When America’s first youth poet laureate, Amanda Gorman, presents another of her original poems during Super Bowl LV events on Sunday, Washington State University student and campus civic poet of 2020 Allyson Pang will be among the millions of people cheering her on.

Like Gorman, Pang wants to use her education and creative writing skills to make the world a better place.

“In my poetry, I always want to inspire and motivate people,” said Pang, a 20-year-old junior from Honolulu, double-majoring in English and journalism.

Gorman’s stirring poetic recital at the U.S. presidential inauguration on Jan. 20 was a passionate call for social change, and her Super Bowl poem will spotlight three people the NFL is honoring for outstanding community leadership during the global pandemic.

Find out more

WSU Insider

In the era of COVID, too few institutions have been considering changes to policies and procedures that could support a wide range of researchers, writes Todd Butler, interim dean of the WSU College of Arts & Sciences.

As we begin the spring semester, the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage and worsen. It’s thus time for higher education to stop treating COVID-19’s impact on faculty careers as primarily a time-management problem, one that can be handled through clock extensions and other short-term interventions. Especially at research-oriented universities, responding effectively to the upheaval resulting from COVID-19 will instead require both institutions and faculty members to reimagine long-term policies and structures that define productivity, tenure and promotion. How institutions of higher education respond to this upheaval is crucial for their futures.

Organizational change is challenging even in nonpandemic times. Institutional policies reflect structures designed at the time of their founding, and change can imply that long-standing practices — and the faculty who have followed them successfully — are in some way “wrong.” Yet none of the suggestions above abandons our research mission. Rather, they widen and update it, disentangling stress-inducing and time-bound measures of “productivity” from the foundational intellectual ambitions that drive faculty members — to inquire, to create and to make a difference with what we learn.

Find out more

Inside Higher Ed

On a spontaneous trip to the Yakima Valley Museum, Tabitha Espina (’20 PhD English) perused the history exhibits and wondered, “Where are all the Filipinos?”

A WSU Pullman graduate student at the time, she had read about the experiences of Yakima’s Filipino Americans in Carlos Bulosan’s classic 1943 memoir, America is in the Heart.

Espina’s question led her to a roundtable with the museum, Arts Washington, and Humanities Washington where she served as a graduate fellow, exploring ways to amplify Filipino-American narratives in the Pacific Northwest.

“You may not be separated by oceans. But there are other borders,” she says. “How do you transcend those borders? Not just geographically, but also ideologically.”

Espina’s work in the classroom and communities requires curiosity, like a moment in a museum. It also requires imagination and envisioning how communities can engage with different perspectives. In addition to teaching and research, she has a heart for service.

Find out more

Washington State Magazine

Washington State University announces the spring virtual Visiting Writers Series, a collaboration of WSU’s campuses in Pullman and Vancouver.

The first online event takes place Jan. 27 at 6:00 p.m. via ZOOM with a reading and talk by Ryka Aoki, an L.A.-based poet, composer, teacher, and author of Seasonal Velocities, He Mele A Hilo (A Hilo Song), Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul and The Great Space Adventure.

A Japanese American and transgender woman, Aoki has been praised by the California State Senate as having an “extraordinary commitment to the visibility and well-being of Transgender people.” She is a two-time Lambda Award finalist, and winner of the Eli Coppola Chapbook Contest, the Corson-Bishop Poetry Prize, and a University Award from the Academy of American Poets.

Find out more

Mirage News
WSU Insider

The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU, in a partnership with the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, announced the grant recipients for the Black Lives Matter Artist Grants.

The winning artists will each receive $2,500 to fund the creation of art that communicates the voices, experiences, and artistic expression of social justice efforts in response to systemic racism. Works from each of the artists are scheduled to be exhibited at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU beginning in the fall semester of 2021.

Mikayla Makle, English major, WSU Black Student Union (president) and member of the jury discussed the grant award process by saying, “This artist’s grant has not only provided me with the opportunity to work with an amazing panel of jurors, but it has also allowed me to be witness to impactful and nuanced artistry. I appreciated gaining knowledge throughout this process about the conceptualization of art, as well as developing appreciation for the stories surrounding it.”

Find out more

WSU Insider