News from Saint Mary's English Department

On April 4th, Sandy Grayson presented a paper entitled "The Divided Self of Gothic Fiction" at the Association for Core Texts and Courses conference in Plymouth, MA. On the panel with Professor Grayson was SMC English Alum Jenny Olin Shanahan, who now is an Associate Professor of English at Saint Mary's University in Winona, MN. In addition to teaching English courses, Jenny directs SMU's Lasallian Honors Program. Her paper, on Bless Me, Ultima, is titled "La Division de la Persona: Bilingual Identity in a Chicana/o Core Text(o).

In March, Bob Gorsch presented "Heinlein and the Golden Age of Radio," at the joint Popular Culture Association/ American Culture Association conference in Francisco. The paper focuses on the transformation of pulp fiction into audio-visual media events in the early to mid 50s.

Colored Bookshelves

At the end of December, Carol Lashof visited Peking University in Beijing to see a production of two of her one-act plays: Persephone Underground and Medusa's Tale. The plays were performed in English with Mandarin subtitles. Carol is now working with her British collaborator, composer James McCarthy, on "Threat Level," a fifteen-minute opera commissioned by the Scottish National Opera. The opera is about homeland security and will premiere in 2009.

As President of the Western Canadian Studies Association, Carol Beran organized two one-day interdisciplinary symposia entitled "Canadian Studies: On the Edge," one in Denver and the other in Berkeley. The Berkeley Symposium in March included the first Bay Area showing of a film made by the Inuit about their culture. A third symposium is scheduled for Phoenix in September. The symposia are supported by generous grants from the Government of Canada.

Lysley Tenorio received a 2007-2008 John Steinbeck Fellowship for emerging writers from San Jose State University. He will be an artist-in-residence at the Macdowell Colony in the summer of 2008. His story, "Save the I-Hotel" was selected by Barry Lopez to appear in the summer 2008 issue of Manoa.

Graham Foust's recent publications include an essay on John Ashbery in Conjunctions; a review of Theodore Enslin's latest collection in Verse; and poems in The Nation and New Ohio Review. His poem "Los Angeles" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and his third collection, Necessary Stranger, was mentioned in the "Inside the List" section of the New York Times Book Review in January.

Jan Doane will present a paper on Gertrude Stein's strange little novel Blood on the Dining Room Floor at the International Narrative Conference in Austin, Texas in May.

Thomas Cooney's essay about a recent trip to Haiti, "10 Days in H," will appear in the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine on Sunday, May 11th.

Brenda Hillman and her Pulitzer Prize-winning (and SMC graduate!) husband Robert Hass were invited by the Green Book Studies Center and the Libyan embassy to be the first delegation of American poets ever to visit Libya topresent poetry. In addition to reading at a poetry festival, they traveled to a village at the edge of the Sahara, and visited to Mediterranean village Leptis Magna.

Barry Horwitz's essay, "Langston Hughes, Shakespeare in Harlem: Socialist Poet in the Desert," appears in the collection, Terror and Its Representations: Studies in Social History and Cultural Expression published by Presses Universitaires de la M�diterann�e, Montpellier, France.