UC s Literary Journal Cracks the Top 20 as Part of Thriving English Department

UC’s

Department of English

boasted another fruitful year of labor. Besides producing lauded literary journals, the efforts of graduate and undergraduate students alike yielded a bevy of published works, while reaping fellowships, scholarships and other honors.

The Cincinnati Review

, a national literary journal housed in the Department of English, ranked as one of the top 20 journals of 2011. Every Writer’s Resource (EWR), which reviews thousands of literary journals, released its annual rankings and the Cincinnati Review broke into the top 20 at number 20. EWR also ranked the Cincinnati Review among the top three university-affiliated journals whose schools offer a creative writing PhD.

“Given that we’re the second-youngest journal in the top 30, our ranking seems that much more mathematically impressive,” says Nicola Mason, managing editor.

Another UC English publication, Short Vine, also made strides by launching an

online version

this past spring. Readers can discover works by UC undergraduate writers, including poetry by Alexander Allendorf, Jeffrey Allen, Amanda Vandermolen, Frank Hull, Amanda Evans and Justin White. Short Vine online also features fiction by Todd Covalcine and Brian Kittrell as well as photographs by Matt Ferguson.

Visitors to Short Vine online will be able to hear the stories and poems as read by the authors, something that particularly excites faculty advisor Michael Hennessey. “We’ll be posting audio from the year-end reading in the near future along with the contents of our spring print issue,” he says.

In other publication news, the distinguished quarterly Mississippi Review recently issued its 2011 Prize Issue which included the work of three UC PhD students. Stories by Jamie Poissant and Peter Grimes were featured as was poetry by Elizabeth Harmon.

Several other UC English graduate students were also honored with published work. Becky Adnot-Haynes and Tessa Mellas each had stories featured in a variety of journals. Sheri Allen, Lisa Ampleman, Eric Bliman, Michelle Burk, Les Kay, Matt McBride, Kat Polak and Ruth Williams all had their poetry published along with scholarly works by Allison Carr and Christina LaVecchia.

English graduate student Joseph DeLong was awarded a U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) to study Japanese in Japan during the summer of 2011. DeLong will spend 10 weeks in an intensive Japanese instructional program while at the same time enjoying cultural enrichment experiences, including a visit to Hiroshima where he will hear from a nuclear survivor. The CLS program provides participants with language skills they can apply to future careers.

“This scholarship is moving me toward my goal of translating contemporary Japanese poetry, which allows me to build on work with American poetry as a doctoral student in English and Comparative Literature,” says Delong.

He also touted the CLS programs to fellow students, saying, “I would strongly encourage anyone at UC interested in language learning and world culture to apply to one of the 13 available language programs.”

Delong wasn’t the only winner. PhD candidates Christian Moody and Morgan Frank were both awarded Taft Distinguished Dissertation Fellowships while Kate Polak was awarded a Taft Graduate Student Enrichment Grant and a University Research Council Summer Fellowship. Lisa Ampleman won a national competition for the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Award, a prize bestowed to poets of unusual promise. And Hannah Rule won an Emerging Pedagogies Research and Travel Award from Pearson, a global leader in educational publishing.

English professor Michael Griffith says it best: “Our graduate students are astonishingly good—congratulations to all. We should be very proud of and grateful to them.”