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Page 1: The Peripatetic Observer 2010

English Stays Strong as Both a Department and Community

A note from the Department chair, Richard Finkelstein

! Despite the challenging economic environment that all of us have faced, the last year has seen our English De-partment move forward in many positive, well-focused directions. Faculty and staff have redoubled their efforts to ensure that English majors receive classroom education that matches Geneseo’s top-ranked reputation, and also get the at-tention, encouragement, and mentorship they deserve. Our push forward also results from the many kinds of generous support that alumni have provided. Eng-lish Department graduates everywhere have confirmed that they remain strong participants in our community, often decades after leaving Geneseo.! During this past year, for example, we held one of our forums that attempts to answer the question, “how do you build a career with an English major after graduation?” Featuring Janet Ten-reiro (’78), a businesswoman in western New York, and lawyers Anne Joynt (’02) and Mary Kate Woods (’96), the session

proved encouraging to students, who heard a happy truth: English majors sometimes take more time to settle on a career path than some, but our major builds the skills and intellectual flexibility to create professional lives in a variety of ways over a lifetime. Alumni have also helped strengthen our students’ confidence by participating in internships and helping them to establish networks. Professor Graham Drake coordinates most of the internships, and he has been kept busy.! As has always been a Geneseo tra-dition, faculty members support students with creative activities and family-like connections outside the classroom. For over two years, Professor Ken Cooper has been working with Geneseo students on an organic garden they designed. Integrated with his courses on literature and eco-criticism, work in the garden has also educated the entire campus about healthy practices. In addition to engag-ing many former students to write sec-tions of his two-volume encyclopedia on the history of Broadway, Professor Tom Greenfield continues to teach guitar and occasionally serenade students in his

classes. Several of our faculty members lead study programs overseas, including a new one in Ireland created by Profes-sor Rob Doggett. The centerpiece of this trip is a residency at the International Yeats Summer School, where students meet and are mentored by some of the world’s most important scholars. With Professor Beth McCoy’s mentoring, we have now sent two students to the Sum-mer Institute for Literary and Cultural Studies at Wheaton College in Massa-chusetts. One of them is now a Ph.D. student at Brown. " As you can see inside, this has also been a growth year for bringing speak-

THE PERIPATETIC OBSERVER

in this issue:keep in touch" 2alumni update" 3literary forum" 4Lima on the “Today Show”! 8

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VOLUME 10SPRING2010

Welles Hall, home of the English Department

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A Letter from the Chair (continued from page one)

ers, poets, and fiction writers to campus to enhance our intellectual environment. Students heard talks from Professor Mi-chael Warner, Chair of the Yale Univer-sity English Department, who delivered the annual Walter Harding Lecture, en-dowed by the Harding family. J.D. McClatchy, poet and translator (and another member of the Yale Depart-ment), gave a poetry reading when he visited for the Phi Beta Kappa lecture last spring. The Geneseo Literary Forum brought prize-winning short story writer ZZ Packer to campus this fall. We were thrilled to sponsor several literary read-ings: and there was little more exciting than hosting an award-winning alumna writer, Ashley Pankratz (’05).

! That we were able to reaffirm our vigorous commitment to building an intel-lectually and socially supportive commu-nity during the sharp economic down-town speaks to the commitment of fac-ulty, staff, and alumni. With your time and generosity we have enlarged our students’ opportunities and the quality of their experience at Geneseo. Thanks for all that you have done. Please continue to keep in touch.

Richard FinkelsteinChair

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2009 Awards:

Here are a few of this year’s student awards and scholarships

1. The William T. Beauchamp Literature Award.Patrick Morgan received this annual $250 award presented to an outstand-ing senior English student.

2. The Rita K. Gollin Award for Excellence in American Literature.This graduating senior award went to Molly Kerker. To be eligible for con-sideration, recipients must demonstrate excellent work in the study of Ameri-can literatures.

3. The Don Watt Memorial Scholarship.Caitlin Klein received this scholarship, established by friends and colleagues of the the former Chair and Professor. It rewards a student who demonstrates a strong academic record as well as a history of having to work to support her- or himself in college.

4. The Natalie Selser Freed Memorial Scholarship. Jeffrey Lovitz received this award, granted to the junior English major with the highest grade point average within the major. It is funded by Pro-fessor Walter Freed in loving memory of his mother.

GREAT Day 2009At this year’s Geneseo Recognizing Excellence, Achievement, and Talent Day (21 April) more than ten student panels featured critical papers, recita-tions, and creative readings in English language and literature. Topics in-cluded the Hebrew Scriptures as Lit-erature, Thoreau and Beauty, Cine-matic Representations of Elizabeth I, “Criticism without Borders” (Multi-media Responses to Literature), and African-American Migration Narrative.

Select English majors serve as Writing Center Tutors, aiding all Geneseo stu-dents with their academic writing.

Keep in touch. Let us know about your accomplishments. Email us at [email protected], or fill out the information below.

Name:

Address:

City/State/Zip:

Email: "

Year of graduation:

Your information:

Send to: Dept. of English, SUNY-Geneseo, 1 College Circle, Geneseo NY 14454-1401

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Alumni News

Please send your news and updates to [email protected]

Bill Bly (1969) graduated as an Art ma-jor with a Creative Writing minor at Geneseo. He studied with the recently ret ired Dave Kel ly ("a first -c lass teacher"), Dr. David Wand, and Profes-sor Walter Harding ("one of the finest professors I ever knew"). Bly attended graduate school in Creative Writing at SUNY Buffalo and has lived for the last 31 years in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, a suburb of Tulsa. " Professor Harding's influence contin-ues, as Mr. Bly is a Life Member of The Thoreau Society. " Bly, a Geneseo village resident from the ages of 2 to 27, finds that Welles Hall will always "have a special meaning for me. It was my grade school from 1956-1963. And, ironically, my last class as a senior at SUNY Geneseo was in that building!" Bly is a Geneseo "leg-acy" graduate, as his father received his BS and MS in Education from the col-lege.

!Peter Wm. V. Fedorchuk (1974) retired in 2007 as English Department Chair and English teacher at Wayland-Cohocton Central School after thirty-three years of service. "I used many of my handwritten notes from undergraduate classes at Geneseo to supplement my lectures and teaching of American, British, and Greek literature to juniors and seniors at the high school level," he writes. He is now an adjunct instructor at Genesee Com-munity College, teaching English and Education courses as well as Public Speaking. <[email protected]>

!Trouble Light, a new volume of poetry by Gerald McCarthy (1974), is available at GeraldMcCarthyPoet.com. McCarthy is Professor of English at St. Thomas Aquinas College, in Sparkill, NY; he received his MFA from the University of Iowa in 1976.<[email protected]>

!Sari Arfin-Schulman (1992) teaches high school English and Drama with the Port Washington school district. "This is my 17th year," she writes, "hard to believe!" She delivered the presentation, "Teach-ing The Canterbury Tales to 21st Century Students," at the November 2009 NCTE

National Convention in Philadelphia. She has two daughters, ages 3 and 7.

!Tracy Strauss (1996) teaches First-Year Writing at Emerson College. She re-cently earned a scholarship to attend the Southampton Writers Conference, where she worked with author Kaylie Jones.

!Alison O'Reilly (1999) is a Youth Services Librarian with the Austin Public Library and serves on the 2010 Newbery Award Committee.

!Julie Sacco Bastedo (1999) teaches Eng-lish and Drama at Orchard Park High School in Orchard Park, NY. She cur-rently runs the Drama program, directing One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest in Fall 2008 and A Midsummer Night's Dream for Fall 2009. She received her Addi-tional Qualification in Dramatic Arts from York University in Toronto, Ontario, in the summer of 2008. Julie also created an interdisciplinary program called "Drama without Borders," dealing with American and Canadian Drama and History, which she co-orchestrates with a drama teacher in Iroquois, Ontario. <[email protected]>

!Padraic McConville (2004) is working on his MBA at Cornell University's Johnson School. He spent last summer working for a private equity firm, and he deliv-ered a presentation to Geneseo's School of Business last autumn.

!Erica Truncale (2007) has been living in Boston, MA, since November 2007. She is the Development Assistant for the Si-lent Spring Institute, a non-profit envi-ronmental research organization. <[email protected]>

!Brian Balduzzi (2009) has been ac-cepted to Washington and Lee Law School.

!Ben DeGeorge (2009) works full-time in his family's company, St. Pauly Textile. "If you live in Western or Central NY you have probably seen our clothing collec-tion sheds at local non profit organiza-tions in your communities," he writes. He invites visits to: www.St-Pauly.com. Ben is also a co-writer of the blog, www.BiggerImpact.com. <[email protected]>

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Tom Greenfield Receives 2009 Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching

Professor Greenfield was one of four Geneseo faculty members to receive the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teach-ing. The awards are SUNY system-level honors conferred to acknowledge and provide system-wide recognition for con-sistently superior professional achievement and to encourage the ongoing pursuit of excel-lence.

A perennial favorite among ma-jors and non-majors alike, Pro-fessor Greenfield teaches many of the department’s drama courses. He also teaches courses in the School of the Arts and mentors students from all over campus. An accomplished acoustic guitarist and songwriter, he lends his services to many college organizations for enter-tainment or fundraising pur-poses.

Greenfield has written two major books on American drama and media and numerous scholarly articles. He served as Dean of the College for 11 years before taking a full-time professorial appointment in the English de-partment six years ago.

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The Geneseo Literary ForumThe Geneseo Literary Forum brings nationally recognized writers and poets to campus, providing valuable experience and training for the department’s Creative Writing majors, and contributing significantly to the college’s cultural offerings. The 2009-2010 forum pre-sented the following contributors.

Last Spring Ashley Pank-ratz (’05), winner of the Colorado Review Nelligan Prize read from her fiction and nonfiction. She is currently a graduate stu-dent in creative writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. As a Geneseo student, Ashley won the English Department writing awards for her fiction and nonfiction. After Gene-seo, she received her MA from SUNY-Brockport; she is working on her MFA at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

This fall, Tina May Hall read at the Literary Forum. The winner of the Cake Train chapbook award for her novella All the Day’s Sad Stories, Tina May Hall teaches writing and literature at Hamilton College. Her fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals including Black Warrior Review, 3rd Bed, and Quarterly West. Hall met with the Fiction Workshop while she was in Geneseo, answering ques-tions about her work as well as leading the class in a writing exercise focusing on lan-guage.

In December, author ZZ Packer visited to read from her short story collection Drinking Cof-fee Elsewhere. Packer is the editor of New Stories from the South 2008: The Year’s Best, and she is currently working on her first novel, The Thousands, about the Buffalo Soldiers.

Her work has been presented in various publications including Story, The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories 2000, and the New York Times. She is a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and the winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Grant and Whiting Writer’s Award. Packer’s reading was followed by questions, a book signing, and dinner with faculty and writing students.

Poet Micah Ling visited in January to read from Three Islands, her recently published book of persona poems about Amelia Ear-hart, Robert Stroud, and Fletcher Christian. Ling’s work has been featured in journals including Fifth Wednesday and Harpur Palate. She is also the deputy editor of Keyhole Magazine. She currently teaches writing and litera-ture at Indiana University, where she received her M.F.A. Following her reading, Ling visited the fiction workshop to lead students in a writing exer-cise.

This April, Kirk Nesset visited. Nesset is the author of Paradise Road and Mr. Agreeable, as well as well as a nonfiction study, The Stories of Raymond Carver, and a forthcoming book of poems, Saint X. His stories, poems, translations and essays have appeared in such journals as the Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Ameri-can Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Agni, The Sun, Fiction, and Prairie Schooner, among others. Nesset gave a read-ing and met with the Senior Creative Writing majors in the Senior Reading Seminar (ENGL370), now required of all Creative Writing majors, to discuss his work and an-swer questions they have about giving read-ings, and writing in general!""

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The 2009 Departmental Awards CeremonyHonoring excellence

Caitlin Klein and Professor Ken Cooper happily reflect upon the many admira-ble award and scholarship recipients.

Planning for the future

Professor Rob Doggett and student Rebecca Huber talk about the upcom-ing Summer 2009 study-abroad course in Ireland.

Deep in discussion

Adam Kroopnick, Rachel Svenson, and Anna Mellace consider their successes over cake during the reception.

Rob Doggett and Richard Finkelstein congratulate an elementary school student winner at the 2009 Peace Poetry Contest award ceremony.

ZZ Packer

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Mary Kate Woods (’96), Anne Joynt (’02), and Janet Tenreiro (’78) met with English majors as part of an advisement initiative.

English Alumni Advise Current Majors

On Thursday, 23 May, the English Department hosted three successful English major alumni who spoke about how they made their career choices, found employment, and, generally, managed their lives after graduating with an English ma-jor. Anne Joynt (’02) (a lawyer with Buffalo’s Lipsitz and Ponterio), Mary Kate Woods (’96) (with CBS Entertainment in New York City), and Janet Tenreiro (’78) (a businesswoman and community leader in Canandaigua) held a roundtable discussion and met with students throughout the day.

Department Faculty Celebrate Black Authors

On 10 February, four members of the English faculty gave a joint reading of works by Black literary authors, including Derek Walcott, Ntozake Shange, Jamaica Kin-caid, and August Wilson. The reading was held in the College Union's Kinetic Gallery, where the Anthony Barboza exhibit, The Soul of Black Genius, was on display.

Pictured, clockwise from the right: Professor Graham Drake, Professor Tom Green-field, Professor Kristen Gentry, and Professor Beth McCoy. (Photos by Christine Cusano.)

See http://mlk.geneseo.edu/celebratingblackauthors.htm for more information.

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Geneseo Students Present at Annual Sigma Tau Delta Conference in St. LouisFour English majors presented critical and creative work at Sigma Tau Delta’s 2010 International Conference, held in St. Louis, Missouri, on 17-20 March. Sigma Tau Delta is the undergraduate honor society for English majors. Two creative writing students read from their fiction: Caitlin Portch (“The Usefulness of Scarves”) and Eleanor Bryan (“Brother Keep-ing”). Abby Mayer read her critical piece, “Life Shaped: Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom,” and Caitlin Klein presented “The Fractilized Nature of Percival Everett’s Erasure and Its Social Implication.” Their travel to the con-ference was made possible in part by undergraduate research grants.

Photos below, clockwise from the top left: Near the Gateway Arch and art museum; Caitlin Klein reads from her paper; a group picture on the streets of St. Louis; Elle Bryan at her panel; walking back to the conference hotel; Caitlin Portch at the podium. All photos courtesy of Abby Mayer.

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Join the English Alumni Facebook GroupThe English Department invites all recent graduates and former students to join our alumni Facebook group. Members of the larger departmental community may use the group page to mark recent achievements, ask questions, note Gene-seo events, and generally keep in touch.

Several college departments, including Physics, History, and Sociology, maintain similar Facebook groups. The English

alumni group promises to be one of the largest of these efforts. In its first day, almost one hundred alumni joined the group.

To find the group, enter “SUNY Gene-seo English Department Alumni” into the Facebook search box. If you have al-ready joined us on-line, please invite your former Geneseo colleagues.

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2009 Departmental

Undergraduate

Writing Awards

The John H. Parry Award in Critical EssayFirst Place, Patrick Morgan

Second PlaceMathé Kamsutchom

Third PlaceWilliam Porter2009 Departmental

Undergraduate

Writing AwardsThe Lucy Harmon Award in FictionFirst Place, Eleanor Bryan

Second PlaceMeghan Pipe

Third PlaceJillian Capewell

2009 Departmental

Undergraduate

Writing AwardsThe Mary A. Thomas Award in PoetryFirst Place, Caroline Povinelli

Second PlaceJenna Geiser

Third PlaceAndrea Colasanto

2009 Departmental

Undergraduate

Writing Awards

The Creative Non-Fiction AwardFirst Place, Danielle Hunt

Second PlaceEleanor S. Bryan

Third PlaceEthan Waddell

2009 Departmental

Undergraduate

Writing Awards

The Jerome de Romanet Award in African-American LiteratureFirst Place, Rebecca Huben

Second PlaceEthan Waddell

Third PlaceWilliam Porter

Recently in print

Romantic Autobiography in EnglandEd. Dr. Eugene Stelzig, Distinguished Teaching Professor. Ashgate, 2009.

This collec-tion pre-sents twelve essays on the devel-opment of autobiog-raphy as a distinct genre dur-ing the 19th cen-tury. Di-

vided into three sections—women's life writing, male self-fashioning, and “genres and modes”—the volume deals with such authors as Dorothy Word-sworth, Gertrude Stein, William Word-sworth, Mary Shelley, Thomas de Quincey, Mary Hays, Joseph Severn, Mary Robinson, and Ned Ludd.

As one reviewer writes, “The essays in this collection are consistently fresh and original in their treatments of an extraordinary range of forms of auto-biographical practice.”

The alumni Facebook group proves to be popular.

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NBC’s Today Show Features Professor Maria Lima

Jenna Wolfe, the co-anchor of NBC's Sunday edition of "Today" and former Geneseo student, visited Professor Maria Lima's ENGL170, The Practice of Criticism, classroom as part of a larger videotaped segment that aired nationally on 27 September 2009.

According to a college press release, Wolfe attended Geneseo from 1992-94 but finished her degree at SUNY Bing-hamton. She spent much of her time at Binghamton away from campus, how-ever, doing internships at local television stations and decided that Geneseo more closely represented her true on-campus college experience.

"I have wonderful memories of Gene-seo," she said. "What I learned here definitely helped me get where I am. Learning how to think critically and write have helped me in ways I didn't antici-

pate." In particular, Wolfe took several classes with Dr. Lima, including the Prac-tice of Criticism in 1994.

The "Today" Sunday co-anchor and Weekday correspondent returned to campus during the 2009 Fall Semester's third week of classes. For her broadcast, Wolfe and the NBC cameras re-corded a "surprise" visit to Lima's class in Welles Hall. Wolfe noted that Lima was "my toughest profes-sor, but also my most in-fluential."

Addressing the ENGL170 students, the television personality testified that "a lot of people can get through school and never say they're using what they learned in school in their everyday life--"

"Are you listening?" interjected Lima, waving her finger at the class.

"--I can honestly say," Wolfe continued, "that a day doesn't go by that I don't go back to some of the fundamentals of writing and of being creative and think-ing outside the box, and thinking of dif-ferent approaches to write things."

More information about Jenna Wolfe can be found on her wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenna_Wolfe.

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Maria Lima on “Today”