Alscw In The Media | Literary Matters

Former ALSCW President Greg Delanty Awarded Inaugural David Ferry and Ellen LaForge Poetry Prize

Poet Greg Delanty has been named the first recipient of the David Ferry and Ellen LaForge Poetry Prize. The prize was established at Suffolk University through the generosity of the Ellen LaForge Memorial Foundation. It honors Ellen LaForge, a lifelong avid poetry lover and supporter, and poet and translator David Ferry. The prize, along with a $2,000 honorarium, is awarded to an accomplished poet who has also published books of translation.

Ferry — a Distinguished Visiting Poet at Suffolk for over a decade and winner of the National Book Award — participated in the ceremony, praising Delanty for the “immediacy of his language.”

Former ALSCW President Greg Delanty Awarded Inaugural David Ferry and Ellen LaForge Poetry Prize full post

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Our New Office Manager

We are delighted to announce that Ryan Wilson is the new Office Manager of the ALSCW headquarters in Washington, D.C. He will also assume the editorship of Literary Matters.

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Robert Schwab of The DENVER EXAMINER Writes About The 2009 ALSC Conference

Schwab writes, “[E]ven in the snow and cold, the confab was a good opportunity for Colorado’s literary crowd, led by Boulder poet David J. Rothman, a ALSC board member, to show off our city’s arts-friendly infrastructure to a pretty brainy group of mostly East Coast literary heavy-lifters.”

To read the full article, click here.

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FORUM Mentioned in THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

The ALSC’s most recent issue of Forum, “The Latest Illiteracy,” has garnered a mention in Mark Bauerlein’s blog on The Chronicle of Higher Education Website. In his piece, Bauerlein assesses the latest debate over William Strunk Jr. & E.B. White’s The Elements of Style, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of its release. His focal point is the dialog between Geoffrey K. Pullum and Andrew Ferguson regarding EOS’s legitimacy as a pedagogical text. The findings presented in Forum are cited as further confirmation that a decline in the quality of the English language is a very real phenomenon, one that Elements of Style has for a half-century acted against as a minor but dependable force.

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Lennon Talks Mailer on NYRB Podcast

On February 16, the New York Review of Books featured a podcast with ALSC member J. Michael Lennon. Lennon is currently working on an authorized biography of Norman Mailer, who was the guest speaker at the Eleventh Annual ALSC Conference in 2005. In the interview, Lennon discusses Mailer’s fascination with uncovering “new pockets of American reality,” his relationships with other authors as a young man, and his tremendous ambition to write the Great American Novel. Arguably more famous for his two Pulitzer-prize winning works of non-fiction, Mailer insisted that even those were works of fiction, reasoning that “there are no histories; we’re all just making it up.”

Lennon Talks Mailer on NYRB Podcast full post

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ALSC Officer Contributes to National Conversation on Workforce Reduction

New York Times reporter Matt Richtel has interviewed ALSC Secretary-Treasurer William Flesch for an article on alternatives to workforce reduction in the current economy. Speaking in his capacity as head of the faculty senate at Brandeis University, Flesch is quoted on his suggestion that the school’s faculty give up 1 percent of their pay. “What we are doing is a symbolic gesture that has real consequences — it can save a few jobs . . . It’s not painless, but it is relatively painless and it could help some people.”

Read the full article here.

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