NAU Spotlights: Oct. 18-22

NAU Spotlights: Oct. 18-22

Kudos to these faculty, staff, students and programs

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• Northern Arizona University has been ranked as having one of the most affordable online bachelor’s degree programs by Best Value Schools. This ranking is based on the cost of instruction.
• Monica Brown, a professor of English, was featured in an article on the Arizona Daily Sun’s front page. The story is about the recent installation at Sawmill Park based on her children’s book, “Marisol McDonald Doesn’t Match.” The book is about a young girl named Marisol who embraces her differences and doesn’t fit in a box.
• Alumnus Reggie Williams has been honored in the city of Guadalupe by naming Sept. 24 Reggie Williams Day. This is in recognition and appreciation of his aid in COVID-19 relief efforts as the program supervisor with Maricopa County Department of Public Health.
• Sherwin Bitsui, assistant professor of English, gave a poetry workshop at the US Botanic Garden and the Folger Shakespeare Library, judged the James Welch Prize and the Colorado Prize in poetry and gave readings in support of the Diné Reader throughout the summer. He has new work forthcoming in Gulf Coast.
• Chelsey Johnson, associate professor of English, attended a month-long writing residency as one of three inaugural Mountain Words Writers-in-Residence, along with MFA student Lee Anderson, at the Center for Literary Arts in Crested Butte, Colorado. They read at the Mountain Words Literary Festival, where Johnson also was on a panel about the urban-rural divide. Her essay about pronghorns recently appeared in Elle.
• Okim Kang, professor of English, received an NSF Multi-University Grant for $300,000. The grant is titled, “EAGER: Collaborative Research: Production of Second Language Speech: Formulation of Objective Speech Intelligibility Measures and Learner-Specific Feedback.”
• Associate professor of English Lawrence Lenhart‘s essay collection titled “Backvalley Ferrets: A Rewilding of the Colorado Plateau” will be published by the University of Georgia Press in 2022. His co-authored textbook (with Will Cordeiro, NAU Honors College), “Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology”, will be published with Bloomsbury Academic in 2023. He recently received grants from Creative Flagstaff, Arizona Humanities, Arizona Community Foundation of Flagstaff and Arizona Commission on the Arts on behalf of the Northern Arizona Book Festival.
• English professor Donelle Ruwe published “The Women’s Poetry Movement and the Affordance of the Lyric: A Visit to William Blake’s Inn,” in Dust Off the Gold Medal: Rediscovering Children’s Literature at the Newbery Centennial (U of Mississippi Press). She presented this research at the Children’s Literature Association Conference and the British Association of Romanticism Studies.
• Nicole Walker, professor of English, has new essays out or forthcoming from About Place Literary Journal, Solstice Literary Magazine and The Normal School. She is the co-president of NonfictioNOW, a nonfiction literature conference which will take place on Dec. 3-5 in Wellington, New Zealand.
• English professor Bill Crawford released a new book last Thursday. “Multiple Perspectives on Learner Interaction: The Corpus of Collaborative Oral Tasks” is an edited volume released by De Gruyter that includes multiple studies that use a common dataset (the Corpus of Collaborative Oral Tasks) to investigate several aspects of second-language acquisition.
• Ekaterina Sudina, a Ph.D. student in applied linguistics, was named doctoral Graduate Student of the Month by the Graduate College. She was nominated by her adviser, professor Luke Plonsky.
• Tara Stafford West, a former graduate student in literature, published work written in ENG 642, “Subverting the Marriage Plot: Jane Taylor’s Progressive Female Friendship,” in ANQ (pp 111-117).