Miscellany
 
 
 
 

The Office of Academic Programs and the University Writing Program held a reception honoring the founding director of ECU's University Writing Program and former Chair of the Writing Across the Curriculum Committee Pat Bizzaro on Thursday, December 6, 2007, in Room 1632 of the Old Cafeteria Building.  In recognition: "Dr. Bizzaro has been a special resource for many faculty and students for twenty years.  We would like to show appreciation for his long service and dedication."  Bizzaro developed and directed the original English Department Writing Center (now known as the Writing Studio), the original site of the National Writing Project  called at the time the Coastal Plains Writing Project (now known as the Tar River Writing Project), and the university-wide program in Writing Across the Curriculum (now under the auspices of Academic Affairs and named the University Writing Program).  In recent years, Bizzaro developed and served as first director of the University Writing Program, which oversees over 400 WI courses in the university and the University Writing Center, and he chaired the WAC Committee from 2001 until 2007.

Daniel Tobin of Emerson College in Boston delivered an invited lecture titled "Cooped Secrets of Process and Ritual" about Seamus Heaney's North on December 3, in Joyner Library.  His visit was sponsored by the East Carolina University Department of English and the Great Books Program, and organized by James Matthew Wilson.  Daniel Tobin is the author of three books of poems -- Where the World is Made for U P of New England (1999), Double Life for Louisiana State U P (2004), and The Narrows for Four Way Books (2005). His critical study of Heaney's work Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney for U of Kentucky P (1999) is an important study of the Irish Nobel prize-winning poet.

Stephanie West-Puckett was recently featured in the November 2007 New Scholars and Scholarship Column of the Journal of College and Character (9:2). After her presentation at the Institute on College Student Values at Florida State University in February 2007 titled "From Charity to Activism: Motivating First-Year Students to Embrace Social Responsibility through Service-Learning," JCC contributor Deborah Lidell of the University of Iowa contacted West-Puckett about service-learning as a pedagogical method to teach composition and research writing, to develop social responsibility, and to help students develop a language of empathy.  Please see the interview with West-Puckett "Doing, Reflecting, and Writing: Helping Students Turn Service Experiences into Powerful Learning."

On December 3, Dr. Roy Jacobstein, a prize-winning poet as well as a pediatrician and public health physician working internationally in the area of women's reproductive health, gave an interactive talk on the successes and remaining challenges of the international family planning and development effort.  Jacobstein also read from his poetry in Bate 1031.  He is the author of three books of poetry: Fuchsia in Cambodia for Northwestern Press/TriQuarterly Books (2008); A Form of Optimism for U P of New England (2006), winner the Samuel French Morse Prize); and Ripe for U of Wisconsin P (2002), winner of the Felix Pollak Prize.  He is a former official of the United States Agency for International Development and serves as an Adjunct Professor of Maternal and Child Health in the University of North Carolina School of Public Health.

The aftermath of the ECU HumorFest, Nov. 1-3, resulted in this essay by Andrei Codrescu about life in Greenville on a Halloween Night titled "Homeland Security in Small Towns, Bees, and the Apocalypse."  Codrescu writes, "They had Halloween in Greenville, North Carolina, on one block of a downtown street.  The street was filled with bees, Jasons, Draculas, and art students.  ..."

The 5th TALGS Conference will be held on Saturday, February 16, 2008, in the Bate Building. Our keynote speaker will be Dr. Walt Wolfram of North Carolina University with a presentation titled "Southern-Bred ESL: Hispanics in the Mid-Atlanic South."  Among the presenters will be both graduate students (including several of our own) and public school teachers. The conference will offer both paper presentations and workshops.  TALGS encourages a dialogue between novice researchers and practitioners in the fields of English studies, discourse studies, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, foreign languages, psychology, communications, and teaching English as a second/foreign language (TESL/TEFL).  Proposals (extended) deadline: January 9, 2008.  Pre-registration deadlines: January 13 and February 3, 2008.  Visit http://core.ecu.edu/engl/talgs/conference/conference.htm for details. To read a review article on TALGS 2007, "Envisioning the new world of multilingualism of TALGS 2007," visit: http://www.eslminiconf.net/spring07/talgs2007.html.  For the archive or presentation schedules and abstracts (TALGS 2004-2007), visit http://core.ecu.edu/engl/talgs/history/index.htm.