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News from the Department

Feb. 2013	The Inaugural conference of the Southern Shakespeare Association has been scheduled to be held at Mississippi State University, February 22 & 23, 2013. The deadline for papers is December 15, 2012.
Spring term	Department head Rich Raymond is spending the spring term at the University of Pristina in Kosovo. He makes this visit as a Fulbright Scholar, the second time he has received such an opportunity and honor. http://www.msstate.edu/web/media/detail.php?id=5341

May	One of Robert West's poems, first published in _American Tanka_, has just been reprinted in _Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka_ (Vol. 4). This volume of approximately 280 poems was selected from over eighteen thousand tanka in English
April	English major Kayleigh Swisher's paper, written for Tommy Anderson's course, won the undergraduate division of the Gender Studies Paper Competition. English Teaching Assistant Caroline Baker's paper, written for Shalyn Claggett's course, won the graduate division of the Gender Studies Paper Competition.
April	Seth Dawson's article "'A heap more took than just took': Acquisition vs. Education in The Town" appears in the recently published issue of POMPA: Publications of the Mississippi Philological Association.
April	Natalie Nations was selected as winner of the MSU Graduate Student Association's 2012 Graduate Teaching Assistant of the Year Award.
April	Ted Atkinson's article "'Blood Petroleum':True Blood the BP Oil Spill, and Fictions of Energy/Culture" has been accepted for publication in the Journal of American Studies.
April	Wendy Herd has been awarded a grant from MSU's Schillig Special Teaching Project. This grant will enable her to equip her lab in such a way that she can involve undergraduate students in designing and running behavioral experiments for linguistics research.
April 18	Congratulations to J. Leslie Joblin for a presentation of Luce Irigaray's feminist theory applied to Shakespeare's play TITUS at the Honors Undergraduate Research Symposium.
April	Holly Johnson's article "The Divine Dinner Party: Domestic Imagery and Easter Sermons in Late Medieval England" has been accepted for publication in the annual journal Traditio: Studies in Ancient and Medieval Thought, History, and Religion.
April	Retired faculty member Meg McGavran Murray's book, Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim, has received the American Library Association Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title. See details.
April 5	Catherine Pierce read poetry from her new collection, The Girls of Peculiar.
April	Andrea Spain's article, "Situation or Event? South African Exceptionalism and the Politics of the Event in Nadine Gordimer's The Pick-Up," has been accepted for publication in a special issue in Modern Fiction Studies. The issue is on "Modern Fiction and Politics," and is guest edited by Rajagopalan Radhakrishanan.
March 26	The English Department proudly hosted readings by Ira Skurungruang and Katherine Riegel.
March	Instructor Brad Campbell, current graduate assistant Natalie Nations, and M.A. graduate Josh Thompson each presented papers at the 2012 South-Central Renaissance Conference in New Orleans.
March	Michael Kardos's One Last Good Time has been announced as the winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters fiction award. The list of winners can be found at http://www.ms-arts-letters.org/winners.shtml.
March	Graduate student Josiah Meints has been accepted into the Oklahoma State Ph.D. program.
March	Tremendous recognition from our colleagues at Mississippi State: Becky Hagenston has been chosen to receive the College of Arts & Sciences Teaching in the Humanities Award for 2012. Ted Atkinson has been chosen to receive the College of Arts & Sciences Research in the Humanities Award for 2012. English major Kelsey Norris has been chosen to receive the College of Arts & Sciences Undergraduate Student Research Award for 2012.
March
February 22	Shirley Hanshaw was the featured speaker for the month’s African American Studies “Talking About Books” Program.
February 17	Wendy Herd gave a talk before MSU's Department of Psychology, titled "Behavioral and neurolinguistic evidence of phonemic recategorization in learners of Spanish after training."
February	Jabberwock Review is pleased to announce the publication of the Winter 2012 issue (32.2), featuring work by Sandra Beasley, Richard Boada, Christina Camarena, Pamela Davis, Toni Graham, Tim Hedges, Brittney Scott, Maggie Smith, Adam Tavel, Suellen Wedmore, and Spencer Wise.
February	Congratulations to Michael Kardos, Noel Polk, and Robert West, whose books One Last Good Time, Walking Safari and Convalescent are among the nominations for awards from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.
February	Casey Bonner (MSU B.A. in English, 2010), who is now in her second year of law school at the University of Alabama, has just been named Editor in Chief of The Alabama Civil Rights & Civil Liberties Law Review.
February	Shirley Hanshaw has been invited by Rust College's Division of Humanities to be the guest speaker at their Annual Assembly Program. She is also asked to do both radio and TV interviews as part of her visit to Rust, and has been offered the opportunity to talk about our graduate program to their senior English majors
February	A number of our students presented at the Mississippi Philological Association conference at Delta State University. Participants included: Recent M.A. graduates Seth Dawson and Kris Robinson; Graduate students Neil Barrett, Natalie Nations, Jonathan Smith, and Joshua Parsons; Undergraduate English majors Cade Holder and Anna Beth Owens.
February	Noel Polk's book of poetry, Walking Safari; or, The Hippo Highway has just been published by Texas Review Press, where it won the 2011 TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: Mississippi.
Jan.	Undergraduate English major Donald (Field) Brown has been selected to be a Fellow in the Summer Research Opportunities Program (SROP) and has been chosen as a McNair Scholar at the University of Iowa during June and July.
Jan.	Quarter After Eight will publish two of Becky Hagenst0n's flash fiction pieces, one of which won their short prose contest. Also, Indiana Review has accepted one of her stories for their upcoming issue.
Jan.	Three of Rich Lyons' poems have been accepted by diode and a long poem from his book manscript has been accepted by the Cincinnati Review.
Jan. 2012	Dr. Pierce has announced this year's winners of the MSU Creative Writing Contest. The first and second place winners in each category will also go on to represent MSU in the Southern Literary Festival competition. Fiction: 1st place: Falan McKnight, "Soul Food" 2nd place: Kelsey Norris, "Limbo" 3rd place: Rachael Burrow, "Adda Grace" Poetry: 1st place: Rachel Perkins, "In Which I Want" 2nd place: Lisa Fulgham, "The Tower of Babel" 3rd place: Kelsey Norris, "Domesticity of the Wanderers"
Nov.	Bonnie Carr O'Neill's article, titled "the Personal Public Sphere of Whitman's 1840s Journalism," appears in the currrent PMLA.
September	The CEA Critic has accepted for publication Rich Raymond's essay on Samuel Johnson. Titled "Teaching Johnson's Sermons: The Nexus of Literature and Rhetoric" the article grows from Dr. Raymond's Johnson seminar and from the excellent work of our graduate students.
September	Connotations: A Journal of Critical Debate will publish Shalyn Claggett's article on "Turning the Corner of Interpretation: A Response to Elena Anastasaki"
Sepember	Catherine Pierce's poem "Postcards from Her Alternate Lives" has been included in the Best American Poetry anthology for 2011.
Sept. 17	The English department held its fall symposium, hosted by Michele Crescenzo. Bonnie O'Neill read from her paper on "Frederick Douglass: Celebrity, Privacy, and the Embodied Self."
September	Jabberwock Review's Suummer 2011 issue (vol.31, no. 2) is now available.
Sept. 6	Don Bogen, author of [an.(A)lgebra] read his poetry at Fowlkes Auditorium in a reading sponsored by the Robert Holland Visiting Writers Series, the English Department, and the Creative Writing program.
July	Dr. Bonnie O'Neill, Assistant Professor of English, has been named the College of Arts & Sciences Researcher of the Month for July/August, 2011 (http://www.cas.msstate.edu/research/). Congratulations to Bonnie.
June 1	Texas Studies in Literature and Language will publish Lara Dodds' article on Milton's divorce tracts: "'To due conversation accessible': The Problem of Courtship in Milton's Writing on Divorce and Paradise Lost."
June	Michael Kardos's novel, The Three-Day Affair, has been accepted for publication by the Mysterious Press, the crime imprint of Grove/Atlantic.
June	Robert West's book of short poems, Convalescent, is now available for pre-order from Finishing Line Press. Convalescent includes twenty of Dr. West's poems, plus three he translated from a little book first published a century ago, Guillaume Apollinaire’s Bestiary (1911). Many of the poems first appeared in Able Muse, Asheville Poetry Review, Christian Science Monitor, Hummingbird, Pembroke Magazine, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, and MotesBooks’ second Motif anthology, Come What May: An Anthology of Writings about Chance.