The USU English Department welcomes new fiction faculty Amber Caron. Amber’s stories and essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, PEN America Best Debut Short Stories, AGNI, Bennington Review, Southwest Review, Kenyon Review Online, Longreads, Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, the Southwest Review McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Fiction, and grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Since 2019, she has been an Assistant Fiction Editor at AGNI. Her first book, Lost Person Behavior,will be published by Milkweed in 2023.
Amber says, “I am thrilled to be joining the department in this new role. As for my goals in the classroom: I once heard the poet Jorie Graham say she knew she had taught a good writing workshop when, years later, students were still trading work with one another. That seems like a worthy goal as a teacher: building a community of writers who take each other’s stories (and each other) seriously. And while it’s tempting to list all the writing skills I hope students will gain in my classes, ultimately, I want them to understand that language matters, that cultivating curiosity about the world is our first step to becoming engaged artists, and that stories have transformative potential.”
Mufti Nadimul Quamar Ahmed is a graduate student in his second year, pursuing a doctorate in sociology at USU. He recently helped survey Utahns to see if environmental concerns affect the decision to have children.
Utah State University President’s Office recently held receptions for this year’s round of inaugural lectures. Three recently promoted faculty in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences presented thoughtful reflections on their research and the even...
