Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Shedding, Emerging; A Rebirth, Christina Van Dueck

English and Creative Writing | Senior Theses

This thesis is a collection of poems; divided into two parts, the first section intimately explores physicality and essence through graphic writing, inspired by Emerson’s work that is deeply rooted in transcendentalism, idealism, and the divinity of nature. The second part of the collection breathes life into the first through an introspection of naturalistic elements based on linguistic tactility. Inspired by Emily Dickinson, this collection embodies complex celestial imagery to display the abstractness of presence and detachment. Both collections comment on the interconnectedness of human nature in its rawest form and seek to encapsulate a soulful display of the innate …

Coeval 2025, Amy Holmberg Editor, Trina Warkentin Editor, Sadie Buteyn Fiction Editor, Emily Costa Fiction Editor, Katelyn Bierma Nonfiction Editor, Michael Harjo Poetry Editor, Lauren Groff Poetry Editor, Tiana Higgins Art Editor, Bright Holst Design Editor, Elizabeth Caneday Contributor, Abby Chalmers Contributor, Kaleb Cramer Contributor, Malachi Fox Contributor, Jayda Francis Contributor, Chloe A. Harvick Contributor, Amelia Keillor Contributor, Kade Nystrom Contributor, Elle Pehrson Contributor, Alyse Petersen Contributor, Eleanor Schuebel Contributor, Kailey Tan Contributor, Elizabeth Turner Contributor

Coeval

On behalf of the Coeval editing team, we proudly present the 2025 issue of Bethel University’s Coeval Literary magazine. As you read through this journal, you will find poetry, prose, fiction, and visual art about the beauties and hardships of life. Together, Bethel University students and faculty contributed to make this magazine happen. We loved reading each submission and viewing every art piece. More than anything, we look forward to what students will continue to create! Thank you for reading.

Sincerely, Trina Warkentin and Amy Holmberg

Cover Art: Places to Be by Natalie Enos

Colors, Volume 1, Jeff Vasiloff, Md, Mph

Physician Assistant Scholarly and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Metaphors For Metamorphosis: The Poetics Of Kenosis And The Apophasis Of Self In Saint John Of The Cross, George Faithful

Social Justice | Faculty Scholarship

Spanish mystic Saint Juan (John) of the Cross (1542–1591) began writing poetry while imprisoned by his own monastic order. He developed manuals for contemplation, in part, in the form of commentaries on his principal poems. Their first-person narrators were women who underwent metamorphoses in order to pursue love: one became a dove in her despair; another became flame itself; the last disguised herself as a knight. Juan explained that all three represented the soul that is seeking God. For readers, these metaphors could engender cognitive dissonance, through which they might step outside of themselves and move closer to union with …

More Bookman Than Bookerite: William Stanley Braithwaite And Poetic Stereotypes, Susanna Ashton

Publications

William Stanley Braithwaite (1878–1962) began his life with printed words as a printer’s apprentice with Ginn and Company in Massachusetts. Unlike Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, all of whom began their meteoric literary careers by typesetting, Braithwaite’s rise was thwarted by the cultural stereotyping around race. It isn’t surprising, therefore, that throughout his career as anthologizer, publisher, poet, critic, and Boston Evening Transcript columnist, William Stanley Braithwaite used his facility with type to inform valuations of narrative and language with an eye not to race-blind aspects of literature, but to ways race might be recognized …

Poetry And Fiction Reading From Introduction To Creative Writing, Cara Dees, Conrad Ligasan, Justice Jackson, Hannah Wagner, Sammi Matias, Mathias Stewart, Reagan Lane, Claire Carrillo, Zander Schirmer

SPARK Symposium Presentations

This poetry and fiction reading features several student presenters from "English 2430: Introduction to Creative Writing" – many of whom are performing their creative work to a live audience for the first time. Whether through poetry or prose, these students' inventive use of language and storytelling will hook you from beginning to end.

Jobs, Benjamin Schmitt

Inscape

Benjamin Schmitt is the Elgin Award-nominated author of four books, most recently The Saints of Capitalism and Soundtrack to a Fleeting Masculinity. His poems have appeared in Sojourners, Antioch Review, The Good Men Project, Hobart, Columbia Review, Spillway, and elsewhere. A co-founder of Pacifica Writers’ Workshop, he has also written articles for The Seattle Times and At The Inkwell. He lives in Seattle with his wife and children.

Communion Of Saints, Kathleen Fields

Inscape

Kathleen Fields (She/Her/They) lives in Chicago. Her honors include a Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Poet & Author Fellowship, Midwest Writing Center’s Iron Pen prize for poetry and a Kankakee One Act Fest prize for playwriting. Fields is a three time National Endowment for the Humanities teacher fellow. Her poems, creative nonfiction and academic writing appear in literary magazines such as Belt Magazine, The Platform Review, The New York Times, and Terra Foundation for the Arts. She is a poetry reader at Iron Oak Editions and a founding poetry editor of Pine Row Press. She holds an M.A. in …

Three Weeks Ago, I Found A Body, Dead., Christie Gardiner

Inscape

Christie Gardiner is an award-winning author, poet, writer, and performer. Her literary oeuvre includes four ecumenical books (one, currently in its ninth printing), four anthologies, journal publications, booklets, articles, and the writing of her own videocast/podcast. Additionally, Christie has made numerous appearances as a regular media contributor, has cohosted two successful podcasts and serves as a facilitator of writing groups for women. She worked in poetry acquisition for Inscape literary journal, holds a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from Utah Valley University and is an MFA student at Brigham Young University. Recent and upcoming publication credits includes poems and essays …

Don't Cry For All The Loves You've Lost, Rose De Maris

Inscape

Rose DeMaris is a poet and teacher. Her poetry appears in New England Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Image Journal, Narrative, and elsewhere. A recipient of the 2023 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award and Orison Books’ 2022 Best Spiritual Literature Award in Poetry, she holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. She lives in Los Angeles.

Autoimmune, Jodi Balas

Inscape

Jodi Balas is a neurodivergent poet from Northeast Pennsylvania. A lover of words (salacious, being a favorite – it just rolls off the tongue), her poetry has been accepted in Hole in the Head Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Wild Roof Journal, and elsewhere. Jodi’s poem, “His mouth, mine” was selected as a finalist for the 2023 River Heron Review poetry prize and her poem, “Bone Density” won the 2023 Comstock Review Muriel Craft Bailey Award judged by Danusha Lameris. Jodi is in the process of developing her first Chapbook to market to the poetry world. You could follow her musings …

Heavy Fog, Thick Mist, Caleb Jagoda

Inscape

Caleb Jagoda is a poet, journalist, and MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire. He is managing editor at Barnstorm Journal and has published work with Polaris Literary Magazine, Write on the DOT, and Down East Magazine. He lives in Dover, New Hampshire.

Wintertime, Deborah Bacharach

Inscape

Deborah Bacharach is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Shake & Tremor (Grayson Books, 2021) and After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her poems, book reviews and essays have been published in One Art, New Letters, Poet Lore, and The Writer’s Chronicle among many others, and she has received a Pushcart prize honorable mention. She is currently a poetry reader for SWWIM and Whale Road Review and a mentor with PEN America. She lives in Seattle. Find out more about her at DeborahBacharach.com.

Interview With Laura Reece Hogan, Madalyn Hansen

Inscape

Laura Reece Hogan is the author of Butterfly Nebula, the winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry (Backwaters, University of Nebraska Press, 2023), Litany of Flights, the winner of the Paraclete Poetry Prize (Paraclete Press, 2020), the chapbook O Garden-Dweller (Finishing Line Press), and the nonfiction spiritual theology book I Live, No Longer I (Wipf & Stock). She is one of ten poets featured in the anthology In a Strange Land (Cascade Books) and serves on the board of Red Hen Press. Her poems have appeared in Sugar House Review, Scientific American, RHINO, America, Connecticut River Review, Amsterdam …

Interview With Sean Enfield, Madalyn Hansen

Inscape

Sean Enfield is an essayist, poet, gardener, bassist, and educator from Dallas, Texas. His debut collection of essays, Holy American Burnout!, was published by Split/Lip Press and was a finalist for the 2024 CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction. He received his MFA from the University of Alaska—Fairbanks, where he served as the editor-in-chief of Permafrost Magazine. Now he serves as an assistant nonfiction editor at Terrain.org. He was the 2020 recipient of the Fourth Genre’s Steinberg Memorial Essay Prize and has twice had essays listed as notable in Best American Essays. You can find his work at …

Lineation To Liberation: The Transformative Power Of Poetic Rhetoric, Amber Rae Alvarez

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project explores the transformative power of poetic rhetoric and examines how poetry as a form of expressive art serves as a means of reclamation in the aftermath of encounters with the American criminal justice system. I contend that poetry provides a space where folks can reimagine (and reclaim) their identities, asserting their agency in empowering and authentic ways. Taking a Cultural Studies and Critical Prison Studies informed approach, this project engages the concept of lineation to liberation to conduct a close reading analysis of artist (Reginald) Dwayne Betts’ poetry. Betts’ work not only provides a powerful example of how …

Pietà, Jack Stewart

Inscape

Jack Stewart was educated at the University of Alabama and Emory University and was a Brittain Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His first book, No Reason, was published by the Poeima Poetry Series in 2020, and his work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The American Literary Review, Nimrod, Image, and others. He currently runs the Talented Writers Program at Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Revealed, Christopher Stewart

Inscape

Christopher Stewart is the author of What Came After (The Calliope Group) and co-author (with Quraysh Ali Lansana) of The Walmart Republic (Mongrel Empire Press). His poems have appeared in RHINO, Bellevue Literary Review, Plainsongs, Oberon, Connecticut River Review, Eastern Iowa Review, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2025 RHINO Poetry Founder’s Prize. You can learn more about him on his website.

Ebenezer Cave, Micah Daniel Mccrotty

Inscape

Micah Daniel McCrotty lives near Piedmont, Tennessee. His poetry has previously appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, Louisiana Literature, Spoon River Poetry Review, Sycamore Review, and The Fourth River among others.

Toward Côte-Vertu: On Abortion, Joshua Benjamen

Inscape

Joshua Benjamen (elleux/themme) is a multi-disciplinary artist currently residing in Tiohtiá:ke Montréal. Benjamen negotiates their queer, non-binary, and mad/disabled identity through their unruly and uncompromising work in which their lived experience is mulled over within a radical kaleidoscopic lens. Originally a musician, Benjamen has recorded several full-length records and toured internationally in their tenured career and is now working on their first full length poetry collection entitled “(RE)DYSORIENTATIONS.”

Second Shift, Eve, Nick Fife

Inscape

Nick Fife is a Deaf Studies major at UVU. They feel too much too often, so they sometimes dance it out or try to put it all on paper. Nick has a particular fondness for science fiction and calico and gray tabby cats (though a bowl of Thai curry is always welcome).

Review: The Catholicism Of Literature In The Age Of The Book Of Common Prayer: Poetry, Plays, Works, 1558-1689, Brandon Schneeberger

Quidditas

Anyone who has observed the worship trends of the younger generation of Christians in the last ten to twenty years will have noticed a renewed interest in traditional, liturgically conservative forms of worship. Whether it is interest in liturgy itself, or in the materials of liturgy - ornate vestments, incense, candles, bells, chanting, etc. - young people today display a keen interest in forms of worship and reverence that seem to have been lost in the cultural upheaval of the late twentieth century, a revolution that affected both Protestant and Catholic forms of worship. However effective the late twentieth-century iconoclasm …

Brenda, Ty Rea

Creative Writing Club Poetry

Writer: Ty Rea

Title: Brenda

Medium: Poem

Genre: Inspirational

Event: N/A

“Women Who Don’T Know How To Stay Married”: The Poetic Afterlives Of The 1927 Bristol Sessions, Aubrey R. Adkins

Honors Theses

This project begins from the understanding that song lyrics can have lasting impacts on the poetic work that proceeds from them, and can and should, therefore, be read as literature. In the cultural context of Southern Appalachia, a historically underserved and academically underrepresented region, this understanding is intertwined with Audre Lorde’s idea that “For women...[poetry] is a vital necessity of our existence.” The women of Southern Appalachia, denied access to particular modes of expression as a result of external circumstances such as poverty and sexism, need poetry, according to Lorde, to take “tangible action” in their lives. What came before …

Poetry Reading From The Craft Of Poetry Class, Cara Dees, Lj Towell, Lo Vaezi, Abigail Eaton, Bevan Johnson, Virginia Peppiatt, Rachel Jones, Zach Clar, Yara Ali, Lucy Rivas

SPARK Symposium Presentations

This creative reading from the students of "English 3420: Craft of Poetry" features several student presenters sharing the original poems that they wrote and revised across the course of the Spring 2025 semester. These poems of grief, joy, love, and survival showcase the linguistic brilliance and dazzling creativity of Belmont undergraduates.

Epilogue: Every Þrose Has Its Thorn On Poison, The Cure, And Other Pharmacological Prickles; Or, Why Are You So Far Away?, David Ben-Merre Ph.D., Manu Samriti Chander Ph.D.

English Department Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Creative Energies: Unearthing The Role Of Romantic Ecocriticism, Nicole Marie Chambers-Stahl

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The literary field of ecocriticism has transcended the boundaries of Academia: excited to connect to their physical environments, many of these scholars are focusing on genres like place-based writing, rhetoric of energy policy, and representations of the Earth in film and media. Interdisciplinary by nature, ecocriticism has demonstrated clear potential in its ability to intersect with concentrations like the history of science, animal studies, and environmental justice.

However, as the language around global crises is heating up —“Today it is scientists, not prophets,” writes Tobias Menely in “‘The Present Obfuscation,’” “who speak the language of apocalypse” (478)—ecocritical scholarship is at …

Our Defender In Battle, Garrett S. "Faustino" Miller Oblsb

Obsculta

"Our Defender in Battle" is a fictional poem about an event not contained within the biblical scriptures. It tells about the coming of St. Michael the Archangel to aid in protecting humanity after the temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man.

Milk Tooth, 2025, Eddie Anderson, Sadie House, Jay Clark, Ravyn Oliver, Edwin Mayo, Joseph Kettelhodt, Kaitlyn Seibel, Daniel Mcnellis, Elise Fladeboe, Ivy Matejcek, Trinity Johnson, Eve Gwendolyn Hansen, Liz Fisher, Emma Niessink, Hannah Lewis

Milk Tooth

"Writings by Bemidji State University Students". Sponsored by the Bemidji State University English Department.

Ferocious (And Tender) Survival, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

A review of Blood Loss: a Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art, by Keiko Lane (Duke University Press, 2024) in the Anarchist Review of Books