5 X Friday: BA Alum Ellen Boschwitz

Ellen Boschwitz may have taken the long road to a BA in English, starting out at Brown University, with stops at Barnard in New York City and Lawrence in Wisconsin, but she met an important deadline: She earned her degree before any of her four kids got to college (in 1976, the same year her oldest graduated from high school). Her favorite teacher at the U? Political science professor Mulford Q. Sibley, a controversial pacifist and socialist--and a surprising choice for the wife of former U.S. Senator (and Republican) Rudy Boschwitz. But Ellen has led an extraordinary life: from World War II refugee to early activist for children with learning disabilities to business manager and marketer. Read on . . . .

Promotions for Scheil and Campion

The Department of English is pleased to announce the promotion of two of our faculty members: Peter Campion to Associate Professor with tenure, and Katherine Scheil to Professor. Campion will publish his third collection of poetry, El Dorado, this October with the University of Chicago Press. Scheil published her second monograph, She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America (Cornell University Press) last fall, and has a third, The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway, in progress. Congratulations!

5 X Friday: MFA Alum Ethan Rutherford

When Seattle native and fiction writer Ethan Rutherford moved to Minneapolis to attend the Creative Writing Program, he brought along a small career as singer-songwriter, with an album known, he thought, by few people outside his mother and sister. One night, at a Minneapolis coffee shop, he heard a stranger singing a familiar song, his song, a track from his CD. How could they not start a band together? Six years later, Pennyroyal (including MFA alum Jake Mohan, as drummer) is mastering its second album for September release. But back to the fiction: Rutherford graduated from the writing program and this spring published his acclaimed debut story collection, The Peripatetic Coffin (Ecco). For more about the book (and its mysterious title), read on. . . .

Graduate Student Research & Writing Awards

Congratulations to PhD and MFA student recipients of department spring and summer research and writing support! Selected for the Graduate Research Partnership Program for summer 2013 are: Patricia Baehler for "Epistolary Infrastructure and the Gendered Letter in Eighteenth-Century Novels" with project adviser Brian Goldberg; Wesley Burdine for "'What Was It?': Phenomenal Bodies and Temporality" with project adviser Jani Scandura; Jennifer Kang for "A Displaced Utopia: The Politics of Modernism in 1930s Colonial Korea" with project adviser Timothy Brennan; Stephen McCulloch for "Sublime Sacrifice: Excessive Force and Form in Fin de Siècle Literature" with project adviser Tony Brown; essayist Bridget Mendel for "The Honeybee Project" with project adviser Dan Philippon; and poet Nicky Tiso for "Bakken Business" with project adviser Ray Gonzalez. Graduate Studies also announced PhD Short Term Research Grants for spring 2013: Stacy Decker (Jani Scandura, adviser) Leslie Nightingale (Andrew Elfenbein, adviser), and Trenton Olson (Elfenbein, adviser). The Creative Writing Program awarded CLA Fellowships to poet Elena Carter, fiction writer Katherine Lee, and poet Jennifer Fossenbell. Poet Elizabeth O'Brien received the Michael Dennis Browne Fellowship in Creative Writing, summer 2013, and nonfiction writer Lalinne Suon Bell was awarded the summer 2013 Scribe For Human Rights Fellowship. Nonfiction writers Sally Franson and Hunter Sharpless received two-week writer residencies at the Anderson Center in Red Wing. Finally, the Marcella DeBourg Fellowship, which supports work that gives "creative expression to women's lives" went to PhD candidate Amanda Taylor for her project "'Be Your Letter'": Rhetoric, Bodies and Passions in Trobairitz Tensos."

Dislocate Magazine New Issue

dislocate, the literary and arts magazine produced by English graduate students, celebrates its ninth issue, entitled Atlas of the Midwest. "A body is a country with borders in crisis," write editors (and MFA candidates) Jennifer Fossenbell and Nasir Sakandar. "Together we are always making, and these made things are maps of our many countries." Featured artists and writers in the issue include Barrie Jean Borich, Wing Young Huie, Ed Bok Lee, and Ernest Williamson III. Ask for a free issue at a Twin Cities independent bookstore.

Woo Defense

Doctoral candidate Jewon Woo will defend her dissertation, "Performing Bodies and Performative Texts: The Bodily Culture of the Antebellum United States and Fleshy Writing," as directed by Dr. Josephine Lee and Dr. Michelle Wright, on Thursday, May 30, in Lind 202. All are welcome for the public portion of the defense from 10-11 am.

Kim Defense

Doctoral candidate Eun Joo Kim will defend her dissertation, "Unreading Multilingualisms of the Korean Diaspora," as directed by Dr. Josephine Lee, on Wednesday, May 22 in Lind 207A. All are welcome for the public portion of the defense from 9-10 am.