Chair: Kent Baxter
Notes compiled by: Kate Haake
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Announcements
Tomorrow night, Friday the 13th, the Graduate Reading Series will be hosting its second reading of the year, at 7:00 p.m. in JR 319! Bring yourself and your friends for a spooooky reading featuring, Marisela Gomez (Fantasy Fiction), Antione Bowman (Poetry/Prose), and Rebecca Starkman (Poetry/Fiction)
There will be snacks, drinks, rad readers, and of course, some horseshoes to fight off bad luck.
New Voices and Wings will be holding their annual Awards Celebration on Friday, October 20, from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. in the USU Grand Salon. Family, friends, and faculty are welcome, as awards are awarded and free books distributed to student authors whose work is appearing in print. This is an important event for the students, and it means a great deal to them to be able to share it not just with their family and friends, but also with us, their professors, who taught them.
And while we’re on the subject of student writing, mark your calendars now for another such event, the imminent return of the Northridge Review, soon to be back in print in an all-new issue featuring work from the past three semesters. The launch reading/celebration will be held Wednesday evening, November 8, from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. in CSUN’s Donald E. Bianchi Planetarium. Refreshments and fabulous writing will be served.
Correction: The upcoming launch reading of Kate Haake’s new chapbook, Assumptions We Might Make About the Postworld, will take place at 5:00 o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday, October 15, at Skylight Bookstore, and not, as previously announced, on Saturday, October 15, a date which does not yet exist.
Reminders
If you haven’t filled out your exit interview availability Doodle poll, please take a minute to do so now at https://doodle.com/poll/t548e8aan64umwr2. The future English teachers of LA need you!
Opportunities
This one is for your students: NBCUniversal will be on campus next week for an information session on their paid Spring 2018 Internships. The event will take place on Thursday, October 19, from 5:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. in the USU Northridge Center. Interested students should R.S.V.P. for this event in their SUNlink account.
Achievements
Dorothy Barresi’s new book, What We Did While We Made More Guns, has been accepted for publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press. This is her fifth full-length collection of poetry and the fourth to appear in the prestigious Pitt Poetry Series. It is slated for publication in Spring 2018. Her long poem, “Skin” appears in the current issue of the American Journal of Poetry; her poem “Fixx/Plot” appears in the current issue of Spillway; “Poem for My Father,” appears in the current issue of Lake Effect. She is currently at work on a new Essay-Review for The Gettysburg Review.
Alumni Christian Cardenas and Dylan Altman, now a part-time lecturer with us, have launched a new venture, Select Start Press, a collective centered on the impact of digital narratives on the world. Intent on bringing scholarly conversations about Video Games to Gamers and Non-Gamers alike, their first book is titled What Your Teachers Are Playing, and you can find out here: http://www.selectstartpress.com/store/p1/Select_Start_Press%3A_What_Your_Teachers_Are_Playing.html.
Kate Haake’s essay, “Writing as a Spiritual Practice,” has been published in Changing Creative Writing in America, edited by Graeme Harper and just out from Multi-Lingual Matters.
Martin Pousson‘s novel-in-stories, Black Sheep Boy, won the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction. He’ll receive the award at the PEN Festival on October 27. Black Sheep Boy also was listed in the Book Riot Must-Read Indie Press Books for 2017. Stories from the novel were selected for the Best Gay Fiction annual series and are out now in Best Gay Stories 2017 and Wilde Stories: Best Gay Speculative Fiction 2017. Martin recently read at Stories Books in Echo Park, along with Jarrett Middleton, and he’ll read with Ben Loory on Sunday, October 15 at 7:30 PM for The Blue Hour at the Victory Theater in Burbank. In October, Black Sheep Boy will be issued in a PEN limited edition, and then in February 2018, it will be issued in a paperback edition.
Jack Solomon has published (with Sonia Maasik) the ninth edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A.: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers (Bedford/St. Martin’s, a division of Macmillan Higher Education). The first textbook of its kind, Signs of Life is one of the last to still be issuing new editions.