Student Presentations and Publications

• Ph.D. candidate Anne Reef gave a paper titled "Try These: Tackling Representations of Rugby in Three South African Novels" at a conference focused on the work of Alan Paton at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, July 16, 2009. The conference was organized by the Alan Paton Center and Struggle Archives to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of its founding.
  
  
• The Missouri Review Spring Issue (32:1) includes the interview with Ellen Bryant Voight that was conducted this year by MFA students Candice Baxter and Wendy Sumner-Winter.
  
  
• Glimmer Train has accepted for publication the recent interview with Elizabeth Strout, conducted by MFA students Lindsay Purves and Ashley Paige.
  
  
• Congratulations to Jervette Ward-Ellis (Ph.D. candidate) who has been awarded a President's Award from the Society for the Study of the MultiEthnic Literature of the United States. She will receive this award at the annual conference of MELUS.
  
  
• Anne Reef (Ph.D. candidate) presented a paper titled "A Message about Mavericks? The Barnard Branch of the Family Tree in Dalene Matthee's Circles in a Forest at the Eighth Biennial Conference on Modern Critical Approaches to Children's Literature in Nashville, TN, March 26-28, 2009.
  
  
• Courtney Miller Santo has been awarded Honorable Mention in the AWP Intro Journals competition for her story "What She Wanted."
  
  
• Anne Reef (Ph.D. candidate) published the article "African Words, Academic Choices: Re-Presenting Interviews and Oral Histories" in the journal History in Africa. 35. (2008).
  
  
• The Southern Literary Journal has accepted "What's Eating Anthony Burns?: Dismembering the Bodies That Matter in Tennessee Williams's Desire and The Black Masseur", written by Nathan Tipton (Ph. D. candidate)
  
  
• Jennifer Vallor, sophomore Professional Writing major, has just been named a "2008 Emerging Scholar of the Honors Society Phi Kappa Phi." Only sixty students in the nation received this honor.
  
  
• Mike Duncan (Ph.D. candidate) presented "Introducing Prose Rhythm to the Composition Classroom" at the CCCC in New Orleans, April 4, 2008. In May, he presented "Reconsidering Prose Rhythm" at the RCA in Seattle.
  
  
• Two of our M.F.A. students have recently had work published in national journal and magazines. The New York Times Magazine published an article by Patrick Walters, and The Missouri Review accepted and published work by Trevor Gore.
  
  
• Undergraduate Honors student, Jason Eley's research for the Works in Progress Symposium was chosen for  "Posters at the Capitol" in Nashville, February 6th. Dr. Barbara Ching, his thesis director, and Dr. Susan Popham, English Honors Director, accompanied him on this trip.
  
  
• Ph.D. candidate Peter Olson's article "John Bealle's Public Worship, Private Faith: A Review," appears in Journal for the Society of American Music (II.1: 2008). Olson has several articles published in the Encyclopedia of Appalachia, Univ. of Tennessee Press, and "Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section" is forthcoming in the online Enclycopedia of Alabama, Auburn Univ.
  
  
• Ph.D. candidate Michael Duncan gave a presentation titled "Faith Is Shared Food, and Other Rhetorical Agricultural Metaphors in the New Testament Gospels" at the PCA/ACA Conference in Boston, April 7, 2007.  His article, "Whatever Became of the Paragraph?", was published in College English (69:5).
  
  
• Ph.D. candidate Anne Reef's essay, "When You Can't See the Forest Because There Are No Trees: Ecocriticism, Postcolonialism, and Environmental Advocacy in Dalene Matthee's Circles in a Forest and Ben Okri's The Famished Road,"  won the Children's Literature Association's 2007 Graduate Student Essay Award. Ms. Reef will present a portion of her paper during the Association's Conference in Newport News, June 14-16, 2007. Professor Lori Cohoon sponsored the submission.