June 2022

Thursday, June 9, 2022Dear Colleagues,I hope your summer is off to a good start. I’d like to share recent accomplishments of our faculty and students.  Our students have done amazing things in recent days, which should come as no surprise to anyone. Thank you for the outstanding teaching and mentoring you provide to our students to help make these achievements possible.  The report below comes from Balaka Basu, who attended the Children’s Literature Association Conference in Atlanta last weekend, where she served as an excellent mentor to our graduate students, going to their presentations and introducing them to members of the association.  Also, as an Associate Editor of the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, she helped the main Editor identify and reach out to potential contributors to the Quarterly.From Balaka: “Concerning our MA students, Julia Barrier attended to meet with journal editors and to get a feel for the experience in preparation for the three conferences she will present at in the upcoming academic year; Kari Case presented her paper, “Nature as Character” in the panel, Navigations of Space, Place, and Self for Young People;and Holly Buescher presented, “Queer Ecology in Series Fiction: Challenging the Conservation/Destruction Binary” for the panel on Queer Ecologies. I was able to watch both these well attended panels (and hear the great comments and questions they each got) but unfortunately Holly’s was scheduled against Dr. Ralf Thiede‘s paper, “The Science behind Here-and-Now, Town-and-Country for the panel, Radical Ideas: Community, Education, and Agency. I should mention that when Dr. Thiede first began working in children’s literature, very few people were applying cognitive studies to the field, and now we’re so excited that it has become a thriving part of the discipline! Dr. Maya Socolovsky presented “Re-Branding the Dreamer: Commodification, Storytelling and Art in Alberto Ledesma’s YA Memoir, Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer: Undocumented Vignettes from a Pre-American Life” at the panel Dreams, Reality, and Action: Refugees and Immigration in Young People’s Texts, which our MA students told me they found her masterful, compelling, and inspiring. Dr. Mark West, as usual, utterly charmed his audience with “The Healing Power of Liminal Spaces in African-American Children’s Literature” for the panel Wonders and Womanism in Black American Youth Literature. Meanwhile, a friend/former colleague of our department, Dr. Sarah Minslow, presented “The Forest Near the City in Children’s Literature of Atrocity” for the panel Trauma, Atrocity and Agency in Youth Literature and a student she sponsored won this year’s Carol Gay Award, given to a college undergraduate for an outstanding paper which contributes to the field of children’s literature. They all did so well! I think UNC Charlotte and the English department are lucky to be associated with them all.”Allison Hutchcraft gave a poetry reading at Chapter Two Art Gallery in Corea, Maine, and published an interview about her work in the EcoTheo Review.Lauryn Massenburg’s work “Love Bernie, Your Favorite Sister” has been selected for the 2022 issue of Aunt Chloe: A Journal of Artful Candor.Verso Woodford, who is finishing up her M.A. in children’s literature, will be in the Masters of Library Science program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fall.Cody Ward, who graduated in May with his M.A. in literature, will attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with full funding to earn a Ph.D. in southern literature. He received competitive offers from other doctoral programs, including Ole Miss, the University of South Carolina, and the University of Kentucky-Lexington.  Cody recently presented a paper at the Thomas Wolfe Conference in Asheville. He impressed the audience with his paper “From Commas to Cosmos: The Pervading Influence of Thomas Wolfe on Cormac McCarthy.” He delivered his paper to a large, diverse audience that included senior Wolfe and southern literature scholars, several fiction writers and poets, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a recent John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities winner, a few deans, and a vice-chancellor.  And there were lots of UNC-Chapel Hill graduates who were thrilled to learn that Cody would be attending their (and Thomas Wolfe’s) alma mater. He also met the staff of the North Carolina Collection at  UNC’s Wilson library. They promised to help Cody get whatever access he needed for his upcoming doctoral work. The theme of the conference was “Wolfe and the Writers Who Followed.” I presented a paper titled “The Skin Artist: Shades of Thomas Wolfe in the New South.” 

Congratulations to all!  I hope you have a wonderful and restorative summer.   

Best wishes,

Paula