Archive for February, 2013

Three graduate students and one faculty member from our department received awards for their paper submissions to the Conference of College Teachers of English (CCTE) and the Texas College English Association, hosted on the ACU campus Feb. 21-23.

Department Chair Cole Bennett said, “We are thrilled with the quality of students in our English MA program, and while we’re not surprised at these accomplishments, we celebrate with them for their good work at CCTE.”

The students and faculty member received the following awards:

•  The William B. Tanner Grad Student Paper award went to Greg Jeffers for his paper, “Glenn Beck, Jim Wallis, and the Debate on Social Justice: A Narrative Critique.”
• The Randy Popkin Memorial Award for a Rhetoric Paper went to Leanne Moore for her paper, “Use of Metaphor in the 2012 Presidential Campaign.”
• The Best Shakespeare Paper Award went to Alison Maxfield for her paper “‘Lord of this fair mansion’ and ‘Queen o’er myself’: Female Agency in The Merchant of Venice and Il Pecorone.”
• The Best Poetry Award went to Al Haley, professor and writer in residence, for his reading of selections from his volume-in-progress of poems about the business world, I Loved a Capitalist.

Each winner will have their work published in the 2013 edition of CCTE Studies, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.

Last Thursday night the appearance of the “bard of Pumpkin Bend, Arkansas”, Greg Browderville filled the Core Classroom with interested students, poetry lovers, and English faculty.

Within minutes the poet, who teaches at SMU, had the crowd laughing with his reading of the epically entitled “From a Nationally Televised Press Conference Starring the Poetic Sheriff, Hjoseph Kilpatrick Conway, after a van Gogh Painting Is Stolen from a Little Rock Exhibit and Recovered in Monroe County.”

Further selections from Brownderville’s 2011 volume Gust followed as well poems that were written in “just the few weeks and no one’s ever heard them.”

The evening ended with an extensive and freewheeling Q & A session in which Brownderville confessed an early, almost obsessive fascination with words and how they sound, including one of his favorites, “Swiss”. A final piece of advice to aspiring poets was to discover a “sweet spot” or state of mind that allows them to write at a peak state of creativity.

Brownderville stayed an extra day and took in the art at the Old Jail Art Museum in Albany, enjoyed a milkshake in the old soda shop (below)  with Prof. Al Haley , and on Saturday held a different crowd in rapt attention. This time he read poems for the Conference of College Teachers of English (CCTE) at their annual meeting. Another new poem broke the air waves, again a crowd pleaser, this one about an existentially surreal customer defeating every effort of Madison the waitress to take his order.

Poet Greg Brownderville, author of the 2011 poetry collection Gust, will read from his work Thursday, Feb. 21, at 8 p.m. in the Core Classroom.

In his lush like kudzu lines Brownderville narrates stories of Ozark holy rollers, backwood voodoo rituals, tornadoes touching down, gigging for frogs on the brown river and more, stirred to a boil by the voice of a young man coming of age and trying to figure out what it all means.

The write-up at Amazon.com summarizes the sweep and modus operandi of these poems well:

Brownderville commands the complex eloquence of Southerners who love not only local color but also high-flown rhetoric. Instead of reinforcing stereotypes about rural folks’ thought and speech, he challenges our assumptions by presenting real life as a festival of mixed diction.

Highlights include a press conference with a bizarrely poetic rural sheriff, a Zimbabwean meter never before employed in English, a rock and roll song interrupted by a Walmart intercom, and poems about the exploitation of Italians in Arkansas cotton fields.

A native of Pumpkin Bend, Arkansas, Brownderville is an Assistant Professor of English at Southern Methodist University. He will be on campus on Friday as well and will speak to sections of American Lit classes taught by Prof. Jeremy Elliot. On Saturday the poet will give a noon reading at the CCTE conference being hosted by our department in the Hunter Welcome Center.

Members of the Conference of College Teachers of English (CCTE) and the Texas Colege English Association (TCEA) will meet in the ACU Hunter Welcome Center later this week to present a varied menu of papers on literature and rhetoric and topics in teaching.

In addition, the conference will feature five sessions of creative writers reading from their work.

Dr. Laura Carroll is coordinating the annual event which will attract over 60 participants and is being held at ACU for the first time in many a year. She says, “The presenters represent excellent teachers and scholars from all over the state, and we look forward to learning together.”

Professors Presenting

• Friday, 7:15 a.m. Kyle Dickson, Bill Carroll (“State of the Profession”)
• Friday, 9:00 a.m. Steve Weathers (Abysmal Wastes: On the Road in West Texas”)
• Friday, 10:30 a.m., Suanna Davis (From Houston to Abilene: Adjusting, A Selection of Poems)
• Friday, 2:45 p.m., Debbie Williams (Taming the Hyrdra: Framing Service Learning)
• Saturday, 9 a.m., Albert Haley (I Loved a Capitalilst: Poetry Meets the Business World)

Instructors, Graduate Students and Undergrads Presenting

• Friday, 9 a.m. Rachel Brown (Behind Every successful Man: Lady Macbeth’s Machiavellian Influence)
• Friday, 9 a.m. Courtney Pearson (Brewing Storms and Children: The Nurturing and Infanticidal Withces in Macbeth and Grimm’s Fairy Tales)
• Friday, 9 a.m. Lorrie Wolfard (Imaginative Staging: A Process for Interpretation of Hamlet)
• Friday, 10:30 a.m. Alison Maxfield (“Lord of this fair mansion” and “Queen o’er myself”: Female Agency in The Merchant of Venice and Il Pecornoe)
• Friday, 1030 a.m., Christina Johnson (The Celebration of Anne Sexton: Defining the Writers in Hollywood’s Biopics)
• Friday, 1:15 p.m., David White (The Wild, Fantastical West: A Short Story)
• Friday, 1:15 p.m., Leanne Moore (Use of Metaphor in the 2012 Presidential Campaign)
• Friday, 1:15 p.m., Melissa Weaver (The Persuasive Power of Poetry)
• Friday, 2:45 p.m., Greg Jeffers (Glenn Beck, Jim Wallis, and the Debate on Social Justice: A Narrative Critique)
• Friday, 2:45 p.m., Suzanne Shedd (Progressive or Passive? Applying Critical Discourse Analysis to Actors with Down Syndrome)
• Friday, 2:45 p.m., Amelia Emery (Itching Ears Want to Hear: Examining Interpretations Through Legitimation)

CCTE is a Texas-based organization that is currently celebrating its 80th year of its founding at the University of Texas.