This Week in English | November 11-17, 2024

New Writing Series Hosts Dawn Lundy Martin on Thursday  

The New Writing Series continues this Thursday, November 14, with a reading by poet, essayist, anthologist, and activist Dawn Lundy Martin, who will be introduced by Jennifer Moxley. The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place in the IMRC Fernald APPE Space (Stewart Commons 104) at 4:30pm. A Q&A with the audience will follow the reading. Our friends at Briarpatch Books will be on hand with selected titles by NWS authors, including Martin. 

Dawn Lundy Martin’s most recent book is Instructions for the Lovers, which was published by Nightboat Books in June. Other collections include Discipline; A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life, winner of a Lambda Literary Award; and Good Stock Strange Blood, for which she received the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is also coeditor, with Vivien Labaton, of The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism. She is the recipient of two poetry grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council as well as the 2008 American Academy of Arts and Sciences May Sarton Prize for Poetry. Martin is cofounder of the Third Wave Foundation, a New York–based grant-making organization that focuses on social justice activism; and founding member of the Black Took Collective, an experimental poetry and performance group. Formerly the founding director at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh, she has been Professor and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College since 2018.

Theories and Practices of Writing Students Engaging in Research

Students in Heather Falconer‘s ENG 215: Theories and Practices of Writing course have begun independent research projects as part of the final few weeks of term. Keep an eye out on campus for opportunities to complete surveys or interviews! Students have taken up timely questions investigating student use of AI in college writing, engagement with mis- and disinformation in the news, ritual/routine in writing practices, the relationship between how one learned to write and how one teaches it, rhetoric in political speeches, and so much more. We hope to be able to share some of this research at the end of term via posters and updates to the weekly bulletin!

Announcing the 2024 Millay Prize Winners

In the summer of 2009, Frank and Helene Crohn generously provided the National Poetry Foundation (now the Center for Poetry and Poetics) at the University of Maine with the means to establish an Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize for Poetry. The Millay Prize seeks to reward achievement in poetry at a crucial early stage in a writer’s development while commemorating the legacy of one of Maine’s best known and most loved poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who herself received the gift of an education at Vassar College in part through the generosity of Caroline B. Dow.

The external judge for the 2024 award was the poet Daisy Fried, who selected the following manuscripts for the Millay Prize:

• First prize to Will Lathrop for “Phloem and other poems”
• Second prize to Miracle Gant for “lung-home”
• Third prize to April Messier for “Curative Voicing”

Faahad Kabir, Sam Keeton, and Jacqueline Knirnschild received honorable mentions and more than ten thousand dollars in prize monies were distributed to the poets.

You can learn more about the winners through the brief biographical statements provided below and you can hear them read excerpts from their winning manuscripts on November 21, 2024, when they will share the New Writing Series podium with Daisy Fried. 

Will Lathrop is a first-year graduate teaching assistant concentrating in Poetry and Poetics. He received a BA in Religion from Princeton University in 2017 with minors in Creative Writing and Environmental Studies. He studies modernism and New American poetry, with interests in publishing histories, countercultures, and ecocriticism. Now in Bangor, Will previously lived and worked in Somerville, Massachusetts and Burlington, Vermont. He is a canoe guide and has paddled extensively throughout New York’s Adirondack Park and the Maine woods. He is originally from New Jersey.

Miracle Gant is a second year M.A. student and teaching assistant concentrating in poetry and poetics. Originally from Round Rock, Texas, right outside of Austin, she graduated from the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in May of 2020 with a B.A. in English and a minor in drawing. Currently, she studies the lasting impact that the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts movement have on contemporary Black creativity. In her own poetic practice, she enjoys exploring what the relationship between language and imagery can tell us about the depths of our psyches.  

April Messier is currently at the University of Maine working on her master’s thesis—a manuscript of original poetry and poetics. Her work explores the relationship between lineage and identity as well as the healing capacities of language and the natural world. She gathers inspiration from her deep connection to this land that her ancestors have steward for many generations, and which she herself has farmed for over a decade. April also enjoys spending time with her partner Eric, two dogs and the peace of woods and water—so easily accessed from their coastal Maine home. 

MA Student Presents at Regional MLA Conference 

Second-year MA student Jacqueline Knirnschild will be traveling to Chicago later this week for the 2024 Midwest Modern Language Association Convention “Health in/of the Humanities.” Knirnschild will be presenting her paper “‘They are hiding in the mist and ferns’: Mediated Narration, (In)direct Experience and Utopia in E.M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops.'” Her presentation will be one of three in the Reading for Wellness panel, which is part of the permanent section on the short story. 

Gerrod Presentation Canceled  

Last week’s bulletin announced an event scheduled for tomorrow, November 13, that has since been canceled. Unfortunately Amanda Gerrod will not be able to present the talk on “Reckoning with Religion in Southern Queer Lit: An Auto-Critical Approach” that had been planned. If the event is rescheduled by our colleagues in WGS, we’ll be sure to include an update in a future bulletin.

Purvis Production of Birth and Afterbirth Opens This Weekend

Tina Howe’s Birth and Afterbirth is a significant contribution to contemporary American theatre and her pioneering effort to bring motherhood literally center stage, incorporating the “female gaze” into the genre of absurdism.

This production is directed by Libra assistant professor of theatre and English Rosalie Purvis and runs November 15-24 in the Cyrus Pavilion Theatre. Tickets are $12; free admission with student MaineCard.

Jansen Presents on the Gimmick in Professional Wrestling on Monday 

On Monday, November 18 at 12:00 pm in Dunn Hall 424 (and via Zoom), Brian Jansen will be giving a talk as part of the Department of Communication and Journalism’s 2024-2025 Colloquium Series. His talk, titled “‘He’s Gonna Try’: Work and the Gimmick in Professional Wrestling” considers the gimmick in professional wrestling and its links to broader understandings of labor in contemporary American life. The gimmick—that set of traits, mannerisms, movements, in-ring maneuvers, and tics by which a professional wrestler becomes legible for an audience—is central to wrestling as performance art. Nevertheless, the gimmick is undertheorized, perhaps because, as Sianne Ngai suggests, it “defends itself from intellectual curiosity in a way that puts any person seeking to analyze it at a comical disadvantage.” Ngai’s Theory of the Gimmick, in linking aesthetic judgments to capitalist form, argues that the gimmick is the only aesthetic judgment we have that indexes how value, labor, and time are linked in capitalism. Ngai’s analysis of the gimmick as a labor-saving device that nevertheless “tries too hard,” Jansen argues, has utility for the study of professional wrestling, and in turn how professional wrestling might help us consider categories of work and labor more broadly. His talk takes up the gimmick in wrestling, with particular interest in wrestling’s literalization of the gimmick’s irony: that it saves labor, though ultimately toward the ignoble end of generating more labor.

This Week in English 162 was sent to students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends of the department on November 12, 2024. If you would rather not receive these weekly bulletins, please reply with <unsubscribe> in your subject line. Earlier installments are archived on our website. If you’re on Facebook, please consider joining the English Department Group. We’re also (since March of 2024) on Linked In. To learn more about faculty members mentioned in this bulletin, visit our People page.

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University of Maine Land Acknowledgment