News and Events

News for the 2008-2009 academic year is posted below.
News from 2007-2008 can be accessed here.

Graduating English major Kokoro Lee is the winner of the 37th annual Nick Adams Short Story Contest administered by the ACM (Associated Colleges of the Midwest). She will receive a $1000 prize for her short story, "A Flawed Vivarium," which she originally wrote for Peter Bognanni's Crafts of Writing: Fiction course. Koko is the fifth Macalester student to win the ACM contest since it began in 1973.

The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis has awarded one of its prestigious 2009 McKnight Artist Fellowships for Writers to Professor Wang Ping. Professor Wang's most recent novel, The Last Communist Virgin (which won a Minnesota Book Award last year) will also be honored this April at the annual meeting of the Association of Asian American Studies in Honolulu with the AAAS Book Award in Poetry and Prose.

We are proud to announce that two current English Department research assistants, Kevin Johnson, class of 2010 (Economics; minor in Japanese) and Emi Kosaku, class of 2011 (Anthrolpology) have been awarded a Mellon Curricular Pathways Student-Faculty Research Collaboration Summer Grant to work with Professor James Dawes this coming summer on an unprecedented oral history project. In the fall of 2008, Professor Dawes travelled to Japan to document the confessions of WWII war criminals in private interviews. In the face of continuing denials and historical revision, these confessions constitute a crucial component of the collective moral archive of the 20th century and are urgently needed to fulfill the moral imperative to create an accurate account of our time for future generations. With the generous support of the Mellon grant, Emi and Kevin will collaborate with Professor Dawes to produce English-language transcripts of the Japanese interviews, and will pursue their own avenue of inquiry into the special problems of translating perpetrator narratives.

The English Department is very pleased to announce the successful completion of our search for an assistant professor of 18th-century British and Transnational Literature:

Neil Chudgar comes to Macalester College from the University of Chicago, where he was a Preceptor in the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities, an Affiliated Doctoral Fellow of the Franke Institute, and the recipient of several other research and teaching fellowships, as well as the Karen Dinal Award for Excellence in Teaching Academic Writing. His research concerns the ways in which books and poems can keep modern people in contact with the objects that surround us. He is currently at work on a book about the sense of touch in early eighteenth-century British literature and philosophy, and he has given papers on affection in Defoe's novels, Wordsworth and the history of kitsch, the textures of Augustan poetry, and the ethics of Swift's satire. His essay “Swift’s Gentleness” is forthcoming in English Literary History. Professor Chudgar was born and raised near Reading, Pennsylvania; he received his B.A. in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh and will receive his Ph.D. in English this summer from the University of Chicago, where he also learned how to dress properly for the prairie winter. We look forward to welcoming Professor Chudgar to the English Department in the coming fall.

The Book of Night Women, the second novel by Professor Marlon James, was published in February by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin, to great critical acclaim. Check out the reviews in The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, FlavorWire.com, and bookslut.com.

Marlon will read from the novel on Saturday, February 28, at 6:00 pm, at Magers & Quinn Booksellers, 3038 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis.
We hope to see you there.

Jeffrey Shotts, visiting professor of literary publishing and Senior Editor at Graywolf Press, was the editor of Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day," the poem read at the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama on January 20, 2009.

Kristin Naca, our CFD Fellow and Visiting Instructor, has been chosen to receive a National Poetry Series Award for her forthcoming book, Bird Eating Bird, which will be published next fall by HarperCollins Publishers. In her poems, Naca investigates the theme of desire: cultural, sexual, and linguistic. Having grown up with a Puerto Rican father, Filipina mother, and aunties all around, she reflects on multi-lingual memories from childhood. She sustains the metaphor of language in poems about learning Spanish as an adult in Pittsburgh and Nebraska, and traveling to Mexico City. Language excites passion in every sense of the word, in torrid love poems, in poems about living with traumatic, chronic pain, and at times as cultural exile.

Visiting instructor Peter Bognanni's first novel, The House of Tomorrow, will be published by Amy Einhorn Books (a new imprint of Putnam/Penguin) this fall or early next spring. The novel is the humorous and heartwarming story of a young man raised by his grandmother in a geodesic dome and home-schooled on the teachings of the inventor and futurist Buckminster Fuller, who, upon leaving the isolated existence he has always known discovers the joys of punk rock and the exquisite torture of first love.

Kristin Naca and Peter Bognanni will read from these works at the upcoming Fall Luncheon for English majors and minors, which will be held on Thursday, September 18, from 11:40 am to 1:10 pm in the Board Room of Weyerhaeuser Hall. Department Chair Daylanne English will also introduce this year's visiting faculty and our new department coordinator, and we will distribute the new English Department t-shirts featuring the winning design from last year's t-shirt contest. Look for your official email invitation to this fun annual event on the English Majors email list soon.

Joining the department for the 2008-2009 academic year are visiting faculty and fellows

• Kristie Allen
• Bradley Liening
• Kristin Naca
• Elizabeth Weixel

Help us in welcoming them aboard! Visit the Faculty page for details and a complete list of current members.

Applying for graduate school? The Thomas E. Critchett Fund will, within certain limits, reimburse Macalester English majors for expenses involved in the application process as long as they apply within two years after graduation.

If you are a student, please remember that we can help you out in this way! If you are a faculty member, please remind any recent graduates (for whom you might be writing recommendations) that we can do this. You can read the details and the rules for these reimbursements on The Critchett Fund page of the English Department Web site Student Resources section.

English in the News

As tracked by Macalester College at delicious.com.