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1. Announcements

Here’s hoping everyone had a fabulous holiday, New Year, and break–restful, productive, and with at least a little bit of fun. Here we are again, though, and doesn’t it already seem like such a long time ago? Meantime, welcome back, all!

Eloise Klein Healy, who in the eighties and early nineties taught as a full-time lecturer in our Department (some of us still remember those days) and was the founder of CSUN’s Women’s Studies Program , has been named the first Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, and will, for the next two years, serve as the official ambassador of Los Angeles literature, using the office as a platform from which to promote the city’s writers and the potentially transformative qualities of poetry and the written word. She is also the founder of the MFA program at Antioch University and the founding editor of Arktoi Books, Red Hen Press’s imprint of books by lesbian writers, as well as the founding director of CSUN’s own Women’s Studies Program. The author of seven collections of poetry, Eloise will publish her newest book, A Wild Surmise, in both print and audio in March.

It’s time to start thinking about what you would most like to do with 3 units of reassigned time next year as the annual CSUN Competition for Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity Awards is coming up. Open to all full-time and part-time faculty and designed to provide the opportunity to receive a mini-grant of up to $5,000 or 3 units of reassigned time to pursue scholarly and creative interests, the deadline for this year’s competition is of applications is 5 p.m. on Monday, March 4, 2013.  Proposal guidelines and application materials are available at http://www.csun.edu/grip/research/forms/. For more information, faculty may also contact the Office of Research and Sponsored Projects at x2901.

And while you are at it, try going for the Grand Prize and applying for a Research Fellows Award.  Founded in 2007 by Provost Harry Hellenbrand, the CSUN Research Fellows Program is funded collaboratively by the Office of the Provost, the Colleges and the Library and provides 12 units of reassigned time and a small research support budget to each of the nine Fellows selected per year (one per College and one in the Library). Proposals will be reviewed by a committee comprised of four elected members of the college faculty and the Associate Dean or a designee appointed by the Dean. Applications must be reviewed by Chairs and submitted to the Office of the Dean by January 21, 2013. Please attach a CV to the application, which is available from Elizabeth Adams’ office in Undergraduate Studies. The committee will make a recommendation to the Dean who will then announce the final decision and award the research fellowship on February 28, 2013.

And for those graduate students among us, the Office of Research and Graduate Studies is pleased to announce Graduate Fellowships of $5,000 for Spring 2013. Twenty fellowships will be awarded to graduate students who want to undertake a research project or a creative activity supervised by a CSUN faculty. While the project may be part of the student’s thesis, it is not a requirement. Students do not need to completely finish the project in the spring semester. However, it is expected that a significant part of the project will be accomplished during the award. Although these are merit-based fellowships, students must have a FAFSA on file. Additional information and application can be found at http://www.csun.edu/grip/graduatestudies/sfo/index.html. Any questions, contact the Office of Graduate Studies at (818) 677-2138.

As previously announced in the last TN, Kathy Leslie, our inestimable yogi and friend, has once again offered to guide us in a community yoga practice on Wednesday, from 12:30 to 1:30, in the LNJ Reading Room (JR 319). As someone who used to roll her eyes at yoga until it saved my life and cured my feet, at least in part because of this very same community practice, I can’t say enough about what a valuable gift Kathy has given to so many of us. (And no, you don’t have to be flexible, coordinated, or strong; you do, however, need to be able to breathe. As another of my yoga teachers is fond of saying, “You can live a long, happy life without doing yoga, but you can’t live a long, happy life without breathing.”) The group is small at present, so please come on down and join us. You will be glad you did, guaranteed.

All College of Humanities Faculty and Staff are invited to the All College Meeting with President Diane Harrison This meeting will provide an opportunity to meet our new President who will share important information regarding the university. When: Monday, February 11, 2013. Where: Whitsett Room, Sierra Hall 451. Time : 4-5 pm. Light refreshments will be served.

Disability Resources and Educational Services (DRES) of California State University, Northridge will be hosting its annual Open House on Tuesday, February 12, 2013 from 11 am – 1:30pm in BH 110. Please stop by and find out more about the excellent services they provide in their ongoing efforts to change the world for people with disabilities.

Good news: for those of you (or your students), who are worried about electronic publication of theses, a 2011 Chronicle of Higher Education survey found that more than 82 percent of the journal editors would consider manuscripts revised from openly accessible ETD’s.

2. Reminders

If you haven’t done so already, please make sure to get your office hours to Frank. He has also requested, as usual, your course syllabi (electronic preferred)– that is, of course, provided you have finished yours. Let this be another, very gentle reminder then–classes are starting next week. It’s time.

Per Provost Hellenbrand’s recent reminders, University policy requires us to be both flexible and sensitive with regard to course exams (and, presumably, other time-restricted course requirements) and religious holidays and student observances. If there’s a conflict, we’re to accommodate the student. Better yet, try not to schedule such requirements when a conflict is likely to occur.

3. Opportunities

And here’s from our former student, Rebbecca Brown, now a full-time lecturer at Hunter College in New York and spending this spring semester on a Fulbright Fellowship in India this spring:  The International Conference on Dalit and Indigenous Studies March 2013 will be held from March 21 to March 23, 23,2013 at Kannur University in Managattuparambu, Kannur, Kerala, India. The Department of Studies in English, started in 1974 as a Centre of Calicut University, is organizing an International Conference on the theme “Dalitality as a Global Paradigm : Theorising Indigenous Studies” with the objective of globalizing Dalit and Indigenous Studies in the backdrop of the global condition that once again places the Dalit and Indigenous people at the receiving end. The conference aims to identify the challenges and foreground the issues theoretically and socially at a wider platform exploring means to address them.

While we’re at it, Rebbecca didn’t ask, but I know they are looking for books where she is. Now that the last book drive is over, does anyone want to organize sending books to India?

Garrett Doherty, former Managing Editor and Editor of Crazyhorse, has started a new online writer’s juried journal, Sixfold, that sounds like an interesting project. Sixfold is a completely writer-voted short-story and poetry journal. The writers who enter vote to decide who wins the $1000, $200, $100 prizes and decide the content of each issue in three rounds of voting, with each writer participating having an equal vote. It’s an online workshop environment, too: by the end of the three rounds of voting, you read, evaluate, vote, and write comments on 18 other writers’ manuscripts, as well as receive up to 6, 24, or 78 votes and comments on your own manuscript from other writers, depending on how far it progresses through the three voting rounds. Full details at www.sixfold.org. Please help spread the word. Pass it on to anyone — writer, student, colleague, etc. — who might be interested. Also at Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/SixfoldJournal, and Twitter, https://twitter.com/SixfoldJournal.

4. Achievements

Robert Chianese has become invited columnist for the American Scientist magazine, writing on relationships among the humanities, arts, and sciences, an invitation that followed his presidential address, “Art Inspired by Science,” to the American Association for the Advancement of Science-Pacific Division in June; which published his book on this topic this year. What multiple honors for a non-scientist!  Chianese’s initial four or five essays have already been accepted for publication in upcoming bi-monthly issues of the American Scientist journal and constitute a series of evaluations of just how ecologically “green” some iconic works of Earth Art actually are. The title for the series is HOW GREEN IS EARTH ART? His first essay, on Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” appears in the current January/February 2013 issue, available at news stands and on line at http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2013/1/spiral-jetty.

Graduate alum, Tiffany Palioungas has been accepted into the Teach for America Corps in Los Angeles.

Graduate student Trista Payte has had one poem and one story published by Uno Kudo, Volume 2: Naked, a literary art journal published by a collective of artists and writers from across the globe. In this volume, the journal explores the theme of “being naked” through a unique blend of short stories, poems and artwork that reflect highly talented artists’ interpretations of the word  to create a “must have look into the future of art and literature.”

Elyce Wakerman‘s essay, “My Visit to Poland,” was published in the 2012 edition of the Mezricher Tribune, a Hebrew and English journal that is printed annually in Israel.

Closer to home, the following students won our Department Awards last term.

Northridge Review Fiction Award: Karlee Johnson, for her story, “Truth Ingest”

The Rachel Sherwood Award: Tiffany Eddy, for her poem, “Two Knives”
Honorable mention: Gina Srmabekian, for her poem, “Invocation to an Engineer”

The Eva Latiff Award: Jason Gallaher, for his paper, “Negating Racial Stereotypes for Young Readers through Linda Sue Park’s A Single Shard and Joseph Bruchac’s Skeleton Man

The Oliver Evans Award: Gina Srmabekian, for her essay, “Where Everything’s Made Up and the Titles Don’t Matter”

The Linda Nichols Joseph English Merit Awards: Angela Blair and Joanna Bradbury

Congratulations all!