English Graduate Student Wins Prestigious Literary Award

Recently, Dr. Amanda Zink, Professor of English, brought four English graduate students to Tucson, Arizona, to present papers at the 2024 meeting of the Western Literature Association (WLA) conference, held October 2-5. For M.A. students Seth Garwood and Lawrence Archuleta, as well as PhD student Ifeyinwa Edna Ndubuka, this was their first paper presentation at an international academic conference. PhD student Aniqa Jahangeer was honored at the conference as the winner of the J. Golden Taylor Award. This award, named after the first editor of the association's scholarly journal, Western American Literature, goes to the graduate student who submitted the best paper to the annual conference. Juried by a panel of judges from three other universities, this prestigious award comes with a cash prize. The title of Aniqa's paper is "The spatial mapping of home and “transmotion” in Native American storytelling through Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection."  Each student presented papers they wrote in the Spring 2024 section of Zink's Studies in Indigenous Literatures course. They stopped at several spots of interest on the drive from Pocatello and back, including the historic Navajo Bridge and the Grand Canyon. 

Since 2015, Dr. Zink has driven dozens of other English graduate students to annual meetings of the WLA: in Reno, Nevada; Big Sky, Montana; Estes Park, Colorado; and the Fort Hall Indian Reservation, where she hosted the 2023 WLA conference in collaboration with the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes and with the generous support of ISU. The ISU Graduate School, College of Arts & Letters, Department of English & Philosophy, and ASISU have been perennial sponsors of these students' travel.