The beginning of the semester has been filled with many accomplishments. Read more to learn about the department’s achievements!

Rani Deighe Crowe‘s short film, Texting: A Love Story, played at the Broad Humor Film Festival at the beginning of the month. The film also:Texting: A Love Story

  • Played at the Milwaukee Women’s Film Festival in August, winning the Audience Award for short film
  • Has been accepted to 74 festivals around the world, including screenings in Israel, South Africa, Japan, Greece, Italy, Austria, Germany, and the UK

In October, the film will screen at the Indie Hype Film Festival in Sydney, Australia and the Portland Comedy Film Festival in Portland, Oregon.

In other news…

Dr. Darolyn “Lyn” Jones accepted an invitation to serve as a three year term board member for the Indiana Teachers of Writing (ITW). She also:

  • Presented at the conference “#blacklivesmatter: And So Do Authentic Writing Prompts” at the Indiana Teachers of Writing Annual Conference with Michael Baumann, a Ph. D. in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville.
  • Spoke with Dr. Sheron Fraser-Burgess at the Indiana Association of Black School Educators (IABSE) Annual Fall Meeting on the topic of “How and why we should create more clubs like the Alliance of Black and Latino Teachers (ABLT) club.”
  • Released her new book “Memory Workshop” with co-author Barbara Shoup

Dr. Adam Beach‘s essay, “Aubin’s The Noble Slaves, Montagu’s Spanish Lady, and English Feminist Writing about Sexual Slavery in the Ottoman World” was accepted for publication in Eighteenth-Century Fiction.

Molly Ferguson‘s article, “Killing them softly: Pillowman assassins in the works of Martin McDonagh and Salman Rushdie” was published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing online (print version forthcoming). Also, her chapter proposal on migrant identity in Hugo Hamilton’s Hand in the Fire was accepted for an edited collection titled Irish Urban Fictions.

Prof. Michael Begnal has two poems at Public Pool — “Walton Ford, Falling Bough”  (an ekphrastic poem in response to a Walton Ford painting) and “Sonnet for Bernadette Mayer.” In addition, he:

  • Was interviewed in the new edition of The California Journal of Poetics
  • Had his poem “The Ewes at Imbolc” published in the anthology The Poet’s Quest for God 

Andrea Powell Wolfe‘s article, “The Subordination of Embodied Power: Sentimental Representations of the Black Maternal Body in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is set to appear in the September issue of the quint: an interdisciplinary quarterly from the north. 

Poems from Professor Mark Neely‘s new book project have recently appeared in the New England Review, South Carolina Review, and Diagram, and are forthcoming in FIELD, Passages North, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and Birmingham Poetry Review. This spring, he will present at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual conference on a panel about “Writing in the Internet Age.” Among the other panelists is former Ball State creative writing major Ashley Ford.

Distinguished Professor Frank Felsenstein and James J. Connolly (Center for Middletown Studies) presented a paper entitled “Approaches to Reading Experiences: What Middletown Read and the Reading Experience Database” at the Reading Communities: Connecting the Past and the Present Conference, hosted by the Institute of English Studies, Senate House, University of London, and sponsored by the U.K. Arts & Humanities Research Council and the Open University. They have been invited to publish their paper in a forthcoming volume.

Professor Angela Jackson-Brown‘s play, “It is Well,” debuted at the Muncie Civic Theatre on October 1 and ran through October 2. Recently, she has started her own production company entitled, Jackson Brown Entertainment. Professor Jackson-Brown says that the goal of her company is “working hard to bring diverse plays to communities that might not always get the opportunity to see theatrical productions that have a cast of characters who resemble them in some way.” She plans to donate a portion of the ticket sales to the Muncie YMCA and the Guiding Light, Inc.

Over the summer, English major Bryan Ball worked at a writing seminar in Colorado, “John Long Writing Symposium.” There, they gave him the opportunity to be published in their magazine Rock and Ice, which is his first publication.

Emily Mack, English education major and creative writing minor in Ball State’s English department, won the 2016 Excellence in Summer Service Education Award (ESSEA) sponsored by The Marion County Commission on Youth (MCCOY).

Ciera Hurt, Barbara Mebane, and Zoe Harvey, members of the Alliance of Black and Latino Teacher club, were each presented with $500 scholarships from the Indiana Association of Black School Educators (IABSE) at their annual meeting Friday, September 23.