In the latest installment of the “Good News” series, the Ball State English Department highlights the accomplishments of our faculty and students.

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Prof. Lyn Jones and her teaching students recently published the second issue of “Rethinking Children’s and Young Adult Literature.” The interactive magazine features dialogue with authors, original and rewritten stories, and teacher resources for the classroom. The goal is to share innovative, diverse stories for children who are lacking representation, who deserve “stories about children like them, about families like theirs, about experiences they have, about lives they actually live.” This issue focuses on LGBTQ issues in children’s and young adult works. The magazine is available online through the BSU Now app.

Professor Cathy Day‘s panel for the 2015 Association of Writers and Writing Programs was recorded for the AWP podcast series, and is now available for listening. “How I Taught Then, How I Teach Now” covers five teachers’ active awareness of their changing assumptions in the classroom, and how it ultimately changed their courses for the better.

Dr. Frank Felsenstein published “Smollett’s Use of ‘Seafarot’: A Long Standing Textual Crux Resolved,” in January’s Notes and Queries, published by Oxford University Press.

Prof. Emily Scalzo has three senryu accepted for publication in 7×20. The online magazine publishes fiction and poetry exclusively on Twitter. Her work will be revealed in the third week of February, so be sure to follow!

Prof. Angela Jackson-Brown‘s play, ANNA’S WINGS, has been accepted as part of the 2016 Diva Fest, which is presented through the generosity of Ellen and Richard Shevitz in association with IndyFringe, Andrew Black, and the Indiana Writers Center. The play will debut on April 2nd and April 10th at the Indy Eleven Theatre in Indianapolis. In the past month Angela also:
  • was a featured poet at The Bards Town in Louisville, KY, sponsored by New Southerner Literary Journal.
  • taught a class at the Indiana Writers Center entitled, “Whose Story Is It Anyway: The Importance of Point of View.” On Saturday, February 20th she will be teaching a workshop called Revision 101.

Dr. Rai Peterson has two articles recently in print:

  • “Low Rank, High Brow: The ‘Adolescent’ War Writing of E. E. Cummings and Kurt Vonnegut” is available in Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society.
  • “Parallax: Nancy Cunard’s Knowing Response to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land” is available in Studies in the Humanities.

Alumni Abby Higgs has a series of essays, “My Life with Annie Lennox,” appearing on The Rumpus.

Undergraduate Luke Bell had poetry accepted for publication in the upcoming SLAB magazine.

Ball Stat12642878_808955794327_3949055353494235587_ne graduate students organized another successful Practical Criticism Midwest Conference! “Out of the Shadows” featured panels and themed work (including those fantastic doggerels) by current Ball State students as well as students from other universities. The keynote address was delivered by Ball State alumnus and current Taylor University faculty member Aaron Housholder. Congratulations all, and thanks for all your hard work!

Dr. Robert Habich’s review of Emerson’s Protégés: Mentoring and Marketing Transcendentalism’s Future by David Dowling appeared in the Autumn 2015 issue of Emerson Society Papers. His essay “An Emerson Bibliography, 2014” was published in the same issue.

Prof. Jill Christman‘s essay, “Going Back to Plum Island” has been published in River Teeth, which is also available on Project Muse through our library’s database. In addition, her essay “On Kindness” has been accepted for publication by Brain, Child magazine.

Dr. Joyce Huff‘s essay, “The Narrating Stomach: Appetite, Authority and Agency in Sydney Whiting’s 1853 Memoirs of a Stomach” has been published in Body Politics, an online journal based in Germany.