English Alum to Start Doctoral Study
June 8, 2009
Leslie Aronson, who graduated in 2003, went on to earn a Master's at Colorado and has been accepted for doctoral study at both Glasgow and Edinburgh. She plans to start at Edinburgh this fall.

William Stafford Research Fellow
May 28, 2009
Here's some good news from our former colleague John Fiedler. John has been invited to be a "William Stafford Research Fellow" at Lewis & Clark this summer. He will be working under Kim Stafford.

Alum to Teach at Cornell
May 13, 2009
Elizabeth Anker (1996) has landed a position (specialty in post-colonial literature) at Cornell University! Congraulations!

Princton Divinity Degree
May 11, 2009
English major alumnus Matthew Nickel will graduate with a Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary this month. He has been called to First Presbyterian Church of Ann Arbor and is engaged to be married.

Teaching Positions Awarded
May 11, 2009
Our grads Rebecca Miller and Glenn Lester have signed contracts for faculty positions. Rebecca will be at Defiance College and Glenn will be at UNC Greensboro.

Former Student to Begin Residency
May 6, 2009
Our former student Stephanie Judd is moving on to a residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan after earning her medical degree at Wayne State.Congratulations to Dr. Judd!

Two Students Honored by 2009 Conference on Christianity and Liaterature
May 6, 2009
Our friend Susanna Childress, Director of the 2009 Conference on Christianity and Literature Creative Writing Contest, notified me that two of our students have won awards in this national conference:

Grace Olson won first prize in the nonfiction category for her essay "Forsythia: An Incantation."

Karis Granberg-Michelson won awards in two categories: second place in nonfiction for "Institution Daisies" and first prize in poetry for a group of three poems: "Spark," "Casualities," and "Balsam."

Thesis Recognition
May 4, 2009
Hope grad Amanda Dykstra received the award for most outstanding thesis during the awards ceremony at Emerson!

Grad Accepted for Teach for America
April 22, 2009
Kristi Orange was accepted into the Teach For America corps this year! As of June 9, 2009, she will be relocating to New Orleans, LA to teach secondary english and special education.

Graduate School Acceptance
April 20, 2009
Emily Wilson, a Hope English grad, has been accepted to do graduate work at Loyola University in Chicago and will be starting in the fall.

New Book Contract
April 20, 2009
Heather Sellers has signed a contract with Writer's Digest for The Nighttime Novelist, due out in 2010. Writer's Digest invited Heather to submit a proposal for the book--a fine tribute to the success of her previous books with that press.

Professor's Review Published
April 20, 2009
Ernest Cole's review of the book Understanding Cry, the Beloved Country has been published in The Journal of the African Literature Association. Ernest has just returned from Burlington, Vermont, where he presented two papers at the 35th Annual Conference of the African Literature Association.

Student Receives Assistantship
April 13, 2009
Lauren Stacks, currently enrolled in the Roosevelt University MFA program, received a new Graduate Assistant position. This position comes with high compliemtns from the head of the program on Lauren's work thus far.

New Publication!
April 13, 2009
Cheers to Kim Douglas, on the publication of her memoir, High Desert: A Journey of Survival and Hope. The book has been called "a courageous, gripping, and deeply personal autobiographical account about growing up in an abusive home and finding a path to recovery by learning how to rely on faith and spiritual beliefs to heal and grow...."

Faculty Featured on CBS Morning
April 13, 2009
Congratulations to Bill Pannapacker, on his appearance yesterday on CBS Sunday Morning. You can watch the segment by clicking here.

Former Student Earns Doctorate
April 13, 2009
Rachael (Pridgeon) Peckham successfully defended her thesis on Friday and is now Dr. Rachael Peckham.

Hope Grad Named Editor
April 13, 2009
Laura Donnelly has been named editor of Third Coast, one of the finer literary magazines.

Review of New Collection
April 6, 2009
Here's a wonderfully celebratory and insightful review of our Chris Dombrowski's new collection. Review of By Cold Water

Saturday's Verse Daily
April 6, 2009
Jack Ridl has a poem on Saturday's Verse Daily.

Presentations at 12th Annual C.S. Lewis Conference
April 3, 2009
Peter Schakel, presented the opening keynote address ("Dinosaurs, Dragons, and Destiny: The Inklings and Old Western Culture"), the banquet address ("A Dinosaur in Narnia"), and participated on the closing panel discussion at the 12th annual conference of The C.S. Lewis and the Inklings Society. The meeting was held last weekend at Calvin College.

Curtis Gruenler also presented at the same conference. His paper was titled "C.S. Lewis and Rene Girard on Myth: The Case of Til We Have Faces." Curtis was a member of the organizing committee of the conference.

Charles Huttar, also a member of the organizing committee, presented "What Lewis Really Did to 'Cupid and Psyche'" and participated on the closing panel discussion.

The C.S. Lewis conference was supported in part by grants from our department, our dean, and our provost.

Acceptance to Writing Programs
March 30, 2009
Corrie Smith has been accepted to the writing programs at Murray State and at Minnesota Mankato.

More Acceptance News
March 30, 2009
Rob Kenagy has been accepted at The New School and is at the top of the wait list at Virginia Tech. He has also been accepted to the MFA program at Virginia Tech.

Faculty Receives NEH Summer Fellowship
March 26, 2009
Congratulations to Julie Kipp, who has been awarded a five-week NEH Summer Fellowship to participate in the seminar at Notre Dame on Anglo-Irish Identities. Julie has also been named the Acting Director of the Women's Studies Program next year while Annie Dandavati is in Japan.

Students Participate in Undergraduate Research Celebration
March 26, 2009
Nate Johnson, Andrew Gehl, and Laura Shears, English majors will present their work on Friday afternoon from 2:30-4:30 pm during the Celebration of Undergraduate Research in the Devos Fieldhouse. Please attend if you can to support these outstanding students.

Faculty/Student Reading
March 26, 2009
Heather Sellers and Krista Mehari, who, in a form of faculty-student collaborative work that is distinctive to our creative writing program, will present a joint reading of their recent writing projects at Literary Life Bookstore in Grand Rapids on April 9.

Alum to Defend Dissertation
March 23, 2009
Rachael Pridgeon Peckham will be defending her dissertation on April 10. She also deserves congratulations on her new tenure-track position in creative writing at Marshall U.

More Grad School Admissions
March 23, 2009
Corrie Smith has been accepted to the MFA program at Western Michigan.
and
Grad Sally Smits has been teaching at University of Indiana/South Bend and was recently accepted to graduate school at UNC Greensboro.

Alum’s Poem Finalist
March 23, 2009
Our grad Allyson Boggess's poem "Citrus" is a finalist for the anthology: Best of the Net along with such poets as Bob Hicok, Lucia Perillo, Marvin Bell, John Yau, and Alberto Rios.

Hope Student Accepted to MFA Program
March 11, 2009
Rob Kenagy has been accepted to The Art Institute of Chicago's MFA program and to the program at Northern Michigan where he was awarded a full fellowship. Also added to the list of acceptances are Butler and Columbia College.

Faculty Awarded Andrew W. Mellon Fellow
March 10, 2009
Jennifer Young, who has been appointed an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Huntington Memorial Library in San Marino, CA. Her one-month residency can occur any time between June 2009 and June 2010. These are VERY competitive fellowships, and it is a huge credit to Jennifer's many accomplishments in Phillis Wheatley studies that she has received this award. Those of you who have been to the Huntington know the pleasures that await her--the gardens, the art collection, the amazing library. What a great fellowship to land!

You can visit the Huntington here:
http://www.huntington.org/default.aspx
Click on the library tab.

Hope Grad Defends MFA Thesis
March 9, 2009
This past Friday Meggie Elliot successfully defended her MFA thesis, titled "Half a House: Poems of Nova Scotia."

Student Accepted to Simmons College
March 3, 2009
Nicole Brugger was accepted to the Simmons College of Arts and Sciences for their dual degree MA-Children's Literature/MFA-Writing for Children program and to the program at Hollins.

Faculty Awarded Summer Research Fellowship
March 2, 2009
Jennifer Young received word today that she has been awarded a Summer Research Fellowship from the Indiana University African Studies Institute. She will do research on narratives about Liberia in William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator.

Interview Available as Podcast
March 2, 2009
Natalie Dykstra's interview at Emerson College is now a podcast, available here: http://acoustictypewriter.com/

English Student Accepted to New England School
March 2, 2009
Nicole Brugger has been accepted to Vermont College of Fine Arts.

MFA Acceptance
March 2, 2009
Rob Kenagy has been accepted to the MFA program in poetry at The University of New Mexico. They made special mention of how much they admired his work.

Graduate School News
February 23, 2009

• Elena Valle has been accepted into the fiction program at Washington University.
• Kristina Martinez just received word that she has been accepted into The University of Wisconsin Madison School of Library and Information Studies.

Congratulations to Hope Student Poets
February 11, 2009
Last week we learned that Gray Emerson earned a place in the anthology 25 Under 25, edited by Naomi Shihab Nye. Now we've learned that a total of NINE Hope poets will be in the book. Joining Gray will be Allison Rivers, Anna West, Lauren Eriks, Brianne Carpenter, Emily Wegemer Hendren, Lauren Stacks, Jonah Ogles, and Matt Baker. This is a huge tribute to our creative writing program, to the achievements of our students, and to the quality of Hope poet-teacher-mentors.

Grad School Admissions
February 11, 2009
Matt Baker has been admitted to MFA programs at Alabama, Florida State, and Vanderbilt. These are all top-tier programs--great news for Matt, and a ratification of the remarkable talent many of us have seen in his writing.

Alumni publication
February 11, 2009
Matthew Fike, a graduate of Hope currently teaching at Winthrop University, has published A Jungian Study of Shakespeare: The Visionary Mode. (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009). Among the mentors Matthew thanks in his Acknowledgments are John Cox and Charles Huttar. Matthew's earlier book was Spenser's Underworld in the 1590 Faerie Queene; his PhD is from University of Michigan.

Memoir Published in Studies in Medievalism
January 29, 2009
Congrautlations to Kathleen Verduin, on the publication of her memoir "The Founding and the Founder: Medievalism and the Legacy of Leslie J. Workman," appearing in Studies in Medievalism XVII. The essay is appended, for those who remember Kathleen's husband Leslie, and especially for those who never had the privilege to know him.

Article in Teaching Classroom
January 29, 2009
Congratulations to David Klooster, Patricia Bloem, and co-author Alison Preece (University of Victoria), on the publication of "Many Voices in the Classroom: The Role of Classroom Talk in Education for Democracy" in Thinking Classroom (simultaneously published in Russian as Peremena), vol. 9, no. 4 (October 2008). The article is a revision and expansion of a conference talk Jesse Montano and Richard Mezeske heard Pat give on our behalf in Tallin, Estonia, several years back, and includes observations from our work in the Czech Republic, Armenia, Macedonia, and Guatemala.

Hope English Major Chosen As Finalist
January 15, 2009
Congratulations to Krista Mehari, chosen as one of 20 semifinalists for the 2008 Atlas Shrugged Essay Contest. Given by the Ayn Rand Institute, Mehari was chosen from over 1,900 entries.

English Alum Headed to Prague
December 15, 2008
Allyson Boggess, who is in the MFA program at Arizona State, was recently awarded a 2009 Piper Global Fellowship. Congratulations to Allyson!

Alum to be Included in Publication
December 1, 2008
Amy E. Hall's poem will be published in a collection due out September 2009. The book, a collection of newspaper blackout poems from Austin Kleon, is being published by Harper Collins.

Poems Included in Anthology
November 26, 2008
Heather Sellers's work has been included in When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women, edited by Andrea Hollander Budy. Heather is in great company in the book, along side Rita Dove, Jane Kenyon, Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, many VWS readers, and poets with departmental connections like Marianne Boruch (teacher of David Cho), Patricia Jabbeh Wesley (friend of Kim Douglas), Naomi Shihab Nye (friend of Jack Ridl--but then most of the 96 poets in the book are friends of Jack). This publication nearly completes Heather's Manifest Destiny in taking over all of North America--she's in the Florida writers anthology, Best of the South, Canadian Poetry Anthology (go figure), and now she stands in the main stream of American women poets. All she needs for a clean sweep is something from Mexico--and she's working on collaborative translations of an important Mexican poet, so that can't be far behind.

Faculty Featured in The Irish Review
November 26, 2008
Julie Kipp has a fascinating article in The Irish Review for Spring 2008. "The Antiwar Movement in Northern Ireland and the Case of the 'Raytheon Nine,'" included in the "Disagreements" section of the journal, is a compelling example of Julie's commitment to scholarship that engages issues of social justice and seeks direct involvement and influence in matters of injustice and oppression.

Poem Accepted by Passages North
November 14, 2008
Good news from our grad Lauren Jensen: Lauren’s poem, “Nevertheless the Alewives” has been accepted by Passages North, one fine journal. This is Lauren’s first publication. She is in the MFA program at Virginia Tech working primarily with Bob Hicok.

Former Hope Student to Present Poetry
October 28, 2008
Alison Laurel has been accepted as a poet at the SWTX Popular and American Culture Association Conference in Albuquerque, NM in February. It will be her first public presentation of her work.

Hope Alum Hired at Northwest Community College
October 21, 2008
Good news from one of our alums: Rebecca Miller has been hired to teach in the English department at Northwest Community College in Archbold, Ohio. Rebecca received her MFA from Chatham.

Play Accepted for Publication
October 21, 2008
Hope alum Donald Steele has had his play "Dearly Beloved" accepted for publication in an anthology of ten minute plays.

Article Accepted to Teaching Professor
September 24, 2008
Barb Mezeske's article "When to Begin the End: The Role and Use of Summary in Course Design" has been accepted for the November Teaching Professor. In August she published "Low-Cost, High-Impact Faculty Development: Writing Camp" in Academic Leader.

Poetry Published in Premiere Journal
September 24, 2008
Kudos to Rhoda Janzen, who received word that one and perhaps two new poems will be published in Poetry. This will be her second appearance in this premiere journal.

Faculty Speech Published Alongside Obama, Clinton, Cheney
September 24, 2008
Congratulations to John Cox, whose convocation address "Where Do We Go From Here?" has been published in the October issue of Vital Speeches of the Day. John shares the front cover with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, Henry Paulson, and others.

Dante in American Culture
September 22, 2008
Kathleen Verduin's article "Dante's Inferno, Jonathan Edwards, and New England Calvinism" has appeared in the latest issue of Dante Studies. The article extends Kathleen's work on the reception of Dante in American culture and will become part of the book she is working on in this field. The article, she notes modestly, is "brilliant, of course."

Faculty Article Published in Thinking Classroom
September 22, 2008
David Klooster and Patricia Bloem, have an article "Reading the Hard Stuff" published in Thinking Classroom: An International Journal of Reading, Writing, and Critical Reflection (published simultaneously in Russian as Peremana). The article is a spin-off from the May faculty workshop at Hope on Reading Difficult Texts.

Whitman Annual Review Published
September 18, 2008
Congratulations to English Department faculty member Bill Pannapacker, on the publication of his annual review of Whitman scholarship in American Literary Scholarship (2006), Duke University Press. The review essay surveys "the surge in Whitman-related publications in the year after the 150th anniversary of the first edition of Leaves of Grass." Bill continues to publish monthly columns in the Chronicle of Higher Education and quarterly pieces in The Chronicle Review.

Second Edition of Poetry Anthology Released
September 18, 2008
Congratulations to English Department faculty member Peter Schakel and emeritus Jack Ridl, on the publication of 250 Poems: A Portable Anthology, second edition. Bedford/St. Martin's. The second edition includes a new introduction, "How to Read a Poem--and Why," and aims to make the book more usable in two settings--intro to literature and creative writing classes.

Katie Bode-Lang to be Published wtih Seven Kitchens Press
September 10, 2008
Katie Bode-Lang ('02) recently received second place in the Keystone Chapbook Contest. Her chapbook will be published Spring of 2009 with Seven Kitchens Press.

Hope English Grad Headed to Law School
September 5, 2008
Nick Vidoni ('05), English major and Newberry Library Program alumnus, has been admitted to the University of Iowa College of Law.

English Faculty Member to be Published in Controlled Burn
September 3, 2008
Congratulations to English Department faculty member Carla Vissers, whose short story "Moose Season" has been accepted for publication in Controlled Burn.

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