An Evening with Poets

Join us next Wednesday evening for some great poetry!

Poets Janna Knittel, Stanley Kusunoki, Sagirah Shahid, and Bryan Thao Worra will present their poetry in an evening of sharing the spoken word. Time for questions and answers will be provided at the end of the session.

This is such a cool opportunity and… it’s virtual!!! Sometimes, COVID brings about great opportunities. This is one of them!

If you’re interested in joining us, visit this website to sign up and reserve your spot!


Poet’s Bios-

Janna Knittel lives in Minnesota but still calls the Pacific Northwest “home.” Janna has published a chapbook, Fish & Wild Life (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and has poems published or forthcoming in Between These Shores Literary and Arts Annual, BluelineCottonwoodUp North LitNorth Dakota QuarterlySplit Rock ReviewCold Mountain ReviewWhale Road Review, The Wild Word, and Waters Deep: A Great Lakes Anthology. Recognition includes 2021 and 2019 grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Stanley Kusunoki is the author of three collections of poetry; 180 Days, Reflections and Observations of a TeacherItems in the News, both published by North Star Press of St. Cloud, and Shelter in Place—Poems in a Time of COVID-19, (Polaris Press, an imprint of North Star Press). He has taught creative writing to young people through programs at The Loft, Asian American Renaissance, Intermedia Arts, and S.A.S.E., The Write Place. He was the recipient of a Loft “Asian Inroads” mentorship, and was awarded a MN State Arts board “Cultural Collaboration” grant to create, write and perform “Beringia-The Land Bridge Project” with Ojibwe performance poet, Jamison Mahto at Intermedia Arts. He is the host/curator of the Bridges reading series at Next Chapter Booksellers in St. Paul. Kusunoki most recently was the High Potential Coordinator at Red Oak Elementary School in Shakopee. He lives in St. Paul with his wife, Claudia Daly.

Sagirah Shahid is an African American Muslim poet, educator, and performance artist from Minneapolis. Sagirah has received awards, residencies, and fellowships from the Loft Literary Center, Wisdom Ways, the Twin Cities Media Alliance, and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. Her debut collection of poetry “Surveillance of Joy” is forthcoming from Half Mystic Press in April 2021.

Bryan Thao Worra is the Lao Minnesotan Poet Laureate and the author of 10+ books, recently appointed by Governor Dayton to the state Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans to represent the Lao community. He holds over 20 national and international awards for his writing and community leadership. This is his first reading in St. Cloud in over 15 years.

Brought to you by the Department of English and the College of Liberal Arts.

Severe Weather Awareness Week

It’s severe weather awareness week!

In honor of the week, I compiled a list of some good reads about weather! Check out some of these novels/stories!

My top book about weather is Winterdance by Gary Paulsen! The book isn’t about weather, necessarily, but it does have aspects of bad weather throughout the story. It’s a nonfiction memoir about Gary’s run in the Iditarod dogsled race in Alaska. The book is filled with humor, horror, and haphazard attempts to do things right. You will find yourself laughing, crying, and everything in between! It’s not one of his common books, but it’s definitely one of his best!

One of my favorite short stories about weather is “To Build a Fire” by Jack London. The unnamed narrator discovers what true cold really means when he finds himself trying to survive the arctic cold. When the termometer reads “75 degrees below 0 (fahrenheit),” things get dangerous!

Poetry is also a great place to find stories about severe weather! Check out Emily Dickenson’s A Thunderstorm, a gripping piece of art!

The last text I’d like to cover is a song, called “The Thunder Rolls” by Garth Brooks. Sometimes, during sever weather awareness week, we just need to sit down and enjoy a good song about severe weather! I like this song particularly because of the use of instrumentation to convey the thunder! Of course, this song could also be a metaphor, but I like to think of the song as purely just a celebration of weather!

What are your favorite texts about severe weather? These are just four of my favorites, but there are so many other good ones out there!

 

Alum Donella Westphal featured in STC Times

Covid has brought about many hardships for many people. Some of our most heavily impacted agencies are small business owners, especially small restaurant owners.

Alum Donella Westphal is not exemption to these hardships. She is the owner of Jule’s Bistro, right down the street from SCSU. If you’re interested in reading more about her bistro, check out this blog post.

Donella states in the article:

“When people ask me how we got through the past year, I tell them with a little duct tape, some paper clips,” she said. “And a lot of it was brutal and ugly at times, but it was also really quite beautiful. And I learned a few things about small business along the way.” 

To read more about Donella’s recently feature, check out the article here!

April Fools’ Day

Today is April Fools’ Day.

Which got me thinking:

  • Where did April Fools’ Day come from?
  • How did we get to this point, of putting vaseline on doorknobs, tape on the bottom of our digital mice, etc?
  • What is the purpose of this day?

Apparently, April Fools’ Day has been around since 1700, when English pranksters starting playing practical jokes on each other.

Prior to this, the history of the day is actually unclear. Some historians think it may date back to 1582, but that is just speculation.

Throughout the 18th century, the tradition became a two-day event in Scotland where people would go on phony errands and participate in many other prank-type activities.

For more information, check out this short explanation on History.com! (All information is taken from this source.)

Jestine Ware Upcoming Publication

We love when alumni produce publications!

One of our alums, Jestine Ware, has been terribly busy since she left our Rhetoric and Writing program. She’s worked as an editor for the company that published Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls and works as both a freelance and a full-time editor for small publishers.

According to her website, she has a publication coming out this fall, Fall 2021, titled Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls 100 Tales of Black Girl Magic. I don’t know about you, but to me, this looks like a great read!

Jestine is someone to watch! She’s doing some really great things and I’m confident that she’ll continue to produce greatness!

Upcoming Events!

We have some really exciting upcoming events! Check them out and mark your calendars!


Wednesday, March 17, 4:00–, Danez Smith reading

Here’s link to info and registration: https://huskiesconnect.stcloudstate.edu/event/6941024

 

Bio: Danez Smith is a Black, Queer, Poz writer & performer from St. Paul, MN. Danez is the author of “Don’t Call Us Dead” (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award, and “[insert] boy” (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. Danez is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and is the co-host of VS with Franny Choi, a podcast sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and Postloudness. Danez’s third collection, “Homie”, was published by Graywolf in January 2020.


Thursday, March 18th, 4:00 – 5:15, Sheila O’Connor will be joining Shannon Olson’s Advanced Fiction class to discuss Evidence of V, her Minnesota Book Award-winning novel. I’ll open this up to students in the department; she was supposed to visit in person last spring but that had to be cancelled.


Wednesday, March 31st, Sheila returns to meet with Harvest to discuss her role as fiction editor for the Water-Stone Review, housed at Hamline. 4:00 – 4:50. That will be open to English students.

https://waterstonereview.com


TBA – A Wednesday at 4:00, Meghan Maloney-Vinz visit to Harvest editorial group; that would be open to students in English as well. Meghan is the general manager for Water-Stone, and she also manages Hamline’s undergraduate national online journal, Runestone, which re-opens its submissions window in April, I think:  https://runestonejournal.com


Wednesday, April 12, 7:00-8:15 Celebrate National Poetry Month with readings by Four Poets, made possible by a grant from the Minnesota Arts Board

Artist Bios

Janna Knittel lives in Minnesota but still calls the Pacific Northwest “home.” Janna has published a chapbook, Fish & Wild Life (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and has poems published or forthcoming in Between These Shores Literary and Arts Annual, BluelineCottonwoodUp North LitNorth Dakota QuarterlySplit Rock ReviewCold Mountain ReviewWhale Road Review, The Wild Word, and Waters Deep: A Great Lakes Anthology. Recognition includes 2021 and 2019 grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Stanley Kusunoki is the author of three collections of poetry; 180 Days, Reflections and Observations of a TeacherItems in the News, both published by North Star Press of St. Cloud, and Shelter in Place—Poems in a Time of COVID-19, (Polaris Press, an imprint of North Star Press). He has taught creative writing to young people through programs at The Loft, Asian American Renaissance, Intermedia Arts, and S.A.S.E., The Write Place. He was the recipient of a Loft “Asian Inroads” mentorship, and was awarded a MN State Arts board “Cultural Collaboration” grant to create, write and perform “Beringia-The Land Bridge Project” with Ojibwe performance poet, Jamison Mahto at Intermedia Arts. He is the host/curator of the Bridges reading series at Next Chapter Booksellers in St. Paul. Kusunoki most recently was the High Potential Coordinator at Red Oak Elementary School in Shakopee. He lives in St. Paul with his wife, Claudia Daly.

Sagirah Shahid is an African American Muslim poet, educator, and performance artist from Minneapolis. Sagirah has received awards, residencies, and fellowships from the Loft Literary Center, Wisdom Ways, the Twin Cities Media Alliance, and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. Her debut collection of poetry “Surveillance of Joy” is forthcoming from Half Mystic Press in April 2021.

 Bryan Thao Worra is the Lao Minnesotan Poet Laureate and the author of 10+ books, recently appointed by Governor Dayton to the state Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans to represent the Lao community. He holds over 20 national and international awards for his writing and community leadership. This is his first reading in St. Cloud in over 15 years.

 


Wednesday, April 21st, Harvest Online Release Party, 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. 

We are printing a limited number this year and will have to sort out distribution when they’re ready.

Join us! for “Infinitum: An Afrofuturist Tale”

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

The English Department is delighted to welcome award-winning illustrator, concept designer, cartoonist, and animator, Tim Fielder for a Virtual Fireside Chat (via ZOOM) on February 10 from 12:30-1:30 PM where we will be discussing his work, Afrofuturism, and his latest, best-selling graphic novel, Infinitum: An Afrofuturist Tale.

 Mr. Fielder is an Illustrator, concept designer, cartoonist, and animator who has worked over the years in the storyboarding, film visual development, gaming, comics, and animation industries for clients as varied as Marvel Comics (‘Dr Dre: Man With A Cold, Cold Heart’), The Village Voice, Tri-Star Pictures (‘The Mothership Connection’), to Ubisoft Entertainment (‘Batman: Vengeance).

This virtual event will include a moderated Q&A session with Fielder on Wednesday, February 10 from 1230-130 PM, in conjunction with the Introduction to English Studies Course (ENGL300). This will be among the first events where Fielder discusses, in-depth for an academic audience, his new graphic novel, Infinitum: An Afrofuturist Tale, available now through Harper Collins press.

Infinitum is steeped in Afrodiasporic experience and presents a unique cosmic experience, addressing issues of racism, classism, gender inequity, the encroachment of technology, and the spiritual cost of war, while exposing the history behind ancient mysteries.

If you would like to attend this Free Event or if you have any questions, please RSVP to mbdando@stcloudstate.edu.

We hope that you’ll be able to join us for what is sure to be a wonderful talk.

Sincerely,

Michael B. Dando

Interested in Working for SCSU?!

Interested in working for SCSU this summer? Great opportunities and GREAT people to work with! We highly encourage you to consider working for SCSU this summer.

As someone who works on campus this year, I can say this is one of the best jobs I’ve had. Everyone on staff is so helpful and kind; it’s truly a pleasure to work here! I personally highly recommend working for SCSU.

Applications are due February 12th. Apply here and email advising@stcloudstate.edu if you have more questions.

From History to English

We have so many amazing Graduate Assistants in our department! Some teach, some do other things, and some work for the Write Place, our SCSU Writing Center designed to help students of all levels improve their writing!

Read below, an experience from one of our GAs working in the Write Place!

I have been a history student at St. Cloud for a few years and I loved my experience so much that now I am a history graduate student! One of my history professors thought I might be a good fit to be a graduate assistant with the English Department.  I was hesitant at first, but after talking with people in the English Department, especially Tim in The Write Place, I thought I could make it work.  Once the semester began and I started meeting with students, I realized how helpful these sessions could be for the student and for myself.  I think I have learned a lot working with the English Department this semester! I look forward to working more with the other coaches and English Department staff as I continue to work on my master’s.  I will always love my History Department relationships, but I am so happy to develop new relationships with the English Department as well!

–Jennifer Sonterre


For more information about the Write Place, visit their website or follow them on Twitter and Facebook!

From the SCSU Write Place website:

“The St. Cloud State writing centers provide free services to support any of the writing and reading you do in and outside of school. We work with writers from all levels of experience and ability at any stage in the writing process. Our purpose is to help you become a more effective, versatile, and confident communicator. 

Most students who visit the writing center schedule appointments to discuss papers that they’re writing for their classes. Some want help getting started. Some have begun writing and are ready to discuss next steps. Some bring drafts that are nearly finished and need help with documenting sources and fine-tuning the language. 

The graduate and undergraduate writing coaches on our staff have been trained to provide this kind of guidance, and they will collaborate with you in making many other kinds of writing decisions.”

This semester, the Write Place offers both in-person and online consultation! Consider checking them out!

Ettien Koffi, Ph.D. – Newest Book

Check out this message from one of our faculty members!


Happy New Year!   I have some good news to share with you.  My book: Relevant Acoustic Phonetics of L2 English: Focus on Intelligibility has been published by CRC Press, the Science Publishing Imprint of Routledge.

 

From the back of the book:

Intelligibility is the ultimate goal of human communication. However, measuring it objectively remained elusive until the 1940s when physicist Harvey Fletcher pioneered a psychoacoustic methodology for doing so. Another physicist, von Bekesy, demonstrated clinically that Fletcher’s theory of Critical Bands was anchored in anatomical and auditory reality. Fletcher’s and Bekesy’s approach to intelligibility has revolutionized contemporary understanding of the processes involved in encoding and decoding speech signals. Their insights are applied in this book to account for the intelligibility of the pronunciation of 67 non-native speakers from the following language backgrounds –10 Arabic, 10 Japanese, 10 Korean, 10 Mandarin, 11 Serbian and Croatian “the Slavic Group,” 6 Somali, and 10 Spanish speakers who read the Speech Accent Archive elicitation paragraph. Their pronunciation is analyzed instrumentally and compared and contrasted with that of 10 native speakers of General American English (GAE) who read the same paragraph. The data-driven intelligibility analyses proposed in this book help answer the following questions – Can L2 speakers of English whose native language lacks a segment/segments or a suprasegment/ suprasegments manage to produce it/them intelligibly? If they cannot, what segments or suprasegments do they use to substitute for it/them? Do the compensatory strategies used interfere with intelligibility?

The findings reported in this book are based on nearly 12,000 measured speech tokens produced by all the participants. This includes some 2,000 vowels, more than 500 stop consonants, over 3,000 fricatives, nearly 1,200 nasals, about 1,500 approximants, over 1,200 syllables onsets, as many as 800 syllable codas, more than 1,600 measurement of F0/pitch, and duration measurements of no fewer than 539 disyllabic words. These measurements are in keeping with Baken and Orlikoff (2000:3) and in accordance with widely accepted Just Noticeable Difference thresholds, and relative functional load calculations provided by Catforda (1987).

Ettien Koffi, Ph.D. linguistics, teaches at Saint Cloud State University, Minnesota. He is the author of four books and author/co-author of several dozen articles. His acoustic phonetic research is synergetic, encompassing L2 acoustic phonetics of English (Speech Intelligibility from the perspective of the Critical Band Theory), sociophonetics of Central Minnesota English, general acoustic phonetics of Anyi (West African language), acoustic phonetic feature extraction for application in Automatic Speech Recognition, Text-to-Speech, Voice Biometrics, and Intelligent Systems.