Gregory E. Bruno received his MA in English from SUNY New Paltz in 2017 where he served as a TA for five semesters. Currently, he teaches English and Writing at Salesian High School in New Rochelle, NY.
Laurence Carr writes plays, fiction, and poetry. His current book is Threnodies: poems in remembrance (Codhill Press), and his play, Kennedy at Colonus, The Journey of Robert F. Kennedy is published as an ebook (Lightwood Press). His novel, Pancake Hollow Primer was awarded first prize in the 2012 Next Generation Indie Book Awards for first novel. He is the editor of Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers, and co-editor of A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley. Prose and poems have published throughout the U.S. and plays produced in NYC, regionally and in Europe. He teaches Creative and Dramatic Writing at SUNY New Paltz.
Joann K. Deiudicibus is the Staff Assistant for the Composition Program and an Adjunct Instructor at SUNY New Paltz, where she earned her MA in English (2003). She is the Associate Editor (poetry) for WaterWrites: A Hudson River Anthology (Codhill Press, 2009). Her poems have been published in A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley (Codhill Press, 2013), Chronogram, and around the Hudson Valley. Her article, “Axing the Frozen Sea: Female Inscriptions of Madness” was included in the anthology Affective Disorder and the Writing Life: The Melancholic Muse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Her research interests include creativity, mental health, and composition, the body, as well as twentieth-century American poetry, particularly the work of Anne Sexton.
Thomas Festa is Associate Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz and the author of several books and essays on John Milton and the literature and culture of sixteenth and seventeenth century England.
Evan Paul Eugenio Korte is pursuing an MA in English after having successfully completed his MAT in Adolescent English Education. He is thrilled to be publishing his first essay in this volume.
Kristina L. Ginnick is an MAT/MA English candidate at SUNY New Paltz, and she earned a dual BA in Psychology and English in 2014 from SUNY Oneonta. She has presented several papers at conferences in the past, all of which were dedicated to Shakespearean studies.
Jacob Hebda is a graduate student in the creative writing program at Wilkes University. He earned his B.A. in English from Misericordia University in 2014, and his M.A. in English from the State University of New York at New Paltz in 2017. Prior to his participation in the SUNY New Paltz English Department’s 2017 Graduate Symposium, he presented at conferences ranging from the Southwest Popular/American Culture Conference, the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Conference, and the Norman Mailer Conference. His research interests include, but are not limited to: the relationship between elite and popular culture and interdisciplinary approaches to literature and culture studies.
Andrew C. Higgins teaches English at SUNY New Paltz. He has published on Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sarah Piatt, and Civil War memoirs. He is currently working on a longer study of Alfred B. Street examining his relationships to Romantic literary culture and to changing attitudes towards the environment in nineteenth-century America.
Nathan Lindsay Lee is a Master’s candidate at SUNY New Paltz. He holds a BA in Playwriting from Belmont University in Nashville.
Allison Leshowitz graduated from the English MA program in December 2016. Previously, Allison presented her work at the 27th Annual Graduate Symposium, “Rhetorical Beings.” There, she shared her examination and critique of cancer stories aimed at a teenage audience. Allison’s work can also be found in the May 2017 issue of the College English Association Forum, where she co-authored an essay alongside Matthew Newcomb that interrogated the traditional writing process of first-year students and opened up a new avenue for the writing process that adopts the basic practices of design process utilized by engineers.
Caroline Levine is the Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University. She is the author of three books: The Serious Pleasures of Suspense (2003), Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007) and, most recently, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), a work which won the 2016 Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture from the Media Ecology Association, and the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association. She is one of a team of editors for the Norton Anthology of World Literature and has written on topics from Victorian realism to television and from contemporary art to academic freedom.
Ed Maietta is an adjunct instructor for the English Deptartment at SUNY New Paltz. He earned his BA and MA from Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus. His published work includes a photograph (cover) and a poem in Downtown Brooklyn: A Journal of Writing, an author photograph for Poems by Robert D. Spector and the cover photographs for The Qui Parle: Play and Poems by Kenneth Bernard.
Matthew Nickel is an Assistant Professor of English at Misericordia University, finished his BA and MA SUNY New Paltz (2007) and PhD University of Louisiana (2011). He is currently co-directing the International Ernest Hemingway Society Conference in Paris, France 2018, and has served as an officer of several national literary organizations. He is the author/editor of numerous books including Hemingway’s Dark Night (New Street Communications 2013) and The Route to Cacharel (Five Oaks Press 2016).
Sarah Pepe graduated from SUNY New Paltz’s English MA program in May 2017. She is interested in new and experimental forms of narrative, popular culture studies, gender representation in the media, and gender and sexuality studies. She plans to turn her paper on Homestuck into a longer work. She currently works as an Adjunct Instructor at Marist College and Westchester Community College, and as a tutor for the SUNY New Paltz EOP program.
Hannah Phillips graduated from SUNY New Paltz in December 2016 with an English major and Journalism minor. Hannah liked the campus community and English department so much that she extended her stay, and is now enrolled in the New Paltz MA program. She is also a Composition Department TA, New Paltz DASH Lab fellow, HASTAC Scholar, and part-time docent at Staatsburgh State Historic Site. Her research interests include: digital humanities, visions of femininity, the Gothic, nineteenth century studies, architecture, and how self-hood is curated through objects and decorative practices.
Victoria Prashad is a May 2017 graduate of the New Paltz MA English program.
Melissa Rubbert graduated cum laude from SUNY New Paltz in May of 2016 with a degree in English and a minor in Creative Writing. Currently, she is a graduate student in the MA program at SUNY New Paltz and a professional writing tutor at SUNY Orange. She plans to complete the English MA program this year, and then commence the MAT program to attain a New York State teaching certification, which she will use to instruct English/Literature courses in public schools.
H.R. Stoneback is SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at New Paltz. His many publications include the monographs Reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (Kent State UP, 2007), Imagism: Essays on Its Initiation, Impact, & Influence (UNO Press 2013), Affirming the Gold Thread (Florida English Press, 2014), and several volumes of poetry, including the forthcoming book and CD, Songs & Poems for Hemingway & Paris.
Joanna Swafford was an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz from 2014-2017 and is currently the Digital Arts and Humanities Specialist at Tufts University. Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Debates in Digital Humanities, Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, Digital Sound Studies: A Provocation, Victorian Poetry, and Victorian Review. She is the project director for Songs of the Victorians (http://www.songsofthevictorians.com/), Augmented Notes (http://www.augmentednotes.com/), and Sounding Poetry, and is also Head of Pedagogical Initiatives for NINES.org (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship). While at New Paltz, she was the co-founder of the DASH (Digital Arts, Sciences, and Humanities) Lab and the chair of the graduate symposium.
Ethel Wesdorp is a 2001 graduate of SUNY New Paltz and works in the English Department. She has published poems in WaterWrites, From Penns’ Store to the World, and A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley.
