The UC Davis Department of English Creative Writing Reading Series starts Nov. 18 with Jos Charles, whose poetry collection feeld was a 2019 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and longlisted for a National Book Award. The series, co-sponsored by the UC Davis Library, continues in 2020 with a wide range of writers, including poets who are also visual artists, novelists and non-fiction writers exploring immigration, race, love, pop culture and language.
Stephen McFeely (M.A. English, ’96) was co-writer, with Christopher Markus (M.A., English, ’96), of the just-released movie "Avengers: Endgame.” The two met at UC Davis in the creative writing program. They've written scripts for the "Captain America" films, the "Chronicles of Narnia" movie franchise, and won an Emmy for their screenplay of HBO movie, "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers."
Gina Bloom, UC Davis English professor, will give the 2019 Shakespeare Birthday Lecture at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Her talk, “Rough Magic: Performing Shakespeare With Gaming Technology,” will take place April 22 at the Folger Theatre in Washington, D.C. The birthday lecture has been held nearly every year since 1932.
Two UC Davis College of Letters and Science faculty members have been awarded 2019 Guggenheim Fellowships. History professor Ari Kelman and English professor Elizbeth Carolyn Miller will receive the prestigious awards. They are among 173 winners in the U.S. and Canada selected from 3,000 applicants.
The debut novel by Maria Kuznetsova (M.A., English, '11) was published in March 2019 by Spiegel & Grau/Random House. OKSANA, BEHAVE! is a coming-of-age story about a young woman whose family has emigrated from Ukraine to Florida. Kuznetsova, a native of Ukraine, also received an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her writing has been published in The Threepenny Review, The Normal School,The Bennington Review, The Iowa Review and Indiana Review.
Peter Hays, English professor emeritus, retired nearly 15 years ago, but the Hemingway scholar is anything but retiring. During the last few years he has written several books and many articles, and each fall teaches a freshman seminar on Ernest Hemingway’s short stories.
“The actual subject of the seminar is reading and writing,” Hays said. “So often students don’t really read, they skim, and they can’t do that with Hemingway. They need to read beyond the surface. Whether they remember anything about Hemingway is inconsequential — it’s all about reading and writing.”
Matt Mason (M.A., English, ’94) has been named state poet of Nebraska. Mason’s duties during his five-year term will include giving public presentations and readings, leading workshops and discussions, and providing outreach at schools, libraries and literary festivals across the state.
Five faculty in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science — an artist, a poet, a psychologist, a mathematician and a physicist — have been named to the 2019 class of Chancellor’s Fellows, the university’s annual honors program recognizing associate professors for high achievement in the quality and excellence of research and teaching.
The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a fellowship this week to English professor Liz Miller to support her work on a book about industrial mining and its effects on 19th- and early 20th-century literature. The $60,000 award, announced Dec. 12, will enable Miller to spend the 2019 calendar year writing Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion, 1830s-1930s.
