Indiana University's Creative Writing Program in the Department of English is now ranked among the top in the nation, according to the November/December issue of Poets and Writers Magazine.

Indiana University Bloomington will host a mini-symposium titled "Representing Animals in Art" as part of "Themester 2009: Evolution, Diversity and Change," the university's inaugural themed semester and a project of the College of Arts and Sciences. The two-day event will be presented by Art and Environment (Institute for Advanced Study New Knowledge Seminar) on the Bloomington campus Oct. 29-30.

Somewhere in the world, right at this moment, someone is watching the cult-classic 1998 Coen brothers film The Big Lebowski and sipping a white Russian. Just ask Ed Comentale, an associate professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington, who co-wrote and edited an upcoming book of essays analyzing the movie, titled The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies.

Somewhere in the world, right at this moment, someone is watching the cult-classic 1998 Coen brothers film The Big Lebowski and sipping a white Russian. Just ask Ed Comentale, an associate professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington, who co-wrote and edited an upcoming book of essays analyzing the movie, titled The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies.

Graduate students from across the Big Ten and the University of Chicago who are involved in Asian American studies are gathering for an inaugural conference on the Indiana University Bloomington campus Sept. 25-26.

High school teachers from across the country will converge in Bloomington July 6 for a four-week Picturing John James Audubon institute at Indiana University, the first of its kind. The institute is directed by Indiana University English Professor Christoph Irmscher (Alita Hornick from the IU Department of English helped organize the institute), and funded by a $200,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities through its Picturing America series of summer seminars and institutes for high school teachers. The institute will feature experts on Audubon, American art and natural history.

Lexical much? In his new book, Slang: The People's Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2009), Indiana University Assistant Professor Michael Adams describes -- and passionately defends -- slang as the creative expression of the every day. The first major work on American slang in nearly a decade, Slang neatly bridges the gap between pop culture and academia with a thorough examination of the ways Americans continually reinvent or combine words to keep language a living, breathing entity.

Indiana University's College of Arts and Sciences has selected two students as winners of its 2009 Palmer-Brandon Prize: Aren Wilson-Wright, a junior majoring in Jewish studies, religious studies and mathematics, and Clara Mitchell, a junior majoring in English and art history, will each receive $20,000. The Palmer-Brandon Prize is given annually to outstanding full-time students who are majoring in the humanities.

Scholars from across the U.S. and from Canada will be at Indiana University Bloomington this month to present and discuss papers on the importance of place in modern American literary and cultural studies. A symposium titled "Deep Localities: The New Critical Regionalism" will take place April 10 in the University Club of the Indiana Memorial Union.

Recipients of the Outstanding Junior Faculty Award this year are Marco Arnaudo, French and Italian; Beth Gazley, Public and Environmental Affairs; Scott Herring, English; Ted Striphas, Communication and Culture; and Haixu Tang, Informatics. Each has received $14,500 to support his or her research and creative activity.

Indiana University English professors John Schilb and Andrew Miller from IU's College of Arts and Sciences are being recognized with prestigious national awards. Schilb, the Culbertson Chair of Writing and a professor of English at IU, will be awarded the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize from the Modern Language Association on Dec. 28. In November, Associate Professor of English Andrew Miller was awarded the Donald Gray Prize from the North American Victorian Studies Association.

The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature has selected Bloomington resident Scott Russell Sanders, a distinguished professor of creative writing at Indiana University's College of Arts and Sciences, to receive the 2009 Mark Twain Award for his "distinguished contributions to Midwestern literature." Previous winners include Toni Morrison, Ray Bradbury, Jim Harrison, William Maxwell, Wright Morris, Harriet Monroe, Gwendolyn Brooks and Jonis Agee. The award ceremony will take place at the society's annual meeting in East Lansing, Mich., on May 8, 2009, and will feature a panel devoted to Sanders' work.

Selections in this issue include books about a 1932 uprising in El Salvador, the "burdens of perfection" described in Victorian literature, a new generation of Jewish writers in America and the present and future of electric power technologies.

Outstanding recent books by Department of English faculty at Indiana University's College of Arts and Sciences have been recognized by Choice magazine, the official journal of the Association of College and Research Libraries, and by the Gutavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights.

Outstanding recent books by Department of English faculty at Indiana University's College of Arts and Sciences have been recognized by Choice magazine, the official journal of the Association of College and Research Libraries, and by the Gutavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights.

Indiana University Bloomington professor George Hutchinson's latest book, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line, has been selected for the 2007 Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa. Hutchinson will receive the award Dec. 7 at the Latham Hotel Georgetown in Washington, D.C. The $10,000 annual award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society is given for works of literary scholarship and criticism.

In the last edition of Lecture Notes for the semester, take part in National Cover the Uninsured Week, explore the photographs of Tijani Sitou and celebrate the 2007 Indiana Law class.

Exciting new scholarly and artistic explorations of Senagalese culture, Shakespeare and climate change are among the Indiana University projects that have received $1 million in grants from the New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities Program, an IU initiative funded by the Lilly Endowment.

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky will present a talk and reading at Indiana University Bloomington on Oct. 26 at 4:30 p.m. at Whittenberger Auditorium in the Indiana Memorial Union. He is one of three former U.S. Poet Laureates who will visit the campus in the coming months as part of a series on the topic of "Solitude."

Michael A. McRobbie, IU interim provost and vice president for academic affairs, highlighted to the Indiana University Board of Trustees today (Aug. 18) four particularly distinguished professors who are among new appointees to the Bloomington faculty.

Though Nepal's embattled king has announced he will restore the nation's parliament, the nation's political problems are far from over and democracy still faces threatening challenges. Having lived with political unrest all of their lives, Nepalis understand that victory might be fleeting, according to Samrat Upadhyay, a native of Nepal and professor of creative writing at Indiana University Bloomington. Upadhyay focuses on how ordinary Nepalis cope with that unrest on a daily basis in his new collection of short stories, The Royal Ghosts.

Indiana University Bloomington and the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program will host a landmark conference, "The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature," March 22-24, featuring presentations by 11 immigrant authors and scholars now living and writing in the United States. It is believed to be the first sizable gathering of such writers ever held in the nation. Renowned Romanian author Norman Manea will deliver the keynote address on March 22 and join his fellow writers as they reflect on the ties between exile and creativity.

For the past 25 years, the graduate creative writing program at Indiana University Bloomington has aspired to instill in each of its writers a lifetime habit of art. Evidence of the program's success is on display in a new 25th anniversary anthology of short stories written by its graduates, The Habit of Art: Best Stories from the Indiana University Fiction Workshop.

Indiana University's thriving -- and ever-growing -- arts scene will be in full bloom during ArtsWeek, the annual campus-community arts festival in Bloomington, Ind., now celebrating its 22nd year. ArtsWeek 2006, which will be held from Thursday (Feb. 23) to March 5, will offer audiences a cornucopia of opportunities to experience the best and most exciting creative work on and around campus and the community. The festivities include the world premiere of Ned Rorem's opera Our Town, as well as performances by such touring headliners as the Urban Bush Women and Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

Indiana University President Adam W. Herbert announced that 19 IU graduate students -- six more than last year -- have received prestigious IIE-Fulbright or Fulbright-Hays grants, both funded through major federal grant programs, for the 2005-06 academic year. Founded in 1946 by the late Sen. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the Fulbright Program for U.S. Students aims to increase understanding of American culture and values through scholarly exchanges of knowledge and skills.