creative presentations

Dear Colleagues:

I’m excited to report that the Creative Writing Program's search for a literary and interdisciplinary writer working in new media and/or digital arts has yielded 4 exciting finalists for campus visits over the next month. So far, we've confirmed dates for 3 consecutive Mondays in February: 2/3, 2/10 and 2/17. We are still awaiting confirmation of our fourth.

Please mark your calendars, as we’re hoping many of you will be able to come and hear our finalists’ presentations—Job Talks 10:00-11:00 (P-H 203); Creative Presentations 3:00-4:00 (Halle 302)—and find an occasion to engage with them. We feel this is an especially exciting search given the explicit interdisciplinary range of the candidates’ research, creative work and pedagogy.

 ~ Rob.

CREATIVE WRITING SEARCH: FINALISTS & CAMPUS VISITS

Jillian Burcar: Monday 2/3

Jillian Burcar is a recent Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from University of Southern California, with a Gender Studies Graduate Certificate (2012). Burcar is a new media literary artist who specializes in experimental narrative.  Her dissertation, “The Cyborg in the Basement: Hauntedness and Narrative Transmography” was accompanied by a new media component, entitled “The Spectral Dollhouse,” which will be published in the spring of 2014 by Eastgate Systems, and she is currently working on a 3D version for publication of the project using the Unity 3D game engine. A chapter of Burcar’s dissertation will soon appear beside work by Donna Haraway in Ada: Gender, New Media and Technology. As interdisciplinary and collaborative artist, Jillian has also written a libretto for Chamber Opera, Light & Power: A Tesla/Edison Story, in collaboration with composer Isaac Schankler, commissioned and performed by the Boston Opera Collective. The opera won the American Prize in Opera Performance and was recently performed in part at the Hammer Museum in L.A.

Burcar’s pedagogy models the ways that literary artists approach the study of literature as it converges with social issues, and she has evidenced her considerable strengths as a committed teacher whose classes are explicitly focused on innovative values and formal experimentation. Moreover, Burcar's approach to digital storytelling would offer our students a strong introduction to “narrative” in an expanded field of possibility that includes any number of digital formats and platforms.

Christopher Higgs: Monday 2/10

Christopher Higgs will receive his Ph.D. in Post-1900 American Literary and Cultural Studies from Florida State University in May of this year with a dissertation entitled “Between Experimentation and Tradition: Two Visions of America,” which “reexamines the unresolved literary debate between conventional and experimental writing practices from the early 20^th century to today”. Chris Higgs is a widely published author of two novels, short fiction, digital literature, prose poetry, nonfiction, and cultural criticism, while also working as a prolific staff writer for the popular online literary journal HTMLGIANT.com. Most recently, Higgs published a collaborative conceptual novel entitled ONE (Roof Books) together with Vanessa Place and Blake Butler, and his MFA thesis, The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney, was published in 2010 by Sator Press in L.A. The latter novel collects a miscellany of materials written by an imaginary author who has mysteriously vanished. An avowed Deleuzian, Higgs’s writing, aims to deterritorialize the generic boundaries between a wide range of forms: story, poem, theory, criticism, drawing, and memoir. His fiction is deeply inflected by a commitment to digital culture, and his work evidences a facility with new media.

Higgs eloquently articulates his work as both a writer and a teacher within a range of theoretical frames. He has won multiple teaching awards, and demonstrates a collaborative spirit in both his editorial and creative work. His significant experience as an on-line editor would put him in a prime position to take over BathHouse Journal. As for his pedagogy, Higgs’s manner of constructing an inquiry-driven classroom underscores our program’s approach to Creative Writing as a rigorous form of critical, imaginative, social and aesthetic investigation.

Adam Klein: Monday 2/17

Adam Klein received his MFA from the New School of General Studies in New York (2009). Since 2007, Klein has been teaching abroad in scenes of colonial and post-colonial conflict, from the University of Mumbai and North Bengal University, to the American University in Beirut. Since 2010, Klein has held the position of Assistant Professor of English at the American University of Afghanistan, in Kabul, where he teaches Creative Writing, Literature and Film Studies.

Klein is an accomplished fiction writer, whose collection of short stories The Medicine Burns (1995) and his novel Tiny Ladies (2003), both published under the High Risk imprint of Serpent’s Tail Books, will be reissued in 2013. As a musician and a writer, Klein’s cross-genre and interdisciplinary work in visual and print mediums has yielded an impressive range of projects, including music videos and multimedia collaborations. Klein is also the author of numerous stories and essays—including “Sontag, Osiris,” a recently published long essay on the work of Susan Sontag, and shorter pieces for the New York Times “At War” blog—as well as a monograph, Jerome: After the Pageant, on the work of the San Francisco drag performance artist, Jerome Caja. Klein’s current fiction writing is engaged with the way geopolitical conflict pressures and constrains contemporary subjectivities and narrative forms. Most recently, Klein edited and introduced The Gifts of the State (published by Dzanc books), a collection of stories written in English by his Afghan students (as a second or third language). That this collection emerged from Klein’s Creative Writing classes underscores his commitment as a teacher.  

Jason Nelson (visit as yet unconfirmed)

Jason Nelson received his Ph.D. in Interface and Digital Art Writing from Griffith University (2013) where he has been living and teaching since 2006. Prior to this, Nelson received his MFA in Poetry with a New Media concentration at Bowling Green State University. An early innovator in the field of digital poetry, and the creator of over 50 works of digital poetry and fiction—including Sydney’s Siberia, The Poetry Cube, and Evidence of Everything Exploding (all of which you can find at SecretTechnology.com). Nelson’s work is impressively situated at the convergence of new media technologies and poetic forms. He’s the winner of numerous awards for his work and sits on the boards of the Electronic Literature Organization as well as the Australia Council of the Arts.

Nelson’s various projects are explicitly interdisciplinary as they move across fields of literary writing, digital art, and gaming. While committed to the horizon of technological possibility awaiting contemporary literary production, he is equally keen on training students’ attentions to page-based textual practices. Nelson would expand the horizon of the Creative Writing program in exciting new ways. Further, he has a strong vision for the BathHouse Journal, where he has published his own work, and would be an ideal mentor for our graduate student editors.

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Rob Halpern
Assistant Professor, Creative Writing Program
Department of English Language and Literature
Eastern Michigan University
Ypsilanti, MI 48197