U-M English News

Nami Mun wins 2009 Whiting Writers' Award

From Columbia College Chicago:

Nami Mun, alumna of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan and assistant professor of Fiction Writing at Columbia College Chicago, has been awarded the prestigious Whiting Writers� Award for her 2009 novel Miles from Nowhere. The award, which includes a $50,000 stipend, has been given annually since 1985 to 10 writers of exceptional talent and promise early in their careers. The program marks its twenty-fifth anniversary this year.The 2009 recipients were announced at a ceremony at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York on Wednesday, October 28, featuring a keynote address by Margaret Atwood. Dr. Robert L. Belknap, president of the foundation, and trustee Kate Douglas Torrey presented the awards.

In addition to the Whiting Award, the widely acclaimed Miles from Nowhere was shortlisted for the U.K.�s Orange Award for New Writers. The novel follows Joon, a 13-year-old runaway, through the streets of New York as she struggles with addiction, exploitation, and her own past. Mun spent several years creating the manuscript.

�I�m no good at letting things go, which is probably why I worked on the book for eight years and revised each chapter roughly 30 times�the book as a whole maybe five times,� she explains. �I knew the manuscript was ready, at least ready to leave my house, because one day I woke up and had nothing to do.�

Mun is in her second year on faculty at Columbia. When asked what has struck her most about the college, she answers, �The students, hands down. They seem to live and work and study and dress and talk and walk creatively.� She adds, �I was never that cool in college.�

As for what�s next for Mun, she says, �I�m always, always looking forward to my next day of writing. Which at the moment involves a book about crime.�

Oprah chooses Uwem Akpan's story collection

A 'literary miracle' crowned by Oprah

By Eileen Pollack, Special to CNN
November 4, 2009 7:45 a.m. EST

Editor's note: Eileen Pollack is director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan and taught Uwem Akpan, author of "Say You Are One of Them." Pollack is the author of "In the Mouth: Stories and Novellas," "The Rabbi in the Attic and Other Stories," "Paradise, New York," and "Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull." Uwem Akpan's book is the choice of the Oprah Book Club.

Ann Arbor, Michigan (CNN) -- Even among the hundreds of applications, this one stood out. Most applicants to creative writing programs submit stories about the angst of their suburban childhoods. This writer's stories concerned the daily ordeals of a boy living with his family on the streets of Nairobi, Kenya, and the horrific plight of a Rwandan girl whose mother is Tutsi and father Hutu.

Not only did the applicant have what writers call "material," he was blessed with an uncanny ear for human speech and the poetry to describe his characters' very unpoetic lives.

I can still remember the young Kenyan boy watching his mother decant the glue she intends to sniff. The glue, the boy tells us, "glowed warm and yellow in the dull light," and when his mother had poured enough, "she cut the flow of the glue by tilting the tin up. The last stream of gum entering the bottle weakened and braided itself before tapering in midair like an icicle."

Still, this applicant gave us pause. The writer had so much to say, he seemed to be trying to channel a raging waterfall through the tiny funnels of two short stories. His use of punctuation was idiosyncratic, to say the least. And the applicant was a priest!

Would the other students be willing to share their stories, rife as these tend to be with profanity, drugs and sex, if a clergyman was in the room? And would this particular clergyman understand what all great religious writers know -- that true literature doesn't spring from one's certainties about the universe, but rather from one's questions?

That said, how could our students be inhibited by a classmate who didn't hesitate to describe a 12-year-old Kenyan prostitute being paid by rich white tourists to perform sexual acts with their monkey? As to the shapelessness of the applicant's prose and the eccentricity of his punctuation, anyone with this writer's gifts could be taught to structure his material and punctuate his characters' speech correctly.

If I still felt apprehensive about having a priest in my workshop, that anxiety vanished when Uwem Akpan walked in the room. Rather than wear his clerical garb and collar, Uwem showed up in a blue and maize University of Michigan sweatshirt. With his wide, gap-toothed smile, wall-shaking laugh, disarming candor and gleeful giggle, he exuded magnetic charm.

Nor was Uwem out of place for being the only Nigerian in his cohort. Despite what the judges of the Nobel Prize might say about American writers being too insular to compete with their European counterparts, this country's MFA programs provide one of the only spaces on the planet where writers of many races, religions, nationalities and sexual orientations can come together.

Writers find common ground not through the homelands they once inhabited but the thematic questions with which they grapple.

Early that first semester, I assigned a story by Philip Roth called "Defender of the Faith," in which a Jewish sergeant who has witnessed the horrors of the concentration camps must decide whether to grant special favors to the Jewish recruits in his command or enforce strict impartiality.

I didn't know whether Uwem would connect to Roth's quintessentially Jewish outlook. But the moment the discussion started, Uwem's hand shot up. "This is the story of my continent!" he declared. If Africans continued to put tribal allegiances above universal fairness, Uwem said, progress would remain unattainable.

This abhorrence of tribalism is what makes Uwem so open-minded. Like most people who are comfortable in their own skins, he is wonderfully able to inhabit the skins of others.

One semester, he audited a seminar on Holocaust literature. The professor had no idea who Uwem was, so she couldn't help but be surprised when he asked, "Can you tell me, please, how is it that people can do such terrible things to one another?"

If anyone else had asked that question, the professor might have thought he was simpleminded. But she could tell that this mysterious stranger was asking his question in the most profound way, from the depths of his own experience.

A few months later, Uwem accompanied me to my temple for the Jewish New Year. After sitting -- and standing -- for hours through the service, he commented that he had studied in the Bible how Jesus opened the scroll to read, but he had never quite understood how that worked, so it was beautiful for him to see how the Jews really did that. And he was happy to note what Catholicism had copied from Judaism.

Just as Uwem opened his mind and heart to us, I opened my mind and heart to Uwem. An atheist with a degree in physics, I don't believe in prayer. And yet, when Uwem stopped by the evening before a frightening operation on my spine, I granted his request that he pray for my well-being. Startled by the warmth I felt flowing along my spine as Uwem held his hands above my head, I burst out crying.

Of course, my colleagues and I never forgot why Uwem was in Ann Arbor, Michigan. During his two years in our program, all of us worked hard to help him develop his many gifts. But mine was the first workshop Uwem took, and I saw his stories at their rawest. As I waded through the reams of rough drafts he had given me, it occurred to me that I had been called upon to help the children of Africa the only way I could -- by helping Uwem to write their stories.

We talked about the need to focus each story around a single character's conflict and a single thematic question rather than attempting to convey everything Uwem knew about all his characters. I also urged him to allow his young protagonists at least a chance for freedom or redemption.

Yes, the children whose lives he wanted to depict were the victims of adults who abused, exploited and betrayed them. But even in a society in which a child can be prostituted to provide her family's food and pay her brother's school fees, the prostitute's brother might choose to decline that money, to leave the family, to walk away.

Uwem listened attentively, but I wasn't sure that he believed what I was saying. I didn't see another version of his story about the street family in Nairobi for several months. When I did, the hairs at the back of my neck stood up.

That second version of "An Ex-Mas Feast" was so powerful and finely polished that I asked Uwem if he would send it to the deputy fiction editor of The New Yorker, whom I had met a few weeks earlier when the magazine brought its college tour to Ann Arbor. Uwem hesitated -- I didn't know this, but he already had submitted an earlier version of the story, twice, to "The Editor" at The New Yorker -- but I kept nagging him until he sent the new version.

The rest, as they say, is history. The magazine accepted Uwem's story for its fiction issue. Then, a year later, it published a revised version of the story about the half-Tutsi, half-Hutu Rwandan girl.

In many ways, Uwem's success makes sense. Even when he was studying to be a priest, he gave up precious hours of sleep to stay up writing. He applied to an MFA program and got accepted. His teachers recognized his extraordinary potential and helped Uwem to achieve it.

And yet, much of Uwem's success is inexplicable. In a world in which so little attention is paid to children's suffering, a world in which fewer and fewer publishing houses remain interested in acquiring literary fiction and independent bookstores, even in college towns such as Ann Arbor, are closing their doors, the editors at every major publishing house in New York competed for the privilege of publishing a book that might not sell many copies but had shaken them to the core.

And Oprah ... how could Oprah, who had never selected a collection of stories for her book club, choose a collection like Uwem Akpan's, with its multilingual patois, complete absence of pathos or sentimentality and nearly unbearable-to-read violence toward children?

Yet all of this came to pass. Oprah respected her audience enough to assume that if she was so deeply moved by Uwem's stories, they would be moved as well. In choosing "Say You Are One of Them," Oprah brought to Uwem's cause the intelligence and heart of her many readers.

That any of this happened at all, let alone in five short years, is a literary miracle.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Eileen Pollack.

Emeritus Professor Robert T. Lenaghan

We learned the sad news that Emeritus Professor Robert (Tom) Lenaghan passed away on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2009. Tom was a professor in our department for 36 years from 1961-1997. His family held a private ceremony to celebrate his life. The link to his obituary is included below.

Obituary

Fall Kudos

Michael Awkward's latest book, Burying Don Imus: Anatomy of a Scapegoat, was published by University of Minnesota Press earlier this month.

Nicholas Delbanco's collection, The Hopwood Lectures: Sixth Series, was published earlier this year by the University of Michigan Press. In addition, Volumes 2 (Poetry) and 3 (Drama) of Nicholas's textbook series, Literature: Craft and Voice have just been published by McGraw-Hill.

Emeritus Professor Russell Fraser has recently published a travel memoir, From China to Peru, with the University of South Carolina Press.

John Knott has been awarded an Emeritus Fellowship grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.

Khaled Mattawa's translation from the Arabic of Amjad Nasser's poetry collection, Shepherd of Solitude, was published by Banipal Books earlier this year.

Adela Pinch's article "Love Thinking" has been selected to receive the Donald Gray Prize for the best essay in Victorian studies published in a journal in 2008.

Tobin Siebers has just published two new books. Disability Theory came out with University of Michigan Press, and Zerbrochene Sch�nheit: Essays �ber Kunst, �sthetik und Behinderung with transcript Verlag, both in July of this year.

Tobin has also been selected to receive the Neubacher Award from the University of Michigan Council for Disability Concerns. He will be honored at a ceremony on October 30 at 9:30 am in the Rackham Assembly Hall.

If the World Becomes so Bright, a poetry collection by Keith Taylor, has recently come out with Wayne State University Press.

MFA wins Rona Jaffe Foundation Award

We are pleased to announce that University of Michigan Poet VIEVEE FRANCIS will receive a 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award, which is given annually to six women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers. Celebrating its 15th year, the Rona Jaffe Awards have helped many women build successful writing careers by offering encouragement and financial support at a critical time. The Awards of $25,000 each will be presented to the six recipients on September 24th in New York City.

Vievee Francis lives in Detroit, Michigan (Hamtramck), where for 15 years she has been instrumental in fostering a literary community for youth and young-adult poets. She received her B.A. from Fisk University and will receive her M.F.A. from the University of Michigan in 2009, where she is the Alice Lloyd Hall Scholars Program Poet-in- Residence. Her first collection of poems, BLUE-TAIL FLY (Wayne State University Press, 2006), is described by her nominator as a "remarkably compassionate and clear-eyed debut that is a masterly poetic sequence rooted in mid-19th-century American voices and history. It is confident and utterly compelling." Her poems have also appeared in Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, and in the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poets. She was a Cave Canem Fellow in 2005 and 2007. Next year, with the help of her Rona Jaffe Award, she will delay full-time employment in order to complete the research for her new collection of poems on the Wendish region of Texas (Texas Hill Country), where her family has lived since the 1800s when the slave holding region was settled by German immigrants seeking religious freedom. She says, "Frankly, it took years for me to find the inner strength to approach the lyric poem from this close a distance, and now that I have I feel on fire to write, write, write, to follow my voice wherever it takes me."

Celebrated novelist Rona Jaffe (1931-2005) established The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Awards program in 1995. It is the only national literary awards program of its kind dedicated to supporting women writers exclusively. Since the program began, the Foundation has awarded more than $1 million to emergent women writers, including several who have gone on to critical acclaim, such as Judy Budnitz, Lan Samantha Chang, Rebecca Curtis, Rivka Galchen, Frances Hwang, Aryn Kyle, ZZ Packer, Tracy K. Smith, Mary Szybist, and Julia Whitty.

Sad News

WILLIAM R. STEINHOFF
1914-2009

William R. Steinhoff, Professor Emeritus of English, died September 2, 2009. Born in Chicago in 1914, he worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps before taking B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees, all at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1940 he married Rosannah Cannon, who predeceased him. Military service in World War II took him to Europe, Africa, and India. In 1948 he joined the English Department at Michigan, where he advanced through the ranks to full professor in 1963. He had a Ford Foundation Fellowship, a visiting professorship at the University of Aix-Marseilles and a Fulbright lectureship at both Gadjal Made University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and at Comenius University in Bratislava. In 1993 he married Marilyn Mason, who survives him.

Professor Steinhoff's scholarly interests were focused on George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope, and George Orwell. His book on Orwell, George Orwell and the Origins of 1984, won the University of Michigan Press Award in 1976. Other interests included the training of teachers of composition; for several years he directed what was then called the Freshman English program. In the decade after his retirement he returned several times to teach the Freshman Seminars being offered by the College.

Steinhoff--always "Bill"--"is remembered with praise," in the words of a former colleague. He was a friendly and generous man who knew when to bristle at foolishness. Colleagues and students alike valued his respect and were proud to have received it.

--Hubert English

More accolades for Uwem Akpan

MFA graduate Uwem Akpan is the recipient of a 2009 PEN/Beyond Margins Award for Say You're One of Them (Little, Brown and Company, 2008).

Another English LSA Staff Spotlight Winner!

A reflection on the hard work, skill and dedication of our administrative staff is the number of LSA Spotlight Award winners we have in our ranks. A well deserving Roberta Saling, Executive Secretary to the Chair, is the most recent recipient of this award. For the full story, please visit the LSA Staff Spotlight website.

Sad News

We regret to note that Emeritus Professor Thomas Garbaty passed away on Wednesday, July 29th, at his home in Ann Arbor. Professor Garbaty taught in the English Department from 1960 to 1992. He was a scholar of medieval literature and a beloved teacher & colleague.

Professor Tobin Siebers had this to say about Professor Garbaty, "He was a wonderful man. He was shy but had great sensitivity to others, and feelings of great responsibility for them, as well as a warm and gentle sense of humor. He was someone whom you looked forward to meeting in the halls of the department, someone whom you wanted to see more of whenever your meeting ended."

Professor Ralph Williams had equally fond memories of Professor Garbaty, adding, "Tom was one of the great teachers in the history of the Department: his courses in Chaucer and medieval literature more generally were the stuff of legend. His scholarship was exacting.

He was hired by Mr. Rice, the long-term Chair of the English Department. In all the years I knew Tom, he was never other than a model of largeness of spirit. Yet he had a sly wit, which could prick pretension. Having deflated a balloon, he would smile and give a self-deprecating laugh, as though he might have made a mistake somehow. With no regard for piffle, he had a remarkable kindness to pifflers.

His own history ties to the history of the last century in ways he seldom spoke of: his family, of very large business concerns, was expropriated by Hitler, the firm being given, as I recall, to Gobbels. He fled, through Switzerland, as I think, and came to this country. He chose and loved the life of literature, admired his colleagues, loved his students, and kept a lively interest in the Department.

I know of no one who did not love Tom, who was a sort of better self for all in any moments of crisis."

A private memorial service was held for close friends & family.

You can read his obituary at the following link: MLive.

Kudos Gazette

Cathy Sanok, Director of the English Honors Program, informs us that Emily Wilson will receive the Virginia Voss prize for her thesis, advised by Ralph Williams, and Amanda Swain will receive the Raoul Wallenberg Humanitarian Award, one of the Goldstein Honors prizes, for her thesis -- advised by Jennifer Wenzel -- and her volunteer work. Kudos to our students and to Ralph and Jennifer for their dedicated guidance.

The 2009 BEN Prize winners are Alex Ralph and Ray McDaniel. The BEN Prize, funded by an endowment in honor of alum and English Advisory Board member Larry Kirschbaum, goes to a lecturer who has achieved a high level of excellence in the classroom.

Michael Awkward has received funding from LSA to support his project entitled �Layers of Reminiscences: Contemporary American Autobiographies�.

David Brown from the Joint Program in English and Education is one of this year's recipients of the Dimond Dissertation Award in the School of Education. The Dimond family created an endowment to recognize excellent scholarship conducted by School of Education students in the form of their dissertations. Dr. Brown's dissertation is entitled �Curricular Approaches to Linguistic Diversity: Code-Switching, Register-Shifting, and Academic Language.� The chair of Dr. Brown's committee was Anne Curzan.

James Beitler, Sridevi Nair and Staci Schultz were awarded a Faculty Mentoring Award or an Outstanding GSI Award for 2009. Rackham bestows this honor to those GSIs who have exemplified outstanding mentoring and/or teaching in the classroom.

Enoch Brater, who is serving as Director of he University of Michigan Program in Florence through June 2010, has recently presented guest lectures on Beckett at the Universita degli Studi di Bologna, the Associazione Culturale Italo-Britannica, and the Universita degli Studi di Cagliari in Sardinia. In February he was in New York to moderate several panels for the new Bridge Project at BAM related to the cross-Atlantic productions of THE CHERRY ORCHARD and THE WINTER'S TALE. Methuen (U.K.) has just published the complete plays of Arthur Miller in six volumes; the playwright wrote the introductions to volumes 1-5, Enoch wrote the introduction to volume 6 containing Miller's four last plays.

Anne Curzan has been selected to receive a 2009 Faculty Recognition Award. This award carries a stipend of $1,000, and will be publicly announced and conferred at a ceremony on October 7, 2009.

Peter Ho Davies will spend next year on an Institute for the Humanities fellowship.

Nicholas Delbanco�s co-edited volume (with Alan Cheuse), entitled Literature: Craft and Voice, Volume 1 Fiction, has come out with McGraw Hill.

Petra Kuppers received support from LSA to fund a research stipend for a graduate assistant for a project on �Deleuze and Disability.�

Petra also received $3290 from the Institute for Research on Women and Gender for a project called Women's Disability Culture Poetry.

Anita Norich�s co-edited volume, entitled Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Context and Intertext, has come out from Brown Judaic Studies.

Adela Pinch has been selected to receive a 2009 University Undergraduate Teaching Award. The award carries a stipend of $1,000, and will be publicly announced and conferred at a ceremony on October 7, 2009.

Eric Rabkin has been chosen for the 2009 Teaching with Technology Institute. This position comes with a $2500 grant to support his project.

Keith Taylor�s book of poems, If the World Becomes so Bright, has just come out from Wayne State University Press.

Congratulations to all!

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