Us #bsuenglish folks just keep accomplishing more and more great things! Read our good news from January and February to share in the joy radiating from our faculty, students, and alumni. 

Faculty

Dr. Suban Nur Cooley has won the 2021 Conference on College Composition and Communication James Berlin Memorial Outstanding Dissertation Award for her dissertation Carrying Culture: Temporal and Spatial Constructions of Somalia Among Women in the Diaspora. 

Kathryn Ludwig has been announced as the 2021-2023 Ball Brothers Foundation Honors College Faculty Fellow. She will develop and teach several Honors College courses during the next two academic years. Her HONR 199 (Inquiries in Contemporary American Society) sections will interrogate the notion and challenge of the American Dream through diverse and disparate narratives. A Spring 2022 HONR 390 (Honors College Colloquium) will use campus-community book discussions to explore how stories can impact attitudes about religious cultural diversity. During the second year, Prof. Ludwig will mentor a team of students as they develop undergraduate theses which critically examine questions of selection, representation, and resiliency in American literature, in collaboration with the American Writers Museum.

Jennifer Grouling and PhD alum, Stephanie Hedge’s, edited collection “Roleplaying Games in the Digital Age” is out! This collection includes essays on the transmedia ecology that has connected analog with digital and audio spaces. Essays explore the boundaries of virtual tabletops and how users engage with a variety of technology to further role-playing. Interviews with content creators are interspersed with academic essays.

Dr. Mary Lou Vercellotti co-authored an article entitled “Creating Analytic Rubrics for Assessing Open-Ended Tasks in the Language Classroom” about creating analytic rubrics for classroom assessment, available to read online. 

Cathy Day will be giving two presentations this semester about the work she’s doing directing the Compass Advantage for the College of Sciences and Humanities: “Helping Humanities Majors Tackle a Tough Job Market from a Position of Strength,” National Humanities Alliance (NHA) Annual Meeting, March 8, 2021 as a virtual panelist, and “Helping English Majors Pivot from College to Career.” W.W. Norton workshop series, Paths Forward for the Humanities: Practical and Inspiring Ideas for College Faculty on February 18, 2021 as a virtual featured presenter. 

In other news, Prof. Day recently earned a 9/10 on Room Rater @ratemyskyperoom. This is definitely going on her CV.

Dr. Darolyn “Lyn” Jones’ case study and article titled “‘Don’t Speechify: Do Something’: University Students Experience Counter Narratives,” was published in a special topics issue of the North Meridian Review on the topic of Freedom to Make and Remake, January 1, 2021

  • Dr. Jones was invited to present with the Indiana State Literacy Association (ISLA) on #blacklivesmatter in Black Children’s & YA Lit February 10. She is presenting with EMDD and English dept alum graduate student Eileen Porzuczek, current English dept student Emily Turner, and Af Am Studies Minor student, Nykasia Williams Wednesday.
  • Dr. Jones is currently a student in Ball State’s Association of Colleges and Universities (ACUE) Course on Effective Teaching Practices (ETP) that runs from the Spring to Fall 2021 Semesters.

Dr. Sarah Domet will be (virtually) presenting at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual conference in March. Her panel is called “The Perfect Match: Finding the Right Agent for You and Your Work.” Dr. Domet was also recently awarded an Aspire Junior Faculty Creative Arts Grant in support of her novel Halley’s. 

Along with Dr. Kiesha Warren-Gordon, Dr. Emily Ruth Rutter recently published “Stories that Matter: Making and Preserving Black Spaces and Places” in North Meridian Review . Dr. Rutter also hosted two Unity Week events: Celebrating Black Poetry with E. Ethelbert Miller and Racial Trauma and White Fragility: A Campus Conversation (in collaboration with Dr. Gabriel Tait, the Counseling Center’s Diversity Team, and the Student Anti-Racism and Intersectionality Advisory Council). 

Dr. Allyson DeMaagd’s manuscript, Dissensuos Women: Modernist Women Writers, Technology, and the Senses, has been accepted for publication by University Press of Florida. Anticipated date of publication is April 2022.  

Professor Rani Deighe Crowe’s short film Quiet on Set has been selected to Tampa Bay Underground Film Festival, Centre Film Festival in State College, Pennsylvania, the Door County Short Film Festival in Door County, WI, and the Big Muddy Film Festival in Carbondale, IL.

  • Professor Crowe’s short short film, Shelter Alone at Home, was selected to screen at the Big Muddy Film Festival in Carbondale, IL. Shelter Alone at Home is one of a series of Pandemic Portrait monologues and short films from a larger series Professor Crowe has been creating during the pandemic.
  • Professor Crowe’s presentation, Combatting the Empathy Gap: The Significance of Arts and Media in Developing Empathy, was selected and presented as part of the Virginia Dares Cinematic Arts Award & Conference for Decolonizing Media at Virginia Tech virtual conference.
  • Professor Crowe became Board Member and Secretary of the Open Circle Theater Company of Washington DC. Open Circle Theatre (OCT) is Washington DC’s first professional theatre dedicated to producing professional productions that integrate the considerable talents of artists with disabilities.

On January 26, 2021, Angela Jackson-Brown hosted “Conversations of Hope: A Celebration of African American Poetry” that was sponsored through the Muncie Public Library. Dr. Emily R. Rutter, Mr. Frank X. Walker, and Dr. Sharon L. Jones were on the panel.

  • On February 16, 2021, Angela Jackson-Brown will read from her upcoming novel, When Stars Rain Down, on The Literary Cypher. Her novel will be out on April 13, 2021 with Thomas Nelson/Harper Collins.

Jill Christman won Iron Horse Literary Review’s Long Story Contest with her 10K-word essay, “Falling,” which will be released as an e-single this May.

Molly Ferguson’s article, “The Changeling Legend and Queer Kinship in Caitriona Lally’s Eggshells” was accepted in Irish University Review, forthcoming in Autumn/Winter 2021.

Mark Neely’s collection of poems entitled, Ticker, is winner of the Idaho Prize in Poetry 2020 (University of Washington Press) and will be out in May 2021. 

Pat Collier’s book Teaching Literature in the Real World: A Practical Guide (Bloomsbury) will be out in July 2021.

Students

Drew Shaeffer has committed to Indiana University’s graduate program for French Linguistics where she will also be serving as an associate instructor for undergraduate French classes. She will being in Fall 2021.

Grace Goze has committed to DePaul University’s MFA program for Screenwriting with a concentration in Comedy. She will begin in Fall 2021.

Shelbi Tedeschi has a craft essay on the braided essay and Anton DiSclafani’s “The Babysitter” up on River Teeth’s River Teeth Revisited. 

We’re proud to announce that Indelible has been announced a semifinalist in the 2021 Screencraft podcast writing competition! There were nearly 300 entrants in this competition, and only 32 podcasts were chosen to move onto the semifinals. 

2020 marked the 20-year anniversary of the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry. To celebrate this
anniversary, Ball State put together a short documentary looking back on the legacy of the VBC. (Many student and faculty faces and voices from the English Department made it into the video!) We encourage you to check it out here.  

Alumni

Maggie Sutton (B.A. Creative Writing 2020) recently got a full-time job as a contract tracer supervisor in Indianapolis. Her official title is Logistics and Support at Indiana University Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health. 

After three years designing covers at Skyhorse Publishing in New York, Daniel Brount (B.A. Creative Writing 2016) recently secured a position at Penguin Random House as book designer. He reports, “Primarily I’ll be designing the interiors for books at Putnam, Dutton, Berkley, and a couple other imprints. Both fiction and nonfiction books (including a couple cookbooks, which I love to design), photo inserts, etc. And I’ll coordinate with typesetters as they build the books I design, and production as we work on meeting all the printing requirements for my titles.”

Nikki Campbell (B.A. Creative Writing 2020) recently started working as a Marketing Coordinator at Bates Security in Lexington, KY. 

We’ve got a lot of great publishing news from our alumni! 

Alysia Li-Ying Sawchyn (M.A. Rhet Comp 2015) has a collection of essays just out with Burrow Press, A Fish Growing Lungs. In March, she’s coming back to Ball State for the InPrint Festival of First Books. Learn more at her website.

  • Check out our latest book review “The People We Once Were” by River Teeth’s Mark Neely, which discusses Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn’s A Fish Growing Lungs. 

J.R. Jamison-Pippen’s book Hillbilly Queer will be out in May with Facing Project Press. He earned his B.S. in Cultural Geography and English in 2001. Learn more at his website.

In June 2021, Ashley C. Ford’s memoir Somebody’s Daughter will be published by Flatiron Books. It’s one of the most anticipated books of 2021. Learn more at her website. Ashley earned her B.A. in English in 2019 and delivered the commencement speech at her graduation. 

Sarah Hollowell’s novel A Dark and Starless Forest will be published in September 2021 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Teen, and it’s also widely anticipated, having made Buzz Feed’s most anticipated list in YA sci-fi/fantasy. Sarah graduated with her B.A. in Creative Writing in 2015, and you can learn more at her website. 

The second novel by recent graduate Jay Coles, Things We Couldn’t Say, will be published by Scholastic in September. He’s also the author of Tyler Johnson Was Here (Little Brown Young Readers 2018). You can read this interview with Jay.