Archive for ‘Events and Readings’

Yesterday, four of our graduating seniors were honored during the University Scholars chapel. Congratulations to James Churchill, Alyssa Johnson, Kirby Lemon, and Lauren Shrader on the recognition of all their hard work over the years! Pictured below are the recipients and their nominating faculty.

From left to right: Kirby Lemon, Paul Roggendorff, Joe Stephenson, Alyssa Johnson, James Churchill, Al Haley, Steve Weathers, and Lauren Shrader

On Thursday, April 7, Sigma Delta Pi had a night of celebration for the presentation of the new volume of Hispaniola and to induct 12 new members. Current senior members were also given their graduation cords and many well-wishes for the future. The speaker for the night was Dr. Doug Foster, and other department directors showed their support for SDP as well, including Dr. Gary Green, Dr. Ron Morgan, and Dr. Pat Hernandez. Pictured below are some of the new SDP members. Felicitaciones! Congratulations to them all on their great achievement.

Current senior members of Sigma Delta Pi with cords for graduation

New inductees into Sigma Delta Pi

Photo by Larry E. Fink

On Thursday, April 14, our department brought poet Jonathan Fink to the elegant setting of the ballroom of The Grace Museum during an ArtWalk evening.

Upwards of 100 people attended, including five entrants in the “Dress as Your Favorite Poet” costume contest. (The winner was “Sylvia Path”.)

Following the seductive acoustic guitar playing of veteran musician Dan Mitchell (ACU Dept. of Music), Jonathan took to the podium and immediately wowed the audience with a reading of his long poem “The Sea of Galilee.”

This poem, which appeared originally in The New England Review, traces the history of the famous painting by Rembrandt from the moment paint is brushed on canvas to centuries later when it is slashed in its frame by thieves, rolled up, and stolen from a Boston Museum (to this day the painting remains unrecovered).

It was a perfect instance of Fink’s method of focusing his poems on less well-known historical events or seeing familiar ones from a new perspective. An example of the latter was his reading of “The Prodigal Son,” a poem which imagines what the story would have been like if it told of the women who surely must have been present at the time in the form of a mother, sisters, and others.

The evening concluded with poems from Fink’s sequence looking at the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City. Those poems were augmented with archival black and white photos projected on a screen.

Following a packed special poetry chapel, a lunch with graduate students, and a class session on revising one’s prose, the evening reading was a perfect capper to this celebration of National Poetry Month spent in the presence of a stellar poet.

The Department of Language and Literature is delighted to announce that the award-winning poet Jonathan Fink will be coming to campus on Thursday, April 14. Fink has authored two poetry collections and received the Bronze Medal in Poetry in the 2015 Florida Book Awards, as well as been named by Poets & Writers magazine as one of America’s 10 best “2015 Debut Poets.”

Fink will be a guest host for a special departmental chapel at 11 a.m. and give a public reading at The Grace Museum ballroom from 7-7:50 p.m. The evening poetry reading will be followed by a book signing of Fink’s new, highly praised collection of poems, The Crossing.

Before his reading at The Grace, Fink will also have the following schedule on Thursday:

• 11 a.m. Talk about poetry and read poems in a special department chapel
• Noon. Discuss writing over lunch with English M.A. students
• 3 p.m. Talk about literary nonfiction techniques to Prof. Haley’s Eng. 320/520 Creative Nonfiction Workshop

The Department of Language and Literature is also hosting a “Dress as Your Favorite Poet” costume contest. Any ACU student can enter, and the winner will receive $50. To enter, just dress up and come to The Grace Museum ballroom on Thursday night, April 14 at 6:45. Participants will be judged before the poetry reading begins at 7 p.m.

Fink has received several other poetry awards and fellowships, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, New England Review and others. It is an honor to have this Abilenian poet come back to his hometown and share his work, so come out and show your support.

To learn more about Fink and his work, visit his website: http://jonathanfink.com/

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Join Dr. Chris Willerton for the 5h Annual Culp Professor Reading. It is now a tradition in our department that each year the current Culp Professor shares some of his or her research. The Culp Professor, who is appointed for a 3-year term, spends time researching and writing a project with the aim of publishing. The reading  becomes a venue to demonstrate over the course of 60 minutes that learning can be both illuminating and fun.

At last year’s event English faculty played a live game of Clue to complement Dr. Willerton’s research into the art of the detective novel. This year different faculty members will perform a radio script murder mystery.

Come on out for what is sure to be a fun evening!

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.