Updates from PWP!

The Professional Writing Program has much to report on in way of accomplishments and news. Keep reading to hear what they've been up to.

Alexandra Calloway had two photographs displayed at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel as part of the APL Women’s Club fundraiser for pediatrics at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Alexandra has other photographs available for sale; contact her if you are interested!

Justin Lohr, along with former UMD Ph.D. student (and current Assistant Professor at Elon) Heather     Lindenman, delivered a presentation at the Conference on College Composition and Communication     convention about their Writing for Change course.  Their presentation was titled “Investigating ‘Consequences’ of a Community Literacy Partnership: Results from a Study of ‘Writing for Change.’”

Patrick Nelson sang with the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington at the UMD Men’s Invitational on April 2 at the Chapel on campus.

Jonathan Rick delivered two workshops: one to undergraduates at Johns Hopkins’s Center for Leadership Education on everything you need to know about writing a magnetic headline; the other, to senior PR executives at the National Press Club, on 14 ways to perfect your next PowerPoint presentation.

The sixth edition of The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors has recently been released by Bedford/St. Martin’s. Co-authors are Leigh Ryan, UMD Writing Center Director, and Lisa Zimmerelli, Director of the Writing Center at Loyola University Maryland.

Along with former tutors Abby Shantzis and Lena Stypeck, Leigh Ryan presented at the Mid-Atlantic Writing Centers Association conference in Philadelphia on “Partnerships in Action: Synergy in a New Inner-City Baltimore High School Writing Center.” Abby and Lena are finishing their MA degrees--Abby in Higher Education at UMD and Lena in Secondary Education at Johns Hopkins. Last year, Lena began a writing center at her Baltimore high school with support from the writing centers at UMD and Towson University.

David Todd volunteered as a returning judge for the annual “Excel Awards” national publications competition hosted by Association Media & Publishing in Washington, D.C.

Ann Bracken’s second manuscript, No Barking in the Hallways: Poems from the Classroom, has been accepted for publication later this year by New Academia Publishing. The volume is composed of poems that explore the student-teacher relationship as well as the systemic challenges faced by teachers in the age of standardization.

Stewart Foehl has an essay in a new book, Thank You, Teacher: Grateful Students Tell the Stories of the Teachers Who Changed Their Lives, published by New World Library. Stewart’s essay is entitled “Changing the Face of Rock and Roll.”

Danuta Hinc was on a panel on “Contemporary Multiethnic American Fiction: Obsessions and Innovations” at the 2016 Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference in Los Angeles. She presented a paper, “The  Limits of Losing: Language, Exile, and the Self in Eva Hoffman’s memoir Lost in Translation, and Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory.” The panel focused on questions related to ethnic fiction. Danuta's paper explored questions of identity. What does it mean to live on the peripheries of history, political systems, and language? What are the spaces we inhabit to preserves our identity? The paper investigated survival through metaphors and memories, and defined multiple approaches to how identity can shift between the personal and the popular, between language and silence, between the sacred and the forbidden.

Doug Kern, Justin Lohr, and Marybeth Shea have been selected as the recipients of the English department's second annual Teaching Excellence Awards for Professional Track Faculty.

Jim Mattson received a Michener-Copernicus Fellowship for his manuscript The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves. The novel describes a high school shooting from the perspectives of five people connected in various ways to    the shooter.

Joan Mooney published an article in Urban Land on solar installations on affordable housing: http://on.uli.org/1VNZrZi.

Rebecca Ritzel was featured in a panel discussion on Arts Journalism in the Digital Age hosted by our university’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism on May 5.

Mary Sirianni will marry Brendan Johnson on June 25 at Mount St. Mary's University in Emmitsburg, MD.