In the latest installment of our “Good News” series, The Ball State English Department highlights the accomplishments of the department’s graduate students and faculty during the Spring 2013 semester:

Graduate Student Adi Angel presented “’She Had Learned to Know Her Body Playing Ball:’ Exploring Representations of the Jewish Mother Through Baseball Fiction” at the PCA/ACA National Conference in Washington D.C.

Angel also presented “’She Remembered the Playground Games and the Dawn of her Awareness of Being a Woman’: Exploring Female Masculinity in Silvia Tennenbaum’s Rachel, the Rabbi’s Wife” at the NINE: Spring Training Conference on the Historical and Sociological Impact of Baseball in Tempe, AZ.

Amit Baishya was invited to present a paper titled “Raw Life: ‘Songs’ of Survival in Raktim Sarma’s Borangar Ngang” at a colloquium titled “Far from the Nation, Close to the State: Hazy Sovereignty and Anxious Citizenship in India’s Northeast” held at Stanford University, March 14 and 15, 2013.

He also presented a paper titled “Country-less Countries: No-Man’s Zones and the Material Realities of Survival in Two Contemporary Assamese Militant Fictions” at a colloquium titled “Materialism and the Colony” at Bard College (MA) on May 23-24, 2013.

Baishya co-organized a seminar titled “States of Permanent Warfare in South Asia” at the Annual American Comparative Literature Association Conference (ACLA) in Toronto from April 4-7, 2013. He delivered a paper titled “Shock Encounters: Scenarios of the ‘Inhuman’ in Two Contemporary Assamese Short Stories” at the Conference.

Graduate student Nicki Litherland Baker presented “Getting Them off Your Stack: Teachers’ Tools for Addressing the Paper Load” at the 2013 College English Association Conference held in Savannah, Georgia in April.

Dr. Brent Blackwell received the C. Warren Vander Hill Award from the Honors College for outstanding teaching.

Angela Jackson-Brown’s novel is slated to be published next spring with WiDo Publishing.  She also had three poems published in Identity Theory and a poem accepted in Toe Good Poetry.

This spring, Jill Christman was elected to the Board of Directors of The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) as the Midwest Representative, and will serve a four-year term representing writers and writing programs in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Ontario, and Wisconsin.

This summer, Christman will be giving two talks in Ashland, Ohio—one at the The River Teeth Conference of Nonfiction on Sunday, May 19^th (“Crafting the Memoir: Carving Questions, Shaping Story, and Juggling the Shifting Roles of Memory, Imagination, and Time” with writers/editors Joe Mackall and Michael Steinberg) and another at the Ashland MFA summer residency on Tuesday, July 30^th (“Exercising Brevity: Nonfiction Lessons in Distillation”). On the evening of Thursday, August 1^st, Jill will give a reading with her Ashland colleagues, Peter Campion and Ruth Schwartz.

Christman’s essay, “Borrowed Babies,” appeared in a special Spring 2013 nonfiction issue of Iron Horse Literary Review.

Elizabeth Dalton’s creative nonfiction piece “If Ever You Decide You Should Go” was published by r.kv.ry quarterly literary journal.

Dalton’s interview, “Interview with Elizabeth Dalton” with April Ford was published in r.kv.ry quarterly literary journal.

Her creative nonfiction piece “Long Hair” was published in All that Glitters: Nonfiction from Sliver of Stone Magazine.

Professor Cathy Day received an immersive learning grant award from the Discovery Group. Her project, “Publishing + BSU Students,” was funded in the amount of $15,398. The project will allow students to intern at and attend the Midwest Writers Workshop in Muncie this summer. To learn more about this project, you can check out her blog at http://literarycitizenship.com/2013/03/05/publishing/.

Day also recently published an essay at Punchnel’s about the Flood of 1913 that ravaged the state of Indiana and her hometown a hundred years ago.

Dr. Stephanie Hedge won the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award.

Dr. Joyce Huff published an essay entitled “‘Fattening’ Literary History” in the Spring 2013 issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body, Weight and Society.

She also gave a conference paper entitled “Suicide by Fat: Body Worlds and the Exhibition of the Fat Corpse” at the annual meeting of the Popular Culture Association in March 2013. Huff served as a panelist on a roundtable entitled, “Frank Talk: Difficult Dialogues on Fat and Sex” at that same conference.

Dr. Darolyn Jones was awarded the Accessibility Faculty Member of the Year from Ball State University, Office of Disabled Student Development for the 2012-2013 academic school year. Jones was also nominated and selected for the Excellence in Teaching (EXIT) Award from Ball State University.

Jones was featured in the Indianapolis Star, “Initiative Wants to Collect the City’s Stories,” October 18, 2012 and on Hoosier History Live Radio Show at WICR 88.7, “Sharing Memories in Captivating Ways,” January 5, 2013.

She published “Sometimes it Sucks, but You Find the Joy: The Joyful Experiences of Mothers of Children with Special Needs,” at the Discursive Constructions of Autism conference at the University of Pennsylvania.

Jones participated in a Ball State University Interactive Simulcast by presenting “Stone Soup: Story and Strategies” for faculty at Tikrit University in Iraq.

This May, she presented “Pre-enrollment Considerations of Undergraduate Wheelchair Users and their Post-enrollment Transitions,” alongside Christina Blanch, Graduate Assistant at Ball State University, Larry Markle, Director of Disabled Student Development at Ball State University, and Dr. Roger Wessel, Professor of Educational Studies at Ball State University at the Ethnographic and Qualitative Research Conference (EQRC), Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio.

Sean Lovelace’s chapbook, Velveeta, was the winner of the Keel Short Short Fiction Chapbook Contest.

Graduate Student Thomas St. Pierre presented “The Combination of Concepts Through Lexical and Syntactic Interplay: The Case of get within the Syntactic Frame of Motion” at the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Conference in Dallas, TX.

Carolyn MacKay and Frank Trechsel’s article, “A Sketch of Pisaflores Tepehua Phonology” was published in International Journal of American Linguistics. Their article, “Totonac-Tepehua Genetic Relationships” was also accepted for publication by Amerindia.

MacKay and Trechsel also received a NEH- Documenting Endangered Languages Grant.

Dr. Nathan Myers won the BSU Alumni Association’s Distinguished Dissertation Award.

Craig O’Hara’s short story “Hard Work” was accepted for publication in the online literary journal, Bull: Men’s Fiction.

Also, O’Hara’s short story “The Corner” has been accepted for publication in the upcoming North Dakota Quarterly special issue number 78.2 “Going Global: Contemporary International Voices and Visions.”

Graduate Student Katharina Pabst presented “Cross-Cultural Differences in German and US-American Compliment Exchanges” with Thomas St. Pierre at the annual meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in Dallas, TX.

Pabst also presented “Compliment Response Strategies of US-American Learners of German” at the Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in Columbus, OH.

Dr. Rai Peterson published “Red, White, and Boyle” in Revue Électronique d’Études sur le Monde Anglophone. 10:1 (Spring 2013) and “’An efficiency, a great beauty’: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Titles.  Plath Profiles (Spring 2013).

Peterson also received an ADVANCE grant for travel to France to research a biography she is writing about Solita Solano, an American expatriate novelist, poet, journalist, and editor who lived in Paris and Le Cannet between 1921 and 1975.

Peterson was awarded The Miller College of Business Outstanding Immersive Program Award for 2012 with co-investigator Dr. Russ Wahlers.

Liz Whitacre’s chapbook of poetry, Hit the Ground, is now available from Finishing Line Press.

Graduate student Heather Wilson presented “Understanding the Process of Writing through Personality Typology” at the 13^th Annual Graduate Symposium at Purdue University.

In addition to receiving an ASPiRE Junior Faculty Research Grant from Ball State, Dr. Maria Windell accepted a Lillian Gary Taylor Visiting Fellowship in American Literature from the University of Virginia, funding two months of research at their Albert H. Small Special Collections Library.

Andrea Powell Wolfe’s article, “Refiguring La Malinche: Female ‘Betrayal’ as Cultural Negotiation in the Short Stories of María Cristina Mena” was accepted by Label Me Latina/o.

Wolfe was also nominated for two teaching awards this spring: The Excellence in Teaching Award and The C. Warren Vander Hill Award.