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.
Laura Laffrado
Laura Laffrado’s chapter on teaching Pacific Northwest author Ella Rhoads Higginson has been published in the collection Teaching Western American Literature. Laura is also the newly-appointed Associate Editor of the journal Nathaniel Hawthorne Review. Laura spoke about Ella Higginson at the Modern Language Association Convention in Seattle in January 2020.
Donna Qualley
Donna Qualley and Matthew Sorlien (English Literature major and PWLR minor, WWU Fall 2020) co-wrote a chapter, “Our (Students’) Work (and Play) Can Make Us Smarter Next Time” for an edited collection entitled Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition Studies, edited by Peter Moe and Stacey Waite and to be published by Parlor Press in 2021. The collection focuses for the important role of student writing in composition studies research and the impact it has had on the development of the field.
Christopher Wise
Christopher Wise (along with Kristiana Kahakauwila) ran the Senegal Program for the second year, bringing 15 WWU English majors to Dakar, Saint Louis, and Saly, where they studied West African literature and culture. Wise, Kahakauwila, and Suzanne Paola co-edited a special international issue of The Bellingham Review featuring West Africa writers. The special issue is entitled “Scribes, Griots, and Poets: New Writing From West Africa,” including Wise’s translations of excerpts from the Tuareg poet Hawad’s poem ‘In The Net’ and the Senegalese author Boris Boubacar Diop’s short story “Night of the Imoko.” Wise also participated in a panel discussion in Djilor, Senegal at the Foundation Léopold Sédar Senghor, entitled “Léopold Sédar Senghor et la poésie de la négritude” (February 10, 2020). Since the coronavirus struck, he has been stuck at home recording lectures for his classes on deconstruction and animal metamorphosis. These lectures are available for public viewing on his YouTube channel, “Christopher Wise.”