The UWM Department of English presents:
The 2023 Gerald J. Alred Professional Writing Awards Ceremony

Speakers

• Prof. Lane Hall, Department of English Chair
• Marian Maris (Emerita Senior Lecturer), Department of English
• Prof. Derek Handley, Department of English
• Sandy Wysocki, Executive Director for the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts
• Laura Davidson, Regional Manager for Macmillan Learning
• Student Winners

Presentation of Awards

The 2023 Gerald J. Alred Professional Writing Challenge Award Winners

Spring 2023

• First Place: Andrew Skyberg
• Second Place: Nora Neubert
• Third Place: Gwendolyn Hardy
• Honorable Mention: Olivia Gresser
• Honorable Mention: Michael Jacobi

Fall 2023

• First Place: Violet Harrison
• Second Place: Aaron Schiebel
• Third Place: Farzana Hekmat

Special Thanks

• Assistant Dean Deanna Alba and the College of Letters & Science
• Laura Davidson, Regional Manager, Macmillan Learning
• Gina Dragutinovich, WUWM
• Professor Lane Hall and the Department of English
• Professor Derek Handley, English Department
• Richard Hay
• Merdith Hubble, English Department Associate
• Marketing President & Publisher Heather Ladage and the Milwaukee Business Journal
• Greg Maliszewski Macmillan Learning
• Mariann Maris, Emerita Senior Lecturer
• Emmy Murphy, Managing Director, CBRE, Inc.
• Nita McDaniel, English Department Administrator
• John Jay Peine III, Video Technology Specialist, Classroom Services
• University Advancement and the UWM Foundation
• Sandy Wysocki, Executive Director, Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts in Brookfield
• Anonymous Donors

The UWM Creative Writing Graduate Program Student-Faculty Series: United We Read will hold an event at 7 p.m. on Friday, March 8 at Sugar Maple (441 E. Lincoln Avenue) with Camilla Lee, Sophie Nunberg, Jessica Drake-Thomas, and Prof. Liam Callanan.

Download the PDF flyer. 

Jason Puskar, UWM Professor of English and Associate Dean for Humanities, is presenting his new book, The Switch: An Off and On History of Digital Humans, on Thursday, February 15 at 6:30 p.m. at Boswell Book Company.

Puskar’s latest book traces a technology that has transformed life for billions of people: the binary switch. Puskar contends that there is no human activity as common as pushing a button or flipping a switch – a deceptively simple act. Far more than a technical history, The Switch offers a cultural analysis of how reducing so much human action to binary alternatives (off or on, one or zero, this or that) has profoundly reshaped modern society.

Mark Goble, author of Beautiful Circuits, says: “Deeply ambitious and sophisticate… Puskar invites us to think more seriously about what happens almost every time we touch one of our devices and turn it on or swipe or click. From the technologies at our fingertips to the vastly larger networks of politics and language that they operate and represent, The Switch provides a fascinating cultural history of how we have made the modern world, and been remade in turn, by the simplest of human actions and the connections they enable.”

Jason Puskar is author of Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance. Puskar earned a PhD in English and American Language and Literature from Harvard University as well as a MPhil in English Literature from the University of Oxford.

Professor Jason Puskar, author of The Switch: An Off and On History of Digital Humans

Thursday, February 15, 6:30 pm at Boswell Book Company

The UWM Creative Writing Graduate Program Student-Faculty Series: United We Read will hold its first event at 7 p.m. on Friday, February 16 at Sugar Maple (441 E. Lincoln Avenue) with Nora Boxer, Danielle Harms, Nancy Nguyen, and Prof. Rebecca Dunham.