Ning Yu’s book on a critical genre which criticizes poems in the form of poetry was published 09/2020 by Beijing Normal University Press. It is a critical evaluation of a modern poet’s poems written to criticizes 25 poets in Chinese literary history, somewhat like a combination of Alexader Pope’s “Essay On Criticism” and Samuel Johnson’s “Lives of the English Poets.” It is a commissioned book. The title, roughly translated, is Interpretation and Remembrance: An Analysis of Professor Chigong’s 25 Critical Poems
(BA, 1980): Dion Lissner O’Reilly
Dian Lissner (BA, 1980) aka Dion O’Reilly published a book of poetry in February of 2020, Ghost Dogs, which was the winner of the Independent Press award for poetry, the Dragonfly award for poetry, the Pinnacle Achievement Award for Poetry, an Honorable Mention in the Eric Hoffer Award, and took third place in the Royal Dragonfly Book Award.
BA, 2005: Rena Priest
Rena Priest (BA, 2005) is a 2019 Jack Straw Writer, and recipient of a National Geographic Explorer Grant. She will be reading at Village Books on July 7th to promote the anthology, For Love of Orcas.
Katherine Anderson
Since joining Western’s English department in fall of 2018, Katherine Anderson has been hard at work on her first monograph, entitled Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain. Her review essays, “The Banality of Empire” and “On the Absurdity of Ethical Capitalism,” have appeared in Public Books. In her teaching, she developed several new courses, focusing on “The Dark Side of Dickens” for ENG 423: Major Authors, and “Post-9/11 Literature” for ENG 418: Senior Seminar, as well as a graduate course (ENG 560) exploring issues of empire and globalization as depicted in British literature. She has also partnered with Professor Nick Galati in Biology to pilot a new program for interdisciplinary community office hours at Western.
Christopher Wise
Christopher Wise’s À la recherche de Yambo Ouologuem (Paris: Les Èditions Philae, 2018) was selected as La Livre de la Semaine [Book of the Week] by Africa No.1 Radio in Paris, France. He also translated Jean-Michel Djian’s The Manuscripts of Timbuktu: Secrets, Myths, Realities (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2019), which was launched at the “Global Africa, Migration, and the Arts” Conference at Rutgers University at a panel honoring Kassahun Checole and Africa World Press on March 28, 2019. Wise was a plenary speaker at the conference and spoke on the topic of “Yambo Ouologuem’s Le devoir de violence at 50.” Wise also published an article “Après Azawad: Le devoir de violence, djihad, et idéologie chérifienne dans le Nord du Mali” in Fabula/Les colloques: L’oeuvre de Yambo Ouologuem: Un carrefour d’écritures (1968-2018). In January 2019, Wise was invited to speak at Green College, UBC in Vancouver Canada, where he gave a talk on the crisis in Mali, entitled “The Jihad of Iyad Ag Ghali”. He gave another talk at Université Hassan II in Casablanca, Morocco on “American Studies in the Arab University: 9/11 to Azawad”. In Paris, Wise also gave a teleconference on Yambo Ouologuem for UBIZNEWS, “Yambo l’Utime Témoignage: Téléconférence” on February 28, 2019.
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.
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.”
Jane Wong
Jane Wong holds an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in English from the University of Washington. She is a former U.S. Fulbright Fellow and Kundiman Fellow, and received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Squaw Valley, and the Fine Arts Work Center. The recipient of The American Poetry Review’s 2016 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, Jane’s poems have appeared in journals such as Pleiades, The Volta, and Third Coast, as well as the anthologies Best American Poetry 2015 from Scribner, Best New Poets 2012 from The University of Virginia Press and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral from Ahsahta Press. Jane is also the author of OVERPOUR from Action Books and is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Western.
Ely Shipley
Ely Shipley graduated from Purdue University with an MFA and holds a PhD from the University of Utah. He taught for many years Baruch College and CUNY in New York City before becoming a professor at Western. Ely is the author of Some Animal from Nightboat Books, Boy with Flowers, winner of the Barrow Street Press book prize judged by Carl Phillips, the Thom Gunn Award, and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and On Beards: A Memoir of Passing, a letterpress chapbook from speCt! Books. His poems and cross-genre work also appear in the Seneca Review, Western Humanities Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Interim, Greensboro Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Witness, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, Fugue, Third Coast, and elsewhere.
Kate Anderson
A specialist in nineteenth-century British literature and culture, Anderson has published on torture, military trauma, and martyrdom in relation to Victorian studies, and is currently at work on a book manuscript entitled Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain. The project argues for the centrality of torture to Victorian history and culture, and consequently, the importance of Victorian history and culture to a global and historical understanding of torture. Tracing acts and rhetorics of torture in India, Jamaica, South Africa, the South Pacific, and Britain itself, Anderson situates state-sanctioned exceptional violence in relation to nineteenth-century liberalism and changing narratives of citizenship and human rights. Twisted Words thus helps us better understand the global implications of contemporary state violence by establishing a longer historical genealogy of torture and terrorism sanctioned explicitly by liberal Western governments. Her research and teaching interests include empire, postcolonial, and global studies; gender and sexuality studies; critical terrorism studies; political theory and philosophy; human rights; moral philosophy; phenomenology; Anglophone literature.