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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Jane Wong
Jane Wong’s second book of poems, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2021. Recently, her essays and poems have appeared in places such as POETRY, Orion, New England Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, The Georgia Review, and others. She has a forthcoming piece in The Best American Non-required Reading 2019 anthology. This summer, she will be busy writing at three residencies, including: Jentel, SAFTA Farms, and Blackacre as Sarabande’s Writer-in-Residence. Check out her solo exhibit at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle (running from June 1st-September 1st) entitled “After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly.