An Occasional Broadsheet
William G. Cooper, Jr., Honors Program in English, UALR
July 2006
COOPER STIPENDS FOR 2006/2007
Congratulations to the following students who have been awarded competitive Cooper stipends for this academic year:
2nd-year students: Sarah Burns, Denies Gaskins, Jeaney Knox, Vicki Malpass
1st-year students: Josh Bradley, Richard Cockrell, Keri Coffman, Ciara Gallion, Cortney Golden, Ben Hall, Angelique Jackson, Nikki Killingsworth, Jeff Miller, Meredith Moseley, Amoja Sumler, Meghan Whitfield
COOPER SEMINAR FOR FALL 2006
Please note that the Cooper seminar on Hemingway and Faulkner that Dr. Dennis Vannatta was going to teach has been cancelled owing to Dr. Vannatta's ill health. He will be recovering from surgery during the fall semester, but he will be back in spring 2007.
The new Cooper seminar for fall 2006 is W. B. Yeats: His Life and Work, which will be taught by Dr. Russell Murphy. It will meet Monday & Wednesday 1:40 to 2:55 pm in Ross Hall 118 (the same time as the previous seminar topic). Please contact Dr. Murphy for more information at remurphy@ualr.edu.
COOPER SPEAKER FOR FALL 2006: JOY HARJO
So far, there is only one Cooper speaker for fall 2006, but she is world famous so you won't want to miss her.
The Cooper Program is co-sponsoring a public reading/lecture by poet, artist, screenwriter, and musician Joy Harjo, a member of the Muskogee tribe, at 5:30 pm on Friday 20 October 2006 in Donaghey Student Center Meeting Room A. Free and open to the public.
Joy Harjo's accomplishments and publications are almost too numerous to mention. Her most recent books are How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2001 (Norton, 2002) and A Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales (Norton, 2001). She founded the band Poetic Justice that combines music with poetry, and she has written many screenplays including the script A Thousand Roads (2005), made for the National Museum of the American Indian. This script won the 2005 Writer of the Year Award: Film Script from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers. Her book In Mad Love and War (1990) won the National Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. She claims as some of her literary influences Leslie Marmon Silko, Simon Ortiz, and Galway Kinnell. For more information, see her official website at http://www.hanksville.org/storytellers/joy/.
COOPER SEMINAR & SPEAKER FOR SPRING 2007
Dr. Jim Levernier will teach his popular Cooper seminar the Alternative American Canon. It will meet on Thursday from 12:15 to 2:55, place TBA. In connection with this seminar, he will host a public lecture and class visit by Dr. Lorrayne Carroll, Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine, author of Rhetorical Drag: Gender Impersonation, Captivity, and the Writing of History (forthcoming, Kent State University Press) and of many articles on early American topics and on pedagogy.
STUDENT NEWS
- RAIN STORY will be attending the University of New Mexico this fall to do graduate work in Spanish.
- VIRGINIA WYETH will be teaching Pre-AP & regular English to 9th graders at Central High School in the "Academy."
- CRAIG PARKER is starting his second year in the PhD Program at Fayetteville. Not only is he doing very well in his course of study, he is particularly enjoying the teaching he does as a graduate assistant. But he chafes that many students in his literature courses are so literal-minded, asking, "Okay, but what really happens?" when he'd like the questions to be about the way language conveys meaning beyond narrative.
- JUSTIN ELWOOD has recently finished an MFA in English at Fayetteville.
NEW FACULTY MEMBER
Please welcome Dr. Brad Minnick to
the Department. His areas of expertise
are English/Secondary Education,
rhetorical theory, and young adult
literature.
OTHER NOTABLE EVENTS
The annual Sequoyah Research Center Symposium on Native American history, literature, journalism, and preservation runs Thursday 19 to 21 October. Hear indigenous authors, scholars, leaders, activists, and archivists from all over the USA and elsewhere. Free and open to the public. For information and the conference program, go to http://www.anpa.ualr.edu
COOPER 10TH ANNIVERSARY
Spring 2007 marks the 10th anniversary
of the first Cooper students that
graduated from the Program. I am
going to put together a celebratory
booklet of information about the
Program, its graduates and
activities. If you have any information
about what past Cooper graduates are
doing now, I'd be very glad to receive it
as well as other suggestions for the
booklet. The Program will also
organize a special anniversary event.
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