2005-2006

What's New in the English Department

Greetings from the Chair

Faculty Features

Retirements, Departures & Arrivals

Forty Years of English

Worth Reading

In brief: Faculty & Graduate Student Professional Activities

Departmental Honors

Alumni & Other Friends

Write to us

Acknowledgments

Note: Please use your back button to return to English News after accessing external links

What's New in the English Department

We had a great time as alumni, current and former faculty members, and colleagues and friends from CSUSB and beyond joined to celebrate "Forty Years of English" on April 22. More about the festivities can be found in this issue of English News.

Awards and Honors

A round-up of some of the most recent awards won by our (literally) award-winning faculty: Alexandria LaFaye's Worth garnered the Arizona Young Author's Award. Bret Johnston's acclaimed Corpus Christi was short-listed for the inaugural Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and won the Southern Review Short Fiction Award. Sunny Hyon and Ron Chen's "Beyond the research article: University faculty genres and EAP graduate preparation," published in English for Specific Purposes, was the journal's runner-up for best article of the year.

This year's College of Arts and Letters award for Outstanding Teaching went to Sunny Hyon, while Dave Carlson was honored by the College for professional development. And once again, the College's Outstanding Graduate Student was from our M.A. program. Lee Dionne earned his B.A. from UC Riverside, and wrote his thesis, "Situating the Cetacean" under the direction of Holly Henry and Luz Elena Ramirez. During his time in the graduate program, Lee volunteered as a special advocate to the court, writing reports on foster children. A $105,000 John Henry Wigmore Scholarship is sending him to Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago. The scholarship is the law school's largest and most prestigious award.

This year's recipient of the Kellie Rayburn Award for the outstanding master's thesis is Davina Padgett. Davina received her B.A. from our department in 2004 and now that she's completed her M.A., she will be pursuing a Ph.D. at Claremont Graduate University. Her thesis is entitled "Irony, Rhetoric, and the Portrayal Of 'No Place': Construing the Elaborate Discourse Of Thomas More's Utopia." Her thesis readers were Bruce Golden and Jenny Andersen.

Honorable mention for the Rayburn Award went to Judy Holiday for her thesis, "Evolving Outcomes of the WPA Outcomes Statement," written under the direction of Mary Boland and Ellen Gil-Gomez. Judy is now off to Arizona State University where she will earn her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition.

Victoria Oldham, concentrating in Literature in the M.A. program, took second place in the annual CSUSB Student Research Competition with her paper "Literary Mythology and The Da Vinci Code."

More good news: Angela Bullard (B.A. 01, M.A. 05), was awarded Texas Christian University's Ida M. Green Doctoral Fellowship, which carries a full tuition waiver and a stipend with no assigned duties; Elise Takehana (B.A. 03, M.A. 06) will attend the University of Florida with tuition paid and a teaching fellowship; Christopher Claro (B.A. 06) has been accepted by Valparaiso University in Indiana with a generous scholarship and stipend, where he will earn a J.D. and an M.A. in Liberal Studies with a concentration in English. Congratulations to one and all!

News from our Department office:

The bad news: in October, we lost our much-beloved Marilyn Gareis to another department (and we hope those folks over in Poli Sci appreciate her). Our woe at Marilyn's departure was commemorated in verse by Peter Schroeder, and she was presented with a framed copy of the poem and a photo of her desk so she wouldn't forget us. The good news: our Marilyn-gap has been filled by Angela Verdugo (formerly Broadway), a welcome and familiar face since she worked as a student assistant in our office while earning her B.A. And in other news (the good variety), Dorothea "Dottie" Cartwright has been nominated for the President's Special Achievement Award for her stellar work on our fortieth anniversary celebration.

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Greetings from the Chair

Year 2005-2006 was a very important one for the English Department at CSUSB. It is the first year for our new and—at least to my mind—much improved undergraduate program. It is the year in which our graduate program prepared the comprehensive examination option, another historical milestone, and it is a year the department, together with the university, celebrated its 40th anniversary.

Year 2005-2006 was also a year of personnel change. In the department office, while Ms. Cartwright has continued to manage the office operation—particularly the chair of the department—efficiently and professionally, Ms. Marilyn Gareis left for the Department of Political Science. In her place is now Ms. Angela Verdugo, who has eased herself into the position of helping the department in a multitude of ways.

The changes in the faculty are many. We welcome Professor Julie Paegle, a poet and a literature specialist, to join the tenure-line faculty beginning Fall, 2006. However, in terms of numbers at least, we stand to lose. Bret Johnston will be leaving us for Harvard, so will Professor Suzanne Lane. Also moving eastwards is Gabrielle Halko, who has accepted a position at West Chester University in Pennsylvania so as to be closer to her father.

A few senior faculty members have also decided to move on. Phil Page and Susan Meisenhelder are now Professor Emeriti, but—good for us indeed!—they will still be around, as they have joined the Faculty Early Retirement Program (FERP), which keeps technically retired faculty members on the faculty (working part-time) for up to five years. Pete Fairchild, who has been in the FERP, has accepted an endowed professorship at Texas Christian University.

But things that should remain in an academic institution have remained. Our students continue to excel. Some of them presented papers and creative work at national conferences; some of them were admitted to reputable graduate programs; some of them won prizes and recognitions of various kinds. Yes, Professor Page, my predecessor, was absolutely right when he told me that students were the greatest source of pride.

Neither have the productivity and accomplishments of my colleagues changed. There have been books, by Professor Dave Carlson and by Professor Luz Elena Ramirez; there have been prizes and awards received by Professor Bret Johnston, Professor Pete Fairchild, and Professor Sunny Hyon; there have been articles and conference presentations—all this accomplished while they are teaching full time.

So, 2005-2006 was a good year indeed. Read on and I am convinced you will agree with me. But better years are still ahead, and the department is poised to move into these better years with never-yielding commitment to student learning, to scholarship, to serving the community.

We will be happy to hear from you. My email address is rchen@csusb.edu and my phone number is (909) 537-5834.

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Faculty Features

Kudos to Dave Carlson, Ellen Gil-Gomez (at left) and Luz Elena Ramirez, who received tenure and promotions to associate professor, and to Sunny Hyon, promoted to full professor. And congratulations to adjunct faculty member Tara Mcdonald, who received her Ph.D. from the University of Alabama in December 2005.

Jonathan Anderson keeps busy with his photography business when he isn't teaching English courses. See his website at: http://www.jonathanandersonphotography.com

Jennifer Andersen will serve in a new position this year: College of Arts and Letters Faculty Grants Coordinator. She participated in a workshop at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington , D.C. on November 4 and 5th, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the Jacobean Gunpowder Plot. The workshop was described in an article by Richard Burne, “Reading the Plot Forward,” (Chronicle of Higher Education, December 9, 2005). The barely-averted plot in King James I's reign was planned by a group of disaffected English Catholics, who aimed to blow up the king and ruling classes of the country with barrels of gunpowder which were discovered in a cellar of the English Houses of Parliament. Jenny notes, "If you thought we had to wait for the twentieth-first century for religious violence, holy massacres, political assassinations, blowing up buildings – curb that modern chauvinism: 16th and 17th-century Europe were way ahead of us."

 

Jenny also enjoyed a day of judging high school drama students performing monologues, dialogues, scenes, and composites (abridged, speeded up scene sequences) at the 32nd Annual John A. Lesser Invitational High School Shakespeare Festival at Cal Poly Pomona in April. Particularly memorable was a mercurial Lancelot Gobbo deciding whether to ditch his master Shylock, and a trio playing the drunken Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban from the Tempest.

 

Dave Carlson was awarded a TRC Summer Course Development Grant for 2006 to develop a graduate seminar on the topic of "Aesthetics and Revolution" that will be offered by the M.A. program in Winter 2007. And Dave will be serving on the Prize Committee for the Society of Early Americanists next year, judging and doling out awards for papers presented at a variety of conference venues.

 

Juan Delgado had several poems published in journals such as the HUBBUB, a literary magazine published by Reed College, which also awarded him the "Stout Award" for one of his poems. He did several poetry readings across the country, and had several poems published or reprinted in anthologies. Also, Juan was awarded the Esperanza Award for exceptional leadership in the Latino community by the California Chicano News Media Association in 2005.

 

In July 2005, Sunny Hyon had a great time being a student again at the Applied Linguistics Summer Institute at Penn State University. Spiral notebook and chewed pens in hand, Sunny attended courses in grammar, task-based language learning and teaching, and implicit vs. explicit second language acquisition. Here she is looking happy in front of one of Penn State's dogwood trees.

 

Warmest good wishes to Liz Langenfeld, alumna and long-time lecturer in the department, who has accepted a tenure-track position at Crafton Hills Community College.

Jackie Rhodes spent about half of her Fall sabbatical in France, where she reports, "I went to Cineffable (the International Lesbian Film Festival) in Paris, spent Armistice Day exploring the Pere Lachaise cemetery (and yes, I made a stop at Eloise and Abelard's tomb), explored Cordes-sur-Ciel and Rabastens, saw a Dada exhibit at the Centre Pompidou, and managed to stay away from the Parisian riots."

Luz Elena Ramirez's British Representations of Latin America will be published by the University of Florida Press in 2007, and she has edited The Encyclopedia of Hispanic American Literature, also to appear in 2007, from the publisher Facts on File.

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Retirements, Departures & Arrivals

Retirements

As Chair Chen reports above, this year two more names were added to our growing list of "ferping" faculty (participants in the Faculty Early Retirement Program), as Susan Meisenhelder and Phil Page swelled those ranks. Susan, who received her Ph.D. from UC Riverside, joined the faculty in 1982, and has for several years been a truly vital force in the California Faculty Association (the union representing CSU faculty). Phil, a Johns Hopkins alumnus, was hired in 1988, and served as department chair from 1999-2003. Asked for his thoughts on retiring, Phil responded:

In 1988, I drifted into Cal State, an waif, an orphan wandering in the academic wilderness, my Ph.D. already yellowing with age. Oh, I had had jobs--jobs galore, in fact--some teaching, some administering, one even as a consultant for a small business, but no direction, no career. I was looking for a place to hang my hat, a place to settle into. I remember even as a lecturer, I was eager--yes, eager--to go to department meetings and to serve on committees. I needed an intellectual home.

And of course I found it. I don't have to tell you how congenial our department is; well, I hope I don't have to. From the inside it's perhaps even more hospitable than from your more or less outside perspective, perhaps because every faculty member has seen other departments that resemble snake pits more than homes.

So, I'm happy to say that I thrived. Put me in a warm, cozy place, give me students who want to learn stuff, let me have the occasional course off or sabbatical to do my scholarly bit, and I'm happy. And then when even all that joy wears off a little, give me the opportunity to chair this amazing department, and I keep exclaiming, "And they pay me for this!"

If it's been all that great, you may wonder, why leave? I guess because life is short and because I've been here, done that, and because there are so many other things to do. So, FERPing is perfect--no sudden shock of retirement, but allowing for a gradual fading into the sunset. And they still pay me!

Departures

Much to our dismay, Bret Johnston accepted a position as Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard, and is off to Boston to take up that post. Asked for comments on leaving CSUSB, Bret wrote,

Here's the absolute truth: I didn't want to leave, but the decision was just kind of a Godfather-esque type thing, an offer I couldn't refuse.  But I almost did refuse it, as in, came really, really, really close to turning the offer down because of my affection for CSUSB.  I love the faculty (most of them) and their work and teaching inspired me, but the reason I almost stayed was the students.  Their drive and hope and passion and the unexpected enthusiasm they brought to class each day is not something I'd experienced at other universities.  And not something, I fear, I'll have the luxury of experiencing again. 

Already, I miss the strangely disinfected smell of UH, Dr. Chen's weird obsession with 2nd Person narration, Dottie's laugh, Ellen's wet hand, the predictable and oddly comforting (in its predictability) mess at the bookstore, the out-of-order copier, the way the sweet janitor with the colored contacts sang in Spanish as she wheeled the recycling bins down the hall.  It all means the world to me, and if I listen closely, I can still hear Dottie laugh, Ron's spirited accusations about how 2nd Person POV actually doesn't exist, those high and soft notes of the Spanish lullaby in the hallway.

While we were still moping about losing Bret, we learned that Suzanne Lane would also depart for Harvard, and Gabrielle Halko would be heading to West Chester University in Pennsylvania. Gabrielle told English News,

I have enjoyed many things about the department and university during my time here. Though it's easy for us to see each other merely as overworked colleagues, I was reminded during our searches this year of how interesting and engaging my peers are as people. (One memorable conversation over dinner at Carol's involved Juan, Peter, me, and kundalini yoga -- I can still hear Peter's voice saying, "Breath of FIRE?") It's been a privilege to work among such talent and diversity. I'll miss my colleagues and especially my students, who remind me on a daily basis that education is the most powerful instrument of democracy and opportunity that I know.

We wish all three the best in their new academic homes--they'll be missed.

Getting rather good at saying goodbye, we also said a warm farewell to two of our "ferping" faculty. Pete Fairchild, after 22 years at CSUSB has accepted an endowed position as Lorraine Sherley Professor of American Literature at Texas Christian University. And on March 26, we gathered on the Chens' patio to mark the conclusion of Clark Mayo's time as a FERP-er and the start of his "real" retirement. Our very best wishes to Clark and Nancy as that new adventure begins.

Arrivals

After so many goodbyes, we were glad to welcome some new arrivals this year. Jason Benjamin "Ben" Bill was born January 6, 2006 to Caroline Vickers and Jason Bill. The happy Ben is shown here with his grandmother, Jane Vickers.

And the lovely baby below is Cira Anderson, born to Jonathan and Diane on March 5, 2006.

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Forty Years of English

Former chairs of the English Department (shown here with Chair Chen, current holder of the august position) gather around a "former chair" to celebrate the department's fortieth anniversary.. Back row, l to r: Edward M. White, Clark Mayo, Phil Page, Peter Schroeder, Sandra Kamusikiri. Front row, l to r: Harry Hellenbrand, Loralee MacPike, Ron Chen. The late Helene Koon also served as department chair..

Our celebration of "Forty Years of English" on April 22 drew alumni, former faculty and other friends of the department for an evening of memories, good food and general conviviality. Speakers included Ed White, the department's first chair, Ron Chen, President Karnig, and Peter Schroeder; tributes to some of our "gone but not forgotten" former faculty were provided by Cindy Cotter (Elinore Partridge), Maureen Newlin (Ed White), Greg Gilbert (Cathy Gannon), Juan Delgado (Larry Kramer), Kathy Schroeder (Helene Koon), Yvonne Atkinson (Harry Hellenbrand), and Harry Hellenbrand (Bob Lee).

Attendees received a copy of "Forty Years of English," a history of the department by Peter Schroeder (if you missed the event, copies are available for $5.00 from the department office). Special thanks go to Christi Rucker for seeing this volume to press. Event organizers were Dottie Cartwright, Dave Carlson, Ron Chen, Bruce Golden, Carol Haviland, Renée Pigeon, and Peter Schroeder, and our photographer for the evening was visiting professor Hao Wang, our guest this year from Yunan University.

More photos. . .

An excerpt from "Forty Years of English":

The World of Yesteryear

In 1966 (the Muse informeth us) 20% of all students at CSCSB majored in English—113 out of 572. By 1968 the percentage was somewhat lower (14.3%), though the raw numbers rose (to 164 out of 1145). Why so many English majors? In part, of course, students had fewer options back then. But in part it was a symptom of the times. The birth of CSCSB coincided with the birth of the Sixties. The Sixties! Speak, Muse—no, on second thought, shut up; we don't need you to tell us that the Sixties were a time of strife at home and abroad, grim assassinations, a hallucinogenic whirl of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. But it was also a time of idealism: once all those untrustable people over thirty eventually faded away, the new generation would green America, abolish racism and bourgeois repression, bring peace and freedom to the world. And even though (according to Marshall McLuhan) the new electronic awareness was shoving old-time books (the linear print media) into the trashbin of history, young folks still looked to books—literature!—as their main guides to life: Kerouac, Salinger, Pynchon, Ken Kesey, Gary Snyder, Sylvia Plath for Chrissake. This may not have been the stuff the musty pedants in the English department were pushing, but even then, if you were wigging on Tolkien (and who wasn't?), it didn't hurt to learn something about Beowulf. And if you thought the musty pedants were leaving something out, you could borrow a classroom, gather a few likeminded fellow students, and offer your own class. Students really did that, back then.

Now, none of this may sound hugely practical, but in those days (our friendly Muse remindeth us) the whole young institution had a kind of childish disdain for the hugely practical . . .

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Worth Reading

What we've been reading this year:

Sunny Hyon:

Jhumpa Lahiri. Interpreter of Maladies. Following the recommendation of my colleague Nancy Best, I read and greatly enjoyed Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, a collection of short stories focused on Asian Indians and Indian Americans in the U.S. The book, which won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, is excellent. Most of the stories concern academic couples negotiating Indian and American mores. Lahiri delicately and precisely illuminates the cultural and individual factors motivating her characters. Among the stories, my two favorites are "A Temporary Matter" and "The Third and Final Continent." I'm now engrossed in Lahiri's novel, The Namesake, which chronicles the life of one boy (and later young man), Gogol, who comes to resist the lifestyle and values of his Indian American parents.

Tim Melnarik:

Danny Fingeroth. Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us about Ourselves and Our Society. He addresses comic book superheroes as a modern mythology, showing how we use their stories to better understand the world around us, and, especially, ourselves. Despite the title, it's really us that's getting analyzed here as Fingeroth, a long-time comics writer himself, shows us the deeper humanity behind our four-color heroes.

Laura Penny. Your Call is Important to Us: The Truth about BULLSHIT. Penny explores the rhetoric of insincerity, looking at the wide variety of ways that we avoid saying what we really mean. Much of her content is political in nature (and at times she can get off on a bit of a ranting tangent), but over the course of her ten chapters she's sure to touch on some way that the truth has been hidden from you.

Renée Pigeon:

Nathaniel Philbrick. Sea of Glory: America 's Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition,1838-1842. After reading Mayflower, Philbrick's current best-selling history of the Plymouth colony, I discovered this earlier (2003) work about the "U.S. Ex. Ex." The clash of personalities Philbrick details, especially the meglomania of the expedition's commander, is fascinating, and he tells the story of their often hazardous attempts to map the coast of Antarctica and explore the South Seas in an absorbing and engaging way. The items brought back by the expedition formed the basis of the Smithsonian Institute's collections.

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In Brief: Recent Professional Activities of Faculty & Graduate Students

Faculty Publications & Presentations

Suzanne Arakawa's article “Suffering Male Bodies: Representations of Dissent and Displacement in the Internment-Themed Narratives of John Okada and Toshio Mori” appeared in Recovered Legacies: Authority and Identity in Early Asian American Literature (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2005).

Mary Boland presented "The Stakes of Not Staking Our Claim: Why Composition Needs a Subject Matter" at the annual MLA conference in Washington, D.C. in December 2005, and along with Carol Haviland, presented "Conservatism, College Republicans, Controversy, and 'Liberal' Faculty: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Teaching Argument" at the Writing Across the Curriculum Conference in May 2006 at Clemson University, South Carolina.

Dave Carlson's book, Sovereign Selves:  American Indian Autobiography and the Law was published this year by the University of Illinois Press.

Margaret Doane gave a paper, "'Do Talk to Me': Violent Deaths and Isolated Survivors in Cather's Novels," at the International Cather Conference in Lincoln, Nebraska in June 2005; it is being published in Violence, the Arts, and Willa Cather, a volume forthcoming from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Another paper, "Not Under Sixty: The Treatment of Old Age in Cather's Novels, Short Stories and Essays" was presented at the Western Literature Association Conference in October 2005.  The article has since been published in The Mower's Tree: A Journal of the Cather Colloquium.

Kim Costino and Sunny Hyon presented "Exploring the Disciplinary Ideologies in L1 and L2 Composition: Why We Do the Things We Do (And What Our Students Think About It)" at the CCCC in Chicago in March 2006.

Holly Henry presented a paper on Einstein and Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves at the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts conference held in Chicago in November 2005, and in January 2006, she presented a paper titled "Flight in the Early Twentieth Century: Dreaming a World Without Borders" at the Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities.

Tara Mcdonald's article "Tennyson's Ulysses as Walter Pater's Aesthete" appeared in the Australasian Victorian Studies Journal.

Phil Page's essay "`Familiar Strangers': The Quest for Connection and Self-Knowledge in Brothers and Keepers " was included in Critical Essays on John Edgar Wideman, eds. Bonnie TuSmith and Keith E. Byerman (Knoxville: Tennessee UP, 2006).

Jackie Rhodes presented “‘Come on in, the Water’s Fine’: Intimacy, Authority, and the Faculty Mentor,” as part of the In & Out Around the Profession roundtable at the 2006 Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) in Montreal, Quebec, in April and was an invited speaker at the Fifth Biennial Feminism(s)/Rhetoric(s) Conference at Michigan Technological University in October, speaking on “Rhetoric, Performance, and the Spectacular Lesbian.”

Peter Schroeder presented "Malory's 'Well'" at the 41st International Congress on Medieval Studies in May, 2006 at Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Graduate Student Publications and Presentations

Katherine Peake reviewed the book Doing Academic Writing in Education: Connecting the Personal and the Professional for Exchanges: the Online Journal of Teaching and Learning in the CSU.

Yvonne Atkinson reports that five students from her Toni Morrison seminar contributed a panel to the National Association of African American Studies and Affiliates 2006 Conference in Baton Rouge, Louisiana:

Deena Baker: “Sula's Rose Tattoo."

Fama A. Adewale-Somadhi: “The Different Layers in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby.”

Lee Dionne: “Inside, Outside, and on the Margins.”

Lydia Pearson: “Pecola's 'Misdirection' in Search of Community.”

Virginia de los Reyes: “African American English as the Primary Female Descriptive in Morrison's Work.”

Victoria Oldham, also a participant in the Morrison seminar, presented a paper at the Stonybrook 2006 graduate conference, "The Passionate Yearning to Fly: Toni Morrison's Use of Myth and Folklore in Song of Solomon. " She also participated in the 2006 Iowa Summer Writing Festival, along with Geoffrey Curran, Lizette Solorzano, and Jan Hudson, all students in Bret Johnston's ENG 621 (Approaches to Imaginative Writing).

Leslie Haynes presented "Grown Children, Small Adults: Visual Rhetoric in Childish Things " at UCR's (dis)junctions conference in April.

Amanda Taylor presented "Fomenting Exile: Romantic Anticipation of 'De-personalization' in Beethoven and Keats" at the Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA) conference in November 2005 in Milwaukee.

Elise Takehana also presented a paper at the MMLA conference, "The Unconscious Elizabeth Bishop: Irrational and Punch Drunk with Surprise," and presented "'Tell Me Again, Who Am I'": The Postmodern Dilemma of Fashion Magazines" at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Chicago in November.

Pictured enjoying a celebratory dinner after their panel presentation, "Tutors Building Community Out of Conflict and Chaos: Starting with Ourselves" at the March 22 all-day writing center workshop at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Chicago in March are MA in English Composition students and Writing Center tutors Chloe De LosReyes, Brenee McDole, Robert Cedillo, Michael Roman, and Paule Chau, with Marcy Trianosky of Hollins College and Carol Peterson Haviland looking over their shoulders. This same group of graduate students/tutors, along with Dario Fozouni, Kristin Kucia-Stauder, Sarah McNay, and Tamara Holder presented an earlier version of this research at the Southern California Writing Centers Association conference on February 25, 2006, at Harvey Mudd College.

Upcoming presentations and publications:

Mary Boland and Kim Costino "The Bottom Line: Counting Students or Making Students Count in the CSU," MLA, December 2006, Philadelphia, PA.

Margaret Doane, "Bridled by Caution': Community-Enforced Conformity in Cather's Nebraska Novels," The Western Literature Association Conference, October 2006, Boise, Idaho.

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Departmental Honors

Congratulations to the following students who earned Departmental Honors in 2005-2006 by completing ENG 517, Honors Project, and presenting their research:

Shawn Mangerino Crisali Ascencio Paula Berry Lisa Briseno Sean Cassady Nikia Chaney William Clark Angela Cloud Jo Ellen Gallina Tameeca Griffin Kristy Krumsiek Jesse McDowell Deborah Pecheur Misty Simon Cari Tulleys Austin Wallace

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Alumni and Other Friends

Alumni News

Best wishes to Leslie Haynes (BA '05) and fiance Roy Peck (BA '04), who plan a July 2007 wedding.

Best wishes to Kerry Branch (BA '94) who wed Scott Chambers on May 28 in at the Red Rock Country Club in Las Vegas. The newlyweds are living in Livingston, Colorado.

Congratulations to the following alumni on their new tenure-track posts: Dirkson Lee (MA '01), San Bernardino Valley College; Joe Noterangelo (MA '01), San Bernardino Valley College; and Becky Rudd (MA '05), Citrus College. And kudos to Joe on the completion of his Ph.D. at UCR!

Luisa Rodriguez Connal (MA '89) is an assistant professor and Writing Program Director at the University of Detroit Mercy.

Congratulations to Faith Dincolo, who writes, "I've got good news! On Sept 1, 2006 I will receive my MFA in screenwriting from the American Film Institute (AFI). It has been a long but worthwhile journey. I sure miss everyone in the English dept., and wish you all well. It looks like there have been big changes in the major since I graduated in 2004. My son, Steven, will be attending CSUSB this fall and is considering becoming an English major. I told him he couldn't pick a better department at CSUSB!"

Kathryn Jordan writes "I graduated in 1970, was a teacher both here and overseas for 28 years and just published my first novel. It's called Hot Water and was published by Berkley, a division of Penguin, in January. I spoke recently at a Women In History luncheon at the College of the Desert, not about my novel, but about a column I write for The Desert Woman called, "Women Changing The World" (more serious than my sexy, little novel - but women are loving the novel and since it's set a a spa here in the desert, I'm touring spa resorts! Wow!)."

Jenni Keys (BA '01) writes "I received my MA from UCR in 2003, and two months ago (June ’06) I passed my Ph.D. qualifying exams. To pay the bills, I’ve been TAing in both the English and Women’s Studies departments at UCR (with the occasional summer adjunct job), and I have been an adjunct faculty member in the English Department at Chaffey Community College since 2005."

We're happy to welcome back Nicole Khoury (MA '05), who after spending time at home in Beirut has returned to teach for the department this fall.

David Ramsey (MA '98) is still teaching for the University of Maryland full time but has moved to Tokyo. Diana Ramseyer (MA '01) is 4 courses from her comps and dissertation and just received a $1000 scholarship for academic achievement at Argosy University.

After earning her MA in the TESL concentration in 2002, Julie Reineman moved to New Orleans to attend Tulane University, where she received her MA in Spanish. Unfortunately, she lost her house in Hurricane Katrina, and decided not to go on for the Ph.D. She is currently teaching Spanish for the Department of World Languages & Literature, as well as composition for the English department.

Congratulations to Jennifer Seaman (BA '02), accepted into the teacher credential program at UC Irvine.

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Write to us

Alumni Updates: Thanks for writing--we really do want to hear from you! Send an e-mail with your news & digital photos to rpigeon@csusb.edu, or write to: Professor Renée Pigeon, Dept. of English, CSUSB, 5500 University Parkway, San Bernardino, CA 92407-2397. And please remember that when you contribute to the University's Annual Fund, you can designate the English Department to receive your contribution.

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Acknowledgments

Special thanks for assistance with this issue of English News to Ron Chen, Jackie Rhodes, and Bruce Golden.

English News Editor: Renée Pigeon

© 2006 CSUSB Department of English