For the twelfth consecutive year, Scribes Valley Publishing has included a short story by Instructor Ronna L. Edelstein in its annual anthology. All of the fictional stories focus on a protagonist named Vera during the different stages of her life. The latest story is called "The Monster Within."
Cover, Carlock Book
Instructor Janine Carlock's book, Developing Information Literacy Skills: A Guide to Finding, Evaluating, and Citing Sources, was published this year by the University of Michigan Press.
Reed Book Cover
Lecturer Shannon Reed's first book Why Did I Get a B: And Other Mysteries We're Discussing in the Faculty Lounge comes out this spring from Simon & Schuster.
Lecturer Renee Prymus' essay, "Keeping Score," was published in Creative Nonfiction 72.
Courtney Weikle-Mills, associate professor and director of the Children's Literature program, gave a lecture and a workshop at Aarhus University in Denmark as one of two guest speakers at the Children and Books, c. 1750-1850, Symposium. She was also one of 22 scholars from more than 10 countries invited to present their work at Books and Children: Transnational Encounters,1750-1850 (Pt. II), a conference at Princeton University's Cotsen Library. At this past year's Modern Language Association annual conference, Weikle-Mills was an invited participant in the roundtable discussion, "Critical Childhood Studies and Intersectionality: The State of the Field." Her essay, "Intersections of Childhood/Slavery and the Invention of Global Children's Literature," appears in Critical Childhood Studies: A Long 19c Digital Humanities Project.
Briana Wipf, a graduate student in English literature, has been recognized with two newspaper writing awards for a 2018 story she wrote for the Shelby Promoter in Montana: first place, feature story, in the National Newspaper Association Better Newspaper Contest; and first place, lifestyle reporting, in the Montana Newspaper Association Better Newspaper Contest. Last summer, Wipf presented her paper, "'Because God Wanted One United People': The Rhetoric of Separation in The Chronicle of Hutterian Brethren," at the second Montana Medieval Roundup conference at the University of Montana in Missoula, and this past fall, she presented "'So I'm Packing My Bags for the Misty Mountain': Reading Led Zeppelin IV's Politics through Medievalism" at the Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association's annual conference, held in 2019 in Pittsburgh.
PhD student in Composition Elise Silva has been named a 2020-2021 Sawyer Seminar Research fellow.
Literature Professor Piotr Gwiazda gave lectures and poetry readings at the University of Graz (Austria); the Walt Whitman International Conference in Huntington, N.Y.; the American Literary Translators Association Conference in Rochester, N.Y.; and the White Whale Bookstore in Pittsburgh. He also published two essays: "'The Dead Will Think the Living Are Worth It': Rereading W.S. Merwin's The Lice" in The American Poetry Review and "The Forest of Language: Etymological Play in Leonard Schwartz's The New Babel" in Talisman. His review of Amanda Golden's critical collection, This Business of Words: Revisiting Anne Sexton appeared in Soundings. He also published poems and translations in Lana Turner, Laurel Review, Malahat Review, and Exchanges.
Sarah Baumann, office manager and assistant to the chair, has been named the winner of the 2020 Orosz Award for Excellence in Emerging Leadership in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, and the College of General Studies. The award, established to honor the memory of Michael Orosz, a staff member in Biological Sciences, recognizes professional excellence and leadership in staff who have been with the University from one to five years.
The Last Artists in New York, a new book of nonfiction by Associate Professor Peter Trachtenberg, is under contract with Black Sparrow Press.
Hard Salami by Kent Kosack
Instructor and MFA alumnus Kent Kosack has a number of recent publications. He's published fiction in Queen Mob's Teahouse, Little Fiction, and The Normal School. Kosack's recent creative nonfiction appears in 3:AM Magazine, Pithead Chapel, and Hobart. And craft essays by Kosack can be found in Entropy and CRAFT.
Cover, Cargill Falls
Writing Associate Professor William Lychack's novel, Cargill Falls, was published this year by Braddock Avenue Books. Read a review of the book here. Lychack's interview with colleague Peter Trachtenberg was recently published in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Senior Lecturer Ellen McGrath Smith received two Pushcart Prize nominations for her work this year. Her long-poem "and now this formal error." was published in the final print issue of The Seattle Review. Her sonnet sequence, "Corona and Confession," was reprinted in part in Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket, 2020). Three poems from her new manuscript, Shaken: A Re-Cycle, appear in Gargoyle 71, and other of her work was published in Cordella, Kestrel, and Is It Hot in Here or Is It Just Me? Women over 40 Write about Aging (Beautiful Cadaver, 2020).
Cover, Tween Pop
Tween Pop: Children's Music and Public Culture, by Associate Professor Tyler Bickford, was published this year by Duke University Press.
Marylou Gramm, a senior lecturer and the director of undergraduate studies for the Composition program, contributed a chapter, "Dialogic Openings for Recreating English," to the collection Translingual Dispositions: Globalized Approaches to the Teaching of Writing (forthcoming, WAC Clearinghouse, 2020).
Visiting Assistant Professor Maggie Jones has been reporting on COVID-19 for the New York Times Magazine, including an article on a flight attendant still working during the pandemic and another on a New York City funeral home during the peak of the pandemic in that city.
Senior Lecturer Carol Mastrangelo Bové writes: "This past September I had the pleasure of participating as a member of a dissertation committee in Paris. Anne Bengochéa completed her dissertation on the translation of Dickens's David Copperfield into French for her doctorate in Anglophone Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. Not only was the discussion enlightening, but I also discovered that the French doctoral student and family provide everyone in attendance with champagne, hors d'oeuvres, and pastries following the defense. Vive la France!"
Carl Kurlander, a senior lecturer in Film and Media Studies, reports that the film he produced on the development of the Salk polio vaccine, "A Shot to Save the World," has been relicensed by the Smithsonian Channel and premiered this spring; the film was begun years ago, when Kurlander and his Making the Documentary course students worked on footage shot for the 50th anniversary of the vaccine. This past spring also saw the release of "The Rehabilitation of the Hill," a feature film about the redevelopment of the Hill District that was made as a joint project involving Kurlander's film students and members of the Hill District community. You can read more about it here. This summer, Kurlander's film Burden of Genius—on Pitt Medicine transplant pioneer Thomas Starzl—is scheduled to air on PBS; the film has roots in a Making the Documentary course Kurlander taught in 2017.
Editor's Note: We publish faculty, staff, and graduate student news once each year, in the Spring/Summer issues of The Fifth Floor. But we accept news all year, and are always open to your story ideas. Reach out to us here.