Member News

Associate Professor of Spanish at Wofford College Laura Barbas-Rhoden’s chapter “Espacio, violencia y heteronormatividad en una Nicaragua transnacional: Lectura ecofeminista de La Yuma y Meet Me Under the Ceiba” is included in the new book Cartografías cul turales del género en Centroamérica: saberes, imágenes e itineraries, edited by Alexandra Ortiz Wallner and Mónica Albizúrez.

Public Culture journal announces the publication of a special issue titled “Visualizing the Environment” with contributions by ASLE Members Allison Carruth, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Ursula K. Heise, Heather Houser, and Rob Nixon. Read it here: http://www.publicculture.org/issues/view/26/2

Christopher Cokinos is co-editing an anthology of contemporary nature writing with Eric Magrane called A Literary Field Guide to the Sonoran Desert for University of Arizona Press. Cokinos was recently named a 2014-2015 Udall Fellow in Public Policy at the University of Arizona, and he has work forthcoming or recent in Orion, Extrapolation, New Delta Review, Western Humanities Review, Saltfront and elsewhere. This coming year he will begin directing the creative writing program at Arizona.

mg_5984-aspen-tkGreg Garrard has recently moved from Bath Spa University in the UK, where he was Reader in Literature and the Environment, to UBC Okanagan, where he has been appointed to one of five Sustainability Professor positions on the campus. Garrard reports that the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan is already strong in eco-poetry and art, so he is looking forward to building ecocriticism and environmental humanities research to complement it. He also joined the university’s research institute for Biodiversity, Resilience and Ecosystems Services, through which he hopes to build interdisciplinary collaborations. Garrard says, “And of course, having chaired ASLE-UKI 2004-2010, I’m delighted to be in a position to engage with colleagues in ALECC and ASLE more immediately than before. I am missing the rain and bluebells of an English spring though!”

Jill McCabe Johnson’s poetry book, Diary of the One Swell ing Sea (MoonPath Press, 2013), a collection of poems in the voice of the sea addressing rising sea levels, was awarded a 2014 Nautilus Book Award in Poetry.

At the WLA conference in California in October, Mark Liebenow presented the paper “Hiking with Kierkegaard” as a member of the panel on “Internalizing Landscape” with Gaynell Gavin, Lisa Knopp, and Liz Stephens. Liebenow’s paper will be published by the Chautauqua Journal in 2014 in Issue 11, “Wonders of the World,” available soon at http://www.chautauquabookstore.ciweb.org/. Liebenow is the author of four books, most recently Mountains of Light: Seasons of Reflection in Yosemite, published by the University of Nebraska Press and winner of the River Teeth Nonfiction Book Prize.His poems, essays, and critical reviews have appeared in the Chautauqua Journal, Colorado Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, and other publications.  His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and named a notable essay in Best American Essays 2012.  He is currently working on a grief memoir.

Laura Long (Lynchburg College) published the novel Out of Peel Tree (April 2014, WVU Press). The novel is rooted in the natural and cultural world of Appalachia, and subtly traces an Appalachia diaspora. The novel was just listed as an “editor’s pick” on Oprah.com. Excerpts appeared in Shenandoah and many other literary magazines. Laura Long also published a chapbook of poems, The Eye of Caroline Herschel: A Life in Poems (Dec 2013, Finishing Line P). Poems from this collection about astronomer Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) are currently nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the Pushcart Prize Editorial Board, and were linked in the blog Cocktail Physics sponsored by Scientific American.

Catherine Meeks co-founded Fall Line South Field Institute (www.falllinesouth.org), an interdisciplinary, environmental education field school for young adults based throughout the Southeastern United States. The school’s inaugural course, “Altamaha Odyssey,” will take place this summer, June 6-15, and author Janisse Ray will be a guest speaker during the class’s canoe trip on the Altamaha River in South Georgia.

Aaron M. Moe’s “Toward a Zoopolis: Animal Poiesis and the Poetry of Emily Dickinson and Brenda Hillman” is now published in the section on Animality and Ecocriticism, guest edited by Scott Slovic, in the online journal Forum for World Literature Studies (Volume 6, Issue 1, 2014). In the introduction to the section, Slovic sees “animality” to be one of the “two major paradigms within the field of ecocriticism.” (The other is “place.”) Aaron joins Karla Armbruster, Michael Lundblad, Diana Villanueva Romero, Wendy Woodward, and Deborah Bird Rose in an exploration of the many facets of animality.

Anna Lena Philips, editor of Ecotone Magazine, reports that Astoria to Zion: Twenty – Six Stories of Risk and Abandon from Ecotone’s First Decade has won a gold IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award) in the anthology category.

Catherine Reid’s essay collection, Falling into Place: An Intimate Geography of Home (Beacon 2014) was included as one of “ten titles to pick up now” in the March issue of Oprah Magazine (one of 14 in the online version). Reid says, “We’ve come of age: place-based essays written from a queer p.o.v. named as notable in a mainstream magazine.” Reid also received creative writing fellowships this past year from the NEA and the North Carolina Arts Council.

Fred Waage presented his paper “Big Dam Foolishness: Rivers & Dams in U.S. Popular Lit. from TVA to Echo Park & Glen Canyon” at NEMLA in April 2014, and his article “The Non-Human in New World Encounter Narratives of the English Renaissance” appears in Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 38.4.