Category: 2022 Faculty News

Jane Wong’s second collection of poetry How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) was longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and was featured in The New York Times, NPR, Boston Globe, Shondaland, Publisher’s Weekly, and more. During her book tour, she performed at over 40 venues virtually and in-person, including the Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival, The Los Angeles Festival of Books, and more. Her debut memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, is forthcoming from Tin House in 2023. An interdisciplinary artist as well, she exhibited her poetry installation work alongside the artist duo Mizzonk for “Nourish” at the Richmond Art Gallery in 2022. Forthcoming poems and essays will appear in The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The New Republic, Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult), and What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People (University Press of Kentucky). Along with receiving the 2021-2022 Woodberry Poetry Room Fellowship from Harvard University and a 2021 Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award, she is the 2022 recipient of the Peter J. Elich Teaching Award at WWU. She also adopted the cutest rescue pup named Panko.

Kami Westhoff’s story collection, The Criteria, appeared this May from Unsolicited Press, and her poetry chapbook, Cloudbound, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press.

The Criteria explores unconventional, and at times highly problematic, motherhood. The characters struggle with impossible choices that often lead to heartbreaking behaviors. In the title story, the main character takes on the burden of breastfeeding infants whose mothers have fallen ill while at the same time struggling with the fate of her own infant. Another story imagines a scenario in which the mother/child bond is prohibited and drastic measures are taken to ensure its prevention. The characters are asked to suffer many tragedies, but also to embrace hope in the most unlikely places.

Kami is an award-winning poet and short story writer. She is also the author of two other poetry chapbooks— Sleepwalker, which won Minerva Rising’s Dare to Be contest, and Your Body a Bullet, co-written with Elizabeth Vignali—and her prose has appeared in various journals including Booth, Carve, Hippocampus, Passages North, Meridian, Waxwing, and West Branch.

Katherine Judith Anderson’s book, Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain, was published in April 2022 by The Ohio State University Press. Twisted Words examines torture across the fiction, periodicals, and government documents of the British Empire in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Placing acts of torture and words about torture in relation to changing definitions of citizenship and human rights, Anderson argues that torture—as a technique of state terrorism—evolved in relation to nineteenth-century liberalism, combining the traditional definition of exceptional acts of cruelty with systemic, banal, or everyday violence. Analyzing canonical novels by George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and George Meredith alongside an impressive array of lesser-known fiction through the lenses of critical terrorism studies and political, legal, and phenomenological theory, Anderson rethinks torture as a mode of reclaiming an embodied citizenship and demonstrates how the Victorians ushered in our modern definition of torture. Furthermore, she argues that torture is foundational to Western modernity since liberalism was, and continues to be, dependent on state-sanctioned—and at times state-sponsored—torture, establishing parallels between Victorian liberal thought and contemporary (neo)imperialism and global politics.

In the 2021-2022 academic year, Ning Yu published a book-length memoir《吾爱吾师》(I Love Truth More) with Chinese People’s Literature Press, the premier literary press in China. He also published three peer-reviewed articles as part of his ongoing work in ecocritical studies. “Six Areas Where Modern Ecocritical Theory can be Applied to Tang Poetry” appeared in Studies in Classic Chinese Literary Theories, the top journal in the field. “Du Fu’s Poems about Co-existing with Wild Tigers in the Three Gorges Area,” appeared in Du Fu Studies (《杜甫研究学刊》). Du Fu is celebrated as the Poet Saint in China, and this journal is likewise among the best in the field of Tang poetry studies. Finally,《虎年译<虎>》(“A New Translation of Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ at the Beginning of the Year of Tiger”) appeared in Asia Interdisciplinary Translation Studies.

This past year, Suzanne Paola’s essay “Commensals” appeared in the anthology Georgia Review Writes the Environment, published by the University of Georgia Press, and her essay “A Drinkable Beauty” appeared in Orion. She also published opinion/commentary pieces in The Hill, Ms., and the Huffington Post. In addition, two new pieces have been accepted for publication: “Gods at Play” in The Little Book of Bugs from Orion Books, and “The Truth in Schreber’s Delusions: Psychotic Experience, Eugenics, and the Trial of Daniel Paul Schreber” in The Futures of Neurodiversity from Modern Language Association Books.

Suzanne is also featured on the Canadian radio program Ideas with Nahlah Ayed, where in a two-part episode entitled “Myth of Normal” she joins a number of other neurodiverse people, including Temple Grandin, to explore the topic. The episodes have been aired across 98% of Canada, in eighty other countries, in the U.S. on Sirius XM and on NPR, and are housed as a podcast on the Ideas website. You can listen here. 

Brenda Miller had two books come out in the fall of 2021. A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form appeared from University of Michigan Press, and her collaboration with Julie Marie Wade (MA 2003), Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, was published by Cleveland State University Press after being selected by Hanif Abdurraqib as the winner of the CSU Poetry Center Essay Collection prize. In addition, Miller’s essay “Things That Glow” appeared in the winter 2022 edition of Speculative Nonfiction, and her article “Tell it Even More Slant” appeared in the winter 2022 edition of Creative Nonfiction as part of a special section on the evolution of the genre.

Carol Guess’s short story collection Sleep Tight Satellite will be published by Tupelo Press in 2023. The book is a collection of interlinked stories about queer friends in Seattle surviving Trump-era politics and the Covid-19 pandemic. The title story can be read here. 

Carol is the author of twenty books of poetry and prose, including Doll Studies: Forensics, Girl Zoo, and Tinderbox Lawn. A frequent collaborator, she writes across genres and illuminates historically marginalized material. In 2014 she was awarded the Philolexian Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement by Columbia University.

The Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco invited Christopher Wise to give a talk, “Yambo Ouologuem, Le devoir de violence, et l’Umarian Tijaniyya,” at the launching ceremony for the Chair of African Literature and Arts on May 17, 2022, in Rabat. Wise was also recently invited to attend the inaugural celebration of the construction of the “Grand Projet de Complex de Halvar d’El Hadj Oumar Foutiyou Tall.” (See video.) The complex will be one of the largest in the Islamic world and will include le Palais de Reception, la Grande Mosquée Familiale, le Temple des Lumières, Umarian archives, a university, and also a hospital. Wise has conducted research in Halwar for many years and has brought WWU English students there in the Senegal Program to meet with Tijaniyya leaders. The inaugural celebration of the Tall Complex, which was attended by numerous African presidents, religious leaders, and other dignitaries, was held in Brazzaville, the Republic of Congo, on May 28, 2022, where Wise also spoke about his research. 

Wise’s translation of a book-length poem by the Tuareg poet Hawad, In the Net, also appeared in 2022 from the University of Nebraska Press as part of Kwame Dawes’s African Poetry Book Series. In the Net, written in Tamajaght with tifinagh characters, is an epic of war about the rise and fall of the briefly lived state of Azawad in Northern Mali and the Tuaregs’ struggle for independence. The Tuareg are a semi-nomadic Amazigh (or “Berber”) people, who have inhabited the Sahara for centuries in places like Timbuktu, Gao, Kidal, Gao, Agadez, and elsewhere. Hawad is also a visual artist who converts tifinagh alphabetic characters from Tuareg writing into paintings and drawings, including the image on the cover of In the Net. Wise’s daughter Ayesha Wise (BA in Fine Art, 2017) made a brief documentary about Wise and Hawad’s meeting in Aix En Provence. (See video.). Excerpts of Wise’s translation of Hawad’s book also appeared in a special issue of the Bellingham Review on West African writing, which was edited by Susanne Paola with Kristiana Kahakauwila and Wise.

In addition to these accomplishments, Wise recently published “Decolonization or Redemption? The One-State Solution: Unsilencing Gaza and Liberating Palestine” in Arena Quarterly, No. 7 (2021) and a review of Alexander Thurston’s Jihadists of North Africa and the Sahel in Reading Religion.