Chair: Kent Baxter
Notes compiled by: Kate Haake
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Announcements
Congratulations on having made it through another year. Now, it’s time to get ready for celebrating! The English Department Awards reception will be held on English Department Awards Reception will be held in the Orange Grove Bistro on May 17th, from 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., with an hour of mingling afterwards. In the afternoon, the graduate student hooding ceremony will be held in the Little Theater, from from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., with a reception to follow. Graduation itself follows bright and early the following Monday, May 20, at 8:00 a.m. on the library lawn.
But first, finals start Saturday, May 11, and conclude on Friday, May 17. This means final grades will be due a week later, by Friday, May 24. In the interests of a seamless transition for all, please aim to get them in as soon as possible. As an added incentive–once you do, you’re done, and summer’s begun!
The staff of The Northridge Review is excited to announce its first ever, year-end, final’s week special
submission window, open from Saturday, May 11, 2019, through Friday, May 17. Please help spread the word and encourage your students to send us their best poems, prose, plays, and comics, or whatever else they might have written this term. Submissions are free and anonymous and can be uploaded at https://thenorthridgereview.submittable.com/submit.
On Friday, May 10th, at 7:00 p.m., at the VPAC’s Experimental Theatre, the Northridge Playwrights Workshop will present staged readings of new plays, scenes, and monologues by CSUN student dramatists. Admission is free, and you can contact Rick Mitchell at rick.mitchell@csun.edu for further information.
And speaking of CSUN playwrights, graduate students Abe Zapata and Karen Cassady will both have productions in LA Fringe this year! In Zapata’s play, “Borracho: Spanish for Drunken Bum,” Miguel invites a select group of friends, including an old high school crush, over for his friend Gerardo’s 35th birthday. His plans for the night are quickly derailed as the alcohol flows, surprise visitors show up, and secrets are revealed.” For more information, check it out here: Borracho: Spanish for Drunken Bum. And Cassady’s plan, “Octopi Wall Street,” takes a “…a more shellfish look at climate change. The play comes at the issue through a series of vignettes told from the perspective of human and non-human entities.” For more information, check this one out here https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/5996.
And just a final note that there will be a lot of moving around over the summer and when you come back, John Garcia and Nicole Morris will both have left us for exciting career changes in the years ahead. Thanks to them both for being such valued colleagues in the time they have spent with us, and here’s wishing them each all the very best at whatever in the world may be coming next. Closer to home, Beth Wightman will have moved into Kent Baxter’s office to begin her service as our new Chair, and we owe them both a huge debt of gratitude for their selfless generosity, commitment, and vision in steering us onward. And Anthony Dawahare will be stepping up to serve as year as Associate Chair, which means these will be my last Thursday’s Notes. Thank you for reading and for keeping me posted on all the important achievements and goings on in the Department! It’s been a real privilege hearing from you all.
Reminders
Please remember that Ramadan, which is an important time of prayer falls during our final examination period, and that we all need to be sensitive to and respectful of the needs of those students who are observing. For additional information on the CSUN Policy on Examinations and Religious Holiday Observations, please click here https://www.csun.edu/sites/default/files/policy-relig-obser%20Fa%2018.pdf. For more information about Ramadan, please click here https://ing.org/ramadan-information-sheet/.
Achievements
Jutta Schamp has published an article ,“Whose Shadow Is It? The Representation of Postcolonial Trauma and Creativity in Anton Nimblett’s ‘Ring Games’ and ‘Section of an Orange,’” in the International Journal of Jungian Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/19409052.2018.1507808.
Audrey Thacker presented her paper, “Mazel Tov–We’ve Made It? In Literature and in Life, ‘Big J’s,’ ‘Little j’s’ and the Farblunget Parameters of Jewish Performance,” at the annual conference of the Western Jewish Studies Association (WJSA), in Palm Desert.
Steve Wexler’s chapter-essay, “Ludwig Wittgenstein: Toward a Dialectical Pragmatism,” has been published in Reading as Democracy in Crisis: Interpretation, Theory, History (Lexington/Rowman & Littlefield 2019).
And here’s the annual creative writing report of what our students and alumni have been up to, courtesy of–and with gratitude to–Martin Pousson.
Brian “The Dude” Andrade (BA, CW, 2017) graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry.
Gianne Braza (BA, CW, ongoing) won the CSUN Northridge Scholars Program Award and won the CSUN Presidential Scholar Award.
Alvaro Castillo (BA, CW, 2015 & MA, CW, 2017) was accepted into the University of Southern California & Los Angeles Review of Books Summer Writing Workshop.
Sean Coolican (MA, 2016) recently completed the MFA program in creative writing at San Diego State University. In the fall, he’ll be heading to Oklahoma State University to work on a PhD in English and Creative Writing.
Joshua Corona (BA, CW, 2019) just won a national contest to have his drabble (a 100 word story) published in an upcoming issue of The New York Times.
Marisela Gomez (BA, CW, 2017 & MA, CW, 2019) won the CSUN Graduate Equity Fellowship Award.
Katharine Mason (BA, CW, 2015 & BA, CW, 2017) published more than 50 book reviews in such places as the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Washington Post.
Adam Miller (BA, CW, 2017) published Axolotl, an online kinetic visual novel.
Anahit Petroysan (BA, CW, 2018) published a short story in Adelaide literary magazine.
Kate Martin Rowe (MA, CW, 2007, and current part-time Lecturer) graduated from Bennington College with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction. She also published book reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Angel City Review and published poems in Bloodroot literary magazine.
Anahita Safarzadeh (BA, MA, Literature, 2018) published a chapbook of poems, Wolf, with Business Bear Press.
Loryn Stone (formerly Loryn Rataizer, BA, CW, 2009) published My Starlight, a debut young adult novel with Affinity Press.
Eli Teitelman (BA, CW, 2016) was accepted into the Master of Arts program at Wheaton College.
Leticia Valente was accepted into the Master of Fine Arts program in Fiction at several universities, including Emerson College in Boston, Portland State University, Colorado State University, and California State University Long Beach. She’ll attend Portland State University, where fellow CSUN alumnus James “Jamie” Bezerra recently finished his MFA while working with the editorial staff at Tin House.
Charlie Ruiz Vasquez (BA, CW, 2017) published a short story in Oakland Arts Review, selected as the lead story alongside work by students from the creative writing programs at Princeton University, Columbia University, and elsewhere.
Doug Weismann (BA, CW, 2010) graduated from the University of San Francisco with a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction.
AND HAPPY SUMMER!