2017 Rutgers-Newark Commencement

Some of our MFA students before the Graduate
Hooding. I had the immense pleasure of having nearly
all of them in a workshop or literature class! 

It has been eons since I've blogged, I know, but this year so far has easily been my busiest in a while, perhaps ever. I've recited the litany so often I think friends and associates, and most certainly my colleagues, are tired of hearing it, but in addition to my departmental chair duties, teaching, mentoring graduate students (3 MFAs, 1 independent study, 1 TA, two different doctoral committees), undergraduates (2 honors students), multiple search committees, and university committees, as well as various non-university profession-related duties, I also spent a good portion of the semester traveling to continue promoting Counternarratives and my other books, and while I love doing so, the physical and psychic toll of travel, especially these days, is always steeper than I envision.

As the scant entries this year testify, my blogging has especially fallen by the wayside this year. This  saddens me because I enjoy writing on here, and I feel like there's a particular need for it now. (I can also recall how just a few years ago, we were told that Twitter was becoming irrelevant and that blogging would soon be joining the ranks of the dodo bird and the woolly mammoth.) My several entries on the current resident of the White House remain stubs, however, and every day--sometimes it feels like every hour--brings so many new political revelations, bombshells, and shocks that, as was the case during the George W. Bush years, if you miss a week, you might as well wait for the next cluster of horrors and outrages. I think you can reasonably describe the White House's attempted Muslim Bans, its health care bills, its assault on regulations, its draconian budget, and so on horrors and outrages, even for some of Donald Trump's supporters....

But my aim with this entry was not to talk about Trump, but rather to congratulate the Rutgers-Newark (and Rutgers more broadly) Classes of 2017, undergraduate and graduate, and by extension, all who graduated this spring and year.  I'm very glad the semester and academic year have come to a close, but I already miss the students I worked with this year. As I mentioned, I supervised three MFA fiction students, Soili Smith, Matt Weir (whom I'd taught when he was a beginning creative writing student at Northwestern!) and Magally "Maggie" Zelaya, all of whom successfully completed their theses this spring. In addition, Soili applied and was admitted to Rutgers-Newark's PhD program in American Studies.

I also supervised two honors undergraduate students, both of whom successfully submitted fiction theses, Secilia Flores and Madani Sheikh. Madani graduated summa cum laude, received a senior prize from the English department, and gained admission into Rutgers-Newark's MFA program. He even was recently the subject of a thoughtful profile on Rutgers-Newark's website, and had previously received coverage as part of a social entrepeneurship team that made it to the regional finalist stage when he was a freshman.

All of these students, as well as others I mentored and taught, were a joy to work with, and I will definitely miss them, though I'll get to see Soili and Madani this upcoming academic year. Congratulations to all of them and all of this year's graduates!

Below are a few photos from Rutgers-Newark's various end-of-the-academic-year and Commencement events. For the Graduate Hooding ceremony and the actual Prudential Center campus-wide commencement, I wore a purple robe (for my graduate degree from NYU), but a creative writing colleague told me that I need to get the fancier, final degree model, with the fancier hat. Will do!

The big shebang, at the Prudential Center! 

Yours truly, one of our talented MFA graduates,
Darise Jean-Baptiste, and my wonderful
colleague Tayari Jones, after Commencement

The MFA graduates, during their end-of-year
reading at the MFA house

Matt Weir, one of my MFA advisees,
reading from his hilarious thesis

Poet Jeremy Clark, with Matt at right 

Darise Jean-Baptiste, reading from
her fiction thesis

Leslie Jones, reading from her
fiction thesis--well, showing its cover
before reading from it 

Maggie Zelaya, sharing her cover before
reading from her thesis, which I saw take
shape over her time at Rutgers-Newark

Aarthi Monteiro, another student I finally
got to work with last fall, reading from
her fiction thesis

Soili Smith, one of my MFA advisees,
reading from her fiction thesis, Sasquatch,
which did not include the story featuring Sasquatch
(though I hope the full collection will)

Students in the book arts course,
with their art-text projects, which they
discussed before sharing a bit of work

The faculty and students listening to the readings

Faculty and students enjoying the readings

Fall Classes Underway + Congratulations All Around

UPDATE: The Edward Baugh reading, scheduled for October 31, 2014 at Rutgers-Newark, has been canceled. I send Dr. Baugh my very best wishes for a swift recovery.

***

A few weeks month (!) ago I had a wonderful lunch with a senior colleague who was visiting the New York area. He teaches on the quarter system and so has had not yet begun his own fall schedule, and he asked how my classes were thus far, which made me realize that unlike in previous years, I haven't posted on or around the first day about the term's classes. As I noted a few posts ago, I have had a health challenge this summer that spilled into September, but I am feeling increasingly better, and do hope to post more regularly.

I am again serving as the Acting Chair of African American and African Studies, an enjoyable post, and having undertaken this post once, it is a lot easier and smoother the second time around. On of my favorite aspects of it involves planning events for the upcoming year, and thus far we have several events on the schedule, including the visit of the great Jamaican poet and scholar Edward Baugh on October 31 (it's Halloween, yes, but it worked best for his overall travel plans to the US), and next semester, scholar, poet and performer Rosamond  S. King on February 4 and the Kùlú Mèlé Dance & Drum Ensemble on February 11, 2015.

My course for the fall is my first graduate fiction workshop at Rutgers-Newark; thus far I have only taught undergraduate and graduate literature, reading and writing, and African American studies courses, so it is exciting to again be working directly with the MFA writing students, who are sharp, talented and hard-working. Each will be writing four stories, so I've geared my eyes up for a lot of reading. Our class discussion focus will be on short-story cycles/novels-in-stories/composite novels, so we're perusing stories, chapters and excerpts by a wide range of authors that include Sherwood Anderson, Sandra Cisneros, J. M. Coetzee, Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdrich, Karl Taro Greenfield, Ayana Mathis, David Mitchell, Gloria Naylor, and Nami Mun, to name just a few. It took me a few years to internalize all the novella reading-and-writing, so perhaps a novel-in-stories will be a possibility in the future, who knows?

***

Congratulations are in order to so many colleagues and friends on recent awards. I probably will be missing someone, so forgive me in advance.

Congratulations to my Rutgers-Newark colleague Rigoberto González on winning the Academy of American Poets' 2014 Lenore Marshall Prize for his highly praised and belauded collection Unpeopled Eden (Four Way Books, 2013).

Congratulations to my fellow Dark Room Collective member, Tracy K. Smith, on receiving the Academy of American Poets' 2014 Fellowship in poetry, adding her to a distinguished list of major American poets.

Congratulations to fellow CC poet Terrance Hayes on receiving a 2014 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship for his acclaimed poetry and future promise.

Congratulations to fellow CC poet Ruth Ellen Kocher on being one of two winners of the 2014 PEN Open Book Award for her collection domina Un/blued (Tupelo Press, 2013); Nina McConaghy also won for her book Cowboys and East Indians (FiveChapters Books).

Congratulations to fellow CC poet Rickey Laurentiis on becoming the newest winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; his collection Boy with Thorn was selected by Terrance and will be published in 2015 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

and for two awards in which I had a hand:

Congratulations to poet Ed Pavlić, whose powerful manuscript Let's Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno I selected for the 2014 National Poetry Series, to be published in 2015 by Fence Books.

A belated congratulations to fellow CC poet and Chicagoan Ladan Osman, who received this year's Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets from the African Poetry Book Fund. Her beautiful début collection The Kitchen Dweller's Testimony will be published by the University of Nebraska Press and Amalion Press in Senegal.

Congratulations also to poets Fred Moten and Claudia Rankine for making the National Book Award in Poetry long list! I'm sure there'll be many more congratulations for these and other friends soon!