Nicole Brown enjoyed teaching courses in the Professional Writing and Rhetoric minor and continues to evolve her course projects around making meaning with others and staying human. She presented at the Popular Culture Association conference in New Orleans on rhetorics of entanglement and old growth forests in the PNW as vibrant matter. She is excited about completing two book chapters which will come out in 2026 on new materialism and more-than-human communication beyond the anthro. One of the collections is titled Sacred Culture and is being published by DeGruyter/Brill. Through this chapter, she has the privilege of collaborating and co-authoring with Dr. Marcelo Zaiduni, a traditional Aymara doctor living a teaching in Bolivia. Marcelo is a social communicator with a PhD in epistemology and semiology specializing in ancestral knowledge and indigenous peoples.
Felicia Cosey presented her paper titled “From Personal Trauma to Ecological Grief: Seeking Transformation in the Shimmer of Annihilation,”—which she is in the process of turning into a book chapter for Bloomsbury’s Environment and Society Series —at the LACK V Conference in March. She also presented a paper titled “Transatlantic Tensions: Black British Actors, Hollywood, and the Perception of Racial Excess” at the 83rd Annual College Language Association Convention in April. Additionally, her video essay titled “Jouissance at the Margins: Revisiting Bersani’s ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ through the Lens of Swallowed” was published in Monstrum journal in January.
Carol Guess published a book entitled Infodemic with Black Lawrence Press (2024). Her book focuses on contemporary queer life during the COVID-19 pandemic and the aftermath of Trump’s presidency. Beginning with the memory of a thwarted kidnapping attempt and ending with musings on life after death, Guess engages philosophical questions about spirituality, ethics, and politics, incorporating prose narratives with lineated poems, and capturing the humor and interconnectedness of the author’s queer chosen family. Infodemic was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2024.
Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi published his debut poetry collection in May 2025 entitled Disintegration Made Plain and Easy with Pizama Press. Surreal, absurd, dreamspeak poems full of humor, autobiographical mistruths, pop culture references, and heartfelt abstractions. Complete with line art illustrations from Gautam Rangan. See this link.
Geri Forsberg was elected as co-president of the International Jacques Ellul Society (IJES). Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) was a French philosopher, sociologist, lay theologian, and communication theorist, known for writing over 60 books and more than a thousand articles. He is well known for his books: The Technological Society and Propaganda.
During spring break, Geri visited Wheaton College with her former student, Moriah Pitts, and project manager Raeef Barsoum. They spent an entire week in the archives at Wheaton, where they scanned nearly 500 documents related to Ellul. These documents will need to be translated from French to English, and this translation project will continue over the next year.
After their time at Wheaton, Geri and Moriah traveled to the University of Notre Dame to prepare for a conference scheduled for July 2026. The theme of the IJES conference will be “The Word Humiliated,” based on Ellul’s book The Humiliation of the Word. The main question guiding the conference discussions will be: How is language changing in our social media, AI, and propaganda culture? Geri is also working on peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and a collection of her selected writings. https://ellul.org/
In December 2024, Stefania Heim published her translation of Metaphysical artist Giorgio de Chirico’s posthumous novel, Mr. Dudron. Following the 1929 publication of his novel Hebdomeros—declared by John Ashbery to be the finest piece of Surrealist literature —de Chirico began work on Mr. Dudron, the humorous (mis)adventures of his autobiographical hero: a painter who wanders, remembers, frets about art, polemicizes, and tells stories. The novel begins with Mr. Dudron in his studio having his siesta, and ends with him going to sleep, “because, as Arthur Schopenhauer used to say, a long sleep is indispensable to persons of genius.” In between, the novel whisks him on a series of adventures, both mundane and mythological. He attends dinner parties in the Italian countryside, and sneaks cans of sardines and tuna into his hotel. There is a centaur family, and three caged lions left alone in a suburban field. A requiem mass for a student, memories of the distant days of his childhood, and the strange world of dreams. De Chirico continued working on the novel steadily for four decades, printing excerpts of Dudron’s adventures in both Italian and French. The novel was finally published in Italian in 1998, the twentieth anniversary of the artist’s death. This publication is the first time the novel will be available in its entirety in English. For her translation of Mr. Dudron, Heim received an NEA Translation Fellowship and a fellowship to attend the ViceVersa Workshop at Villa Garbald, Switzerland.
Caitlin Roach’s book Surveille was selected as winner of the 2024 Brittingham Prize in Poetry by award-winning poet and professor of English at Stanford University, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, Surveille interrogates the multiple violences inflicted on bodies in our current historical moment—from natural to self-inflicted to state-sponsored—and a simultaneous deep reverence for the body’s capacity to nevertheless bear life. The poems in Surveille are born from encounters with sites of surveillance and political violence, like the militarized zones of the US/Mexico border wall, Creech Air Force Base, the Sonoran Desert, inside a Las Vegas casino, or outside a courthouse in Albuquerque where ICE agents apprehended undocumented people on their way to their scheduled court appearances. At its heart, Surveille confronts the various ways we watch and are watched—by ourselves, by others, and the state—and tracks a speaker with a subjectivity within the American empire who becomes pregnant by someone outside it, and the new life that sits at that fraught nexus. In his judge’s citation for the book, Amaud Jamaul Johnson writes, “Born between the twin flames of Brigit Pegeen Kelly and Mary Oliver, this book is both intimate and political…urgent and heart-piercing. This debut challenges us to stand witness.” Surveille was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in November 2024.
Jamie Rogers presented a paper at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2025 Conference in Chicago called “Archiving Space, Placing Race in RaMell Ross’ Hale County This Morning, This Evening and Garrett Bradley’s America.”
Kate Trueblood’s essay, “Blank Spaces, Black Frames,” was selected as the winner of the 2025 Rico Prize for Nonfiction from Reed Magazine and will be published in its 158th edition in May. Excerpted from Trueblood’s memoir The Big Ask, Blank Spaces, Black Frames,” is about her mother’s decision to voluntarily stop eating and drinking rather than enter assisted living during Covid 19. Reed Magazine recently posted a podcast with Trueblood on their website that addresses some of the issues caused by death denial in our culture: In the Reeds Podcast. Reed Magazine is the oldest journal west of the Mississippi, named after James Reed of the Donner Party. Trueblood will appear at the Chuckanut Writers Conference in June 2025, where she will offer sessions on “Time Travel” and “Fear of Writing the Erotic.”
For more info: https://kathryntrueblood.com/
Cori Winrock‘s new book-length essay, Alterations, will be published as part of Transit Book’s Undelivered Lecture Series in July. Threading together stories of textiles and texts, from the first space suits and the seamstresses who made them, to Emily Dickinson’s famous white dress, to the Steinian rhythms of Goodnight Moon, Winrock constructs and reconstructs an essay in order to accommodate devastating loss. A work of process and possibility, Alterations enacts the hidden labors of mourning.
Christopher Wise and students in the Senegal Program 2025 were guests of honor at a televised “poetry slam” in Podor, a fishing village on the border of Senegal and Mauritania in the Sahara Desert. The event can be viewed here. Wise also appeared in a documentary on the Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem, the controversial author of The Duty of Violence and Sufi mystic. Senegalese filmmaker Kalidou Sy filmed the documentary, which was nominated for the Thomas Sakara Prize at FESPACO in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. The documentary on Ouologuem can be viewed here. Wise also published a memoir entitled Conjurations about his experiences researching West African Sufism (Sahel Nomad). Here is an excerpt from Kirkus Reviews about his new book: “[Wise’s] book offers poignant insights into the intersection of religion, ethnicity, and racism, from Oklahoma and Nazi Germany to West Africa and the Levant. It also doubles as an accessible introduction to Islamic Africa.”
Jane Wong’s memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (now in paperback) won the 2024 Washington State Book Award and won the 2024 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is also the recipient of writing residency fellowships from the Carolyn Moore House and the Vermont Studio Center (the James Merrill Poetry Fellowship), both in 2025. Her poems and essays this year have appeared in or are forthcoming in Literary Hub, Terrain, Creature Conserve: Writing at the Intersection of Arts and Sciences, and others. She continued her book tour and read at numerous events this year, including for the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers Series, Ohio State University’s Visiting Writer Series, All Island Reads, the Poetry Palooza Festival, and others. Wong is working on two new manuscripts—a new book of poems and a collection of short stories. As a poet and ceramicist, she is also collaborating with chef Sean Arakaki at Itsumono for a special event at the Frye Art Museum this summer.