Jemma – Page 8 – English Department Alumni News

Christopher Wise

Christopher Wise’s À la recherche de Yambo Ouologuem (Paris: Les Èditions Philae, 2018) was selected as La Livre de la Semaine [Book of the Week] by Africa No.1 Radio in Paris, France. He also translated Jean-Michel Djian’s The Manuscripts of Timbuktu: Secrets, Myths, Realities (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2019), which was launched at the “Global Africa, Migration, and the Arts” Conference at Rutgers University at a panel honoring Kassahun Checole and Africa World Press on March 28, 2019. Wise was a plenary speaker at the conference and spoke on the topic of “Yambo Ouologuem’s Le devoir de violence at 50.” Wise also published an article “Après Azawad: Le devoir de violence, djihad, et idéologie chérifienne dans le Nord du Mali” in Fabula/Les colloques: L’oeuvre de Yambo Ouologuem: Un carrefour d’écritures (1968-2018). In January 2019, Wise was invited to speak at Green College, UBC in Vancouver Canada, where he gave a talk on the crisis in Mali, entitled “The Jihad of Iyad Ag Ghali”. He gave another talk at Université Hassan II in Casablanca, Morocco on “American Studies in the Arab University: 9/11 to Azawad”. In Paris, Wise also gave a teleconference on Yambo Ouologuem for UBIZNEWS, “Yambo l’Utime Témoignage: Téléconférence” on February 28, 2019.

May 28, 2019June 10, 2022 Jemma 2019 Newsletter, 2020 Faculty News

Kristiana Kahakauwila and Christopher Wise

This past Winter term (2019) Kristiana Kahakauwila and Christopher Wise co-led a Study Abroad class to Senegal, the first of its kind for WWU and the English department. Christopher taught two courses in West African literature, covering the pre- and post-colonial eras, while Kristiana taught contemporary Senegalese women writers as well as travel writing and its pitfalls. Fourteen undergraduates, almost all department majors, went on the trip and spent time in the cities of Dakar, Touba, St. Louis, and Saly. Western Today wrote about the trip in an article titled “Postcards from Senegal,” and the experience was deemed such a success that the same trip will be offered in Winter 2020.

May 28, 2019June 10, 2022 Jemma 2019 Newsletter, 2020 Faculty News

Andrew Lucchesi

Andrew Lucchesi just finished his first year as Director of Composition. His work has included training and mentoring the thirty English graduate students who teach English 101, and designing new curriculum for the writing program, including a Poster Showcase where six-hundred students display their research for the public every quarter. He publishes in the fields of curriculum design (see his chapter in Next Steps: New Directions for/in Writing About Writing, 2019) and critical disability studies (see his edited special issue in the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 2015). He is currently writing about game-based pedagogy and “playable” course documents for college writing classes. Along with Allison Griffin, Andrew was awarded a Diversity and Social Justice grant to develop new English department courses in the field of Disability Studies at both the senior level and as large GUR courses. Andrew teaches courses on first-year writing pedagogy, disability studies and rhetoric, comic books, and developmental writing.

May 28, 2019June 10, 2022 Jemma 2019 Newsletter, 2020 Faculty News

Kathryn Trueblood

Kathryn Trueblood’s new novel, Take Daily As Needed, treats parenting while chronically ill with the desperado humor the subject deserves (forthcoming September 2019 from the University of New Mexico Press). She will be offering a workshop to celebrate the Whatcom Library System’s Anniversary: 75 Years of Sharing Stories called “Telling Tough Stories: Writing Illness,” in the fall of 2019. This year, Trueblood co-taught a Red Badge Project weekend workshop in Walla Walla with Shawn Wong in October 2018, and a month-long workshop at The Bellingham Veterans Center in April 2019. She was invited to attend a workshop sponsored by the Great Books Foundation “Help Veterans Help Each Other,” in Chicago, October 26-27, 2018, fully funded. From October to May, she then co-moderated a book club, “War Through the Eyes of Women” at The Bellingham Vet Center, and she again served as writing coach and faculty advisor for “Stories Deployed: the Veteran Chronicles,” now in its sixth year.

May 28, 2019June 10, 2022 Jemma 2019 Newsletter, 2020 Faculty News

Brenda Miller

Brenda Miller, with her colleague Suzanne Paola, has been hard at work on the updates for the Third Edition of Tell it Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction, scheduled for release this summer. Her poetry and essays have appeared in such venues as Tupelo Quarterly, Jet Fuel Review (with alum Julie Marie Wade), and Psaltery & Lyre (edited by alum Dayna Patterson). Brenda’s essay “The Shape of Emptiness,” originally published in Brevity, received recognition as a “Notable Essay of 2018” in Best American Essays. Her article “The Fine Art of Containment in Creative Nonfiction” appeared in the March issue of The Writer’s Chronicle. In her teaching, she developed a new course focused solely on “Hermit Crab Essays” for ENG 458: Topics in Nonfiction Writing, and a graduate course (ENG 598) exploring the assumptions and practices of creative writing pedagogy.

May 28, 2019June 10, 2022 Jemma 2019 Newsletter, 2020 Faculty News

Kelly Magee

Kelly Magee’s story “Nobody Understands You Like You” was selected by Antonya Nelson to be included in New Stories from the Midwest 2018, her story (with Carol Guess), “With Killer Bees” was included in an anthology of collaborative writing, They Said, and her story (with Kami Westhoff) “The Unbearable Here” was published in Contrary. She developed a new course in “Queer Memoir” and taught a Graduate Fiction Workshop around the idea of “influence”—what things contemporary writers are influenced by, and how they can best exert their own influence. She also spoke on a panel on “The Speculative and Fantastic in LGBTQ+ Writing” and organized “Taste of Western,” a reading of WWU faculty at this year’s AWP conference in Portland.

May 28, 2019June 10, 2022 Jemma 2019 Newsletter, 2020 Faculty News

Laura Laffrado

Laura Laffrado and her work on Pacific Northwest author Ella Rhoads Higginson were featured in the Seattle Sunday Times Magazine cover story “Poetic Justice.” Her project for a bronze bust honoring Higginson was completed in November with installation of the bust in the Wilson Library foyer and the Ella Higginson Celebration (watch the event). Her book Selected Writings of Ella Higginson: Inventing Pacific Northwest Literature received the 2018 Society for the Study of American Women Writers Edition Award ( watch her acceptance speech in Denver). Her essay, “The Value of Digitized Newspaper Collections in Researching Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Women’s Writing: Two Newly Recovered Poems by Ella Rhoads Higginson,” appeared in the Readex Report and her Op-Ed “The New West” appeared in The Seattle Times.

May 28, 2019June 10, 2022 Jemma 2019 Newsletter, 2020 Faculty News

Allison Giffen

Allison Giffen recently co-edited the collection Saving the World: Girlhood and Evangelicalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature. This year she is on professional leave researching her new book on childhood and disability in nineteenth-century US popular literature. She is also collaborating on a digital humanities project in Critical Childhood Studies, that includes a website titled the Critical Childhood Studies Forum, funded through the Hatter award. In addition, she is developing a new upper-level seminar titled “Critical Childhood Studies” which will offer interrogations into representations of childhood in literature, the history and construction of childhood, and children as agents of cultural production. She received a summer grant from the Social Justice and Equity Committee to develop new curriculum in disability studies and is working on a new upper-level seminar in the English department, titled “Disability and Literature.”

May 28, 2019June 10, 2022 Jemma 2019 Newsletter, 2020 Faculty News

Christopher Loar

Chris Loar’s unhealthy obsession with Daniel Defoe continues. His essay on Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year will appear in Eighteenth-Century Fiction this fall, and he is currently working on a book chapter about Defoe’s responses to scientific developments in the early eighteenth century. He’s also still co-editing the online journal Digital Defoe (digitaldefoe.org). And this summer he’ll travel to York in the UK to present some of his research on Defoe and deism. His students this year have mostly been spared from this obsession, though; instead, his teaching has focused on the sibling novelists Henry and Sarah Fielding; on ecological writing in the past, present, and future tenses; and on literary animals.