Retiring professor Brenda Miller has endowed two creative writing scholarships: one for undergraduate students writing creative nonfiction, and one for MFA students specializing in creative nonfiction. These scholarships are part of her estate and will be endowed at $30,000 and $50,000 respectively, to provide funding over many years for the creative writing program at WWU.
Endowed scholarships provide perennial financial support to Western students thanks to the generosity of donors like Brenda. Endowed funds are invested and managed in such a way that the fund principal remains untouched and a percentage of the fund value is available each year for scholarship support, allowing them to last in perpetuity.
Matthew Hammatt, J.D., Senior Director for Planned Giving at Western, wants future donors to know that they “have a significant say in how their gift would be used, and they can help to craft the eligibility criteria for any scholarship they create.” According to Matt, establishing a scholarship with a gift from the donor’s will/trust and/or from their IRA, 401k/403b “requires no outlay of cash during the donor’s lifetime. By focusing on a testamentary gift, a donor is able to look at their overall net worth (investments, real estate equity, deferred-tax accounts, etc.) rather than simply their cash on hand. By looking at overall net worth, even a relatively modest percentage can translate into a significant financial gift.”
Readers who are interested in learning more about establishing a scholarship can contact Matt at hammatm@wwu.edu
A big thank you to Brenda and to all the donors who have helped support the education of WWU English students over the years!
In Fall 2024, the English department launches a new major track in Film and Media Studies. This exciting development has been a long time coming. The department first offered a Film Studies minor twenty years ago under the leadership of Professors Dawn Dietrich and Doug Park, and since then the program has slowly but steadily grown. As of next year we have four full-time professors specializing in the discipline: Felicia Cosey, Eren Odabasi, Jamie Rogers, and Greg Youmans. Finally enough to launch a major!
The interdisciplinary Film and Media Studies major curriculum is built around six core classes, including new offerings in film and media theory, major directors and genres, and equity and representation. These are supplemented by courses on other topics in film and media studies, modern and contemporary literature, and various aspects of media production. The program will continue to work closely with faculty members in Art, Fairhaven, and other relevant departments, as well as with the Digital Media Center in the library, the Pickford Film Center downtown, and other campus and community partners.
In offering the major, we recognized a critical need both within our university and statewide for this kind of program. While a few other schools offer undergraduate degrees in film and media production, the University of Washington is the only other university in the state that offers a B.A. in the critical study of film and media.
According to Professor Dietrich, who can recall when “Literature and Film” was the only film course taught at Western, “This evolution of the Film and Media Studies major is the long-term goal Doug and I dreamed of achieving during our tenure here. Since Doug is retired now, and I am retiring in 2025, it has happened in the nick of time. I can tell you that not only do we have a state-of-the-art film program, but we have world-class faculty teaching its courses. Best wishes to all of my film colleagues now and into the future!”
During Fall Quarter 2024, the English Department hosted Professor Alassane Abdoulaye Dia of the Université Numérique Cheikh Hamidou Kane in Senegal. Professor Dia, who has taught in the English Department’s Senegal Program since its inception in 2019, offered courses in African and African Diaspora literature. He also gave presentations at WWU on the Bellingham-based author Robert Lashley’s novel, I Never Dreamed You’d Leave In Summer, and his own English language novel, The Power of Peace and Love: An African Tale of Wisdom.
Dr. Dia has collaborated with Professor Christopher Wise over the last two decades on various translation and research projects. Recently, they co-edited a bilingual book, The Writings of Al Hajj Sekou Tall / Les écrits d’El Hajj Sékou Tall, which students in the department study in the Senegal Program.
Dr. Dia comes from a small fishing village in Northeastern Senegal, near the border of Mauritania. He earned his Ph.D. from Gaston Berger University and his currently the Head of his Department at Cheikh Hamidou Kane. He is also the author of books and numerous articles on African-American and Anglophone African literature.
WWU English faculty are delighted to share updates from their teaching, scholarship, service, and other areas of practice in this series of vignettes.
Elizabeth Colen
I am delighted to have branched out in my fiction pursuits to include work in an upcoming anthology Someplace Generous: An Inclusive Romance Anthology, the first book from Row House imprint Generous Press, which focuses on romance with BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and disability-focused content. The anthology comes out this spring and was recently highlighted at Publishers Weekly. I’m currently at work another short story collection, as well as a collaborative novel project, and am most focused right now on completing an essay collection from which several pieces have recently been published, including essay “Under the Shadows,” which made the notable list for Best American Essays 2023.
Additionally, a popular course I developed recently for WGSS, Queer Comix, was accepted this year as a permanent part of the curriculum after consistently achieving full capacity (and at times a lengthy wait list). In terms of greater community, I continue doing the vital work of supporting local queer youth as both board member and full-fledged, boots-on-the-ground (happy, but exhausted this time of year) volunteer with Whatcom Youth Pride. I also continue to volunteer my time as sometimes-mentor for young, marginalized writers to help them advance their writing skills and usher their writing into the world. And I am in my eighth year as Nonfiction Acquisitions Editor for Tupelo Press, as well as Prose Editor-at-Large for Tupelo Quarterly.
Felicia Cosey
I developed my first course at Western, ENG 367—Equity and Representation in Film and Media—which was approved by the curriculum committee and will be a core course for the new film studies major. My video essay proposal was accepted by Monstrum journal. I was also invited to give introductions for two Jordan Peele movies at the Pickford in February in recognition of black history month.
Stefania Heim
This past year I began an exciting translation exchange with contemporary Italian poet Stefania Zampiga, who I met at a translation residency at Villa Garbald in Switzerland. Her translations of my poems appeared in the Italian journal Interno Poesia. And my translations of her poems appeared in Consilience, a peer-reviewed journal of science and art, and are forthcoming this summer in Fence magazine.
Kelly Magee
Kelly’s short story, “Florida Girl Kidnaps Girl from Hospital Waiting Room,” was listed in “Other Distinguished Stories of 2022” in The Best American Short Stories 2023.
Brenda Miller
After 25 years teaching at WWU, Brenda is retiring with the status of Faculty Emerita! She is grateful for her colleagues, and for the hundreds of students who have enriched her life. This year, she taught an Honors Seminar encouraging students to find “Wonders and Delights” to incorporate into their writing, as well as a multi-genre course on writing about (and with) animals. In the spring, she taught a graduate seminar on creative writing pedagogy, her last hurrah! She had collaborative work, with alum Julie Marie Wade, published in Superstition Reviewand Fourth Genre, and her edited volume, The Next Draft: Inspiring Craft Talks from the Rainier Writing Workshop, is out from the University of Michigan Press. She also received her 7th Pushcart Prize, this time for her essay “Care Warning” which appeared in The Sun in June 2023.
Donna Qualley
I retired from Western Washington University on December 31st after 29.33 years of service.
Caitlin Roach Orduña
My debut collection of poems, Surveille, was selected by Amaud Jamaul Johnson as winner of the 2024 Brittingham Prize in Poetry and will be published by the University of Wisconsin Press this Fall (2024). My poem “Washington” was a finalist for Narrative Magazine’s 15th Annual Poetry Contest and will be published by Narrative on 5/13. The same poem, “Washington” was selected for Best New Poets 2023.
Kate Trueblood
I am circulating my first collection of essays, Death Fever, about my mother’s decision to voluntarily stop eating and drinking rather than enter assisted living during Covid 19. In the fall, I tried a new course, English 525: Extreme States, a class that explored how such states are portrayed in language: we covered trauma, illness, addiction, and madness. The students took big risks, and I admired the work they produced.
Kami Westhoff
Kami won the 2023 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook contest. Her chapbook, Sacral, will be published in 2025. Her poems and essays appeared in Fugue, Booth, The Boiler, SWWIM, and she was A Dozen Nothing‘s featured monthly poet in May 2024.
Christopher Wise
Christopher took 17 students to Senegal again in February 2024 with WWU’s faculty-led Senegal Global Learning Program (see brief film WWU at Alwar). He also made two documentaries in Paris, France with a RSP grant, Bamako sur Seine and Grand Mosquée de Paris. On October 6, 2023, Wise gave a commemorative address on the occasion of the death of the Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera at the Riyad International Book Fair, sponsored by King Saud University in Riyad, Saudi Arabia. In response to the crisis in Gaza, he spoke on November 7, 2023 to the Native & Indigenous Law Students Association (NISLA) at the University of Tucson Law School on the Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish and the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, which is available for viewing, “Law of Return vs. Right of Return: Israel, Palestine, and Poetry from the Inside”. Wise was also interviewed for a podcast that is available here entitled “Palestine & O’odham Homelands: Shared Struggles,” with Tina Nelson, Napoleon Marrietta, and Amy Juan. Tohono O’odham Young Voices Podcast, Episode 40, on November 29, 2023.
Prof. Christopher Wise and 17 WWU students travelled to Senegal in February 2024 with WWU’s faculty-led Senegal Global Learning Program
Jane Wong
My most recent book, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023), won the 2024 Pacific Northwest Bookseller Award, was longlisted for the 2023 New American Voices Award, and was released as a paperback in April 2024. In the past year, I was an artist-in-residence at Ucross and Mass MOCA. New poems and essays also appeared in Sierra, River Styx, Lit Hub, and others. In 2024, I was the Sojka Poet-in-Residence at Bucknell University. I am working on my fourth and fifth books, In the Future We Held Each Other (poems) and Waste Not To Want All Too Much (a novel).
Jeanne Yeasting
In February, I conducted research in the Manuscripts Reading Room of the British Library on the pre-Frankenstein work of Mary Shelley and the less well-known Victorian fiction of Florence Marryat. (Marryat’s novel, Blood of the Vampire was published the same year at Bram Stoker’s Dracula.)
