Student News Winter 2024

Oluwatoyosi Agbaakin’s poems are forthcoming in the following journals: Denver Quarterly, Epoch Magazine, Colorado Review, Transition Magazine, and Poetry Magazine. In 2023, he won the Key West Literary Fellowship, and was invited to read his work by the African Poetry Book Fund at the African Center in was New York City and Avid Poetry Reading Series, Avid Bookshop, Athens, GA.

Zack Anderson published four prose poems in Annulet: A Journal of Poetics. He presented a paper on Laura Riding titled "Spurious Mediumship: Translation Living and Dead" at the SAMLA conference in Atlanta. In his role as Graduate Editor at The Georgia Review, Anderson co-organized (with Sarah Shermyen) a graduate student symposium for Spotlight on the Arts, which took place at the Athenaeum on November 12.

In August, Emily Beckwith's first article, "Tessa Hadley and William Wordsworth: Literary Lineage and Patriarchal Legacy in The Past," was published in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. This year she also helped organize the Victorians Institute's annual conference. Additionally, she presented on teaching Victorian texts in the first-year writing classroom and acted in a staged reading of Sullivan's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the North American Victorian Studies Association conference. 

Colin Bishoff presented his paper "Wonderland as a Space of Mental Illness: American McGee's Alice and Madness Returns" at the Midwest Popular Cultural Association regional conference and was awarded one of four Gary Burns travel grants. His paper "All of Them Witches: Genre Revisionism and Authorship in Roman Polanski's Macbeth" will be presented to the Shakespeare on Television and Film panel at the 2024 national Pop Cultural Association / American Popular Culture (PCA/ACA) conference. 

David Lumpkin’s short story “The Dying Person,” written for Professor Aruni Kashyap’s Fall 2022 Creative Writing seminar, appeared in the Summer 2023 Issue of STORY Magazine. His essay "Undetermined Circumstances," which appeared in the Fall 2022 edition of The Oxford American, was selected as one of twelve finalists (out of more than 1200 submissions) for the 2023 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction and Essay Contest.

Kelsey McQueen was selected to receive a 2023-2024 Jane Mulkey Green and Rufus King Green Graduate Fellowship from the University's Franklin College.

Sayantika Mandal organized and moderated a panel titled “Defying Tradition in Lyric Flash Creative Nonfiction” at the annual AWP 2023 conference in Seattle, and she was the only graduate student from UGA who had a panel accepted at the conference. Additionally, she was selected for the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. In an international essay contest organized by Craft Literary and judged by award-winning writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Mandal’s essay found an “honorable mention.”

Erin O'Keefe’s essay “Though few can reason, all mankind can feel”: Hannah More’s Rational and Emotionally Authoritative Persuasion in “Slavery” has been accepted for publication in the upcoming annual volume of the Sigma Tau Delta Review, Journal of Critical Writing.

Ben Rutherford co-wrote a chapter (“Down in Strata: Stratigraphic Poetics and Feminist Literary Engagement in Brenda Hillman's Cascadia.”) with Gerald Maa about the poetry of Brenda Hillman and her experimental, feminist poetics of California for the Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics; and presented a companion piece to this chapter at the ASLE conference held in Portland, Oregon called “Hillman's Birds: Writing as Praxis in Brenda Hillman's Practical Water.”

Abhijit Sarmah was a finalist for 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Poetry Fellowship. It is considered one of the top poetry fellowships given to young poets based in the US by the Poetry Foundation. He also read original work as part of a distinguished panel at the 2023 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival, and presented a paper titled “Refusing to Move Beyond Biases: Racism in Hollywood and Earnest Gaines’ Of Love and Dust” at the 2023 Southeastern American Studies Association Conference. 

Sarah Shermyen published a peer-reviewed article in Studies in American Humor ("Reading Gertrude Stein for Pleasure: Finding the 'Mere Humor' in 'High Modernism'") and her review “The Porch: Meditations on the Edge of Nature” by Charlie Hailey is accepted for publication in The Georgia Review. She was also co-organizer of the graduate student symposium of Spotlight On the Arts 2023. 

Kaitlin Thurlow's painting, "Revision," was selected for the juried show, "Surface," on view at Athica: Athens Institute of Contemporary Art.  On December 1, Kaitlin presented the paper, "'End of Descriptive Passage': Sublime Encounters in Mercier and Camier" at the 8th Annual Samuel Beckett Society Conference. 

Hannah V Warren spent the 22/23 year in Germany as a Fulbright Fellow. She’s thrilled to share that her poetry collection Slaughterhouse for Old Wives' Tales will debut with Sundress Publications in January 2024. In the past year, she published poetry with Colorado Review, Southeast Review, Nimrod, Arkansas International, Seneca, and Pleiades, as well as English translations of German poet Alexandra Bernhardt's poetry with Action Books. She has forthcoming a critical article in Science Fiction Film and Television and a book chapter in Creatures in the Classroom: Teaching Environmental Creature Features. Hannah received the 2023 McAlexander Graduate Award in American Literature from the English Department, as well as the Appleby Doctoral Award. While in Germany, Hannah presented research on Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men at the Annual Conference of the German Association for American Studies in Rostock, and a creative and critical exploration of monstrosity at the University of Freiburg.

Christina Wood published two book reviews with Full Stop magazine (on Christine Lai's Landscapes and Xyta Maya Murray's God Went Like That) and The McNeese Review accepted her critical/craft essay "Craft as Contradiction: Truth and Fiction in the Work of Willa Cather" for publication in print in early 2024. She presented “Our Ambassadors to the Future: The Stories Time Capsules Tell,” at the Spotlight Ecologies Graduate Student Symposium alongside graduate students from English and Lamar Dodd.