A nice crowd filled the Hansen Student Center and was clearly taken with the performance, which featured DeVore, students Mike Whitfield and Shanna Cardea, and professors Bob Bray, Alison Sainsbury, Spencer Sauter (from Art), and Mike Theune.

Nathaniel Strauss (’10) will present his paper on Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, and Linda Martin (’09) will present her senior research honors project on consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s novels. STD colloquia are a great way to meet other majors and interact with professors in an informal setting.

Professor Terkla’s house is only a five-minute walk from campus. From Ames Library head east on Empire, cross Clinton, and turn left on White Place. The address is 18 White Place.

Sigma Tau Delta is the English honor society, but all English majors and minors are invited to attend.

Brown University’s Ivy Film Festival is calling for student screenplays for its latest competition. The Festival was created by students for students, exhibiting the works of young filmmakers from around the globe as well as guest speakers, panels, and workshops by industry professionals. Past guests include Oliver Stone, Tim Robbins, Adrian Brody, Martin Scorsese, and Jack Nicholson. Attracting crowds of thousands to Brown University’s campus, the Festival has emerged as the largest student-run film festival in the country.

IWU students are invited to enter the screenplay competition. While films are the focus of the Ivy Film Festival, they recognize screenwriting as an integral part of the filmmaking process. They have a myriad of events for screenwriters this year that will hopefully encourage many young writers, even those who have never submitted their work to a judged competition, to participate.

Students can electronically submit their screenplays for consideration in the 2010 screenplay competition until the final deadline of February 22, 2010, through Withoutabox.com.  A link to our Withoutabox.com account can be found on the Ivy Film Festival website. The screenplay competition is currently accepting both short-form (under 30 pages) and feature-length screenplays from undergraduate and graduate students. Submissions may be in any genre, and the winners will receive a cash prize. Additionally, outstanding work in Comedy, Drama, and other genres will be recognized.

During the festival (April 13-18) there will be a reading of the winning screenplays and we will be hosting forums with screenwriters currently working in the industry. All finalists will be notified and invited as VIP guests to the festival. They will provide housing, meals, tickets to film screenings, and passes to special networking events, panels and parties.

Professor Lynn DeVore will read from his Vietnam war-era novel, Feast of Light, at 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday, November 19 in the Hansen Student Center, followed by a Q&A on the creative process. This is the third event sponsored by Tributaries focusing on faculty and their writing. Thus far Professors Mike Theune and Alison Sainsbury have shared their creative work.

Both events are free and open to the public.

McAuliffe is the author of A Better Life (2002) and Next Door (2007), and his poems have also appeared in TLS, Poetry Ireland Review, Metre, PN Review, Poetry London, and Poetry Review. It’s a good chance to hear an award-winning poet from the U.K. and also learn about Manchester’s popular summer writing program.

“Unexpected Places is exactly the kind of book most needed in the field right now,” writes John Ernest, author of Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History.”

According to Gardner, “The book was a natural outgrowth of my fascination with archival work—and so was several years in the making. When I ‘found’ Black journalist Jennie Carter and then early Black playwright William Jay Greenly in the midst of other scholars’ rediscoveries that have changed our sense of Black literature, I knew I needed to think through just why so many early Black writers still needed recovery and how that recovery might change . . . well, might change everything about the field.”

In addition to revisiting such better known writers as William Wells Brown, Maria Stewart, and Hannah Crafts, Unexpected Places offers the first critical considerations of several important figures, including Jennie Carter, Polly Wash, Lizzie Hart, and William Jay Greenly. The book’s discussion of physical locations leads to a study of how region is tied to genre, authorship, publication circumstances, the Black press, domestic and nascent Black nationalist idealogies, and Black mobility in the nineteenth century.

Gardner writes, “Geography was key to my thinking about this subject. Growing up in Illinois, I always assumed that I and my Midwestern ancestors were far from questions surrounding, say, slavery–and certainly far from the early development of Black literature in the urban centers of the Northeast. I was wrong—as were most critics in the field. Early Black struggles for literacy and literary culture happened across the nation. I’m hoping that the book will let folks in Ohio and Indiana and Missouri and Nevada and California and all sorts of other ‘unexpected places’ know that a Black literary past might be as close as their own backyard.

“I was already fascinated by historical digging when I got to Illinois Wesleyan, but when I had a chance to combine and build on those skills in one of Bob Bray’s classes to better understand an intriguing writer—Belle Owen, a little-known Illinois author—I was hooked on doing literary history.”