February Wrap-Up

February has been a busy, busy month. Even with the extra day that leap year afforded, it seemed to go faster than ever.

At Mississippi University for Women, our year began with the announcement of a new name: a name that went over like a lead balloon. So February started with a scramble to come up with another new name and to include more voices in that process. What was at issue? Many of our alums didn’t want a new name at all, but even those who recognized the necessity of a new name were not happy with the name that had been chosen, which took many of us by surprise. Alums wanted to keep the brand or nickname that the university has been known by for a long, long time: The W. Though that brand doesn’t say much to many people, for those who know us, that has been the name they knew for decades. So the new (new) name, which was announced early in the month needed to begin with a W. Ultimately, we landed on the name Wynbridge, since Wyn in Old English was the name of the character that stood for W (even though it didn’t look like the letter “w”), combined with “bridge” to emphasize a bridge from the past to the future, from current students to alumni, etc. Many didn’t like this created name much better, but the decision had been made that a historic name was too fraught with pitfalls.

Fortunately, I had a break from all of that when I went to AWP in Kansas City. Yes, we did talk about the name because I was with current students who wanted that conversation, and because people always bring it up even if they didn’t know about our attempts to change it. The controversy got us an article or two in Inside Higher Ed so some migth have actually known. But the conference was full of books, writers, publishers, panels, and lots and lots of interactions. I even got to hang out with some of my long-time friends from Knox. So in that sense, it was a break, even though it was both exhilerating and exhausting. I talked to two of my editors, met magazine editors, and even had a magazine write and ask me for poems. i didn’t have a lot of what they were looking for, so I even wrote a poem for them — or started it at the conference and finished when I got home.

I enjoyed meeting Eric from Fernwood Press and seeing their books with marvelous covers. I was also happy to be able to flip through several of their poetry books to see how they handled things like acknowledgements and bios. And meeting with my editor from Bloomsbury led to more serious discussions of a possible 2nd edition of A Writer’s Craft.

Coming back home meant catching up on all the things I didn’t do while I was away, along with a big push to support the new new name in the legislature, and then the news that the bill would never make it out of committee. Though that was disappointing after all the effort people had made (and I had been less active than others) in the end, it will probably be a good thing. Having more time will give the university a chance to build support for a name change, to let people get used to the new name or possibly come up with a better solution. Maybe the decision about historical names might also be revisited.

Meanwhile, I kept teaching my classes, got back to reading poems for Poetry South, and even applied for an artist fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission. And there’s a fair amount I’m leaving out because it’s the fairly mundane work of a department chair. Today, March 1, I was at the Mississippi Philological Association conference at the Mississippi School of Mathematics and Sciences (which is on our campus and held in our library), where I read seven poems on a panel with two other writers, and attended two other panels, all while trying to round up the last midterm grades in my department and taking part in a curriclum committee meeting by Zoom between sessions.

So my apologies for not getting a blog post out in awhile. I have been exploring Bluesky, Mastodon, and Substack, but haven’t been too active on my blog. Check me out there, especially on my Substack Newsletter if you’d like to see more about AWP or the latest developments on my books.