In summer 2019, Greg Youmans served as the film consultant for the Oakland Museum of California’s exhibition “Queer California: Untold Stories.” The exhibition, which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Riots, was on view from April 13 to August 11. Youmans also gave a talk at the museum about the film selections in June. In his teaching, he developed a new course topic for ENG 464, Advanced Topics in Film Studies: “Queer Experimental.” The course surveys the history of avant-garde film and media production by queer and trans artists, and in its first iteration, taught in Spring 2020 during the pandemic, it featured online class visits from a number of contemporary filmmakers.
Bruce Beasley
Bruce Beasley published new poems in Poetry, Georgia Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, New American Writing, Plume, and Hotel Amerika. His work was featured in the Poetry Magazine podcast “Dreams and Fathers.”
Jane Wong
In the spring of 2019, Jane Wong was honored by receiving the Womxn of Color Empowerment Award at WWU. Her first solo art exhibition, “After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly,” ran from June-September 2019 at the Frye Art Museum, and was featured on Hyperallergic. Also during the summer, she was an artist-in-residence via the Jentel Foundation, SAFTA, and Sarabande Books. Recent poems and essays have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit, Apogee, The Common, Shenandoah, POETRY, Orion, The Yale Review, and others. Her second book, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything from Alice James is forthcoming next year. And she’s busy working on a third book of poems and a collection of essays. This past fall, she was thrilled to have a poem alongside a former WWU student of hers, Tessie Monique (Class of 2018), in The Lantern Review.
Brenda Miller
Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola revised their highly popular textbook Tell it Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction for a 3rd edition, published by McGraw-Hill in August 2019. In the past year, Brenda’s essays and poems appeared in such venues as Fusion, Bellevue Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, and The Writer’s Chronicle. Her book of collaborative essays, written with MA Alum Julie Marie Wade, called Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, received the Cleveland Poetry Center Award for an Essay Collection, chosen by Hanif Abdurraqib, in 2019, and it will be published by Cleveland State University Press in 2021. She also has forthcoming a collection of her “writing on writing,” called A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form, with University of Michigan Press in 2021. Her website is www.brendamillerwriter.com
Bruce Goebel
Bruce Goebel helped establish a new ELL/English major for future K-12 educators and published “ENG 1: Humor for Teachers,” English Journal, Vol. 109, No. 4, March 2020.
Kami Westhoff
Kami Westhoff’s poetry and fiction appeared or is forthcoming in XRAY Magazine, SWIMM, Whale Road Review, Ghost Parachute, and Carve’s Ways of Looking Anthology. Her collection of short stories, The Criteria, was accepted by Unsolicited Press.
Kathryn Trueblood
Kathryn Trueblood’s newest novel, Take Daily As Needed, presents the challenges of parenting while ill with the desperado humor the subject deserves; it was published by the University of New Mexico Press in September 2019. Trueblood offered workshops in therapeutic writing at “The Examined Life” Conference at the University of Iowa, the Hugo House in Seattle, and the Lighthouse Writers Conference in Denver. Her essay, “Writing from a Pile of Shoes: Chronic Illness, Kids, and Creation,” was published by Literary Mama in November 2019, and “Honey, Don’t Break Yourself” is forthcoming in Minerva Rising #18. You can find her interviews at Invisible Not Broken Podcast, Montana Public Radio, and Writing It Real.
Katherine Anderson
Katherine Anderson has given invited lectures at the National Museum of Language and the University of Washington, as well as conference papers for Victorians Institute and the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States. She is completing her first monograph, Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain, which is now under contract with The Ohio State University Press. In her teaching, she developed three new courses, creating two different versions of “Victorian Sexualities” for ENG 320: The Long Nineteenth Century and ENG 560: Studies in British Literature, respectively, and “The Rise of the Monster” for ENG 215: British Literature.
Suzanne Paola
Suzanne Paola has had three books accepted for publication this year: one, The Devil’s Castle (nonfiction), is in the writing stage and appearing in 2022 from Counterpoint Press. Two are finished and in the publication process— Entangled Objects: A Novel in Quantum Parts (Slant Books, fiction) and The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here (OSU 21st Century Essay series, nonfiction)— both appearing in 2021. She has published poetry in the South Carolina Review and essays in Signal Mountain Review, the UK Independent, and the New York Times. Additionally, she has published the critical article “Speculative Nonfiction” in the AWP Chronicle and contributed a chapter, “The Truth in Schreber’s Delusions,” to the scholarly work The Futures of Neurodiversity, forthcoming from Modern Language Association Books.
Dawn Deitrich
Dawn Dietrich published, “‘For America to Rise it’s a Matter of Black Lives/And We Gonna Free Them, so We Can Free Us’: 13th and Anti-Racist Filmmaking in the ‘Age of Fake News'”in Pacific Coast Philology.