Two Alums, Two New Books!

Posted on by

MFA alum, Tarfia Faizullah, was the winner of the Crab Orchard Review 2012 First Book Award competition. The final judge, Chad Davidson, selected Tarfia Faizullah’s collection, Seam.  The collection will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in February 2014.  For more information please see their website.

 

Meanwhile, The University of Akron Press announced that it will publish the poetry manuscript Signaletics by MFA alum Emilia Phillips, as the Editor’s Choice selection from the 2012 Akron Poetry Prize competition. About Signaletics, series editor Mary Biddinger commented, “In this blazing, magnificent debut, Emilia Phillips presents her readers with a body of poetry as complex and exquisite as the human body itself. As the first poem in Signaletics asserts, “Balancing is an act of forgetting,” and this collection’s greatest asset is its measured balance between intimate disclosure and objective discovery. These poems elucidate the power struggles created by language, science, medicine, and the profound longings of the human heart.”

 

Congrats to both Tarfia and Emilia for their prize-winning debuts.

 

15th Annual Levis Reading Prize – Katherine Larson for Radial Symmetry

Posted on by

The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to host a reading by the winner of the 2012 Levis Reading Prize  Katherine Larson (Radial Symmetry).  This annual award is given in the name of the late Larry Levis for the best first or second book of poetry published in the calendar year 2011. Larson will receive an honorarium of $2000 and will be brought to Richmond, all expenses paid, for a reception and public reading on September 20th, 2012 to be held at 8PM at the Grace Street Theater.  This event is free and open to the public.

Katherine Larson is the author of Radial Symmetry (Yale University Press, 2011), selected by Louise Glück as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Larson’s work has appeared in AGNI, Boulevard, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry, and Poetry Northwest, among other publications. She is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. In addition to writing, she has worked as a molecular biologist and field ecologist. She lives in Arizona with her husband and daughter.

This year the Prize Committee would also like to recognize two finalists, Anthony Carelli for his collection Carnations (Princeton University Press, 2011) and Brian Barker for The Black Ocean (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011).

The Levis Reading Prize is presented on behalf of VCU’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. Sponsors include the VCU Department of English, James Branch Cabell Library Associates, VCU Friends of the Library, the VCU Libraries, the VCU Honors College, Barnes & Noble @ VCU, and the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences, with additional funding provided by the family of Larry Levis.

For further information about the Levis Reading Prize, see http://www.has.vcu.edu/eng/resources/levis_prize/levis_prize.htm

VCU English Grad Pens “Classic of Contemporary War Fiction”

Posted on by

The buzz began early for VCU alumnus Kevin Powers’ debut novel, The Yellow Birds, a story of a young soldier’s experience serving in the United States Army during the Iraq War. At the start of 2012, Entertainment Weekly placed the book on its short list of the most promising new novels for the year. 

For more information, see this news report.

VCU Opens Inaugural Lecture Series in Media, Art & Text

Posted on by

Virginia Commonwealth University’s interdisciplinary doctoral program in Media Art & Text (MATX) will inaugurate its annual faculty lecture series, the Cornis-Pope Lecture in Media Art & Text.

The series honors Marcel Cornis-Pope, Ph.D., professor of English, the MATX program’s founding director and an internationally recognized scholar in literary theory and modern and postmodern literature.

The Cornis-Pope Lecture in Media Art & Text will be held on Friday, Sept. 14, at 3 p.m. at the Scott House, 909 W. Franklin St., with a reception to follow. This event is free and open to the public.

This year’s lecture is “Franz Kugler: Becoming an Art Historian ca. 1830″, delivered by the current MATX director, Eric Garberson, Ph.D., associate professor of art history. His research examines the early formation of art history as a modern discipline in Berlin in the first half of the nineteenth century.

MATX is a joint endeavor of the School of the Arts and the School of Mass Communications and the Department of English in the College of Humanities and Sciences. The program emphasizes the historical and theoretical foundations essential to the scholarly study of media, both old and new, broadly defined.

For more information, visit http://www.matx.vcu.edu.

Victorians Institute at VCU 19-20 October

Posted on by

Victorian Mixed Media

Victorians Institute Annual Conference

19-20 October 2012

The conference will feature papers presented by 70+ scholars from around the country and abroad. The plenary speaker will be W. J. T. Mitchell, the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. Professor Mitchell’s talk is titled “Seeing Madness:  Insanity, Media, and Visual Culture.” He is the author most recently of Seeing through Race (Harvard University Press, 2012); earlier books from the University of Chicago Press include What do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (2005) and The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (1998). He is the editor of the journal Critical Inquiry.

The conference will also feature a celebration of the bicentenary of the birth of Robert Browning, with three panels of papers devoted to his work, followed by a plenary address by Herbert F. Tucker, the John C. Coleman Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Professor Tucker’s lecture is titled, “Unsettled Scores: Structure and Play in Browning’s Music Poems.” He is the author of Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790-1910 (Oxford 2008) as well as Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism, and Browning’s Beginnings. He is also editor of the Blackwell Companion to Victorian Literature and (along with Dorothy Mermin) Victorian Literature: 1830-1900.

As part of the conference, “Robert Browning, 1812-1889—The First Modern Media Poet: A Bicentenary Selection from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection” will be on display in VCU Cabell Library Special Collections Department from the start of the conference until the end of the semester.

There will also be a musical and a theatrical performance.

More information can be found at the conference web page.

GSWS Brown Bag Lunches Begin

Posted on by

The Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies announces their monthly fall brown-bag luncheon series. The first lunch will be on September 10th at 12:00 pm in Crenshaw House. Cristina Stanciu, Assistant Professor in the Department of English will discuss “An Indian Woman of Many Hats: Laura Cornelius Kellogg’s Embattled Search for an Indigenous Voice.” Upcoming dates and topics can be found on the CHS blog.

Fall 2012 MATX PhD Class

Posted on by

Byeongwon Ha 
In 1979, Byeongwon was born in Busan, South Korea, one of the largest port cities in the world. He studied Film, Television and Multimedia from Sung Kyun Kwan University, South Korea. After receiving his BFA, he created interactive media and experimental films in the graduate study of Media Art from Yonsei University, South Korea. He also received MFA in Digital+Media from Rhode Island School of Design. Currently, he studies indoor-air-quality-mapping in digital media as a member of the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science.

Francesca Lyn       
Francesca is a recent graduate of the University of Florida’s Digital Worlds Master of Arts in Digital Arts & Sciences. Her thesis explored contemporary mashup culture as well as earlier remix antecedents. Francesca’s undergraduate studies were also at UF. She received a Bachelor’s of  Fine Arts with a concentration in painting in 2008. Her research interests include digital literacies, participatory culture, and social media. She has a very infrequently updated blog www.thelustre.com and Tweets more frequently at @francescalyn. She is originally from South Florida and is excited to finally live somewhere with distinct seasons.

Paul Robertson
Paul Robertson is originally from the Roanoke, Virginia area.  He earned a B.A. in English from VCU before receiving a M.A. in Appalachian Studies and a M.A. in English from Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. As a project librarian, he produced the “So Mote It Ever Be”: The Folksong Heritage of North Carolina’s Northern Blue Ridge Mountains component for Appalachian State’s Documenting Appalachia online collection and coordinated efforts to preserve and digitize obsolete-format audio/visual recordings in the W. L. Eury Appalachian Collection and the Stock Car Racing Collection.  While at Appalachian State, Paul also taught courses in the Appalachian Studies, English, and Women’s Studies departments. For the previous two years, Paul has worked for the Carolina Digital Library and Archives, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,managing the mass-digitization of Southern Historical Collection manuscripts and assisting with the digitization of photographic material from the Southern Folklife Collection and the North Carolina Collection.

Neal Swisher       
Neal Swisher was born and raised in the Philadelphia area and attended Franklin & Marshall college. He studied philosophy and cognitive science, and conducted experimental robotics research. After college, he taught himself Windows support and video editing, managed a media lab at the University of Pennsylvania, and produced dozens of promotional videos for Upenn. For his Masters degree thesis, he edited video and designed a culturally sensitive web interface for an archive of native American oral histories. Recently, he was hired by the VCU School of Education to design and manage a full-service production and editing suite. He has made short films, documentaries, music videos, and performance pieces. He is an avid cyclist, record collector, juggler and pretty tall guy.

Tamara Watkins       
Tamara Watkins earned her BA in English and MA in Communication and Multimedia from Saginaw Valley State University.  Originally from Michigan, she has lived in Virginia for several years. She has worked as an editor and college adjunct. Her interests center primarily on the portrayal of gender in science fiction, fantasy, and horror texts.

Les Harrison Recipient of Fulbright Scholars Grant

Posted on by

Les HarrisonLes Harrison, associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, has been awarded a 2012-13 Fulbright Scholars Grant.  As a Fulbright Scholar, Les will teach one graduate and one undergraduate course in American Literature at Ghent University in Belgium during the Spring 2013 semester.  The Fulbright Program is an international exchange program sponsored by the U.S. Department of State that awards grants to students and scholars based upon academic achievement and leadership potential.  Recipients study or teach abroad, exchanging ideas and researching solutions to international concerns with scholars in other countries.

Please Welcome our Fall 2012 Incoming MFA class

Posted on by

Amanda Bausch  is from Warrenton, Virginia, but lived in Memphis for the past three years to finish her undergrad. She writes songs, plays guitar, and loves singing more than anything. Robert Hass, Mark Strand, Li Young Lee, and Sharon Olds are among her favorite poets.                 

Justin Belote  grew up in New England (New Hampshire during the school year, Rhode Island in the summer).  Went to a small liberal arts school in Illinois called Principia College. Now he lives in Seattle.  He likes to write (obviously), paint, and philosophical conversations. Other than that he doesn’t really know what to say about himself.

Dale Brumfield  has worked as a magazine editor and publisher, technical writer and illustrator in the theme park industry, and as an employee benefits consultant.  In 2009 his semi-autobiographical short story collection “Three Buck Naked Commodes: and 18 More Tales from a Small Town” was released. 2010 saw the publication of his first novel “Remnants: a Novel about God, Insurance and Quality Floorcoverings”, and in 2011 published his eNovels “Trapped Under the Pack-Ice” and “Bad Day at the Amusement Park” for Kindle and Nook. His horror novel “Standers” was released nationally March 31, 2012. He has also had short stories published in the horror anthology “Richmond Macabre” and in Spurt Literary Journal. Dale is an arts features writer, cartoonist and opinion commentator for Richmond’s Style Weekly magazine, and since 2010 has won numerous state and national awards for his Arts cover stories, including “Pulp Treasures” and “The Best Worst Movie you Never Saw”. Dale lives in Doswell, Virginia with his wife Susan and three college-age children, and blogs at Newsfromdoswell.com.

Justin Carmickle’s “roots” are in a three-stoplight Indiana town called Loogootee (pronounced low-go-tee) but he spent his formative years in Bloomington, Indiana. At Indiana University he studied Creative Writing, English, and Comparative Literature. His writing is largely informed by themes that have inflected his own life—family, gender, poverty, and sexuality (especially how the lines between heterosexual and homosexual can be/are blurred). As both a writer and reader he is drawn to writings interested in questioning categorical boundaries of gender and sexuality, as well as the ideology of “male” and “female.” Authors he admires are Andre Dubus, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Julie Hecht, and Richard Yates; also, ones from the traditionally marginalized perspective like James Baldwin, Larry Kramer, and Claude McKay. He believe writers should be omnivorous: open to narrative designs that may be as much inspired by film, music, painting, or dance. He also enjoy film, art, comics, music (rock, folk, jazz), theatre, and cooking. When not writing he is absorbed by the chaos surrounding LGBTQIA rights. His favorite films are Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (considered the first gay film) and (currently) the Italian film The Son’s Room. In other lives, he has worked for two years as an intern for the Indiana Writers’ Conference for which he was the judge for fiction scholarships, as a reader for an undergraduate literary journal, and at the food pantry Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard. Recently he published a story in Louisiana Literature.

Taryn Chesshire  received her BA in Creative Writing from Texas Tech University in 2008. Transient in nature, she spent the last few years living in various mountain towns of Colorado working hospitality jobs for summer and ski resorts. Technically a fiction writer, she’s also interested in creative non-fiction and exploring the grey area between the two genres.

Christian Detisch  was born in Pohang, South Korea and was adopted and raised in Southwestern Pennsylvania. He went to Allegheny College for his undergraduate degree in English with a concentration in Creative Writing and while there was the Senior Managing Editor of the Allegheny Review, a national undergraduate literary magazine. Since graduating he has worked in Meadville, Pennsylvania as an AmeriCorps VISTA with the Housing Authority of the City of Meadville where he coordinates arts-integrated after school programming for kids–and in his spare time he likes running and cooking and the usual distractions.

Leia El-Darwish  has a BA in English Lit./Creative Writing from University of Colorado Denver. In 2011, she was one of six winning poets to have a poem displayed in Northern Virginia’s METRO system’s Moving Words exhibit. Her work has also appeared in Copper Nickel and is forthcoming in Blackbird. In the spring of 2012, she served as a semi-finals judge in Colorado’s Poetry Out Loud competition and a poetry mentor to a high school  student while continuing to serve as managing editor of Copper Nickel.       

Teresa Hudson has lived all of her life in and around Richmond. She received both a BA and Master of Humanities degree from the University of Richmond, and worked for local PBS affiliate WCVE as a producer/director for many years.  She has also worked as a caterer, a professional musician, and a music teacher.  Teresa spends a lot of time with her husband in Russia but also loves traveling to other places.  She also loves rock concerts, beekeeping, gardening, and of course, writing.

Lauren  McCarty received her BA in 2009 from The College of William and Mary with a major in English and a minor in Film Studies.   She currently lives in Midlothian and works full time for Goodwill of Central Virginia as an IT HelpDesk Coordinator (she tells people to reboot their computers a lot—kidding! Sort of!).  She was working on her Masters in English Literature at VCU when she realized she needed to follow her true calling in life, fiction writing.

Lauren Miner is originally from Richmond, Virginia, though she’s tested out a few other cities in her adult life, her favorite being Albuquerque, New Mexico. She got her B.A. in English, with a minor in creative writing, from James Madison University in 2007, and she’s finishing up an M.A. in English research from Virginia Commonwealth University this summer. Lauren has a deep-seated love for both poetry and photography, and she’s writing her master’s thesis about verbal representations of photographic images in the poems of Larry Levis.       

Abby Otte is from Winfield, Kansas (no, she’s never walked the yellow brick road and her dog’s name is Lily, not Toto) and she studied English and Journalism at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. A few of her favorite authors: Amy Bloom, Miranda July, and Rebecca Curtis. Rebecca Curtis changed her life last summer when she read her short story “Hungry Self.” She enjoys cooking the occasional meal with a glass of Middle Sister wine because she is a middle sister and it’s her way of consoling herself. She’s in love with KU basketball and for those of you who don’t know, VCU beat KU in the tournament last year and when she decided to go to VCU there was a serious possibility her family and friends would disown her. She took the risk. Also, Bob Dylan is glorious. And olives are not.   

Matthew Phipps grew up on the Gulf coast of Florida and studied Creative Writing and Spanish Literature at Florida State University in Tallahassee. He spent a Fulbright year in Chile in 2008 and has lived in Portland, Oregon since 2009. He’s interested in translation and in the formal possibilities of the novella.       

Ann Rudy first discovered her love for poetry while growing up on a farm outside of Farmville, Virginia. The works of Whitman and Thoreau in particular inspired her to study creative writing at the University of Virginia. She has had poems published in the Virginia Literary Review and 3.7 Magazine, and has also received an honorable mention for the Poetry Society of Virginia’s 2011 Brodie Herndon Memorial Prize. 

Our Entering MA Class

Posted on by

Lesley Brooks is from Chester, Virginia. She is twenty-two years old and recently graduated from the University of Virginia with a BA in English and in Anthropology. At UVA, Lesley worked as a Resident Advisor for first-year students and as the Head Program Director of Madison House Medical Services. She finds English Literature fascinating, believing that it allows readers to be transported into different eras, different cultures, and into fantasies. This love of the transformative power of the written word and of history led Lesley to her academic love of novels, biographies, and autobiographies. Besides reading and writing, her hobbies include camping, kayaking, painting, and playing the piano.

Joshua Katz is a Richmond native, mostly; he was born in Maine, and the conditions of his parents’ respective employments necessitated a four-year stay in South Florida, but since December of 1995, his permanent residence has been in the West End district just outside the city.  Thus, he guesses that, technically, he might not be a native (if one defines “nativeness” as having spent one’s whole life in one place), but he’s lived here longer than he has lived any place else, so Joshua thinks that comes pretty close to the designation.  After high school, Joshua spent eighteen months as a Film/TV major at Emerson College before transferring back to Richmond, where he received his English BA at the University of Richmond.  Graduation led to a series of odd jobs: a stage hand at UR’s Modlin Center for the Arts; a bank teller at a credit union in Portland, Maine; a closed captioner for the National Captioning Institute, which is located in the historic district of beautiful Chantilly, Virginia (note: Chantilly is not beautiful, nor does it have a historic district, unless strip malls built in the early 1980’s constitute “historic”).  Currently, he serves as the head news editor for Blu-ray.com and writes movie reviews for the Culture Mob Blog.  His hobbies include movies (or film, if you’d prefer), jogging, and American Literature post-1800, with a particular interest in the transformative purposes of literary violence.

Melissa Lawhorn will always consider Richmond, Virginia her home–regardless if one day she decides to settle down again outside of her small city limits. The adventurous spirit within her soul aspires to travel, discover the unknown, and grasp the beauty she has yet to see with her own eyes. After 23 years, the evolution of one’s self has hardly begun, and although Melissa feels she has taken many steps and crossed several bridges in her lifetime, she has found that the train on which she’s aboard is far from its final destination. In December of 2010, when she graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University, she felt she had come to know herself fairly well. However, Ms. Lawhorn is still on the journey of finding exactly who she is and where she’s going.  Nevertheless, there’s no question that she has purposely chosen to seek the path that leads to becoming an educator. At a young age, Melissa knew that one day she would be a teacher. And in time, she also learned of her desire to express her love for one of her greatest passions: the marriage of the mind and paper. In the past year, she has come closer to discovering where her train will end up in the long haul. Starting graduate school this fall will be the fuel needed to keep this train headed in the direction she feels it should be. Melissa is excited for this opportunity because it will complement many great experiences from her past (graduating from high school and college, living in Prague and earning a TEFL certificate, and encompassing a love for the English language) and prepare her for future experiences to come.

Zachary Marson was born in California, only to move to New Jersey when he was four.  After ten years of living the guido life, he moved to Richmond, Virginia.  In 2008, Zach attended VCU as an English Major where he discovered his desire to read everything in modern and contemporary literature’s catalogue. Zach graduated with his BA in May 2012 only to reapply to VCU as a grad student.  He is excited to continue his studies in the fall and even more thrilled to meet his fellow graduate scholars.

Nancy McPherson is living, breathing and walking proof that when George Eliot said “It’s never too late to become what you might have been,” she was right.  At the inception, or very nearly there, of her third expedition through academia, Nancy was irretrievably grabbed by literature.  What had always been an interest soon became an obsession.  The reading of texts, and the resultant writing in response, analysis or criticism of them became an irresistible siren’s call.  But the road to this end had been neither simple nor easy.  She had gone to college at the usually prescribed age because that was the family expectation, even though what she was mostly interested in was ballet.  After a couple of years or so, the ballet siren’s call was becoming increasingly insistent.  So, Nancy became a ballet teacher.  Many years later she found herself in the VCU School of the Arts at night, nibbling away at courses there for three years, and interestingly enough, that was, by now, nearly thirty years ago.  The English Department here has given Nancy the loving support that enabled her, not only to finish her BA, but also to be welcomed into the MA program.

Zoya Mirza grew up in Lahore, Pakistan where she completed an undergraduate honors degree in Humanities and Social Sciences with a focus in Literature in 2010. The nebulous cluster of her research interests includes magical realism, self-conscious fiction, and post-colonial and post-modern literary theory. Zoya is also interested in art, photography, and visual culture. Some of the ideas that inspire her study of literature are the fashioning of narrative voice, the place and value of aesthetic pleasure, and the relationship between visual and literary forms and the cultural traditions that produce and inhabit them. Most simply though, her study is inspired by the joy of luxuriating in language, and the hope to become firmly grounded in the discipline so as to address these nebulous concerns through literature in English, Urdu, and Punjabi.

Kenneth Rebello is originally from Rhode Island but has been in Jacksonville, FL for the past 6 years and graduated from the University of North Florida. VCU’s program caught his eye, and upon visiting campus won his heart. He’s heard great things about Richmond and is looking forward to exploring it more. Kenneth was an English major, with a minor in mass communications theory. He also edited for a literary journal known as Fiction Fix and is known for his creative and analytic editing skills. His passion is words, and he loves to write as much as he loves to read. Kenneth currently owns his own pressure washing business to pay the bills and get him through college. He is a seeded long-distance runner, as it helps him think. That’s just Kenneth compressed. He’s incredibly excited to meet everyone and start the program. He just graduated in December and already misses the stimulation and fulfillment of academia compounded by other sharp minds.

Olivia Sanchez is 24 years old and the oldest of four children.  She is originally from California, but was raised in Spokane, WA.  She enjoys outdoor activities such as snow skiing, hiking and rock climbing. She also enjoys playing volleyball and tennis. Olivia attended Eastern Washington University for her undergrad. Her degree was in English (Literary Studies) and she also had a minor in Government. In the MA program, Olivia want to pursue Literature as her focus.

Justin Torres Wins the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award for “We the Animals”

Posted on by
We the Animals

We the Animals

Justin Torres has won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, which honors an outstanding debut novel published during a calendar year. His winning book, “We the Animals,” is a powerful coming-of-age novel about three brothers growing up amidst the chaotic and destructive love of their working-class parents.

Torres will receive the Award at the VCU Cabell First Novelist Festival at Virginia Commonwealth University, November 8. He was one of three finalists for the prize, now in its eleventh year. The other finalists were Alexi Zentner for “Touch” and Peter Mountford for “A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism.”

Published in August 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, ”We the Animals” is narrated by the youngest sibling in a voice that is both compelling and urgent and prose that is brutally honest and beautifully poetic.  Composed in short, disjointed chapters, the novel swiftly moves through six years in the tumultuous childhood of the three brothers as they claw their way toward adulthood.

“We the Animals” has received critical acclaim. Christopher Isherwood of The New York Times wrote that the novel relates “an affecting story of love, loss and the irreversible trauma that a single event can bring to a family.” In his Esquire review, author Benjamin Percy proclaimed “Torres’s sentences are gymnastic, leaping and twirling, but never fancy for the sake of fancy, always justified by the ferocity and heartbreak and hunger and slap-happy euphoria of these three boys.”

The VCU Cabell First Novelist Award celebrates the VCU MFA in Creative Writing Program’s year-long novel workshop, the first in the nation and one of the few still in existence. The winning author receives a $5,000 cash prize. Travel expenses and lodging are also provided for the author and his or her agent and editor to attend the VCU Cabell First Novelist Festival, a series of events that focus on the creation, publication and promotion of a debut novel.

Co-sponsors of the award and the festival are the VCU Department of English, the VCU MFA Program in Creative Writing, the James Branch Cabell Library Associates, the VCU Friends of the Library, VCU Libraries, the VCU Honors College, Barnes and Noble, and the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences.

English Undergraduate News

Posted on by

Some news from recent undergraduates…

Rising undergrad senior Nicole “Nikki” Fernandes has been accepted into the Rutgers REDI program (Rutgers English Diversity Institute), a summer program for minority students interested in academic careers.  The program accepts only 12 students, and Nikki won out in national competition.  In addition to an intensive seminar, students get a $500 stipend and attend a Broadway show.  Here’s the link for more info about REDI: http://redi.rutgers.edu/about.

Cindy Kim (class of 2012) was accepted into the Summer Publishing Institute at New York University, as well as into their Master of Science Program in Publishing, which she will begin this fall.

Cole Cridlin (class of 2011) has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study in France,which he will begin this fall.

Announcing the Winner of the 2012 Levis Reading Prize

Posted on by

Katherine LarsonThe Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to announce that Radial Symmetry by Katherine Larson has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Levis Reading Prize for the best first or second book of poetry published in the calendar year 2011. The award is named in memory of the late Larry Levis, the poet who taught at VCU. Larson will receive an honorarium of $2000 and will be brought to Richmond, expenses paid, for a reception and public reading on September 20th, 2012.

Katherine Larson’s Radial Symmetry (Yale University Press, 2011) was also selected by Louise Glück as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Larsen’s work has appeared in AGNI, Boulevard, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry, and Poetry Northwest, among other publications. She is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. In addition to her literary career, Larson has worked as a molecular biologist and field ecologist. She lives in Arizona with her husband and daughter.

This year the Prize Committee would also like to recognize the outstanding books of two additional finalists, Anthony Carelli for his collection Carnations (Princeton University Press, 2011) and Brian Barker for The Black Ocean (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011).

The Levis Reading Prize is presented on behalf of VCU’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. Sponsors include the VCU Department of English, James Branch Cabell Library Associates, VCU Friends of the Library, the VCU Libraries, the VCU Honors College, Barnes & Noble @ VCU, and the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences, with primary funding provided by the family of Larry Levis.

We would like to express our sincere thanks to all who entered and thus helped to make this annual contest such a success.

For further information about the Levis Reading Prize, see http://www.has.vcu.edu/eng/resources/levis_prize/levis_prize.htm, call 804.828.1329, or contact Katelyn Kiley, Levis Fellow, at kileyk@vcu.edu

2011-12 Funded MATX Student Conference/Seminar Participation

Posted on by

Here are some recent scholarly activities by our MATX PhD students:

Nathan Altice presented his paper, “Tool-Assisted: Console Emulation and Platform Plasticity,” at the conference is the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science at Loyola University.

Robin Ashworth paper was accepted as part of the International Conference on the Constructed Environment (registration paid only).  Her proposal is an outgrowth of a study she completed during coursework, applying Bloom’s theory of poetics in Anxiety of Influence to the construction of Sagrada Familia in Spain, a cathedral still under construction.  The paper will be published in the Conference Journal.

Salvadore Barajas was accepted to participate as an artist in residence a Black Mountain Art Center in Ashville, NC.

Garreth Blackwell was accepted to participate in the Summer 2012 Design Writing and Research Intensive.

Amy Colombo presented a paper on ESL resources offered by VCU’s University College at the 2011 Southeast TESOL Conference.

Randy Davis presented his paper, “Images in Soviet Cinema,” at the 2011 Image Conference in San Sebastian, Spain

Norberto Gomez presented an exhibit at the South Eastern College Art Conference SECAC in Houston, TX.

Rebecca Johnson presented a paper on feminist methods and blogging at the National Women’s Studies Association conference in Atlanta.

Leejin Kim presented her paper “Commercialization of Male Body Images and Construction of Yaoi (Boys Love Boys) Fantasies in Korean Female Culture” at the conference held by The Midwest Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association.

David Lawrence accepted to participate in one-week alternative environmental filmmaking seminar as a part of the Center for Environmental Filmmaking at American University.

Shana Meganck presented her paper, “Digital media: Giving Voices to the Voiceless,” at the National Communication Association Conference in New Orleans, LA

Jennifer Smith presented a paper at the International Digital Media Arts Association Conference hosted by the Savannah College of Art & Design in Savannah, Georgia.

Leah Thomas presented her paper, “Cultural Production of Geographic Knowledge: Identity in Cartographic Materials,” at the American Society for 18th Century Studies in San Antonio, TX.

Neal Wyatt was accepted and participated in The Project Narrative Summer Institute (PNSI)– a two-week workshop on the Ohio State University campus that offers scholars an opportunity for an intensive study of core concepts and issues in narrative theory.