Rena Priest (BA, 2005) has recently been published by High Country News for her article “A Captive Orca and a Chance for Our Redemption.” https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/indigenous-affairs-wildlife-a-captive-orca-and-a-chance-for-our-redemption.
BA, 2006: Matthew Campell Roberts
Matthew Campell Roberts (BA, 2006) has published his first collection of poetry, A River Once More, through MoonPass Press. He currently teaches at Everett Community College.
MFA, 2018: Kathryn Merwin
Kathryn Merwin (MFA, 2018) has her first collection, womanskin, forthcoming from Cutbank Books.
BA, 2018: Ari Koontz
Ari Koontz (BA, 2018) has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Under the Gum Tree for the creative non-fiction piece, “Bodies of Water.” Additionally, her essay “Uprooting” has been nominated by Sweet Tree.
BA, 2007: Brooklyn Walter
Brooklyn Walter (BA, 2007) is the director of The Writing Center at Washington State University and a doctoral candidate in WSU’s Rhetoric and Composition department. She recently published a co-written article in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy titled “A ‘Threat’—or ‘Just a Book’? Analyzing Responses to 13 Reasons Why in a Discourse Community.”
BA, 2019: Anita Levin
Anita Levin (BA, 2019) currently works at Publishers Group West in Berkeley California. She has also published numerous essays and stories in a handful of journals, including The Lifted Brow, Hypertext, Alternating Current, The Lidenwood Review, Barnhouse, and others.
Greg Youmans
Greg Youmans’s essay “Greener Pastures: Filming Sex and Place at Druid Heights” will appear later this year in The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema, edited by Ronald Gregg and Amy Villarejo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). He also served as the film consultant for the Oakland Museum of California’s exhibition Queer California: Untold Stories. The exhibition was on view from April 13 to August 11, and he gave a talk at the museum about the film selections in June. In his teaching, he developed a new course topic for ENG 406: Topics in Critical and Cultural Theory: “Dream/Film,” a course that considers art and experimental film practices in relation to various theories of dreaming and of cinema and of the relationship between the two.
Eren Odabasi
Eren Odabasi has recently published two peer-reviewed book chapters; a study on various audience groups in film festivals included in International Film Festivals (edited by Tricia Jenkins, I.B. Tauris) and an analysis of the commercial success popular Hindi films enjoy at the American box office featured in Pop Culture Matters (edited by Martin Norden and Robert Weir, Cambridge Scholars Publishing). He also has two forthcoming peer-reviewed articles in the journals Post Script and Society and Leisure, exploring the cinematic portrayals of the Jewish community in Buenos Aires and film funds associated with major festivals. In relation to teaching, he has designed new courses on contemporary world cinema with an emphasis on diversifying the canon beyond Western European films (ENG 365), the textual and organizational aspects of international film festivals (ENG 464), and screen portrayals of immigration through different periods in film history (ENG 580).
Bruce Goebel
Bruce Goebel’s article, “What’s So Funny about Social Justice?” was published in English Journal. The article focuses specifically on breaking down stereotypes of Muslims and people of Middle Eastern descent and is a direct response to anti-Muslim rhetoric of the Trump administration. Over the past year, he’s collaborated with Jennifer Green and Beth Dillard from the ELL program in creating an English major with a combined ELL/Bilingual Education emphasis. Currently there is no ELL “major” which means the ELL program is an “add on” that takes an additional year. This major is designed to allow a student interested in being an ELL teacher to complete GURs, the English major, and the Secondary Education program in four years rather than five. It should also make ELL and Bilingual Education more visible at Western.
Kami Westhoff
Kami Westhoff’s Your Body a Bullet, a collaborative book with alumna Elizabeth Vignali, was published by Unsolicited Press in November 2018. She presented “Immensities” at the PMLA conference, a poetry project that seeks to honor women who’ve been murdered in Whatcom County. Her poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction appeared in various journals including SWIMM, Ghost City, Stirring, Hippocampus, Threadcount, Permafrost, A-Minor, and Contrary, received six Best of the Net nominations and two Pushcart Prize nominations, and will be included in three anthologies: Mansion, by Ghost City Press, and Ways of Looking, by Carve, and the Running Wild Novella Anthology, by Running Wild Press.