Creative writer to teach memoir writing course at UMBC

Laura Wexler, author of a critically-acclaimed nonfiction account of the last mass lynching in America, will be teaching a course in creative nonfiction writing at UMBC this spring.

Ms. Wexler is the author of Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America (Scribner 2003) (http://www.fireinacanebrake.com).

She is senior editor at Style Magazine in Baltimore and has taught classes in memoir writing and literary journalism at Johns Hopkins University's Writing Seminars.

A resident of Baltimore, Ms. Wexler is co-founder of the Stoop Storytelling Series (stoopstorytelling.com), which both Baltimore magazine and The City Paper named best performance series for 2006. Students in her class at UMBC may have an opportunity to participate in a storytelling performance similar to the Stoop during the spring semester.

Ms. Wexler's course (ENGL320/0101) focuses on memoir writing and students will examine the memoir through both reading and writing. Students will read a selection of contemporary memoirs, discussing them both as artistic creations and purportedly factual documents. As part of the study of the genre and craft of memoir, students will do their own writing, ranging from in-class free-writes to at-home writing exercises that invite experimentation with various storytelling techniques. The final section of the course will investigate the issues raised by translating/shaping a written memoir into an aural performance.

For further information contact Christopher Corbett, acting chair, English Department, at corbett@umbc.edu.

UMBC astronomer helps discover possible new black hole

BALTIMORE -- An international team of astrophysicists including Volker Beckmann of UMBC/NASA-Goddard has discovered a possible new black hole near the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

The previously unknown black hole surprised scientists by suddenly "switching on," emitting strong pulses of radiation as it began consuming gas from the star it orbits over 26,000 light years away from our solar system. The discovery, detailed in a letter published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, was made using NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) satellites.

In an ESA press release, Roland Walter, an astronomer at the ESA's INTEGRAL Science Data Center and lead author of the research results, said, "The galactic center is one of the most exciting regions for gamma ray astronomy because there are so many potential gamma-ray sources."

Beckmann, a research assistant professor at UMBC's Joint Center for Astrophysics and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, was part of the team who used NASA's Swift satellite and ESA's INTEGRAL satellite to spot the tell-tale gamma-ray outburst. The research team includes scientists from Switzerland, France, Belgium, Poland, the United States and Spain.

According to Beckmann, potential new black holes are scarcer than commonly thought. "We know about 10 stellar systems in which we're pretty sure that there's a black hole involved, and 10 more are good candidates," he said. "What really surprised us was the intensity of the radiation it emitted and how quickly it became an obvious black hole candidate."

The team found that the black hole's unusually strong gravitational pull ripped off layers of the star it orbits, drawing them into its maelstrom. "We're not sure why this black hole is letting off occasional bright outbursts of radiation instead of a steady stream," said Beckmann, "But we suspect these powerful emissions are caused by big chunks of the star's matter falling into the black hole."