Faculty Notes for January 2017

JOHN BALABAN

Four of John Balaban’s poems are part of the exhibition The World After January 20, 2017 at the James W. Palmer Gallery at Vassar College: “Varna Snow,” “Christmas at Washington’s Crossing,” “Portal,” and “Georgi Borisov in Paris.”

A chapter from his memoir Remembering Heaven’s Face is now online at Narrative Magazine.

Belle Boggs is one of five finalists for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

In February, she will be on two panels at the AWP conference: “Writing Under the Gun: the Agony and the Ecstasy of the Book Contract” and “Looking Outward: Avoiding the Conventional Memoir,” both on February 10. That same day, she will read at an off-site benefit for 826DC, a nonprofit writing/arts organization for K-12 students, in which writers will read short works that will be adapted by illustrators and made into books in real time.

Helen Burgess presented “That’s Not How Scholarship Works” on a panel, delivered the paper “Machine Dream Anthropocene,” and gave a reading (for the Electronic Literature Organization) titled “Anna, Autopoietic” at the 2017 MLA Annual Convention in Philadelphia, January 5–8.

Over the winter break, Sheryl Cornett was Visiting Research Fellow in Residence at the CS Lewis Foundation’s Kilns Study Center in Oxford, England.

Her poem “Apples in Winter” was awarded honorable mention in Carolina Woman’s 2016 Writing Contest; it was published in the 2017 winter issue.

Cornett’s interview essay “From Northeast to Downeast: Four Diverse North Carolina Writers Revisit their NCLR Interviews” was published as part of the North Carolina Literary Review‘s 25th Anniversary Issue Online. The digital journal launches February 2017.

Paul Fyfe’s “An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers” was published as the lead article in a special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review on “Moments of Challenge and Change.”

MARSHA GORDON

Marsha Gordon’s book Film is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Movies has just been published by Oxford University Press and is now available on the Oxford UP website as well as on Amazon.

Her first book event will take place February 15 at Hunt Library. Gordon will introduce a screening of Fuller’s The Steel Helmet (1951), the first American feature film about the Korean conflict. The event, which begins at 7 p.m., is free and open to the public; please announce to your students. Visit the NCSU Libraries website for more information.

Gordon has also joined the board of the Southern Documentary Fund.

MELANIE GRAHAM

In January, Melanie Graham was awarded a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Sierra Nevada College.

Three of her poems have been accepted for publication in Southern Women’s Review.

Bob Kochersberger’s essay “From Hope to Apprehension, a Tale of Two Inaugurations” appeared in the News & Observer on January 18.

Jason Miller is now an Honorary Citizen of Rocky Mount, NC. Mayor David Combs announced the honor on January 16 as Miller served as the keynote speaker at the city’s MLK Unity Breakfast. Called an “envoy of goodwill,” the honor recognizes his work making Dr. King’s November 27, 1962, speech in Rocky Mount widely available with his King’s First Dream project.

Miller’s film Origin of the Dream has just made a new excerpt available featuring actor Danny Glover, Ambassador Andrew Young, MLK Pulitzer Prize-winner David Garrow, and one of the last interviews with the late former NAACP President Julian Bond.

Miller will deliver multiple invited presentations through the end of February, including appearances at the NC Museum of History’s African American Cultural Celebration, all Wake County Public Libraries, and the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching (NCCAT).

He is under contract to write a compact biography of Langston Hughes in the Critical Lives series, from the University of Chicago Press. 

Beryl Cox Pittman taught Academic Writing in the international business program of Aalto University in Mikkeli, Finland, during the second half of Fall semester.

Jon Thompson published the serial poem “Paul Eluard Dreams of America” in Colorado Review, Fall/Winter 2016.

Rebecca Walsh’s essay “Environmental Determinism and American Literature: Historicizing Geography and Form” has been published in The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space, a collection edited by Robert Tally, Jr. 

Walsh delivered two papers at the MLA convention in Philadelphia in early January: “Geographic Modernism’s Temporal Dodges” and “The African American and Indian Blues.” 

In November, she delivered the paper “Can We Understand Globalization without Scale? Rethinking Scale through Literary Studies and Disciplinary Geography” at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Pasadena, CA.