CCTE recognizes ACU Language and Literature

faculty

Posted March 26, 2014

Four ACU Department of Language and Literature faculty members were recognized at the Conference of College Teachers of English (CCTE) on March 1-3.

Sherry Rankin, instructor of English, won the award for best pedagogy paper in CCTE’s Literature, Film, and Popular Culture section. Her paper on using Tolkien in the British literature survey course will be published in CCTE Studies, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.

Erin Daugherty, M.A. student, garnered an Honorable Mention from CCTE’s Creative Writing section for her poem “Yellow Stripes Between.”

Sarah Eason, M.A. student, won the Best Paper in Shakespeare Award for her presentation, “‘Where two raging fires meet together’: Constructed Gender Performances of Kate and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew.”

Dr. Chris Willerton, professor of English, won the Frances Hernandez Teacher-Scholar Award. He was recognized for being an excellent undergraduate instructor and a mentor for many of his colleagues. Dr. Nancy Jordan, ACU professor of English, is a previous recipient of the Hernandez Teacher-Scholar award.

“The fact that we have won two Hernandez awards speaks well of our department,” says Dr. Cole Bennett, chair of the Department of Language and Literature. “While I am quite pleased to be associated with colleagues who win such awards, I am not surprised. The quality of teaching and scholarship in which our department is engaged is unparalleled.”

Delony named Culp Distinguished Professor

Posted March 21, 2014

Dr. Mikee Delony, associate professor of English at ACU, has been named the James W. Culp Distinguished Professor for 2014-17. Named after the former chair of ACU’s English department, the endowed professorship recognizes Delony as a Christian scholar, role model and mentor.

Dr. Delony says she didn’t start out to be an English teacher – or any kind of teacher. In fact, she went straight from high school to the workforce, and it was years before she began to pursue a bachelor’s degree.

When she started college, Delony intended to earn her B.A. and stop there. But as she discovered how much she loved learning about English literature, she realized she had a gift for teaching it.

“A friend once told me that when you find your gift, it gives you energy,” she said. “That’s what teaching does for me. There’s just so much to talk about and discuss – there’s always a conversation to be had. Teaching is the most wonderful, energizing thing I’ve ever done.”

In 1986, friends and former students established the endowed professorship to honor Dr. James Culp (’49), while honoring a distinguished language and literature faculty member. Culp specified that the income from the endowment be used for research and academic support to allow the recipient to engage in reflection and study of his or her field.

Culp was the first to hold the professorship, from 1986 until his retirement in 1992. Since then, recipients have included Dr. Darryl Tippens, Dr. Gay Barton, Dr. Steve Weathers, Al Haley and Dr. Chris Willerton.

Tanner Hadfield, Selfie, 2014

When we last saw English major Tanner Hadfield he was headed off to the land of the Rockies (and the Broncos! for football fans) as he prepared to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Tanner was certainly qualified. Prof. Al Haley remembers making a major discovery in Eng. 323: Poetry Workshop in the Fall 2009:

“There was this quiet person who wrote surreal poems with the most amazing language, and you could still understand them. It was like John Berryman meeting up with John Ashberry and someone much more sober and coherent. I’d never seen anything quite like it from a student.”

Tanner went on to prove that his real forte was in fiction writing. His story in a semi-magical realist mode, “Snowing in Darling,” written a year later, won first place in the 2011 Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers (TACWT) contest.

With that kind of “back story,” we’re not to surprised to get this update about what’s been going on in Boulder.

• Tanner finished runner-up in the fiction category of an annual writing contest for authors from western U.S. states. The story will be published in an upcoming issue this year of the University of Utah’s “Western Humanities Review,” a journal founded in 1947:  http://ourworld.info/whrweb/
• He continues to serve as assistant editor for Caketrain Journal whichis associasted with a publishing house in Pittsburgh.  http://www.caketrain.org/
• Since joining the UC program, he has been teaching freshman and sophomore classes.

Having learned of the above accomplishments from a well-informed source, we thought we’d conclude this post/update by contacting Tanner himself and asking him to respond to a couple of questions about the writing life.

INKWELL: What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned about writing since studying it at the graduate level?

TANNER: It’s still an ongoing process, and definitely a scary one, but the biggest advance would have to be learning to remove myself from my writing vacuum. That is, letting go of empty self-expression and vague notions of success in favor of writing for an actual real world audience, with an actual purpose in conversation with contemporary culture and literature. Very many people are very good writers inside the safety of their own vacuum and most of them stay there forever.

INKWELL: As someone who works as a fiction editor, what kinds of stories attract you and what do you see in stories that immediately generate a thumbs-down?

TANNER:  I’m attracted to stories with a rich, economical prose style and angle. The knowing chance of folly via abstraction. An immediate thumbs-down comes from a lack of immediacy. If one waits even until the second paragraph to get to the good stuff, one’s odds become abysmal. Merely competent writing is of no use and won’t buy one time outside the classroom (though achieving competence is certainly a necessary step in the process of becoming a real writer). This is just the nature of the present world of writing. It may not be cutthroat, but it’s incredibly competitive!

“In this collection, we see critical approaches to a New West, a West that is a state of mind, not a geographical place but a mythic space with no boundaries and no political inevitabilities. These New Western studies accept the idea of a West that includes Canada, Mexico, Alaska, and, in the case of the US, every geographic and historical point west of the historic founding settlements. The West we study today is a post-West, an idea of the West past the traditional views of an old West dominated by white US nationalism and gendered as uncompromisingly masculine. The idea itself of a single West no longer holds validity. We now understand that all renderings of the West are renderings of multiple Wests; Wests constructed by American nationalists, Wests constructed by EuroAmerican writers and filmmakers, Wests constructed by native peoples, or Wests constructed outside the geographical boundaries of the US.” — (from the cover notes)

Dr. Paul Varner is teaching

ENGL 446: Literature of the Beat Movement

Class begins Spring 2014

For more information click HERE.

Dr. Deb Williams is teaching-

ENGL 329/529: Rhetoric As Written Discourse

Classes start Spring 2014

For more information click HERE

Click on link below to view the poster.

Dr. Steven Moore Publication

Congratulation to Dr. Steven Moore for his new publication The Cry of Black Rage

Now available at Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com

Join us for Entra a La Plaza in the Hunter Welcome Center Friday, September 27th!

There will be FREE Food, Music, Dancers and Fun!