Hannah McSorley, a senior English major at SUNY Geneseo, has had her story “Washing Machine Time” published online at Crab Fat Magazine. Hannah’s story was originally written for Assistant Professor of English Lytton Smith’s section of ENGL 201: Foundations of Creative Writing, where it received workshop feedback from students in that class. “It’s wonderful to see that revision process leading to a publication,” says Dr. Smith. “Congratulations to Hannah!”
Greenfield and Carlo essay to appear in Arthur Miller Journal
Professor Tom Greenfield and senior Erin Carlo are co-authors of a 3000-word essay that’s been accepted by The Arthur Miller Journal (Penn State University Press) for publication in Fall 2017. “Strange Stage Fellows: Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter” grew out of discussions that occurred over the course of a year during which Carlo took two classes with Greenfield: The Legacy and Influence of Arthur Miller (ENGL 203) and Anglo–Irish Absurdist Drama (ENGL 486). Their essay identifies a recent trend in comparative scholarship between the two playwrights, moving from early hard-edged contrasts toward later nuanced explorations of artistic similarities in their work.
English Department Announces 2017 Writing Contest Winners
The English Department announced the winners of the annual Writing Contest for analytical and creative writing. Winners of the Writing Contest were recognized at the Department’s annual award ceremony held on Study Day. The Writing Contest is college-wide and students from all majors are encouraged to submit their analytical and creative writing for recognition.
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Zach Muhlbauer Selected For Phi Beta Kappa Writing Internship
Recent Geneseo graduate Zachary Muhlbauer (’17) has been awarded a six month writing internship with the national office of Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious academic honors society. As part of the internship, Zach will be writing articles for The Key Reporter, an integrative online newsletter run by Phi Beta Kappa.
During his time at Geneseo, Zach served as a Writing Learning Center tutor, a Writing Course Fellow, and president of Sigma Tau Delta. He graduated magna cum laude in May 2017 with a double major in English Literature and Philosophy.
Beth McCoy And Eight Geneseo Alumni Co-Authored Article Accepted For Publication
Accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journal Genders is “’There is No Magic Here’: Saidiya Hartman, Percival Everett’s Zulus, and Slavery’s Archive,” an essay coauthored by Distinguished Teaching Professor Beth A. McCoy and Geneseo alumni Gregory J. Palermo (English/Literature, Physics), Jeremy A. Jackson (English/Literature), Danielle M. Ward (English, Geological Sciences), Timothy Moriarty (English/Creative Writing), Christina Broomfield (English/Literature, Art History), Melissa Ann Smith (Childhood/Special Education), Matt Huben (English/Literature), and Justin M. Turner (English/Literature).
The essay emerged from the collaborative final project in McCoy’s Fall 2013 ENGL 394 Black Apocalyptic Fiction seminar. You can view the full essay here.
Geneseo Students Present at Annual Sigma Tau Delta Convention
Eight Geneseo students represented the English Department in March in Louisville, KY at the annual convention for Sigma Tau Delta, the international English Honors society. The students—Marissa Bellusci, Kate Collis, Zach Muhlbauer, Amanda Saladino, Kristen Seaman, Veronica Taglia, Amanda Wentworth, and Melissa Whyman—were accompanied by Dr. Gillian Paku, who serves as faculty sponsor to the Geneseo chapter.
During the convention, students presented their critical essays or creative pieces as part of a panel of related topics (for instance, Gender and Drama in Oscar Wilde, or Cultural Theory in American Television), followed by a dialogue between the panelists and audience. The convention offered many opportunities for students to attend panels or workshops that caught their interest and to engage in conversation with fellow English majors from across the country, plus allowing some free time to explore the attractions of Louisville. Geneseo students were also able to attend a talk given by the convention’s featured speaker, the Booker prize-winning author Marlon James, whose fiction spans across several genres to explore Jamaican history and mythology.
At the convention’s student meeting, Geneseo’s chapter of Sigma Tau Delta was awarded a prize in recognition of the chapter’s involvement in the society for 45 years.
All students who are members of Sigma Tau Delta are eligible to submit to the convention: for the 2017-2018 academic year, it will be held from March 21-24 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Submissions are usually due at the end of October, and the Sigma Tau Delta student e-board is always happy to help students prepare essays to continue Geneseo’s longstanding involvement with this valuable event.
Evan Goldstein wins SUNY arts award
Graduating senior Evan Goldstein has been awarded the SUNY-wide Patricia Kerr Ross Award, administered by the New York Foundation on the Arts, for his poetry, photography, and his work with social justice/arts organizations such as Guerrilla, an on-campus arts group Evan founded which aims to put poetry in public spaces while working with under-represented groups. A recently-begun project involves outreach with the Geneseo Migrant Center.
The Patricia Ross Kerr Award helps bridge study at The State University of New York and first-time entry into a professional career in the creative or performing arts: namely music, theatre, dance, film and video, creative writing, and the visual arts. This award of $1,000 is given annually to an individual (or divided among two exceptional applicants) according to excellence, originality, and promise, and helps the recipient begin to make a career in the arts.
Join us at the 2016 Rochester Fringe Festival
Come to the Fringe Festival in Rochester, New York next weekend and see what the English department’s creative writers, filmmakers, and multimedia artists have prepared for your enjoyment! All events are free.
See page 35 of the print Festival Guide for a full listing, including free performances from 11:30 am to midnight on Saturday, September 24. Events include:
- Guerrilla Art: (a student art collective) have prepared a site-specific installation. At the Spiegelgarden, corner of Main and Gibbs Sts, Friday 9/23, 5-11 pm, and Saturday 9/24, 12 noon to 11 pm. Faculty sponsor: Lytton Smith.
- Heirlooms: creative writers reading their work: Sarah Steil, creative non-fiction Oliver Diaz, fiction Evan Goldstein, poetry 3:45 at the Lyric Theatre, 440 Main St at the corner with Prince. Faculty sponsor: Kristen Gentry.
- Filmmakers: Saturday 9/17, 7:15 pm at Spiegelgarden, corner of Main and Gibbs Interaction by Wei Ying Ch’ng Run by Michael MacDonald Saturday 9/24, 7:15 pm at Spiegelgarden, corner of Main and Gibbs She Used to Be Mine by Anna Tailleur Overture by Jason Guisao Arrive early and turn in an ID for headphones. Faculty sponsor: Melanie Blood.
Concessions are available at both the Spiegelgarden and Lyric Theatre. Free parking at Lyric, garage and pay lots near Spiegelgarden.
Lytton Smith sound poem featured in online journal
“Dear World Service,” a new sound poem by Assistant Professor of English Lytton Smith, is included in the second issue of ythm, an audio journal of contemporary poetry. Written in response to Robyn Schiff’s “Death of a Salesman,” Smith’s poem is one of five audio-only poems in the issue. A podcast can be found via Soundcloud. The issue also features work by Katie Peterson, Michael Joseph Walsh, and Sheila McMullin.
Taking its name from Nathanial Mackey’s gloss of “ythm” as “anagrammatic myth” in his 1993 poetry collection School of Udhra, ythm is an argument that “the spoken voice is central to both the praxis and appreciation of contemporary poetry,” and central, in particular, to the American tradition.
ythm editor Sean Pears found Smith through the blog that Smith maintains for Geneseo students in Literature and Creative Writing, The Contemporary Poem. Responding in a comment to student Nicole Pero’s post about “breaking from sound” via Benjamin Franklin, which neatly synthesized themes from Geneseo’s Western Humanities courses and the Advanced Poetry Workshop, Smith suggested “isn’t sound a form itself?,” offering Karen Volkman’s sonnets from Nomina, published by Rochester-based BOA Editions, as an example.
Smith credits the English department’s transition to four-credit courses with creating the space in his classes to incorporate student blogging.
English department announces 2016 student awards and scholarships
The following students have won department awards and scholarships for 2015-2016 and will be honored at an awards ceremony on Study Day, May 4.
Graduating Senior Awards
- William T. Beauchamp Literature Award: Jeremy Jackson
- Patricia Conrad Lindsay Memorial Award: Sean Fischer
- Calvin Israel Award in the Humanities: Britina Cheng and Harrison Hartsough
- Joseph M. O’Brien Memorial Award: Mary Auld and Christy Leigh Agrawal
- Outstanding Speech Buddy: Lauren Sarrantonio
Scholarships
- Natalie Selser Freed Memorial Scholarship: John Panus
- Rita K. Gollin Senior Year Scholarship for Excellence in American Literature: Zach Muhlbauer
- Rita K. Gollin Junior Year Scholarship for Excellence in American Literature: Amanda Wentworth
- Hans Gottschalk Award: Brendan Mahoney
- Joseph M. O’Brien Transfer Scholarship: Jeffrey Curtin
- Don Watt Memorial Scholarship: Jason Guisao
- Bonnie C Henzel Memorial Scholarship: Gabriella Garcia, Chloe Forsell, Kiaya Rose Dilsner-Lopez, and Thomas McCarthy
- Jesse M Rodgers Memorial Scholarship: Erik Mebust and Evan Goldstein
Writing Awards
Creative Non-Fiction
- First place: Jeremy A. Jackson, “To Dr. C., Ph.D.”
- Second place: Leandra Griffith, “Birthday for That Generic Someone in Your Life”
- Third place: Lauren Sarrantonio, “The Amorphous Children”
John H. Parry Award for a Critical Essay
- First place: Carrie Anne Potter, “Ahead of Their Time: Temporality and Spatiality in Two Keats Odes”
- Second place: Joshua DeJoy, “The Objective, the Subjective, and the Ugly: E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class at Fifty-Two”
- Third place: Zachary Muhlbauer, “Nietzschean Dualism in Heart of Darkness: A Structuralist Analysis”
Jérome de Romanet de Beaune Award for an Essay in Diversity Studies
- First place: Ariana DiPreta, “Subversion of Bourgeois Masculinity in Ulysses”
- Second place: Veronica Taglia, “Construction of Black Masculine Identity in African American Drama, 1959–1969”
- Third place (tied): Emily Ercolano, “Toulouse-Lautrec and the Female Form”
- Third place (tied): Joshua DeJoy, “The Dialectics of Slavery: Hegel and the Contradictions in Slavery”
Agnes Rigney Award in Drama
- Emily Warnken, “Vampires”
Irene E. Smith Award in First-Year Critical Writing: INTD 105
- First place: Isabel Owen, “Searching for Answers in Silence: The Issue of Memory in State Violence”
- Second place: George Goga, “The Dictionary, the Gummy Worms, and the Grotesque”
Lucy Harmon Award in Literary Fiction
- First place: Katie Soares, “We Buy Gold”
- Second place: Leandra Griffith, “Mary”
- Third place: Margaret Thon, “The Ballad of Summer ’72”
Mary Thomas Award in Poetry
- First place: Savannah Skinner, “A Guide To Recognizing Your Ghost”
- Second place: Cassandra Schweizer, “What I Wrote For You”
- Third place: Kallie Swyer, “Hundreds of Birds”
Research Paper
- First place: Erik Mebust, “Shakespeare’s Rising Stars”
- Second place: Jessica Heppler, “Civil Disobedience and the Rawlsian Non-Citizen: An Appeal to Political or Natural Rights?”
- Third place: Veronica Taglia, “Subversion of the American Dream: An Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Leading Protagonists.”
Africana/Black Studies
- Best Analytical Essay: Azaria Davis, “Colorblind? That Ain’t Right!”
- Best Research Paper: Kathleen O’Brien, “Would There Be Slave Resistance without Women?: The Crucial Role Women Play”
- Best Creative Work: Chloe Forsell, “Mother Tongue”