Department News

Caroline Ketcham, one of the Topp/Grillot winners in poetry, is an intern at the new Great Smokies Review, a biannual online literary magazine produced by the Great Smokies Writing Program.  Caroline has a piece in the spring issue, called "Writing Home."

Literature Alumnus Mason Currey (class of 2002) has recently published his first book,Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.  Slate has been running selections from it on a daily basis.

Erica Abrams Locklear received the university award for Scholarly or Creative Activity in the May

Brian Sneeden, who graduated in December, 2008, has recently been admitted to the University of Virginia's prestigious MFA program with a full fellowship for two years. He was one of ten students chosen from more than 800 applicants. He said he's really looking forward to working with Rita Dove, Greg Orr, and Paul Guest. Alessa Edwards Leming (class of 1993) has had three poems published at www.wordgathering.com an online journal of essaays and poetry focusing on disabilities. The poems are in the following issues: December 2010; June 2011, under the link to the contest winners; and September 2011. Her poem, Zwolf, won third place in the contest for non-disabled poets.

At the spring 2012 Student and Alumni Leadership Awards event, Matt Owens won the award for Outstanding Community Service, for creative writing programs on campus and in the community.

Jacob Riley, a 2010 graduate, has just been admitted to the doctoral program at the University of Florida, with a $20,000 Fellowship.

Bryce Arghiere, class of 2010, has been accepted in the Appalachian State University recently Geography MA program (Geographic Information Systems track) for Fall 2012 with all expenses paid by a renewable apprenticeship position.

A work of fiction by Mesha Maren-Hogan, a story entitled "Meridian," was chosen by Katherine Vaz as the winner of the Lex Allen Literary Festival Fiction Contest at Hollins University on March 10.

Dr. Lori Horvitz has once again led the F-Word Film Festival: A Celebration of Images by and about Women but for all Audiences, which showed films in the Humanities Lecture Hall on Wednesday and Thursday, March 21-22; a panel discussion with UNCA Faculty and Students followed the screenings.  This is the eleventh year of the F-Word Festival, created by Dr. Horvitz.

As usual, the Literature Department had a substantial presence at the annual    meeting of the Philological Association of the Carolinas, which took place in Myrtle Beach. Professors Russell, Boyle, Moseley, Ettari, and Hobby presented papers on the program. Dr. Ettari is now the president of PAC, Dr. Boyle an at-large member of the governing board, and Dr. Hobby the editor of the proceedings, called Postscript, and the webmaster.

And several of Dr. Ettari's students presented, again following a well-established tradition of undergraduate research presentations by outstanding UNC Asheville students. Their Shakespeare Student Panel consisted of Sarah Hinson, "Reconciling Conceptions of Madness, Patriarchal Control and the Fate of Lady Macbeth"; Heide Penner, "Homeostatic Aims: Maintaining Balance in Shakespear's Coriolanus"; and Jeremy Johnson, "The Implications of Clothes and Costumes in King Lear." Amanda Gardner  presented "I Am a Story that I Tell Myself: A Reader's Response to Beckett's Company." See more photos from PAC.

Congratulations to all the students who passed their Senior Comprehensive Exams this spring, and especially to those who earned a HIGH PASS: Julia Culbreath, Jesse Rice-Evans, and Allison Smith.

Katherine Min is presenting at the 2012 AWP (Associated Writing Programs) Conference, on a panel entitled, "Why Time Matters?" Her short paper is on the concept of time in the novel. The presentation is March 2, and the Conference is in Chicago.

And an interview with Katherine, conducted by Margo Williams, a writer from Wilmington, will be featured in the Spring 2012 issue of Glimmer Train Magazine.

The Literature and Language Department welcomes two new additions to the faculty this year: Assistant Professor of literature Amanda Wray and Visiting Assistant Professor Kirk Boyle. 

David Hopes has won the 2011 Sonora Review Short Short Fiction Contest for “Toward A Cinema of the Imagination.” Details of the selection and an excerpt from the story are available at the journal's online site.

Current Student Amy Smith has been accepted for study at Aalborg University in Denmark for the spring semester.  Congratulations, Amy!

On October 21, the Great Smokies Writing Program and Malaprops Bookstore hosted a reading and discussion by Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain, in the Humanities Lecture Hall. Frazier discussed his new novel, Nightwoods, and he was interviewed onstage by fellow local author Brian Lee Knopp. 

Appalachian poet Melissa Range read from her work on November 9 in the Laurel Forum. Her book, "Horse and Rider," was published in 2010.

Members of the Creative Writing Faculty, Holly Iglesias, Molly Walling, Cynn Chadwick, Rick Chess, Tommy Hays, and Katherine Min, read from their recent work on September 16 in the Laurel Forum. A second reading in the spring semester will feature works by the other half of this talented group.

Erica Abrams Locklear read from her book, "Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment: Appalachian Women's Literacies," to a large and enthusiastic crowd at Malaprops Bookstore in downtown Asheville on September 25.

Memoir writer, journalist, and activist Stephanie Elizondo Griest gave a presentation and reading in the Laurel Forum on September 27th. She has written two award-winning memoirs: "Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines" (Washington Square Press/Simon & Schuster, 2008); and "Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana" (Villard/Random House, 2004), and has edited the best-selling guidebook "100 Places Every Woman Should Go" (Travelers’ Tales, 2007). A passionate activist, Griest founded and directed the Youth Free Expression Network, a program of the National Coalition Against Censorship, in New York City.

Norman Fischer, author of "Taking Our Places: The Buddhist Path to Truly Growing Up," read from his work in February.

Poet and South Asian scholar Laurie Patton will be on campus in March. Her most recent volume of poetry is "Angel's Task: Poems in Biblical Time."

Author Sandra Cisneros will speak about her writing when she visits UNC Asheville in March. Her novels, innovative for crossing borders of genre and form, include the internationally acclaimed "The House on Mango Street" and "Caramelo," awarded the Premio Napoli, nominated for the Orange Prize, and shortlisted for the International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award. Her awards include two National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships for both fiction and poetry, the Lannan Literary Award, the American Book Award, the Texas Medal of the Arts, and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship.

Cindy Ho, along with three other UNC Asheville faculty, attended a two-week workshop at the East-West Center in Honolulu on developing Chinese culture curriculum. This workshop was funded by a three year Dept. of Education Title VI Grant awarded to UNC Asheville and administered by Cindy. Among other activities, this grant supports annual faculty development projects on campus. This year’s program, China Symposium: Chinese Culture and Humanities (Nov. 7 and 8) will bring two outstanding scholars to campus. Roger Ames, Professor of Philosophy at University of Hawaii, Manoa, and editor of Philosophy East & West and Stanley Murashige, Associate Professor of the Art Institute of Chicago, both of whom will give public presentations and meet with faculty and students. Cindy also has spent the past year researching and writing her Humanities textbook, "Spirit of the Times," projected to appear from Oxford UP late 2012.

Richard Chess has been appointed to the new Roy Carroll Professorship of Honors Arts and Sciences.

Deborah James is Co-Director of the UNC Asheville Ghana Summer Study Abroad program and spent a rewarding month in Ghana this summer with a group of other faculty members and seven students. She welcomes questions about the program from all interested parties. In the Laurel Forum on September 15 at 12:30, Dee and other members of the group that traveled to Ghana spoke to an enthusiastic crowd about their adventures there.

Blake Hobby was honored with the UNC Asheville Scholarly/Creative Achievement Award at the final faculty meeting of the year in May. Among his many accomplishments for this academic year, Blake published "The Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers 1945-1970," as well as eight volumes in the Bloom’s Literary Themes series. Blake delivered a paper on Cormac McCarthy at the 25th Anniversary Blood Meridian Conference in San Marcos, TX, and took along several of his enthusiastic students, who also presented their work at the conference. He serves as president of the Philological Association of the Carolinas, with Gary Ettari, as editor for Postscript, the journal of the Philological Association of the Carolinas, and, with Brian Butler, as executive editor of the Journal of Black Mountain College Studies. He also continues as Director of the University Honors Program. Blake's musical versatility has recently been displayed in three local Baroque concerts, where he played harpsichord, and in a spring reception for Peg Downes, where he accompanied a rhythmically-challenged flash mob.

Jim Driggers is now Director of Creative Writing. He has taught Creative Writing classes in the department for ten years, as well as courses in Literature, Humanities, and Language 120. He has also taught Italian film as part of the department summer sessions in Italy. As part of the spring semester's Faculty Lecture Series, Jim presented "Lessons from Camp: Douglas Sirk, Melodrama, and Social Messaging." Showing clips from Sirk's Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s in Highsmith Union's Grotto, Jim illustrated the ways movies that are identified as "camp" can actually address more serious social issues. Jim recently read from his prizewinning novella, "Jesus is My BFF," at the eighth annual Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans.

David Hopes's history play Vance was featured in August at Mars Hill’s Southern Appalachian Repertory Theater. A commissioned piece about local 19th century political figure Zebulon Vance, Vance joins Hopes's Lincoln series -- "TheLoves of Mr. Lincoln" and "Earthly Power" -- in investigating dramatically the great American drama of the Civil War. Hopes has just finished a novel about life in Asheville, entitled "Night, Sleep, and the Dreams of Lovers."

Cynn Chadwick, whose fifth book, “As The Table Turns,” was released in Spring 2011 by Napping Porch Press, read at Posana Cafe on Monday April 25th with local novelists, Charles Dodd White and Vicki Lane, as part of the Flood Gallery Reading Series. Cynn notes on her blog that "writing fiction is mostly a hindsight way to rectifying wrongs, serving justice or vengeance, fulfilling dreams, explaining mysteries, revealing histories, and happily ever-aftering an otherwise sad or tragic ending." She is the author of Bywater Books publications “Angels and Manners" and the Cat Rising Series. In addition, Napping Porch Press has released all of her novels and a continuing series of Shorts as ebooks on Kindle and Nook.

Michael Gillum published "Rational Fealty and Willed Faith in Paradise Lost" in Postscript 27 (2011). Dr. Gilllum was featured in the Fall/Winter issue of UNC Asheville Magazine in an article celebrating his forty-three years of teaching at the University.

Merritt Moseley is at work on a book called "Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism of Pat Barker," for Palgrave Macmillan.  He chaired sessions and made a presentation at the PAC Conference in March. He presented a paper on constrained literature at the Oulipo Conference in November and was recently awarded the Robert B. Heilman Award for outstanding book reviewing, by the Sewanee Review.

Several of the Literature and Language faculty, including Cynn Chadwick, Lorena Russell, David Hopes, Jim Driggers, and Lori Horvitz, chaired sessions and presented papers at the 2011 Queer Studies Conference on the campus of UNC Asheville  on March 31-April 2. The theme of this year's conference was "Queer as an Active Verb." Several students in the Literature and Language department also made presentations.

The Literature and Language Department hosted the 35th Annual Conference of the Philological Association of the Carolinas March 17-19. Among the faculty session chairs and presenters were Blake Hobby (the president of PAC), Gary Ettari, Merritt Moseley, Cindy Ho, Michael Gillum, and Lorena Russell. Sam Schuman gave Friday's Keynote Address on the topic   "Only Connect." The well-received UNC Asheville student presenters included Brian Hart, Lindsey Sprague, Seth Chandler, and Amanda Gardner.

Katherine Min spent the summer traveling to and from Southern California, where she wrote every morning and went to the beach every afternoon. She also went back to South Korea, (for the first time in nearly 30 years), to celebrate her father's 80th birthday. An excerpt from her novel-in-progress, The Fetishist, appears in the recent issue of Black Clock, the literary journal published by the California Institute of the Arts. She taught in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University, in Charlotte, in May.

As part of the Flood Reading Series, poets Richard Chess and Holly Iglesias and novelists Tommy Hays and Katherine Min read from their recent works at Posana Cafe in downtown Asheville in February and March.

Holly Iglesias is one of only forty-two recipients of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in poetry. Dr. Iglesias, core faculty in UNC Asheville's Master of Liberal Arts program, as well as an instructor in Humanities, Arts,Literature and Language, and History, is North Carolina's only 2011 recipient of this honor. This fall she will be giving the Harwood-Cole Endowed Lecture at Warren Wilson College as well as leading the Prose Poetry Workshop at the North Carolina Writers Network Conference. Her volume of poetry, "Angles of Approach," is available from White Pine Press, and she has a poetry chapbook, “Fruta Bomba” forthcoming, as well as “Boom,” a poetry manuscript focused on the Cold War, in progress. 

 

 

Erica Abrams Locklear has been reappointed as Assistant Professor in Literature. Her book, "Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment: Appalachian Women's Literacies," is now available from Ohio University Press' Series in Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Appalachia. She served as core faculty in the NEH Summer Institute, Power and Place: Land and Peoples in Appalachiathis summer on the UNC Asheville campus. Her Appalachian Literature class partnered with Madison High School in the spring, and her essay about the collaboration, "Building Bridges: Results from One University and High School Partnership," is soon to be published by Ohio University Press in a new collection on teaching Appalachia.In November Erica presented a paper entitled “Fictionalizing Agency: Reading to Make Student Empowerment Real” at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Between her frequent presentations at regional conferences, Erica has published a review in the Mississippi Quarterly, and has some other articles in the works, all at various stages (from "revise and we're almost ready!" to "still drafting"), demonstrating that even very accomplished professional writers follow the recursive writing process taught in Language 120.

On March 3, the Literature Club sponsored a lecture entitled "Trouble in Paradise," by Valerie Smith, the founding director of the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. Dr. Smith is a specialist in African American literature and culture, an authority on the works of Toni Morrison, and has special interest in black feminist theory and film studies. Her works as author and editor include "Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative," "Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings," "New Essays on Song of Solomon," and "Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video."

Department Awards and Scholarships:

• Matthew Owens - the Comfort Award for Excellence in in Creative Writing
• Adam Jernigan - the Wilma Dykeman Award for University Writing;
• Chett Tiller - the Thomas Wolfe Prize in Fiction;
• Ryan-Ashley Anderson - the Carl Sandburg Prize in Poetry;
• Michaela Holcombe, Jacob Latini, and Mary Ellen Phillips - the Topp/Grilliot Poetry Award;
• Jasper Moore - the Comfort Scholarship;
• Hannah Doyle (Fall 2010) and Laura Hunt (Spring 2011)- the Virginia Bryan Award for Best Senior Paper;
• Lindsey Sprague - the Gerald Gullickson Award for Top Rising Senior;
• Seth Chandler - the Jeff Rackham Award for Teaching Scholar.

Senior Rebecca Levy presented her paper, “Aestheticism in Prison: Oscar Wilde's Politics after Reading Gaol,” at the NC State Association of English Graduate Students Symposium, in Raleigh on February 25-26. Rebecca’s paper, which began as her senior thesis under the guidance of Drs. Deborah James and Lorena Russell, investigates the ways that Oscar Wilde's identity as an aesthetic shaped his writing on prison reforms.

Seniors Hannah Doyle and Daniel Resner, students of Dr. Blake Hobby, presented papers at the Cormac McCarthy Society’s San Marcos Conference in Texas in October 2010. Both Hannah’s work, “The Glanton Gang and its Discontents—The Judge as Cultural Super-Ego in Blood Meridian,” and Danny’s, “’Eternal war since the world began’—Blood Meridian's Revision of Moby-Dick,” have been accepted for publication in the journal of conference papers.

"Out of My Control," a poem by recent graduate and office assistant Brian Hart, was selected as a finalist for the Literary Festival Undergraduate Poetry Contest of Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia.