Damon Wins Teaching Recognition

Professor Maria Damon received the University of Minnesota Distinguished Teaching Award for Outstanding Postbaccalaureate, Graduate, and Professional Education for 2006-07. This award recognizes faculty members for excellence in instruction, instructional program development, intellectual distinction, advising and mentoring, and involvement of students in research, scholarship, and professional development. English professors Madelon Sprengnether, John Mowitt, Edward M. Griffin, and Tom Clayton are previous winners of this award.

Alumnus Writes on Dante's Teacher

Michael Kleine (PhD 1983) is publishing Searching For Latini (Parlor Press), a book about Brunetto Latini, the teacher of Dante. A composition scholar and a poet, Kleine "argues that Latini should be rescued from obscurity, not only because of the literary status of his student but also because of Latini’s promotion of Ciceronian rhetoric during the dawn of the Renaissance and the relevance of his work to contemporary teachers of writing." Kleine is a professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Faculty News

Ellen Messer-Davidow was selected to be a Residential Fellow at the University of Minnesota Institute for Advanced Study for the fall of 2007. . . . Katherine Scheil will be a McKnight Summer Fellow for the summer of 2007. . . . Natasha Tinsley received funding for one year from the President's Faculty Multicultural Research Award for her proposal "Desiring the Blue Lagoon: Sea Crossings and Fluid Identities in Caribbean Literature."

MFA Candidate to Publish Chapbook

MFA candidate Emily Bright's first chapbook of poetry will be published by Pudding House Press in summer 2007. Bright plans to graduate in 2008.

MFA Alumna Sells Novel

Shaye Areheart Books, a division of Random House, will publish MFA alumna Amy Shearn's debut novel, How Far is the Ocean from Here? in summer 2008. Shearn received her MFA in 2005.

Louise Erdrich and Nuruddin Farah Return

The Department of English welcomes back to the University of Minnesota Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah, who was a visiting writer in 1988, and Minnesota writer Louise Erdrich, who delivered the Joseph Warren Beach Lecture in Literature here in 1996. Farah and Erdrich met recently at a conference and discovered they had much to discuss, a conversation they will continue with this unique dialogue and reading, 3:30 pm Sunday March 4 at Cowles Auditorium. Farah will be interviewed on National Public Radio's Morning Edition February 23.

MFA Alumni Nets NYT Review

Alumna Lauren Fox published her first novel Still Life With Husband on Knopf this month, and on February 16, the New York Times gave it a thumbs up. Reviewer Michiko Kakutani names Fox "a delightful new voice in American fiction," describes her as a blend of Lorrie Moore and Roz Chast, and continues: "Ms. Fox, who earned an M.F.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1998, has an uncanny ability to capture the absurdities of her heroine’s pastel-colored life in Milwaukee, and to map the darker emotional landscape she inhabits."