Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

Sutton Fellow 2003-2006

Ms. Jeanetta Calhoun Mish received a Bachelor of Arts in English and a Master of Arts in English from the University of Texas Permian Basin.

Since coming to the University of Oklahoma, Ms. Mish has taught first year composition and in 2006 will teach both American Literature survey courses. In 2005, she was awarded The Peter Kyle mccarter Endowment Award for Excellence in American Studies, and the Ruby N. Courtney Writer’s Scholarship, which is administered by the Oklahoma State Regents.

Ms. Mish’s essay “The Heart’s Sweatshop”: Weaving Poetries of Witness in Demetria Martinez’s The Devil’s Workshop” was published in Mediating Chicano/a Culture (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006) and her biographical essay on the Native American writer Carroll Arnett is scheduled for 2006 publication in The Encyclopedia of Native American Literature (Facts on File). Ms. Mish has presented papers for the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies Conference and the Neustadt Conference, and her paper entitled “Queering Martin Eden” has been accepted for the National Pop Culture Association/American Culture Association conference to be held in Boston in April of 2007. Ms. Mish also served as a panelist for the 2005 English Department Colloquium entitled “Pedagogy: Enlightenment, Advocacy, and Brick Walls.”

Ms. Mish has been an active participant in Oklahoma’s biennial Red Dirt Book Festival, serving as an invited writer for the inaugural festival in 2003 and as both an invited writer and a member of the Programming Board for 2005. She is also a member of the Woody Guthrie Poets and has performed poetry readings at Full Circle Books ( Oklahoma City, 2003) and the Norman Performing Arts Center (2006). Ms. Mish’s most recent poetry publications are in the acclaimed online journal Poetry Bay and in “Walt’s Corner,” the column begun by Walt Whitman and which continues in the newspaper he edited, the Long-Islander.

Ms. Mish completed her general exams in May 2006 and she is currently researching her dissertation on contemporary working-class women poets and the ethical and political dimensions of their work.