Marco Abel and Roland Végső are delighted to announce that as co-editors of the University of Nebraska Press's new book series, Provocations, they just published Provocations #1: Frank Ruda's Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism. The book series' manifesto reads: "'Something in the world forces us to think' (Gilles Deleuze). The world provokes thought. Thinking is nothing but the human response to this provocation. Thus the very nature of thought is to be the product of a provocation. This is why a genuine act of provocation cannot be the empty rhetorical gesture of the contrarian. It must be an experimental response to the historical necessity to act. Unlike the contrarian, we refuse to reduce provocation to a passive noun or a state of being. We believe that real moments of provocation are constituted by a series of actions that are best defined by verbs or even infinitives—verbs in a modality of potentiality, of the promise of action. To provoke is to intervene in the present by invoking an as yet undecided future radically different from what is declared to be possible in the present and, in so doing, to arouse the desire for bringing about change. By publishing short books from multiple disciplinary perspectives that are closer to the genres of the manifesto, the polemical essay, the intervention, and the pamphlet than to traditional scholarly monographs, 'Provocations' hopes to serve as a forum for the kind of theoretical experimentation that we consider to be the very essence of thought." Marco and Roland thank Jaime Brunton, Daniel Clausen, Daniel Froid, Robert Lipscomb, and Edwardo Rios, for their help with line-editing the manuscript.

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster published Stella Dallas: The Female Hero in the Maternal Melodrama, in Senses of Cinema. Foster's article, Consuming the Apocalypse, Marketing Bunker Materiality, has been accepted for publication, and will appear shortly in Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Several of Foster's book reviews are forthcoming in Choice, including reviews of The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul, by Gina Freitag and André Loiselle; Sex Radical Cinema, by Carol Siegel; The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography, by Jennifer C. Nash; Skepticism Films: Knowing and Doubting the World in Contemporary Cinema, by Philipp Schmerheim; and Rock ‘n’ Film: Cinema’s Dance with Popular Music, by David E. James. Foster has been invited to return for another term as Fulbright Discipline Peer Reviewer for the Film Studies Area in Fulbright Fellowships and the Fulbright Scholar Program for 2017-2018. Foster's 2014 book, Hoarders, Doomsday Preppers, and the Culture of Apocalypse, is reviewed in Choice and Cultural Politics. Foster's most recently published book, Disruptive Feminisms: Raced, Gendered, and Classed Bodies in Film (2016) already received several enthusiastic reviews. As Frank Tomasulo, former editor of Cinema Journal writes, "Foster establishes at the outset that she writes as a global cultural feminist. By shrewdly focusing on specific films (and TV shows and star personas) that ‘disrupt, challenge, and overturn the norms of race, gender, age, sexuality, and class,’ this volume provides a much-needed alternative . . . Brava!”

Ted Kooser's third picture book, The Bell in the Bridge, illustrated by Barry Root, who also illustrated Ted's Bag in the Wind, will be released by Candlewick Press on May 8th. It has already received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and a positive review in Booklist.

Erin M. Bertram's poem "Bravado" appears in the Spring 2016 issue of So to Speak Online, and her poem "One Definition of Intimacy" will appear in the inaugural issue of The New Territory, a journal focusing on the Lower Midwest.

Chris Harding Thornton's poem "Static" will appear in an upcoming print issue of Tampa Review, and her poem "Providence" will appear in the spring issue of The Baltimore Review.

Patrick T. Randolph (of PIESL) recently published an article in TESOL’s Second Language Writing News - Inspiring the Critical Mind: Introducing the One-Point Multiskills Analysis.

The paper looks at an alternative to the research paper by focusing on a detailed analysis through six highly structured paragraphs (each with its own function) that look at one topic from various perspectives. The analysis also uses various writing skills and genres.

Randolph also published a piece for the CATESOL News Quarterly — Turning the Ordinary into the Extraordinary with Synesthetic-Based Metaphors . In this article, he shows how to fuse concepts in Sufism with a synesthetic-based reality, and then use alternative verbs (i.e., drink the light vs. see the light, taste the song vs. hear the song) to highlight unique perspectives of our everyday experiences and events.

Julia Schleck's article "Courtly Connections: Anthony Sherley’s Relation of his travels into Persia (1613) in a Global Context", which she wrote collaboratively with Ottomanist Kaya Şahin (University of Indiana Bloomington), was published in the spring issue of Renaissance Quarterly (pp. 80-115).

Tom Lynch's article “Ecopastoralism: Settler Colonial Pastoral Imaginary in the US West and Australian Outback” has recently been published in a special issue of the journal Australian Literary Studies devoted to "Afterlives of the Pastoral." You can read more about it, and access the full article, on his Ecopastoralism blog post.

A poem by Ryler Dustin appears in the most recent issue of Iron Horse . He was also the featured author of this issue's "From the Horse's Mouth" interview column.

Gabriel Houck's short story, "The Refold," was accepted for publication in Bayou.

Rebecca Macijeski has been selected for participation in the 2016 Conference on Poetry and Teaching at The Frost Place in Franconia, NH. She will spend the last week of June with other teaching poets at Robert Frost's historic homestead.

Marcus Meade recently had a chapter entitled "Seeing is Believing: Re-presentation, Cognition, and Transformation in Writing Classes" accepted in the forthcoming edited collection Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition and Writing. The collection has been accepted by WAC Clearinghouse as part of the Perspectives on Writing series.

Zach Beare and Rachel Azima facilitated a pre-conference workshop titled "Winds of Change: Navigating Renewal and Remembrance in the Writing Center" at the Midwest Writing Centers Association conference in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Rachel and Writing Center Consultants Amanda Hovseth, Lucy Koch, Katherine Pierson, Wyn Andrews Richards, and Natalie Wiebelhaus also presented on two panels at the conference: "Consulting Mr. Darcy: Regrowth and Intersectionality in the Writing Center" and "Hospitality in the Writing Center."

Julia Schleck participated in a round table conversation on Reconsidering the Global Renaissance at the Renaissance Society of America's annual meeting in Boston at the beginning of April. The discussion was sponsored by the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies.

Melissa J. Homestead chaired and responded to a panel at the C19: Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference in State College, PA, on the topic "Unsettlling the Gendered West." In early April, she will present the keynote address at the annual colloquium of the Early Atlantic Reading Group at Purdue University. Her topic is "Adventures in Transatlantic Circulation: Tracking Women Authors and Their Books, the 1790s to the 1850s."

On Thursday, March 31, Dr. Amelia Montes gave a paper at AWP Los Angeles honoring Chicano writer, John Rechy (author of City of Night). This panel was organized by Belinda Acosta who served as the moderator for the panel.

As well, Dr. Montes read her work (fiction) at the (AWP) 20th Anniversary Macondo Celebration on Saturday evening, April 2nd, 2016. Writer Sandra Cisneros is the founder of the Macondo writing group. Readers also included Luis Rodriguez, Carla Trujillo, Norma Cantu, Sarah Chavez, and Reyna Grande, among others.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, April 5 & 6, 2016, Dr. Amelia Montes will give a lecture entitled "Seeking to Understand The Body: Gloria Anzaldua and Diabetes" and will lead a closed-group discussion on Diabetes at The University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). This invited lecture/discussion is sponsored by the UCSC Chicano Latino and American Indian Resource Centers.

Please join us in congratulating the following colleagues for their wonderful accomplishments:

• Gwendolyn Foster received a Willa Cather Professorship
• Ken Price received the College of Arts and Science’s Outstanding Research and Creative Activity award (ORCA)
• Fran Kaye received the Faculty Senate’s Lousie-Pound-George-Howard Distinguished Career Service Award
• Maureen Honey received UNL’s Annis Chaikin Sorensen Distinguished Teaching Award in the Humanities and was also awarded the Excellence in Graduate Education Award by Graduate Studies.

Katelyn Hemmeke has been awarded a 2016-2017 Fulbright research grant. She will spend 10 months in South Korea, where she will continue her research on Korean transnational adoption and the birth family search process.

Kristi Carter has been selected as a recipient of the WGS Graduate Student Travel Award for her presentation this spring at the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference on the intersection of confessional poetry, trauma narratives, and biographical readings of public figures.

The second ever UNL Poetry Slam Team will be competing against the top universities in the nation at the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational in Austin, Texas, April 6-9. Team members Becca Human, Helen Winston, Reagan Myers, Sam Nichols, and Riley Westerholt will be representing the university, coached by Dr. Stacey Waite and assistant coach Ryler Dustin.

Courtney Lawton received a $1500 dissertation fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.