Accolades

Welcome back to another installment of the department’s Accolades!

To start, senior Jizelle Villegas’ research paper, “Transcending and Complicating Stereotypes in Latine Young Adult literature: Forging New Alternatives through Glimmers,” has been accepted for presentation at the Latina/o Studies Association Conference for their bi-annual conference. This 4-day conference will happen in March at the University of Texas in Austin and hosts academics of any and all disciplines to share their work within Latina/o studies, present posters, and host panels and workshops.

Professor Ben Voigt’s poem “Grief”, which was originally published in the journal Cave Wall, was selected for the 2025 Best New Poets Anthology, which came out at the end of 2025. The anthology collects the best poems from emerging poets over the past year. This year the guest judge was Cecily Parks. You can read more here.

Professor Michael Prior was the poet-in-residence at the Blake School in Hopkins (middle school) for all of J-Term. He spent all of January teaching the grade 7 students about poetry and helping them draft their own portfolios of poems, and concluded the residency with a Poetry Night where the students shared their work with their classmates and parents. 

In addition, Professor Michael Prior’s new book of poems, Wartime Measures, has been accepted for publication by Penguin Random House. The book will start showing up in online databases/bookstores probably sometime over the summer, but until then you can read a few of the poems from the book in The Nation, The Kenyon Review, and Poetry Daily. 

In earlier February, select poets from around St. Paul, including our very own Michael Prior and Sarah Ghazal Ali, participated in a Zoom poetry reading to raise emergency rent funds for Minnesota immigrant families. Read more in Professor Sarah’s substack post here.

Also in late February, Professor Jim Dawes appeared as an author at the Authors for Minnesota Day, an event which raised money for the Minnesota Immigration Rapid Response Fund. The event was covered in Publisher’s Weekly and covers writers responding publicly to ICE activity in Minnesota. Here is a link to the Facebook event page as well.

Professor Peter Bognanni’s new novel “How to Lose Yourself Completely” has gotten some early recognition. It was recently named A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection, which means the book will now make it into more libraries as well as bookstore shelves for purchase. The book is being published by Balzar and Bray.