English Department Faculty News

June 12, 2012

• Professor Connie Roberts' 12-poem manuscript, Good-for-Nothing Irish Blues, was shortlisted for the 2012 Listowel Writers’ Week Poetry Collection Competition. Judge: Moya Cannon.

April 13, 2012

• Dr. Vimala Pasupathi was invited to speak at a colloquium, The History of Cardenio: Spain and England, Then and Now, at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis.
• Professor Connie Roberts has four poems forthcoming in the Poetry Salzburg Review,
  Autumn, 2012, Salzburg University, Austria.
  
  Her poem “Altar” is cited in the forthcoming doctoral dissertation, "A Discourse Analysis of the Ryan Report: The Construction of Children in Care in Irish Social Policy”,
  Cullen, Caroline, Cork University, Ireland.
  
  On Tuesday, April 17, Prof. Roberts will read her work at the Irish American Writers & Artists’ Salon at the Cell Theatre, NYC.
  
  The Irish Echo—the USA’s most widely read Irish-American newspaper—recently published a full-page article about Prof. Roberts and her work:   Survivor Roberts is Prize-winning Poet, March 14-20, 2012, Vol. 85, No. 11.

March 26, 2012

• Janet Kaplan's Dreamlife of a Philanthropist: Prose Poems & Prose Sonnets, winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, was published in 2011 by the University of Notre Dame Press. In addition, the following poems appeared or are forthcoming in anthologies, journals and literary magazines, online and in print: "After the Sacrifice" in Lit from Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books, Introduction by Maxine Kumin (forthcoming from Alice James Books); "Deep Play" and "Of and Unceasing Rising Action, Falling Action" forthcoming in POOL; Twelve prose poems from "The Chronicles" in The Prose Poem Project's online and print journals, Vol. 1, Issue 4, 2011; "Small Chronicle" in The Southampton Review, Spring 2012; and "from Technopolis" and "Tree" in YellowField, March 2012.

  In 2011, Professor Kaplan founded Red Glass Books, a literary not for profit press publishing fine art limited-edition chapbooks. Chapbooks published in 2011 are Swimming to America by Patricia Spears Jones and it all stayed open by Margaret Diehl. Chapbooks forthcoming in 2012 2013 include One Night: Poems for the Sleepy by Edwin Torres (June 2012), our weakness no stranger by Kate Greenstreet (Summer 2012), and titles by Regie Cabico, Elisabeth Frost, Judith Taylor, and Jean Valentine.

  Professor Kaplan's poem "Matar as Saudades" ("To Kill the Yearning") was commissioned by the Yeshiva University Museum and presented at their Forth Annual Writers on View in collaboration with "A Mirror in My Heart: Reflections on Aristides de Sousa Mendes," an art installation by Sebastian Mendes, New York, March 2011. Also, excerpts from the long poem "Ascending Descending" (now titled "Technopolis") were commissioned by composer Martin Hennessey and performed at the Galapagos Art Space as part of the 2011 Brooklyn Book Festival and at the September 11 Memorial Concert at The Irondale Center, Brooklyn, September 11, 2011.

• Dr. Alice Levine delivered a paper, "The Je ne sais quoi of Byron's Poetry: Gallicisms in Don Juan," at the International Byron Conference in Valladolid, Spain, in June 2011; the paper will be included in a volume of selections from the conference proceedings, to be published by Cambridge Scholars Publications. She also delivered a paper, "Indeterminacy and Method: Editing Byron's Accidentals," at the Modern Language Association convention in January 2012.

• Patti Horvath's story "But Now Am Found" received the Goldenberg Fiction Award at the Bellevue Literary Review and was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize. Her story "Hold on Fast" is forthcoming in The Laurel Review.

March 31, 2011

• The Irish Arts Council has awarded Professor Connie Roberts a Literature Bursary Award, worth $5,700.00. Her proposal was selected from a total of 520 applications.

September 20, 2010

• Professor Connie Roberts received first prize—500 euros and a week-end at the Killaloe Hedge-School for Writing, County Clare, Ireland—in the 2010 Dromineer Literary Festival Poetry Competition. The awards ceremony will take place at the Lough Derg Yacht Club, Dromineer, County Tipperary on October 8th.

  In July, Prof. Roberts received a Highly Commended award in the iYeats Poetry Competition in County Sligo.

  In June, she was shortlisted for the Swift Satire Competition in County Meath.

  This fall her work will appear in the Long Island anthology Toward Forgiveness and in the Irish literary journal Boyne Berries.

August 18, 2010

• Janet Kaplan's book, Dreamlife of a Philanthropist, winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry from the University of Notre Dame Press, will be published in 2011.

June 3, 2010

• Martha McPhee’s fourth novel , Dear Money, has been published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

April 27, 2010

• Dr. Joseph  McLaren’s book, I Walked with Giants: The Autobiography of Jimmy Heath (Temple University Press, 2010), has been nominated by the Jazz Journalists Association for “Best Book About Jazz.”

March 10, 2010

• Professor Martha McPhee’s fourth novel, Dear Money, will be published in June by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. In May, her article on food and recipe books will appear in More Magazine.
• Professor Richard Pioreck’s play Child’s Play was presented in December by the Act II...gether Children's Theatre Co, affiliated with the Abingdon Theatre. In February a staged reading of his play Prove That You Love Me was presented as part of the Abindgon Theatre's Playwright Challenge. In November Professor Pioreck became cordinator of the Queens Theatre in the Park Playwrights Group.
• Professor Connie Roberts has been selected to present her work at the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series 2010. She will read at the Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, in May.
• Dr. Joseph McLaren is the co-author, with jazz great Jimmy Heath, of a new book, I Walked with Giants: the Autobiography of Jimmy Heath, published by Temple University Press.

March 8, 2010

• Professor Zachary Lazar’s latest book, Evening's Empire, was selected as a best book of 2009 by the Chicago Tribune.
• Professor Patricia Horvath was awarded a residency fellowship to the Can Serrat Foundation in El Bruc, Spain, for June 2010. In November 2009 she gave a reading/lecture on the topic of "sudden" fiction at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.
• Dr. Scott Harshbarger’s essay, “Intimations of Neoteny: Play and God in Wordsworth’s 1799 Prelude,” will appear in an upcoming issues of Philosophy and Literature.
• Dr. Andrew Stambuk’s book, The Man Who Is and Is Not There: The Prose and Poetry of Robert Francis, has been accepted for publication by the University of Massachusetts Press.
• Dr. Vimala Pasupathi was one of 20 scholars from North America and Great Britain invited to participate in the New Directions in Medieval and Early Modern Performance Workshop at the University of Calgary. Papers from the workshop will appear in two volumes of essays published by Palgrave Press.
• Dr. Alice Levine delivered a paper, "Byron's and Verdi's The Two Foscari: From History to Closet Drama to Grand Opera," at the 35th International Byron Conference, at Missolonghi, Greece, on 11 September 2009. Her edition, Byron's Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition, was published in August 2009. She will participate in a round table discussion by editors of Romantic poetry at the 37th International Byron Conference in Boston in July 2010.

September 4, 2009

• Dr. John DiGaetani has edited a new book, Wagner Outside the Ring: Essays on the Operas, Their Performance, and their Connections with Other Arts , published by McFarland Press.

July 20, 2009

• Dr. John DiGaetani has edited a forthcoming book, Wagner Outside the Ring, published by McFarland Press.

June 29, 2009

• Dr. Phillip Lopate's newest book, Notes on Sontag, has been published by Princeton University Press.
• Dr. Joseph McLaren presented a paper titled "Obama's Kenyan Ethnicity: New African Diaspora Identity and Conflict Resolution" at the Third European Conference on African Studies, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany, June 2009.
  He presented a second paper titled "Obama and Soyinka: Blackness, Ethnicity, and the Nation" at the 35th African Literature Association Conference, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, April 2009.
• Dr. Karyn Valerius presented a paper titled "Corrupting Books and Womanly Virtue: Literary Seduction in Louisa May Alcott's A Modern Mephistopheles" at the American Literature Association meeting held in Boston, Massachusetts.

June 23, 2009

• Dr. G. Thomas Couser’s new book, Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing, will be published by the University of Michigan Press in fall 2009.
  A chapter from his memoir of his father, “Posted to (and from) Aleppo: My Father in Syria, 1930-33,” appeared recently in Lifewriting Annual (2008).
• Dr. Couser recently delivered a paper titled “Filiation in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father” at a conference on The Work of Lifewriting, held at King’s College, London,
• Dr. Scott Harshbarger presented a paper, "Intimations of Neoteny: Play and God in Wordsworth's 1799 Prelude" at Hofstra's Darwin's Reach conference.
• Dr. Robert Sulcer presented a paper titled "Keeping School: Romancing the Everyday" at the annual conference of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association, held this year at Wellesley College. The topic of the conference was "The Victorian Everyday."