The English Department enthusiastically welcomes five new professors to our faculty this fall.
CREATIVE WRITING:
Christopher Cokinos is the author of The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars and Hope is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds, both from Tarcher/Penguin. The books have been praised or featured in such venues as the Chicago Tribune, Nature, Science, Natural History, “All Things Considered,” and People. His poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in Poetry, Hotel Amerika, Science, Orion, the New York Times, High Country News, andThe American Scholar. He is the winner of a Whiting Award, the Glasgow Prize and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. Chris is at work on a new book for Tarcher/Penguin on the history of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Selenography, featuring Polaroids by Tim Rutili (Sidebrow 2010). He has edited two anthologies for University of Iowa Press, including Poets on Teaching (2010), and his tour documentary about Califone co-directed with Solan Jensen — entitled Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape — was just released (IndiePix Films 2011). His degrees include an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Arizona, an MA in Film Studies from University College Dublin, and a Ph.D. in English from University of Denver. He has been awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and the Rella Lossy Prize from the San Francisco Poetry Center, and his writing has appeared recently in American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Colorado Review, New American Writing, and Verse, among others. He is a founding editor of Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal of Poetics; Rabbit Light Movies: A Journal of Poemfilms; and Letter Machine Editions, a nonprofit publisher of prose and verse. Presently, he is at work on a five-book sequence of poetry.
Kate Bernheimer is the author the story collection Horse, Flower, Bird (Coffee House Press 2010, with illustrations by Rikki Ducornet) and a trilogy based on fairy tales that concluded recently with The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold (FC2 2011). How a Mother Weaned a Girl from Fairy Tales, a new story collection, is coming from Coffee House Press in 2014. She has edited three anthologies including the World Fantasy Award-winning My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin 2010). She teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
LITERATURE:
John Melillo is an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at the University of Arizona for 2011-2013. He specializes in poetry and twentieth century British and American Literature. His dissertation, “Outside In: The Sound of Noise from Dada to Punk,” examines the influence of noise--environmental and musical--on poetics and poetry during the twentieth century. John studies the relationship between sound and meaning in a variety of literary and cultural contexts, from the rhetorical strategies of modernist poets to the contemporary performance of punk music. In addition to his academic research in noise, John writes music criticism and plays guitar and sings, most recently in the pop/noise project Algae and Tentacles.
RCTE:
Cristina Ramirez focuses her research on the recovery of Mexican women writers/journalists from the turn of the twentieth century. Her dissertation titled, Claiming the Discursive Self: The Rhetoric of Mexican Women Journalists (1875-1924) uncovers a feminist history of rhetoric just south of our borders that have been neglected. Using the overarching theory of Gloria Anzaldúa’s mestizaje, Ramirez looks into the feminist mestiza discursive practices the women journalists were using far before the term mestizaje emerged as a Mexican or Chicano nationalist sentiment. Some of the women of focus are Laureana Wright de Kleinhans (1842-1896), Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza (1876-1942), las mujeres de Zitácuaro (1900), Hermila Galindo (1896-1954), and others. Her essay, and the first chapter of her dissertation, “Forging a Mestiza Rhetoric: Mexican Women Journalists’ Role in the Construction of a National Identity” appeared in the July 2009 edition of College English. A forth coming chapter, “Venimos a ocupar nuestro puesto: The Revolutionary Rhetoric of Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza” will be appearing in an edited collection titled, Revolutionary Women: Portraits and Essays, which focuses on reframing the ways in which Texas and Mexican women participated in various wars and revolutions. Her research in this area has led to conducting research in archives in Mexico, and is among the first in rhetoric and writing studies to consider various Mexican women journalists as rhetors. Other areas of interests include serving as a writing specialist and consultant with colleges to help them integrate writing into their curriculum.