Voices Behind the Bars: Four Stories from Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy

Hungry Poets 2016 Contest Call for Submissions

Coming up much earlier than usual this year is the deadline for the Hungry Poets contest in memory of Gabe Friedberg. Usually a spring activity, the contest this year has been shifted to the fall. If you are a poet under 30 years old who would like to participate in a great event please see the flyer below for details. And if you teach creative writing classes (or any English or humanities classes) please distribute this information to your students as soon as possible. Don't be afraid to emphasize that there are cash prizes for first, second, and third place.

Please note that entries must be emailed in on or before 29 August, so the deadline is coming up quickly. See the flyer below for more information, and again, please distribute this flyer to your students.

The Question: Why We Read and Write Literature

Major thanks to the philosophy department's Sharon Ryan, who put together a great video and essays from English department faculty and grad students answering The Question: Why we read and write literature. The video and some essays are posted here. See what motivates us as scholars and artists to engage with the worlds of literature.

Michael Austin's new book on the Founding Fathers

A former professor of mine, Michael Austin, has a new book on how the Founding Fathers have been redeployed by the right wing as a kind of stick to shut down reasonable debate. The title of the book is That's Not What They Meant!: Reclaiming the Founding Fathers from America's Right Wing.

I post this to TCH partially because we have people who work on early American lit, but also to kind of reprise some of the issues raised in Adam Komisaruk's Public Spheres Seminar from last Spring, and related less directly to Ryan Claycomb's Fall Seminar on uses of the past (though not British postmodernism). You can watch the After Words interview with Michael where he talks extensively about how the idea of the Founders functions rhetorically in contemporary public politics and in the public sphere of the Early Republic. Of course, history is used continually in the public sphere as a source of authority for certain points, but Michael's book points to a flaw in the rhetorical use of 'The Founding Fathers,' namely that there was no such thing as 'The Founding Fathers' as a kind of "collective hive mind" as Michael says in the interview. However, Michael also notes that shifting the discourse to 'some' or 'many' Founding Fathers would destroy the power of the rhetorical appeal. In other words, any position that evokes a hive mind collective of Founding Fathers relies on a logical fallacy for its authority, but despite the fallacious quality the position is incredibly effective (dangerously so, Michael argues) for limiting the sphere of what can 'legitimately' be considered in public policy.

You can follow the blog that lead up to TNWTM! here, and Michael's newest blog attempting to encourage civil and rational debate about contemporary political issues here.

Andi Stout's New Review of Jason T. Lewis' The 14th Colony

Our MFA program's own Andi Stout has a new review, entitled "Nowhere Else To Go But Home: A Review of The Fourteenth Colony," published through Connotation Press (you can read the review here). This is Andi's second review with CP, the first was of Jim Harm's Comet Scar.

Andi reviews Jason Lewis' new (2012) novel The Fourteenth Colony: a Novel With Music. Lewis is a from a small West Virginia town, so it is fitting that a WVU student and fellow West Virginian write the review.

One thing that is even more impressive about this review is that Andi wrote it in just one day. She was asked to write the review just a few days before the deadline and she took up the challenge with admirable results.

I encourage you all to read the review, then buy Lewis' book. And congratulate Andi next time you see her on another published review.

Reflections of the Other: An EGO Arts Series Presentation

The EGO Arts Series

Hosted by EGO Presents:

A Reading from the Newly Published Book by Ethel Morgan Smith

Friday 19 Oct. 2012, at 7:30

Colson 130

That's Not What They Meant!, a new book for early Americanists and anyone interested in contemporary US political rhetoric

Michael Austin, a provost and English professor at Newman University (and one of my undergrad instructors from Shepherd Univeristy), has a new book being released tomorrow. The book's title is That's Not What They Meant! Reclaiming the Founding Fathers from America's Right Wing. The book is being published through Prometheus Books for the very afforable price of $19 (the link I've provided is to the book listing on the Prometheus website).

Austin's work, which has been partially developed through his insightful, unique, and sometimes downright funny blog Founderstein, works to deconstruct the mythos of a unified set of 'Founding Fathers' for the American republic. Prompted by the casual use of the 'Founding Fathers' as a stick with which to threaten or a talisman with which to legitimate any position in contemporary US political rhetoric, Austin goes back to contemporary documents and debates of the Early Republic period and shows how diverse and messy the founding of our nation actually was--and that the mess and diversity is how things are supposed to be.

Although I haven't read the book (I have read every Founderstein post though), I would say this is going to be an important text for early Americanists (I'm looking at you, Tim Sweet and Ryan Fletcher), or anyone who follows contemporary US politics and the rhetorics of political debate.

New Review of Comet Scar

There is a new review of our beloved leader Jim Harms' recently published book Comet Scar. And if you needed any more impetus to pick up a copy of the book, this review might just do the trick.

The reviewer is our MFA program's own Andi Stout, a follower and dedicated student of Jim.

Jim also has another recently published book, entitled What to Borrow, What to Steal.

What is hip?

I'm no style maven, but I will admit that I like to see what folks are wearing when fall semester starts.  On my trip up High Street to campus on the first day of classes, I was walking behind a woman who was sporting a full-on Flashdance look:  open-necked sweatshirt with dolman sleeves (and elbow patches!), skinny jeans, flat black leather boots, and big hair.

Now, I have very little room to critique this look, since I sported it myself in college.  However, being a firm believer in the maxim that "If you wore it the first time around, you shouldn't wear it the second time around," you won't be seeing me in that getup anytime soon, although I confess that I do, in fact, still have two vintage Flashdance-y sweatshirts and a Marithe + François Girbaud stonewashed denim mini skirt in my closet. At the time, that skirt was the single most expensive piece of clothing I'd ever bought.

If you clicked the link above, you probably noted that Flashdance star Jennifer Beals is one of our people--a fellow English major who studied American literature at Yale, and sent a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise to Brooke Shields upon her admission to the other Ivy down the road because she felt it was "necessary reading before you go to Princeton."

Well, literary fashions come and go, too.  This semester I'm using the 10th edition of the Pearson American literature anthology in my English 242 class, and as I put together my syllabus, I was interested to see what had been added and, maybe more importantly, left out since the previous edition.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, you couldn't have found an American lit anthology that didn't have at least a couple of token poems by H. D., an Imagist poet who'd recently been "reclaimed" and rescued from obscurity.  Everyone was talking about how she was one of the overlooked geniuses of Modernism.

In the 10th edition, there's not a single poem by H. D.  There is, however, a lot more Ezra Pound than there was in the 9th edition.  Guess that as the years go by, we're becoming more willing to overlook his involvement with Italian Fascism.

Ernest Hemingway, meanwhile, is relegated to a scant four pages in a 2300-page tome:  he's represented by a single, fairly obscure story, "In Another Country."  Yet this edition includes a few writers who previously have pretty much only been mentioned as the butt of jokes, like Carl Sandburg and Edna St. Vincent Millay.  I guess those two are kind of the Flashdance sweatshirts of the literary scene this season, rescued from ridicule to be appreciated in a new context.

I think Tower of Power captured the fickleness of fashion best:  "Hipness is what it is...and sometimes, hipness is what it ain't."  Either way, as the song goes, "If you're really hip, the passing years will show" if you're hipper than hip, or if what's hip today becomes passé.



Let's hope, though, that none of those 70s fashions come back.  Gahhh!!!!