This Week in English | March 4-10, 2024
Jonathan Barron to Co-Lead Poetry Roundtable on “the New Lyric” at Robert Frost Sesquicentennial in San Diego
Scholars from across the world will gather in San Diego later this month to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of the poet Robert Frost.
Professors Natalie Gerber and Jonathan Barron will lead a 3-day (March 22-23) roundtable discussion on how the contemporary lyric poem has evolved in form, aesthetics, subject, and style from the practice of the early 20th-Century modernists. A professor of English at SUNY Fredonia, Gerber has published widely on prosody and the linguistic foundations of poetic intonation. University of Maine Professor of English Jonathan Barron is a former Executive Director of the Robert Frost Society and the author or editor of several books of criticism, including most recently How Robert Frost Made Realism Matter (2015).
Volume Co-Edited by Ryan Dippre Reviewed in Composition Studies
A review of Ryan Dippre’s co-edited collection Approaches to Lifespan Writing Research was published in the latest issue of Composition Studies. The reviewer finds the volume likely to “inspire undergraduate and graduate students to interview everyday writers, generate data from them, visit digital and physical archives to look at past artifacts to decipher the pattern of everyday writing during major geopolitical changes, and thereby to understand how that past informs the present in lifespan research writing.” MA alumna Lauren Marshall Bowen’s contribution to the volume is discussed in the review, which can be read in its entirety here.
Hollie Adams Publishes Poems in The New Quarterly
Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing Hollie Adams has three poems collected in the most recent issue of The New Quarterly (Fall 2023, issue 168). The New Quarterly—TNQ, for short—is a Canadian literary journal founded at the University of Waterloo in 1981; its past contributors include recipients of National Magazine Awards, the Man Booker Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Journey Prize, and the Writers Trust Fiction Prize.
Mark Your Calendars: Queer Romance Author March 26
WGS is hosting queer romance author Cat Sebastian for a Q&A and writing workshop on Tuesday, March 26 at 12:30 and 5pm respectively. No advance registration is required for the lunch-time Q&A. The afternoon workshop is open to all UMaine community members but is limited to forty participants. Advance registration is required. Please email Elizabeth Neiman at Elizabeth.Neiman@maine.edu to reserve a spot. The first 18 undergraduates to reserve a spot will receive a free copy of Sebastian’s 2023 novel We Could Be So Good! This event is co-sponsored by the Stephen E. King Chair. Sebastian is on IG here.
Morgan Talty to Talk about Tommy Orange Novel at Maine Humanities Council event on April 6
The Maine Humanities Council is hosting a Readers Retreat at UMaine on Saturday, April 6. As Morgan Talty informs us:
A number of events will be occurring starting at 8 am to 5 pm at UMaine (Wells Conference Center), but at 1:15 pm I will be giving a lecture on There There and Native Fiction, and then at 3:30 there will be a panel of three Native writers (me, Brendan Basham, and Julian Noisecat).
More details about the day’s events can be found here.
On February 27, just after our last bulletin was circulated, Talty’s interview with Tommy Orange was published in Esquire under the title “Tommy Orange Refuses to Be Your Tour Guide to Native Life.”
UMaine Hosts Sport Literature Association Annual Conference this Summer
The forty-first annual conference of the Sport Literature Association will be held at the University of Maine in Orono, Maine, from June 19-22, 2024. Longtime part-time faculty member Bruce Pratt is helping organize the event and has passed along two calls for papers, including one aimed specifically at graduate-student scholars (see below for details).
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University of Maine Language Acknowledgment