Laurel Coffey receives Pat Smith Teaching Award

The Taos Summer Writers' Conference is pleased to provide the $300 award to MFA student Laurel Coffey, who is this year's recipient of the Patricia Clark Smith Teaching Award.

Monica Kowal presenting at National Outreach Scholarship Conference

Monica Kowal will present at the 2012 National Outreach Scholarship Conference to be held at the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa Sept. 29-Oct. 3. She’ll be presenting her dissertation research on institutionalizing and sustaining service-learning programs at the secondary level. Also, she has been accepted to the Emerging Engagement Scholars Workshop, which occurs in conjunction with the conference, during which she will be working to develop a research agenda and service-learning curriculum focused on freshmen composition and first-generation college students.

Monica looks forward to sharing her experience with anyone interested in service-learning, community-based research, or community engagement.

Oil Culture edited by Daniel Worden just published

The Journal of American Studies has just published a special issue on Oil Culture, edited by new English Department faculty member Daniel Worden and Ross Barrett (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). The special issue advances the first comprehensive account of “oil culture,” the broad field of cultural representations and symbolic forms that have taken shape around the fugacious material of oil in the 150 years since the inception of the U.S. petroleum industry.

Exploring the cultural life of oil from a variety of methodological perspectives, the essays in this special issue seek to elucidate the complex role that imaginative representations have played in establishing and contesting oil’s status as the primary commodity underpinning modern economic expansion and a fundamental ontological construct shaping social and political life in the United States and beyond. By addressing the rise of oil as a cultural problem, this issue aims to fill a significant gap in oil scholarship and to intervene in what has become an epochal and highly charged moment in the history of petro-capitalism.

Alan M. Ehrlich at Bookworks Friday, June 15, at 7:00 P.M.

Alan M. Ehrlich, a UNM alumnus with an M. A. from our department, will be at Bookworks discussing and signing his novel, Plunket in Wonderland--A Hollywood Tale, on Friday, June 15, at 7:00 P.M.
Book blurb: “It's a little-guy-against-the-system comic story told through the perspective of a studio story analyst [which Mr. Ehrlich has been for many years]--i.e. an insider's tale that would be of interest to you and your English students in particular and readers of quality prose fiction of all ages.”
The novel has gone on Amazon and Mr. Ehrlich has done signings at independent bookstores and the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
More details about it and the author are on his website (www.AlanMEhrlich.com) where there are also abundant excerpts.

Starr Jenkins publishes More Than My Share

Starr Jenkins, who graduated from UNM's English with a BA in 1948 and then went on to receive a Ph.D. in American Studies at UNM in 1973, just published his book More Than My Share, an adventure memoir in which many of the episodes take place in New Mexico. He sent the department a gift copy in honor of Julia Keleher, who taught Creative Writing in our department from 1946-48. Many congratulations and thanks to Mr. Starr Jenkins.