English Department Newsletter, Winter-Spring 2007

Faculty News

ARIELLE BYWATER-GREENBERG

The new issue of the literary journal Black Clock is out, for which Arielle serves as poetry editor. This is the all-poetry issue and features many of our faculty and students. The website is http://www.calarts.edu/blackclock/open.html

Arielle will be on a panel entitled "Nu What's New About Jewish Poetry" at the Associated Writing Programs conference in Atlanta. She may also be moderating, "if the moderator is too pregnant to come," says Arielle. She will be reading as part of an Action Books/Fence Books reading on Thursday evening. "I am also proud to be hosting an informal get-together at AWP for the listserv I founded through Columbia's server (thanks, Brendan!), poet-moms, which is a private listserv for established poets who are mothers to young children."

Arielle published in the fall the college composition reader YOUTH SUBCULTURES: EXPLORING UNDERGROUND AMERICA (Longman) and she'd be glad to talk to anyone who's interested in teaching from it. "The book was edited and compiled with the help of a Professional Writing/cultural studies course I taught here, so Columbia is involved here as well."

GARNETT KILBERG COHEN

Garnett Kilberg Cohen's short story, "The Cure," has been accepted for publication by the Roanoke Review, where it is a finalist in the journal's National Fiction Competition. The winner will be selected in late February or early March. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and was recently a finalist in both the Seattle Review's National Fiction Competetion and The Spokane Book Prize (neither of these two finalist awards carry publication with them).

DAVID LAZAR

David Lazar has two prose poems forthcoming in the Denver Quarterly, one in Sentence, one in The Laurel Review, and four in Quarter After Eight. He has two nominations for Pushcart Prizes.

David will be on a panel at the AWP in Atlanta discussing "The Impersonal Essay."

His anthology, TRUTH IN NONFICTION, should be out next fall. His book of films noir prose poems, POWDER TOWN, will be published later this year by Pecan Grove.

SARAH ODISHOO

Sarah Odishoo's most recent acceptances include "Persephone Matters," River Oaks Review, Elmhurst, IL (forthcoming 2007); "The Trial," West Wind Review, Southern Oregon University, 2006, and "The Trial," First Intensity, Lawrence Kansas (forthcoming 2006).

Sarah will be presenting her paper, "Yoking the Arts and the Liberal Arts," at the Humanities Symposium '07 sponsored by Common Ground at Columbia University, New York City, NY.

SAMUEL PARK

Samuel Park published his debut novel SHAKESPEARE?S SONNETS (Alyson Books). Sam read in Los Angeles and San Francisco at A Different Light bookstores. NPR affiliate KALW 91.7 FM hosted a half-hour interview and on-air reading. Sam will be reading at Women and Children First bookstore on March 29.

Sam presented his paper, "Racial Melancholia in Ira Sachs" "The Delta," as part of the panel "Gender Studies and Male Beauty," at the 48^th Annual Midwest Modern Language Association Conference. His encyclopedia entries on Asian American playwrights Sung Rno, Alice Tuan, and Lane Nishikawa are forthcoming in the Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature (ed. Seiwoong Oh).

DOUGLAS REICHERT POWELL

Douglas Reichert Powell's CRITICAL REGIONALISM: CONNECTING POLITICS AND CULTURE IN THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE, will be released by University of North Carolina Press on March 19.

BRENDAN RILEY

Brendan Riley's j-session course, "Zombies in Popular Media" will be profiled in the "Syllabus" column of the Chronicle of Higher Education on 23 February 2007.

Brendan presented at two conferences this autumn. He gave a talk about superhero comics, "Warren Ellis in the Shadow of Superman," at the Midwest Popular Culture Association meeting this October, and he presented with the Sharing Cultures team at the Midwest Modern Language Association this November.

He also participated in a panel at the Chicago Humanities Festival entitled "Cyberconflict-- Representations of War in New Media and Electronic Games" in November.

JOHN SALOVAARA AND DAN GODSTON

Jonn Salovaara and Dan Godston will present on the topic of composition instructors stepping outside their comfort zones to teach in the first year seminar, at the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, in Big Rapid, Michigan, on March 9. Jonn is also coordinating a teaching partnership program between instructors in first-year writing and instructors in the first-year seminar at Columbia, New Millennium Studies. The partnership is sponsored by First-Year Writing, the Center for Teaching Excellence, and New Millennium Studies.

TONY TRIGILIO

Tony Trigilio's book of poems, THE LAMA'S ENGLISH LESSONS, was published by Three Candles Press. He also published poems in Big Bridge, absent, Black Clock, Diagram, La Petite Zine, New Orleans Review, and Denver Quarterly.

DAVID TRINIDAD

David Trinidad's essay "Two Sweet Ladies?: Sexton and Plath's Friendship and Mutual Influence" appeared in the November/December issue of The American Poetry Review. His sonnet sequence "Eighteen to Twenty-One" appeared in UP IS UP: NEW YORK'S DOWNTOWN LITERARY SCENE, 1974-1992 (New York University Press).

Five poems appear in UNDER THE ROCK UMBRELLA: CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETS FROM 1951-1977 (Mercer University Press). In Tom O'Connor's book POETIC ACTS & NEW MEDIA (just out from University Press of America) there's a subchapter entitled "The Media Poetry of David Trinidad: 'I Didn?t Know Why I Was So Fascinated By...Murder.'" He analyzes several of David's poems.

Poems recently appeared in these journals: Black Clock, Bombay Gin, and Combo. And in these online magazines: EOAGH (Queering Language issue), Jacket (The Holiday Album: Greeting Card Poems edited by Elaine Equi), Reservoir, Solitary Plover, and Wicked Alice.

On October 15 David read at Myopic Books here in Chicago. On November 6 he read in the Downcity Poetry Series in Providence, Rhode Island. And on December 8 he read at the Center for Book Arts in New York City. The Center for Book Arts produced a beautiful letterpress broadside of his poem "To Arielle and the Moon."

TONY DEL VALLE

Tony Del Valle published Spanish versions of two of his poems: "Cuatro De Julio 2002" and "Cadenas" ("Chains") in Contratiempo. 41 Chicago. October 2006: 18. Contratiempo is a Chicago-based Spanish-language literary magazine.

MARK WITHROW

Mark Withrow had a paper accepted at the 38^th Annual College English Association Conference in New Orleans, LA (April 12-14, 2007). The conference theme is Empathy and Ethics. His paper title is "Cormac McCarthy's The Road: Empathy and Ethics in a Post-Apocalyptic World."

For inclusion in future newsletters, please email Samuel Park or wait for a listserve request in mid-spring. Thanks to all those who have sent in items.

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Tech/Ped Corner

On Nudging Students.

I've often advocated opening lines of communication between us and our students. I encourage my students to contact me by whatever medium they feel most comfortable. Many email, some send instant messages, some write on my Facebook "wall," and some call. It's my experience that this multitude of avenues encourages students to inquire with questions they might otherwise leave unasked; the benefits to this approach are obvious.

At the same time, the ubiquitous avenues to me encourage other habits that I dislike--what I call the help-center crutch. When students embark on a research project, it's likely that the top 10 Google responses (or, hopefully, library database searches) will be the main sources for their paper. Ease of availability often trumps depth of research. While this approach isn?t incurable, it does go with the networked, database world.

This problem is exacerbated when some of those research avenues include real people. Online help forums are an excellent example of this problem. When people join support forums (for software or hardware), they're usually looking for the answer to a specific problem. Thus, they often join the forum and post their question right away, rather than searching through the old posts to see if anyone else has already asked their question. Regulars to such forums will scold these newcomers, often giving them links to the old posts or, if they're more crotchety, telling the user that the question has been answered before and that s/he should search for it.

It's natural to post our question right away: the anonymity of the forums makes us forget about the time involved in answering the questions. These real people, usually volunteers, feel to us like much like smarter Googles, giving us the answers we need in the top ten choices. But in repeating questions, we squander our community resource. Just as students who don't listen drive us crazy in class, so do forum users who don?t search.

So when students ask me questions, my response always hinges on whether the student has the resources to answer the question him- or herself. For example, a student who emails me to ask about the homework will receive not the assignment, but a reminder that the web syllabus provides that information. In pursuing this strategy, I'm surely echoing the in-class strategies we all use: "It's on the piece of paper I just gave you."

But it behooves us to consider how the shifting nature of data storage (and the benefits of networked resources) changes the approaches students can take to problem solving, and to modulate our own responses accordingly. My conversations encourage my students to develop their bootstrapping mindset--to troubleshoot and attempt to repair their own problems before they bring them to me. In essence, I'm trying to give them a digital pole, rather than electronic fish.

See you next time!
Brendan

Department newsletter compiled by Samuel Park.