Garlands

Spring 2009

Faculty

Judy Blunt's Breaking Clean (Knopf, 2002) was recently mentioned by the Wall Street Journal as one of the five best books evoking the Modern American West. She was also featured in a recent issue of Montana Magazine.

Rob Browning's article “‘Immota Triumphans’: Corruptions of Triumph in the Caroline Court and Paradise Lost,” has been accepted by Milton Studies.

Heather Bruce presented “Project Outreach: Increasing Access, Relevance and Diversity in Writing Project Work” at the Annual Meeting of the National Writing Project in San Antonio in November. In February, she presented in Helena at the Indian Education Best Practices conference, “Sherman Alexie in the Classroom. This is not a silent movie. Our voices will save our lives,” and participated in the National Writing Project’s Annual Peer Review in Berkeley. In March, she presented “Universities Use Visual Propaganda with Indian Mascots” and “Building Cultures of Peace: Terry Tempest Williams and Montana’s Mandate, ‘Indian Education for All,’” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in San Francisco.

Kevin Canty has a new short story collection Where the Money Went that will be published in July 2009 by Nan A. Talese/Knopf, also coming out over the next year from Albin Michel in France, de Harmonie in the Netherlands, and minimum fax in Italy. He has recent story publications in HOW Journal and Avery Anthology. And his story "Blue Boy" was made into a short film which won entry into the Tribeca film festival.

Beverly Chin participated in the Professors' Study Tour at Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, Israel, in January. The study tour was sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League, USC Shoah Foundation Institute, and Yad Vashem. In February, she assisted in the training of 45 state trainers for this year's MUS Writing Assessment. In March, she directed the Missoula MUS WA scoring workshop. Seventy-five educators from K-12, COT, and UM participated, including many ENT preservice students and composition TAs and instructors. She also co-directed the second year of the writing assessment of eighth grade students. Beverly presented "Beyond the Horizon: Helping Students Explore the World through Multicultural Young Adult Literature" at the International Reading Association conference in Phoenix, AZ in February; "Helping All Students Improve Their Writing" at Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development conference in Orlando, FL, in March; and "Strategies that Improve Students' Writing and Grammar" and "Effective Strategies that Link Writing Instruction with Writing Assessment" at National Catholic Education Association conference in Anaheim, CA in April.

Chris Dombrowski has a new book of poetry By Cold Water which is out and available April 2009 from Wayne State University Press.

Brady Harrison’s edited collection All Our Stories Are Here: Critical Perspectives on Montana Literature is now available at bookstores and from University of Nebraska Press. Contributors include English Department Emeriti as well as current faculty such as Brady Harrison and Nancy Cook.

Katie Kane attended the Annual MLA Conference in San Francisco in December as a delegate to the Assembly and gave a paper on Jack London. Her movie reviews are appearing regularly in the Missoula Independent.

Chris Knight’s book Omissions Are Not Accidents: Modern Apophaticism from Henry James to Jacques Derrida is to be published by the University of Toronto Press in late 2009. His essay “Charles Taylor’s “A Secular Age: The Apophatic Impulse” is to published in Charles Taylor's Vision of Modernity: Reconstructions and Interpretations, ed. Christopher Garbowski, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University Press (Poland) and by Cambridge Scholars Press (United Kingdom).

Keetje Kuipers was awarded a Stegner Fellowship and won the A. Poulin Jr. Prize and will have a book published by BOA editions next spring.

David Moore’s invited essay for a collection on Anishinaabeg writer, Gerald Vizenor entitled, “Moon Vines among the Ruins: Vizenor’s Poetics of Presence” will be published in Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts. Eds., Deborah Madsen & A. Robert Lee. Albuquerque: New Mexico UP, forthcoming.

Sean O'Brien's documentary Be Thou Always as a Guest will premiere at the Crystal Theater on Saturday, May 9th.

Greg Pape participated in a panel at the AWP, moderated by Beth Shadur, which featured pairs of poets and visual artists reflecting on their collaborate process.

Kate Ryan has signed a book contract with Parlor Press for GenAdmin: Theorizing WPA Identities in the 21st Century, coauthored with Colin Charlton, Jonikka Charlton, Tarez Samra Graban, and Amy Ferdinandt Stolley. She presented a paper entitled "jWPA Ethos: What Do We Mean by Responsibility?" at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in San Francisco in April 2009.

Rob Schlegel won the 2009 Colorado Prize for Poetry with his manuscript The Lesser Fields. The book is scheduled to be released November, 2009.

Prageeta Sharma had four of her poems translated by Eduardo Chirinos and published in Literal Magazine #15. In February, at the Chicago AWP, she delivered a talk as part of a panel entitled “Post-Racial Writing” with poets and scholars John Keene, Angelica Lawson and Dorothy Wang. She also participated in the Best of Fence reading hosted by Fence Books. She is now also a contributing editor for the AWP Writer's Chronicle for the next two years. She is also currently welcoming submission ideas from the English/CW department and is able to put forth and propose at least two articles per year. On March 14th she co-judged (with Mark Gibbons and superintendent Alex Apostle) the Poetry Out Loud contest at Hellgate High School. Sharma's poem “Ode to Badminton” was featured on March 15 on BBC's Words and Music, read by actor Angela Wynter.

Robert Stubblefield will be on the faculty for Summer Fishtrap 2009, July 5-12, in Wallowa Lake, Oregon. He will teach a short fiction workshop. Also, his essay on ecosystem adaptation to climate change entitled “Better Than You Found It” is forthcoming in Your National Forests magazine.

Bernadette Sweeney was awarded a publication grant of from the NUI (National University of Ireland) Publications Fund towards the publication of her forthcoming book The Theatre of Tom Mac Inytre.

Undergraduate Students

Jessica Johnston’s play Shakespeare's Inferno (with Kirby Ann Witte) won the "Superior" Award for Original Work at the Drama Fest at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales in February and is being published by Pioneer Drama Service, Inc. in the upcoming Fall Catalog.

Sam Luikens will intern for Lost Horse Press this summer.

James Maynard was accepted to the University of Alabama MFA in Poetry.

A. J. Miller was accepted to University of Montana School of Law.

Andrew Nance will give a paper entitled "The Poetics of Historical Encounter in Cole Swensen's Such Rich Hour"at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) in La Crosse, Wisconsin in April.

Graduate Students

Michael Bartch will be presenting a paper entitled “The Characters of Joyce’s Resistance” at Eire on the Erie, the North American James Joyce conference in Buffalo, NY in June.

Kerry Fine has accepted an offer into the Texas Tech University doctoral program in Literature, Social Justice and Environment.

Lauren Hamlin’s interview with writer Robin Romm is in Poets & Writers.

Brandon Henderson will present his paper “Divisions” at the 2009 Pop Culture/ American Culture Association's National Conference in New Orleans in April. The essay is being published in the Spring Edition of Raging Dove. His non-fiction piece “Immersion” won first place for the Journey’s contest and was published in the magazine's Winter Solstice 2008 edition.

Brian Kevin received a grant from the President's Excellence Fund to pursue a month of research in Colombia this summer, gathering material for a book that will retrace a young Hunter S. Thompson's route across South America in the early 1960s.

Megan Melvin will be presenting a paper on selected works of Rick Bass and Barry Lopez at the ASLE conference in Victoria, B.C.

Kathryn Puerini has a poem in the latest issue of the online journal Apocryphal Text.

Lehua Shelton has a short story entitled “Suit” forthcoming in issue VII of Versal Magazine in May under the pen name Lehua Taitano. She will present her professional paper entitled "Categories of Indigenousness and Minoritization: A Literary and Theoretical Investigation of Chamorro Identity" at the Native American & Idigenous Studies Association (NAISA) Conference at the University of Minnesota in May 2009. Shelton will also serve on a panel entitled, "Post-Conquest Literary Cultures and Figurations of Indigeneity” with Sheila M. Contreras, Director of Chicano/Latino Studies, Michigan State University; Katie Kane, Director of Irish Studies, University of Montana; Ben V. Olguin, Associate Professor, University of Texas at San Antonio.

Veronica Vold presented her paper ‘"Who Robbed the Woods--": Emily Dickinson's Ecofeminist Poetics’ at the 30th Annual Conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association in Milwaukee in March. She has accepted an offer to attend the University of Oregon PhD program in literature.