News & Events from the English Departmentupco

Upcoming Events
News from the Department

Februrary 11, 7:30 pm	Poet Angela Ball will read. The reading is scheduled to be held at Swalm Hall, 4th. floor.
March 2, 7:30 pm	Fiction writer Michelle Herman is scheduled to read. The reading will be held in the Fowlkes Auditorium of the Student Union.
April 15, 7:30 pm	Fiction writer and English Department faculty member Becky Hagenston will read from her newly published short story collection, Strange Weather.

Febuary	Lecturer and MSU M.A. graduate Nick White has been accepted into the Ph.D. program at Ohio State University and received an assistantship from the institution. MSU graduate and M.A. student Lauren Shook will be entering the Ph.D. program at Southern Illinois University, where she has received an assistantship.
Jan. 21	A reception and book-signing by Nancy Hargrove for her new book, T.S. Eliot's Parisian Year, was held in the Grisham Room of Mitchell Memorial Library.
January 2010	Winners of the Mississippi State University undergraduate writing contest have been selected: Fiction: Winner: "In Too Deep" by Chad Walters Honorable Mention: "Climate Change: Dress Accordingly" by Marianna Prather Poetry: Winner: "The Effects of Speaking Loudly" by Lisa McMurtray Honorable Mention: "Hester Street, Encinitas" by Jerry Johnston Formal Essay: Winner: "Sex and Money--Reasons for the Treatment of Women: A Marxist-Feminist Look at Bibi Haldar" by Marianna Prather Chad Walters, Lisa McMurtray, and Marianna Prather will be representing MSU at the Southern Literary Festival, hosted this year by Mississippi University for Women in late April. Winners at the festival will receive publication and a cash prize.
January	Richard Patteson's new book, The Fiction of Robert Antoni: Writing in the Estuary, is scheduled for release in April.
January	Thomas Anderson's Acts of Reading, a volume on the John Foxe Actes and Monuments, published by the University of Deleware Press, is now in print.
January	Studies in American Culture will publish one of Ted Atkinson's articles in the October 2010 volume. The article carries the title "Seeing Red in the Free State of Jones: Confederates, Communism, and the Cold War in Tap Roots."
Dec. 1, 2009	The Surreal South fiction anthology reading, featuring Becky Hagenston and Michael Kardos was held at Fowlkes Auditorium. The event featured animal balloons and strange fiction.
December	Professor Emerita Nancy Hargrove has been invited to serve on the faculty of the T.S. Eliot International Summer School, which meets in London in July. Later in the summer she will present a paper at the conference of the International Association of University Professors in Malta.
November	Ted Atkinson's article, "Hellbound on His Trail: Faulknerian Blood-guilt and the Traumatized Form of Lewis Nordan's Wolf Whistle," has been accepted for publication by the Southern Literary Journal.
Nov. 23	Robert West delivered his Humanities Professor of the Year lecture in the Grisham Room of Mitchell Memorial Library. He will be officially presented with his award this February.
Nov. 11	The annual Sigma Tau Delta induction ceremony was held at Harvey's in Starkville.
Nov. 4	The Creative Writing Program offered their annual Student Symposium. A variety of students read their from their original work.
November	Matthew Tutor was named recepient of the 2009 Peyton Williams award for his essay, "Trauma and the Language Barrier in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried." Matthew Clark was awarded honorable mention for "Ghosts of Hope: Doppelgangers in Ian McEwan's Attonement."
Oct. 20	Gerry LeFemina, poet and fiction writer, read as part of the Robert Holland Reading Series. Gerry LeFemina is the author of a number of collections of poetry including Graffiti Heart, The Window Facing Winter, Zarathustra in Love, and The Book of Clown Baby. His The Parakeets of Brooklyn received the 2003 Bordighera Prize and was published in a bilingual English and Italian edition. His collection of short fiction, Wish List, was published by Marick Press in 2009.
Oct. 28	Michael Kardos led a discussion on "Not Legal, Not a Thriller, Grisham's Other Story in A Painted House" as part of the Maroon Edition weekly event.
October	Freshman English major Ann Elizabeth Allison has been awarded third place in the Maroon Edition Freshman Reading Experience essay contest.
October	Nancy Hargrove's T. S. Eliot's Parisian Year has been published by the University of Florida Press.
October	Recent faculty publications include an article on Thoreau by Matt Little (published in Pedagogy) and an upcoming book on Robert Antoni by Richard Patteson (scheduled to reach print in 2010).
October	Scott Crossley credits Research Assistants Brandi Williams, Abigail Voller, and Jessica Mann for their work on the project that led to his article for Language Testing (Crossley, S. A., Salsbury, T., McNamara, D. S., & Jarvis, S. "Predicting lexical proficiency in language learners using computational indices").
September	Jabberwock Review announces the publication of issue 30.1, offering a mix of work by new and established writers including Pam Crow, K. E. Duffin, Raymond Fleischmann, Joan Frank, Amanda Giracca, Kerry Hudson, Les Kay, D Sprung Kurilecz, Cory Lucius, Dan Pinkerton, Susanna Rich, Maggie Smith, Charles Harper Webb, Helen Wickes, and Robert E. Wood.
Sept. 26	Kelly Marsh joined Tom Carskadon and Wes Ammon in leading an advising workship sponsored by the Center for Teaching and Learning.
Sept. 12	Faculty, guests, and graduate students gathered for the English department's annual Fall Symposium. Kelly Marsh read from her article in progress, "A Story to End a Career: The Failure of Narrative Ethics in Truman Capote's 'La Cote Basque, 1965.'"
August	Bonnie O'Neill's article " 'Does Such a Being Exist?': Olive Branch Readers respond to Fanny Fern" has been published in the volume Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860, edited by Theresa Strouth Gaul and Sharon M. Harris.
August	Ted Atkinson (southern literature) and Peter DeGabriele (eighteenth century literature) have joined the graduate faculty as of the fall 2009 term.
Summer	Bonnie O'Neill has been appointed to the advisory board of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society.
July	Becky Hagenston has been awarded the Spokane Prize for her story collection Strange Weather. Strange Weather will be published by the Eastern Washington University Press in January.
June	Lecturer Peter Olson has received the Scharff Graduate Award from the University of Memphis.
June	Lara Dodds' "Reading and Writing in Sociable Letters; or, How Margaret Cavendish Read Her Plutarch" has been scheduled for publication by English Literary Renaissance.