Paula Rabinowitz Wins Book History Prize

Professor Paula Rabinowitz's 2014 book American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton) is the co-winner of the 2015 DeLong Book History Book Prize, presented by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP). According to the judges, the book "acknowledges the power of pulp paperbacks as a medium which introduced new ideas, genres, themes and forms of reading to large audiences." With more than 1000 members in over 20 countries, SHARP supports the study of book history and print culture. "This lively and surprising book is beautifully written," the judges' statement continues, "making for that rarest of scholarly publications: a book that others will not just want to consult in their own research but read all the way through for the sheer pleasure of it." Professor Rabinowitz received the $1,000 prize at the SHARP conference in Montreal July 7-10. Congratulations!

New English Alumnae/i Magazine

What will retiring Regents Professor Tom Clayton miss about teaching? "Everything," he declares. "What I will most miss is the kind of intellectual stimulation I get from asking questions of students, getting responses, hearing questions, responding, and having my mind in continual process," he continues. "There's no substitute." The new English at Minnesota alumnae/i magazine features newly Emeritus Professor Clayton, along with an interview with another Regents Professor of English, Madelon Sprengnether, who's just published a poetry collection and a memoir. Plus summer reading recommendations, news, and more!

Students Win Top Awards

Yesterday, our Undergraduate Recognition Reception, hosted by Undergraduate Studies Director Dan Philippon, celebrated graduating seniors, honors students, and award winners with praise, cake, and Reddit jokes. Among the honored was senior English major Edward Chappell, who has received a Beinecke Scholarship, one of 20 awarded nationally from 125 undergraduates nominated; he receives $34,000 toward future graduate education. Chappell completed an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program project with Professor David Haley entitled "'Till thou applaud the deed': Milton as a Reader of Macbeth." Meanwhile, major Julie Sinn won one of ten CLA 2015-16 Talle Family Scholarships, which provide full-time tuition scholarship support. And major Laura Schmidt won one of 19 2015-16 Selmer Birkelo Scholarships offered through CLA. . . . In other news, three of our PhD graduate students will be supported in 2015-16 by the Graduate School's competitive Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships: Jessica Apolloni, Hyeryung Hwang, and Katie Sisneros. Congratulations to all!

English Majors Win Leadership Award

The University of Minnesota's top student leadership award for undergraduates, the Donald R. Zander Award for Outstanding Student Leadership, is given to two students each year. The 2015 recipients are both English majors: Marina Kuperman and Ian Taylor, Jr. Kuperman (left, with President Eric Kaler) is a peer counselor in our advising office, a UROP participant, and a Community Engagement Scholar; she is enrolled in the College of Education's DirecTrack to Teaching Program. Taylor is the founder of student group Black Men's Forum (winner of the SUA 2014 Rookie Student Group of the Year), a long-time Assistant Admissions Counselor at the U's Admissions Office, and a Harvard Public Policy and Leadership Conference Fellow; he plans to attend law school. Taylor and Kuperman receive $1000 scholarships from the University of Minnesota Alumni Association. Congratulations!

5 X Friday: Regents Professor Madelon Sprengnether

Twenty years ago, Regents Professor Madelon Sprengnether wrote and shepherded the proposal for the MFA in Creative Writing through various levels of University approval so the Program could begin granting the degree in 1996. What about the MFA Program is she most proud of? "The accomplishments of our graduates," she answers quickly. "The proof is in the pudding." The growing number of alumnae/i publications parallels the feverish output of Creative Writing Program faculty: This spring, Professor Sprengnether publishes (and reads from--see listing below) both a memoir, Great River Road (New Rivers), and a prose poetry collection, Near Solstice (Holy Cow!). What does this all have to do with lab research on memory? Read on.

5 X Friday: English Major Mason Nunemaker

Senior English major Mason Nunemaker is a poetry editor for our annual undergraduate literary arts journal Ivory Tower, created by students in a two-semester English magazine production class. According to Nunemaker, this year's content has just been finalized (from over 600 student submissions!). "I'm very excited to see how the pieces all converse with each other," he reports, "especially across the different genres of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual art." A poet himself, Nunemaker won a poetry award from the University's Steven J. Schochet Endowment for GLBT Studies awards program, and he's also an officer for USlam, the U's spoken word poetry team. How does he see printed and performance poetry differing? Read on.

5 X Friday: Associate Professor Dan Philippon

In the last three years, Associate Professor Dan Philippon has researched and taught in Germany, Italy, and France, buoyed by a Fulbright and a fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. The travel has widened his thinking about food writing and the sustainable food movement, subject of his current research. "Although my specialty will always be American environmental literature, I can't think in isolation anymore," reports Professor Philippon, who serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies. "Now, when I think of American writers, it is always in a global context. And when I think of global processes, like climate change, I think of their effects on particular places and particular people--like the Italian rice grower I met, whose paddies depend on meltwater from the Alps." How does that book-in-progress involve Alice Waters, Wendell Berry . . . and a certain Italian rice grower? Read on.

English Course Coordinator Lauded

Jessica McKenna, course coordinator for the Department of English, has been honored with an Outstanding Service Award from the College of Liberal Arts. These awards celebrate the extraordinary contributions of staff in CLA. Director of Undergraduate Studies Dan Philippon presented McKenna with the honor at a ceremony in McNamara Alumni Center January 21. Congratulations!

Professor Rabinowitz Reviewed in New Yorker

Professor Paula Rabinowitz's 2014 book American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton) is reviewed this week in the January 5 New Yorker print magazine and online. Professor Rabinowitz has also been interviewed frequently about the book, the latest with an Irish radio station (she's on from 35:17 to 48:05).

English at the Citrus Bowl!

When Golden Gopher football players take the field against Missouri in the Citrus Bowl, three English majors will be among them, reveling in Minnesota's first New Year's Day bowl game in 50 years. Junior defensive back Eric Murray is a starter who made the coaches' All-Big Ten Second Team. Sophomore wide receiver Drew Wolitarsky played in seven games this fall. Offensive linebacker Luke McAvoy (right) this year won the Gophers' Tony Dungy Character and Community Service Award and was Academic All-Big Ten. In the midst of finals week, we grabbed McAvoy, a senior, for a quick download on the life of a football-playing English major. Read on.

New English Alumnae/i Magazine

The largest literary conference in North America lands in the Twin Cities April 8-11, and our Creative Writing Program faculty and alums are all over it. English Chair Ellen Messer-Davidow recommends Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century--and a thriller or two. Plus an annotated list of the latest fiction, poetry, and nonfiction from professors, alums, and students, and information about our unique collaboration with Penumbra Theatre in February. Read the winter 2014 e-Quarterly!

5 X Friday: BA Alumnus Mark Mishek

"There continues to be a large segment of the population that believes overcoming addiction is a matter of willpower," says Mark Mishek (summa cum laude BA 1974; JD with honors 1977), CEO and President of the recently merged Hazelden and Betty Ford Foundations. The former, which he's led since 2008, has of course been a pioneer for 65 years in defining addiction not as a crime or character flaw but as a disease. Changing minds is still difficult. "The thing that's helped right now in a sad sort of way," Mishek notes, "is that with the opioid crises affecting young males more than any other population, more parents are realizing that it's not a matter of willpower, it's not a matter of more education, more self-knowledge, and so on. While that stuff's important, it can't get you well in and of itself." How did Mishek come to lead the nation's largest nonprofit addiction treatment provider? Two words: liberal arts. Read more.

New Books by English Professors

Since September, three English professors have published new works. Professor Paula Rabinowitz's American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton University Press) has drawn praise for its passion and acuity. She was invited to write about her favorite post-war pulps in The Wall Street Journal. Fresh from his third appearance in the annual Best American Poetry anthology, Professor Ray Gonzalez published the "vibrant" (according to Booklist) Soul Over Lightning (University of Arizona Press), his 13th poetry collection. Finally, Professor Nabil Matar published his authoritative compendium of research on British Captives from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1563-1760 (The Atlantic World, Brill). Congratulations to all!

5 X Friday: PhD Alumna Mary Petrie

You may have read Mary Petrie's story in The Star Tribune this summer, or on the Today Parents site. Not long after her oldest child, Stryker, graduated high school last spring, he presented Petrie (PhD 2000) with a wrapped gift. Inside was a book proof of a novel Petrie had written more than a decade ago--a novel a New York agency had shopped unsuccessfully, and Petrie had put aside. Her son had proofed, formatted, and readied the book for self-publishing--to thank the Inver Hills CC professor for raising him and to, as Petrie has said, take "your mother's dreams off the shelf." A story that good needs a follow-up, and we did. Read more.

John Berryman Conference

On the 100th anniversary of his birth, we celebrate influential poet and longtime U professor John Berryman with a free, public conference October 24-26 at Andersen Library. Publisher FSG has just released new versions of Berryman's Sonnets, 77 Dream Songs, and The Dream Songs, along with a New & Selected--and series editor Daniel Swift will give the conference keynote, along with poets April Bernard, Henri Cole, and Michael Hofmann, who introduced the three reprints. Here are 10 reasons to join us for a weekend delving into the words and worlds of the Pulitzer Prize winner.

5 X Friday: Assistant Professor Kim Todd

Her work has been called "spellbinding" (by The New Yorker) and "beautifully written" (by Outside magazine). A big welcome to Kim Todd, a new creative nonfiction addition to the Creative Writing Program faculty roster. Todd has written one book about that vagabond Sparrow, another about a female naturalist who, in 1699, voyaged from Amsterdam to South America to study insect metamorphosis (Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis), and her self-explanatory first, Tinkering with Eden: A Natural History of Exotics in America. It's no surprise she holds masters in both environmental studies and creative writing (from the University of Montana). What led her there? Read on.

5 X Friday: Professor Julie Schumacher

Intent on figuring out how to construct solid plots, Professor Julie Schumacher wrote her first book for younger readers in 2004, a decade before young adult fiction became so popular it spawned an abstinence movement. Schumacher's third such effort, The Book of One Hundred Truths (2006), won a Minnesota Book Award for Young Adult Fiction. This summer she shows off her plot chops with the adult comic novel Dear Committee Members, a book consisting only of fictional letters of recommendation--from a single imagined Creative Writing professor--that nevertheless contains classic (and compelling) exposition, conflict, climax, and denouement. Indeed, as an admiring Slate review points out, what finally happens in the tale "turn[s] the book's theme upside down," revealing the moral weight beneath the undeniably funny characterizations. For Schumacher's favorite novel-in-letters and other revelations, read on.

5 X Friday: MFA Alum Josh Ostergaard

When the New York Times Book Review's thoughtful piece on his book debut described him as "the young author," 37-year-old alumnus Josh Ostergaard (MFA 2011) wasn't about to complain. Just the fact that the august Manhattan newspaper would cover his baseball essay, The Devil's Snake Curve, was thrilling. Especially given that it's a book in which Ostergaard denounces the wealthy, self-confident, and mighty New York Yankees to further, as the reviewer recognized, a larger critique of American hegemony across the globe. The "young" descriptor probably was used to distinguish him from previous baseball writers such as George Will, Ostergaard points out: "Even though I love the game, I'm less reverent." Read on.

5 X Friday: English major Marina Kuperman

As a freshman, Marina Kuperman didn't know that experiential learning in college boosts graduates' job prospects. Nevertheless, she chose an English class featuring community volunteer opportunities--and quickly discovered that she loved helping others develop literacy. Convinced now of both her major and her vocation, she applied as a sophomore to become a peer counselor for English majors, a job in which she excelled through her junior year and will continue this fall. Meanwhile, she enrolled in further experiential learning courses, while completing an independent research project on local education practices. An American Literature survey course left Kuperman a fan of Emerson, and these words of his seem appropriate here: "Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood." Why is literacy so important for Kuperman? Read on.

5 X Friday: BA Alum Mary Nyquist

For BA alumna Mary Nyquist, entry level lecture classes at the U were large, yes, but also liberating: This small town native experienced anonymity as a refreshing freedom. But she wasn't anonymous for long. Encouraged by her professors, Nyquist went on to graduate school and ultimately became a literature professor at the University of Toronto. There she made a name for herself as a fearless scholar of Milton. These days she thinking and publishing about tyranny through the lens of literature and philosophy, among other interdisciplinary explorations. Read more.