English Club: Books & Brews / ENG 218 Poetry Reading

 

This Thursday at 5:30 pm in Albertus 369, English Club will be holding their last meeting of the year. We will be reviewing on this past semester and this past year, talking about ways that we can improve the club for next year.

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English Club Meets April 25

This Thursday, English Club will hold a meeting at 5:30pm in Albertus room 369. We will go over our final event for the semester, as well as our outcomes for our two past fundraisers. We will also be speaking of future events.

Hope to see you all there!

After our elections I figured that I should congratulate our new e-board for English Club for the 2019-2020 academic year. The e-board positions are as follows:

Treasurer: Gabrielle Martinez

Vice President: Karila Warner

President: Samantha Zimmerman

We are still looking for someone to be the secretary for the English Club, so if you are interested in what that entails, please send me an email!

Sam Zimmerman
English Club Vice President

Visiting Scholar: John Keene

Photo via MacArthur Foundation

John Keene: ‘Counternarratives’

7 pm April 24th
Carondelet Symposium, Lally Hall, 3rd Floor

We are delighted to host 2018 MacArthur fellow John Keene as our visiting scholar for the 2018-9 academic year. He will be speaking the evening after our department symposium (beginning at 9am in Midnight Eats). From the MacArthur Foundation press materials:

John Keene is a fiction writer exploring the ways in which historical narratives shape contemporary lives while simultaneously re-envisioning these narratives from the perspectives of those whose voices have been suppressed. Through innovations in language and form, he imbues with multifaceted subjectivities those who have been denied nuanced histories within the story of the Americas—primarily people of color and queer people—and exposes the social structures that confine, enslave, or destroy them.

His first book, Annotations (1995), is simultaneously a semi-autobiographical novel chronicling the coming of age of a black, queer, middle-class child in the 1970s and ‘80s in St. Louis and a collection of essays about the ideological, philosophical, and political contexts that define his struggle to achieve agency. In the story collection Counternarratives (2015), Keene reimagines moments, both real and fictional, from the history of the Americas, adopting the language and literary forms of the time periods in which his characters live—from seventeenth-century epistolary novels to Modernist and post-modernist experiments with stream of consciousness.  One story, “Gloss on a History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic,” is framed as an excerpt from a history book. As the text unfolds, it is revealed that what at first appears to be a footnote about the disappearance of a convent school in early nineteenth-century Kentucky is in fact the eyewitness account of Carmel, an enslaved girl who achieves literacy and a literary voice within the space of the work. “A Letter on the Trials of the Counterreformation in New Lisbon,” also narrated by an enslaved person, turns a letter between missionary priests into an assertion of queer African presence in the New World. In “Rivers,” Keene imagines two meetings between an older Huckleberry Finn and a now-free Jim; he endows Jim with a voice and consciousness, thereby presenting Tom Sawyer and Huck from a powerful new perspective that extends and transforms Twain’s original novels.

In his fiction and in a number of other projects spanning translation, poetry, and cultural criticism, Keene is correcting and enlarging our distorted, partial views of American history and culture, and challenging his readers to question received understandings of our past.

BIOGRAPHY

John Keene received an A.B. (1987) from Harvard University and an M.F.A. (1997) from New York University. Before joining the faculty at Rutgers University-Newark, where he is currently professor and chair of the Department of African American and African Studies and a professor in the Department of English, he taught at Brown University and Northwestern University, among other institutions. He was a member of the Dark Room Collective and is a graduate fellow of Cave Canem. In addition to his novels, he has published two collaborative volumes of poetry, Seismosis (2006) and GRIND (2016), a chapbook of poems, Playland (2016), and translated Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer, from Portuguese. His writing has appeared in TriQuarterly, the Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares, among other journals.

The Art of the Essay’s Virtual Visiting Author

Over at the CSR Chronicle a piece on English professor Jennifer Marlow inviting an author for a virtual visit with students:

Author Lacy M. Johnson, who wrote “The Reckonings,” which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, virtually visited Wednesday with English 317-The Art of Essay class via Skype, for a Q&A session.

College of Saint Rose professor, Jennifer Marlow, invited Johnson to offer insights to her student writers. “Since she is a writing teacher herself, I know that she will be able to converse with and offer practical advice to student writers,” said Marlow.

Read the rest here.

ENG 252: Here’s to the first-generation college students!

By Amanda Famigletti

College is a scary phase in life. It consists of parents cosigning on loans you’ll be paying until you’re 35. Maybe stepping away from your hometown to a big city at 18. And everyone’s favorite part of the transition, a non-virtual game of Tetris to figure out how to fit every last article of clothing, piece of furniture and miscellaneous items to squeeze into a 10 x 10 home for the next year. It’s the biggest academic endeavor you have yet to face, and it’s far from easy.

However, there is a certain population of students in particular that I’d like to shout out to. It’s the first-generation students.

The term can be simply defined as an undergraduate whose parents did not attend university. Research suggests that first-generation college students differ in the sense of their counterparts such that they are typically not as active in extracurricular activities, and can even be less academically prepared. This ties to less satisfaction in college, and without academic or social support, could potentially drop out of college. However, the amount of first-generation college students enrolled in college is rapidly increasing, and this is something we should be proud of.

I am saying this because I too am a first-generation college student, and it makes me so incredibly proud to be one because it shows that there is hope despite one’s circumstances. I encourage everyone who is in the same shoes as me to find the courage to seek out help from professors. Your academic success is most important to them and they are always there to help.

Try and create a social circle as well. Keep up with information about new clubs that may interest you, join a study group, anything that you feel may help. These are key components to your academic success.

I would never say it is easy, but it is worth it. Take a step back and look at where

you are right now. You’re probably studying for your upcoming midterm, chugging coffee late at night to write your term paper or watching Netflix for some down time. Regardless, you are on the path to where you need to be and will get there soon. So, take a deep breath, pat yourself on the back and be proud to be a first-generation college student.

For additional information, here is a blog post from Psychology Today called “What We

Can Learn from First-Generation College Students” by Annie Murphy Paul.

About the writer:  Amanda Famigletti is a senior at the College of Saint Rose, currently studying Psychology.

[The students in ENG 252 are writing blog posts highlighting campus and community events and opportunities.]

ENG 252: COMpass Newsletter

COMpass Newsletter:
Charting your Path – COMING SOON!

Saint Rose Communications Department is coming out with a newsletter. The communications department doesn’t have any formal tactics or strategy in place to show the development or accomplishments of the communications department, its students, or its alumni. The opportunity the communication department newsletter will bring is engagement from current students and alumni and a marketing tool to get new students wanting and researching Saint Rose. The newsletter will include department news, alumni stories, student and faculty spotlight, interns, things trending in the communication field, clubs in the communication department, and class notes. The newsletter will be published once every semester and subjected to change if needed. The first newsletter will be completed by the end of this semester, Spring 2019.

Five Saint Rose students have taken on the initiated becoming the first to publish a communication newsletter with the help of Professor Mark Congdon. The students are Breanne Colon, Nina Laluz-Rivera, Daria Lee, Tamia McDonald, and Skylar Wolfe. The team as of now are looking for writers. If you are interested in building a professional portfolio, networking, and making a difference in the Saint Rose community write for COMpass Newsletter. If you are interested in writing for the COMpass newsletter please contact COMpassNewsletter@gmail.com.

The COMpass newsletter team will start promoting via social after spring break, March 13th. PLEASE BE ON THE LOOK OUT! They’ll be creating different social media pages to spread content and information. The first post will be attached to the Saint Rose Communication Department Facebook page to inform everyone about their new social media pages.

As of now if you have any questions, please contact COMpassNewsletter@gmail.com or any of the five students publishers or Mark Congdon.

About the Writer: My name is Tamia McDonald from Queens, NY. Currently a senior at Saint Rose majoring in business with a concentration in sports management and a minor in communication with a concentration in PR & Advertising. I am one of the publishers of the COMpass Newsletter. If you would like to know more you can email me at mcdonaldt516@strose.edu and/or add me on LinkedIn.

[The students in ENG 252 are writing blog posts highlighting campus and community events and opportunities.]