NEWS AND VIEWS
 

Julie Campbell

On March 31, 2010, I and my co-editor Anne Larsen of Hope College have been invited to give a talk for the Newberry Library's Colloquium Series on our book, Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters (Ashgate 2009).

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Bruce Guernsey

Back in C-town again, I've been chasing deer and working on The Spoon River Review. Recently I had 3.5 of my allotted 15 minutes of fame, courtesy PBS / WTTW in Chicago:

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John Guzlowski

My Third Winter of War: Buchenwald, a chapbook about my father's experiences in the Nazi concentration camp, has recently been reviewed by Jennifer Whitaker for StorySouth. A review of Lightning and Ashes will appear in the next issue of Chattahoochee Review.

By the way, our daughter Lillian has been posting photos of her daughter, our granddaughter, Luciana. I think at this point there are about a thousand! Here's the link: https://web.me.com/lcguzlowski/Lillians_Home/Welcome.html

We're off on a cruise tomorrow, November 29, 12 days to the Eastern Caribbean. This is our second cruise this semester. One of the great things about the Great Recession is that vacationing has gotten really cheap. We spent a week in Las Vegas earlier in the month for almost nothing. The Orleans Casino gave us 4 nights free for buying one night for $29. They also gave us a $30 food credit each day. And we won at the tables. At one point I won 37 blackjack hands in a row.

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Daiva Markelis

Spent Thanksgiving break in Singapore with my husband. Decided where I want to spend the rest of my life—the Seoul International Airport. During the nine hour layover I got a massage, listened to some traditional Korean flute music, had a double mocha latte at Starbuck's, wandered in and out of the endless duty-free shops admiring the luxury goods, made a new friend in the bookstore, and had delicious noodles for dinner. Also: watched a movie on new Korean fashion designers and participated in a crafts demonstration. Even the name of the airport is appealing—Incheon. Sounds like luncheon. Singapore wasn’t bad either—bargaining for shawls on Arab Street, eating fresh crab with chili sauce, watching a boat race on the Singapore River—but the Singapore Airport is but a pale ghost of Seoul’s.

My memoir, White Field, Black Sheep: A Lithuanian-American Life, is coming out next October. The publisher is the University of Chicago Press.

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David Raybin

Susanna and I were awarded a grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to direct a second Summer Seminar for School Teachers on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The seminar will take place July 19 – August 14, 2010 in London, with trips to Oxford and Canterbury. Information about the seminar, which is open to school teachers (K-12) and two graduate students intending to be school teachers, can be found at our website: https://www.eiu.edu/~neh2010/ .

Also, our book, Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches, including chapters by eleven top-notch Chaucer scholars from the U.S., U.K., and France, is due out any day now from Penn State University Press. Susanna also had two other books come out this year (an edition of the Poems and Carols of the fifteenth-century Shropshire poet John Audelay and a collection of essays on his book), so I live in awe.

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Debra Valentino

We are going to miss David Radavich's bright smile in this department, not to mention his creative energy, scholarly dedication, joyous heart and just plain fun. On October 30, 31, and November 1 of this year, some of us accompanied David in delivering his and Bailey Young's compilation of Beat poetry in "The Beat Goes On" at the Charleston Alley Theatre. David also got EIU's Jazz Ensemble (directed by Paul Johnston) to join us, and they gave a great, crowd-pleasing accompaniment to our efforts.

Here are a few photographs that capture some of the fun, and a bit of David's irrepressible spirit.




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