The (Black Privilege/Penguin Random House), a debut memoir from Grammy-winning artist 2 Chainz cowritten with 51猎奇 professor and poet Derrick Harriell, debuted at number 10 on the Times’ Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction Bestseller list in March 2026.
Kim Rouse, who is pursuing an MA in English with a creative writing focus, recently won a聽 from the Southeast Wisconsin Festival of Books. Congratuations, Kim!
Su Cho (PhD, 2021) and Canese Jarboe (PhD, 2024), have both been named 2025 NEA Fellows in Poetry and will receive grants of $25,000 each.
Cho will join Vanderbilt University’s MFA program as an assistant professor in fall 2025; Jarboe published their collection Sissy (Garden-Door Press) in 2024 and was also a 2024 Tallgrass Artist-in-Residence.
The National Endowment for the Arts website explains that “[t]hese fellowships represent the agency’s most direct investment in American creativity. The goal of the fellowships program is to encourage the production of new work and allow writers the time and means to write.”
Congratulations Su and Canese!
Susan Kerns, Ph.D. in Media, Cinema, and Digital Studies at 51猎奇, accomplished filmmaker, and scholar, Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Chicago Feminist Film Festival, and recent Professor and Associate Provost for Faculty Research and Development at Columbia University, has been named executive director of Milwaukee Film.
Poetry faculty emerita and alumna聽Brenda C谩rdenas聽was named聽聽in December, 2024. Her two-year term starts January 15, 2025.聽 Her books include聽Trace聽(Red Hen Press) and聽Boomerang聽(Bilingual Press). In addition, she is the author or co-author of three chapbooks:聽Bread of the Earth/The Last Colors, Achiote Seeds/Semillas de Achiote, and聽From the Tongues of Brick and Stone.聽Congratulations, Brenda!
Professor Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece was interviewed in聽Film Quarterly聽to discuss her latest book,聽Movies Under the Influence.
Media, cinema, and digital studies PhD student David Kocik was a 2024 Research Fellow at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.聽
Media, cinema, and digital studies PhD student Jessica Hoover is the recipient of a James and Sylvia Thayer Research Fellowship from the UCLA Library Special Collections. Jess talks about her research into women TV comedy-variety performers like Carol Burnett and聽.
Creative Writing program alum Dr. Ching-In Chen (PhD, 2015) recently won a $50,000 fellowship from the . The award is part of a program that, in the words of the Academy, honors “laureates鈥� literary excellence while enabling them to undertake meaningful and innovative projects that enrich the lives of community members, including youth, through responsive and interactive poetry activities.” Dr. Chen was named poet laureate of Redmond, Washington in 2024 and teaches at the University of Washington-Bothell. Supported by the fellowship, Dr. Chen plans to “work with organizations that are part of the local food ecosystem to sponsor a community youth poetry gathering, with a focus on transgender, nonbinary, intersex, and gender-expansive poets. Dr. Chen will also solicit work from global poets through other UNESCO Cities of Literature and Gastronomy to share at these gatherings, and will print and distribute poetry postcards featuring these poems alongside the poems by local poets.
A special visitor made an appearance at the last department meeting of the semester: congratulations to Professor Lane Hall, current English Department Chair, who retires from 51猎奇 in August 2024, and our other retiring faculty members.
