone interested in collaborating with DHR on future “Historic Virginia, Site of the Month” slide shows.
More information and Randy Jones’ contact information can be found on the “Sources slide” at the end of the Longs Chapel slide show.
