Trent Masiki's short stories and essays have appeared in Callaloo, Obsidian II, Xavier Review, Reform Judaism Magazine, and These Hands I Know: African American Writers on Family.  In 2007, he received a PEN New England Discovery Award for New Writers and read at Harvard's Radcliffe Center for the ceremony.  In 2005, he served as one of two fiction judges for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards, and in 2003 he received an honorable mention in Best American Short Stories.  He has written cover stories and features articles for Poets & Writers Magazine since 2001.  His editorial services include profile and feature writing, as well as copy, line, and developmental editing.  Trent Masiki began teaching at Quinsigamond Community College as an assistant professor in September of 2001, the same month he earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College in Boston.  He became a full professor in 2007.  He currently teaches ENG 204 Writing Fiction, ENG 203 Writing Poetry, and other courses in the Humanities Division.  He serves on the board of the Worcester County Poetry Association (WCPA) and  is responsible for co-founding and co-organizing three annual QCC poetry readings:  Worcester's Women Poets, The Worcester Poetry Showcase, and Local Harvest: The Fall Open Mic.  He is also a co-advisor of the college's BSU, whose first community service trip involved post-Katrina relief work in New Orleans in the spring of 2011.  His teaching interests include fiction and narrative nonfiction.  His interest in organizational culture in higher education includes the intersection of academic visual identity (AVI) and symbolic leadership.  Trent Masiki was recently accepted into the Afro-American Studies program (PhD) at UMass-Amherst.  There, he plans to pursue his interest in the literature and culture of African Americans and Anglo and Hispanophone Afro-Caribbeans.

Works in Progress

Rueda de casino and other popular Cuban dances
(three interviews filmed in Havana, 2011)

 The Academic Visual Identity of Worcester: A Narrative History of Collegiate Heraldry and Visual Culture
(book manuscript)

On the Malecón
(personal essay about a 2010 Roots of Salsa dance and music research trip in Havana)

 Whiskey Under the Mattress, Playboy on the Porch
(personal essay on masculinity, fathers, and fathering)

Hegira
(personal essay on travels in southern Spain)

Profiles & Interviews

 
The Path of Creation: A Profile of Afaa Michael Weaver
Poets & Writers Magazine (November/December 2007)  

One Man, One Nation: A Profile of Wole Soyinka
Poets & Writers Magazine (May/June 2006)  

Irony and Ecstasy: A Profile of Percival Everett
Poets & Writers Magazine (May/June 2004)  

Aesthetically Speaking: The Emergence and Survival of Callaloo
Poets & Writers Magazine (January/February 2003) 

Consistently Himself: A Conversation with James Alan McPherson
Poets & Writers Magazine (March/April 2001)
  

Literary Nonfiction

A Curious Absence
These Hands I Know: African American Writers on Family (Sarabande 2002)
(personal essay about the death of my father and being bi-ethnic)
 

Short Fiction

With Myth and Fire  
Callaloo 25.2 (Spring 2002)  

Peniel Dawn 
Reform Judaism Magazine (Winter 1999)

Winners Go First
Xavier Review (Fall 1997)
In a Field of Words (Prentice-Hall 2002)

And We Dream
Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review (1995)
 

Scholarly Articles

Academic Visual Identity (AVI): An Act of Symbolic Leadership
Journal of Marketing for Higher Education 21.1 (2011)

The Burden of Insight: Dramatic Irony & the Rhetoric of Illumination in Elbow Room
Short Story Journal 9.1 (Spring 2001)

Book Reviews

Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art
by Tony Medina, Samiya A. Bashir, and Quraysh Ali Lansana (Third World Press 2002)
Black Issues Book Review (January/February 2002)  

Soledad: A Novel
by Angie Cruz (Simon and Schuster 2001)
Black Issues Book Review (September/October 2001)  

Fire on the Beach
by David Wright and David Zoby (Scribner 2001)
Black Issues Book Review (July/August 2001)  
 

Contact
Trent Masiki, MFA
Professor of English
Quinsigamond Community College
670 W. Boylston, St. 01606
Worcester, MA
Office 312-A
508-854-2779
tmasiki@qcc.mass.edu

Curriculum Vitae      Teaching Philosophy
 

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