UPbeat

News for and about University of Portland faculty and staff.

English

2019 NUCL Conference Held in Seattle, March 23

For the first time since its inception sixteen years ago, UP’s Northwest Undergraduate Conference on Literature (NUCL) was organized and hosted by the English Department of Seattle University on March 23, 2019. The submissions of ten UP students were accepted, and eight students were able to attend and present their critical and/or creative work: Tayler Bradley, Claire Breiholz, Sophie Downing, Berkeley Franklin, Caroline Holyoak, Emily Nelson, Claire Noring, andBianca Salazar. Several English faculty members also traveled to Seattle to support students and facilitate travel and lodging arrangements.

Two students won individual recognition for their work. Emily Nelson won the award for Best Critical Paper for “A Woman’s Place: The Revolution Personified in A Grain of Wheat,” and Caroline Holyoak received an honorable mention in the Best Creative Writing Submission category for her poetry collection Live Wire.

For more information contact Genevieve Brassard, English, at brassard@up.edu.

Writing and Faith: A Literary Panel, March 28

All are invited to hear celebrated writers read from their works, followed by a moderated panel examining how their faith influences the inspiration, process, and products of their imaginations, on Thursday, March 28, at 7 p.m., in Franz Hall room 120. Panelists include poet and scholar Sr. Eva Hooker, C.S.C.; novelist and essayist Allison Grace Myers; poet GC Waldrep; and poet and fiction writer Rachel Jamison Webster. The event, a collaboration by the Department of English, the Garaventa Center, and Portland Magazine, is free and open to the public.

For ADA accommodations or more information contact the Garaventa Center at x7702 or up.edu/garaventa/events.

Poetry Reading: Laura Read, March 26

Poet Laura Read will present her work in a reading on Tuesday, March 26, at 7:30 p.m., in the Pilot House bookstore. The reading is free and open to all.

Laura Read’s chapbook The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You won the Floating Bridge Chapbook Award in 2010, and her first full-length collection, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral, was chosen as the winner of the AWP/Donald Hall Prize for Poetry by Dorianne Laux in 2011 and published in 2012 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her second collection, Dresses from the Old Country, will be published by BOA in October of 2018. Her individual poems have received awards from The Florida Review, Dogwood, and Crab Creek Review and have been published in many different journals, including most recently, Radar, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blood Orange Review, and The New York Times Magazine. She teaches English composition, literature, and creative writing at Spokane Falls Community College and helps advise SFCC’s creative arts magazine The Wire Harp. 

For more information contact the English department at english@up.edu.

Visiting Professor Wei Feng Lectures, March 18, 19

The English Department and the Honors Program are sponsoring Dr. Wei Feng, Fangwu Professor of English at North East Normal University in Changchun, China, to present two lectures on campus. Feng is currently a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Yale University, where he is working on a project titled “Americanizing Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century: A Cultural History.” He will present lectures on Monday, March 18 and Tuesday, March 19, at 4 p.m., in Franz Hall room 120. His topics are the Chinese translation of King Lear and the impact of Shakespeare on Peking Opera. For more information, contact John Orr, English, at orr@up.edu.

Elena Passarello Reading, Jan. 30

Actor and essayist Elena Passarello will read from her work on Wednesday, January 30, at 7:30 p.m., in the Pilot House bookstore. She will also appear at an informal question and answer social that afternoon from 4 to 5 p.m., in the Bauccio Commons Teske Room. All are welcome and refreshments will be served.

Passarello is the recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Paris Review, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018. She is the author of the essay collections Let Me Clear My Throat and Animals Strike Curious Poses, the latter of which won the 2018 Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction and made the Best Books of 2017 lists in The New York Times, Guardian, and Publisher’s Weekly. Passarello teaches at Oregon State University. Her talk is sponsored by the English department’s Readings and Lectures Series.

For more information go to this link.

UP Writing Center and Integrated Writing Program At Your Service

The Integrated Writing Program and the Writing Center are gearing up to serve the UP community in spring 2019, according to Molly Hiro, English. The Writing Center (BC 163) is a completely free resource, staffed with trained writing assistants who can help students at all levels, from all disciplines, at all stages of the writing process. The center opens for the semester on Sunday, January 20 (open daily except Saturdays). Please visit the Writing Center website to learn more and make appointments.

One of the best means of getting students to bring their work-in-progress to the Writing Center is for faculty themselves to encourage them to do so (some professors require at least one visit; some give extra credit to students for using our services). When talking to your students about the UP Writing Center, you might keep in mind the following:

  • Our goal is not just to inspire better papers, but create better writers. This means we don’t “fix” papers; we work with students to improve their overall writing skills for this and future tasks.
  • Writing assistance isn’t just for students with major grammar or mechanical problems. Instead, we focus on higher-order concepts such as argument, organization, development, and other areas. Even accomplished writers can make progress on their work in a half-hour session.
  • While our writing assistants represent most majors as well as the professional schools, they are trained in a semester-long course to work with students from any discipline.
  • When a student meets with a writing assistant to discuss a paper for your course, you’ll get a copy of the conference report—a brief summary of what the student and writing assistant worked on (This is an easy way of keeping track of who visited the WC for assigning extra credit, e.g.).
  • An effective way to familiarize your students with the Writing Center and to demonstrate your support for our services is to invite a writing assistant to visit your classroom with a 5-10 minute presentation during the first few weeks of the semester. Email our hotline at writing@up.edu with the day and time of the class you’d like a writing assistant to visit and we’ll get back to you shortly.
  • Lastly, all Moodle pages now have a link to the Writing Center—see the top left corner, under “Learning Resources.”

To foster student writing integrity at UP, consider using the Turnitin function through your class Moodle page. Instructions for using this paper-authentication software can be found here.

All of your students should possess The Pocket Cengage Handbook since it is required in their two writing-embedded courses. The handbook helps keep our campus on the same page when it comes to grammar, punctuation, citation styles, and basic expectations for essay writing across the University. If you need a desk copy of this reference, please contact the Writing Center director by the second week of the semester.

As the director of the Integrated Writing Program and the Writing Center, Hiro is happy to be a point of contact on all writing-related matters this semester. Need insight on crafting better writing prompts? Resources for integrating writing instruction into your class-time? Help with language to use when evaluating student writing? Please feel free to contact her at hiro@up.edu or x8031.

TLC From The TLC: “Why English?”

Why do all UP students take an English course, regardless of their professional aims? This week on the Teaching & Learning Blog, English chair Lars Erik Larson details how ENG 112 works within UP’s Core program. This is the second essay in Core Matters, a year-long series started by Andrew Guest that offer a discipline-by-discipline explanation of our University’s existing core curriculum.

NUCL Keynote: “Does Literature Change Anything? Lessons from African American Writing,” March 24

Kenneth W. Warren will present  will present “Does Literature Change Anything? Lessons from African American Writing,” the keynote address for the 2018 Northwest Undergraduate Conference on Literature (NUCL), on Saturday, March 24, at 1:45 p.m., in the Bauccio Commons. His talk is free and open to all.

Warren is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Professor in the English department at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is What Was African American Literature? (2011) and he is co-editor (with Adolph Reed Jr.) of Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought (2009).

NUCL is sponsored by the English department, the provost’s office, the College of Arts & Sciences, and the dean of admissions. For ADA accommodations or more information, contact the Department of English at x8031 or hiro@up.edu.

Schoenfeldt, ReadUP Author Rebecca Skloot Lecture, Feb. 26

The entire University community is invited to take part in the culmination of the fourth annual ReadUP event, according to Thomas Greene, provost. This year features The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, who will speak on February 26 as a guest of the Schoenfeldt Distinguished Writers Series. Her lecture will take place at 7:30 p.m. in Buckley Center Auditorium.

This New York Times bestseller tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of scientific discovery and faith healing; and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew. Though best-known for The Immortal Life, Rebecca Skloot has written more than 200 feature articles, personal essays, book reviews, and news stories for The New York Times Magazine, O, The Oprah Magazine, Discover, and other publications. She served as co-editor of The Best American Science Writing 2011 and has worked as a correspondent for NPR’s Radiolab and PBS’s Nova ScienceNOW. Her 2010 book was a number one New York Times bestseller and was featured on more than 60 critics’ “best of the year” lists. It was the 2011 winner of the National Academies Communication Award for best creative work that helps the public understanding of topics in science, engineering or medicine.

The “One Book Together” series is a campus-wide common reading program aimed at bringing students, faculty, and staff together. More information regarding book discussions and other highlights can be found at up.edu/readup.

Reading By Leni Zumas, Nov. 15

Author Leni Zumas will read from her work on Wednesday, November 15, at 7:30 p.m., in the Pilot House bookstore. Zumas is the author of the story collection Farewell Navigator and the novel The Listeners, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. She teaches in the MFA program at Portland State University. Her forthcoming novel, Red Clocks, was selected for Publishers Weekly’s “Top 10 Literary Fiction” list and has been described by Maggie Nelson as “funny, mordant, political, poetic, alarming, and inspiring—not to mention a way forward for fiction now.”

For details follow this link to the English department’s list of readers or contact Lars Larson, English, at larson@up.edu. Please note: Leni Zumas is substituting for the previously scheduled Carmen Maria Machado.