This Week in English | April 30 – May 6, 2018

Departmental Recognition Ceremony on Wednesday

As the academic year draws to an end, we will gather to celebrate the wide-ranging accomplishments of students and faculty in the English Department. Please plan to join us at the Hill Auditorium in Barrows Hall on Wednesday afternoon, which is also Maine Day. Light refreshments will be available starting at 4pm and the ceremony itself begins at 4:30pm. Recent inductees to Sigma Tau Delta and Phi Beta Kappa will be honored, along with recipients of the Ellis, Hakola, Haughton, and Hill awards and the winners of the Grady, Grenfell, Hamlet, and Turner prizes, and the Kelly and King scholarships.

English Majors Inducted to Phi Beta Kappa

Four English majors will be among the twenty-eight undergraduates from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to be inducted to the Delta of Maine chapter of Phi Beta Kappa on May 1 at 4pm in the Buchanan Alumni House. Hearty congratulations to Stephanie Alexander, Emily Lewis, Amber Mondor, and Timothy Rocha for the well-deserved recognition from the nation’s oldest honors society!

Maine Day of Giving

The UMaine Foundation designates May 2 as a Maine Day of Giving. If you’d like to support the mission of the English Department, please consider a donation to the Annual Fund through our dedicated on-line portal.

Recent Publications by Hank Garfield & Leonore Hildebrandt

Hank Garfield’s short-short story “The Pickup Artist” is featured in the fiction section of the May issue of Portland Magazine. His non-fiction piece “An Old Boat Gets a New Waterline,” appears in the May issue of Points East, a boating magazine covering the New England coast. Garfield teaches creative writing for the English Department and tends the blog Slower Traffic for the Bangor Daily News.

Leonore Hildebrandt’s new book of poetry, Where You Happen to Be, was published earlier this month by Deerbrook Editions. Fellow poet Lee Sharkey says of the volume:

The reigning intelligence in Leonore Hildebrandt’s Where You Happen to Be is a wanderer over physical, political, and spiritual landscapes. Intensely observant, ever aware of the contingency of her present circumstances, Hildebrandt carries the reader from the Maine coast, where “the ocean was right in its fervor” to the arid hills of northern New Mexico, their “desert patina . . . chiseled” with petroglyphs; from ominous urban ruins to the great, dark forests of fairy tales and the unconscious. Do not come to these poems looking for peaceful resolution; this poet is too busy with the work of being “unconstructed / uncontrolled / unstoppable.” But do come to these poems.

Quick Links

  • Griffin Stockford writes about the Grady Awards for the Maine Campus
  • Flickr albumfrom the Grady Awards reading will be available later today
  • Bonus track: seasonal Talking Heads song

Enjoy this last week of classes, everyone!

Steve Evans

English Department Chair

 

This Week in English 28 was circulated to faculty, students, and friends of the department on Monday, April 30, 2018. If you would rather not receive these weekly bulletins, please reply with <unsubscribe> in your subject line. Earlier installments are archived on our website.