News
2008-2009 Academic Year
June-August, 2008
The Department of English is taking these summer months to prepare for another great academic year. The MA program looks forward to an incoming class of 15 new students, while both the national-ranked MFA program and the new PhD program in Media, Art & Text will have 8 and 13 additional students respectively. Winners of the annual Levis Reading Prize and First Novelist Award will soon be announced, and the Department's distinguished Visiting Writers Series for 08-09 will host readings by such acclaimed authors as Stuart Dybek, Ron Hansen, Victoria Chang, Bruce Beasley and others.
2007-2008 Academic Year
April 24, 2008
The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to host a reading by award-winning author, Bret Lott. The reading will take place Thursday, April 24th at 8 pm at Gallery 1708 (319 W. Broad St.) Lott is the author of 11 books, most recently the story collection The Difference Between Women and Men, Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer's Life, and the bestselling novel A Song I Knew by Heart. His newest book, the novel Ancient Highway, will be released by Random House in July.
April 17, 2008
The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to host a joint poetry reading by Claudia Emerson and Clint McCown. The reading will take place on Thursday, April 17th, at 8 pm in the University Student Commons (Richmond Salons I/II), 907 Floyd Avenue. Emerson’s most recent collection, Late Wife, won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Her other poetry collections include Pharaoh, Pharaoh, and Pinion, An Elegy. McCown’s latest collection of poems is Dead Languages (Anhinga Press, 2008). He published two collections of poems (Sidetracks and Wind Over Water), and three novels (The Member-Guest, War Memorials, and The Weatherman).
April 3, 2008
The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to host a reading by acclaimed poet, Terrance Hayes. The reading will take place on April 3rd at 7 pm at VCU University Student Commons – Richmond Salons. Hayes is the author of Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006), Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002) and Muscular Music (Carnegie Mellon University Contemporary Classics, 2005, and Tia Chucha Press, 1999). His honors include a Whiting Writers' Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a National Poetry Series Award, a Pushcart Prize, two Best American Poetry selections, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His poems have appeared in a range of journals, including The New Yorker, Fence, Tin House, The Kenyon Review and Ploughshares. He co-edits the poetry journal jubilat, and is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
February 28, 2008
The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to host a reading by award-winning author, Thomas Mallon. The reading will take place on February 28th at 8 pm at VCU University Student Commons – Virginia Rooms. Mallon's seven novels include Henry and Clara, Bandbox, and the recently-published Fellow Travelers. He has written non-fiction books about plagiarism (Stolen Words), diaries (A Book of One's Own) and the Kennedy assassination (Mrs. Paine's Garage), as well as two volumes of essays (Rockets and Rodeos and In Fact). His work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Book Review and other publications.
February 14, 2008
The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to host a reading by award-winning poet, Jean Valentine. The reading will take place Thursday, February 14th at 8 pm at Gallery 1708 (319 W. Broad St.) Valentine's most recent book is Little Boat (Wesleyan University Press, 2007). Her previous collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965 - 2003, was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.
November 16, 2007
The Sixth Annual VCU First Novelist Award, for a book published in 2006, will go to Peter Orner for his novel The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, published by Random House. The award will be presented at the First Novelist Forum at VCU Student Commons at 7PM. Previous awards have gone to Karen Fisher for A Sudden Country, Lorraine Adams for Harbor, Michael Byers for Long for This World, Isabel Zuber for Salt, and Maribeth Fischer for The Language of Good-bye. For more details, please visit http://www.firstnovelist.vcu.edu
November 8 , 2007
The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to host a reading by award-winning poet, C.K. Williams. The reading will take place on Thursday, November 8th at 8 pm in the VCU School of Business Auditorium (Room 101, 1015 Floyd Avenue). Please note the venue for this event was changed from the original announcement. C.K. Williams’ Collected Poems appeared in 2006. He has published nine other books of poetry, the most recent of which, The Singing, won the National Book Award for 2003. His previous book, Repair, was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, and his collection, Flesh and Blood, received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has published translations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Euripides’ Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, among others. His book of essays, Poetry and Consciousness, appeared in 1998, and a memoir, Misgivings, in 2000. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and teaches in the writing program at Princeton University.
October 15, 2007
The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to host a reading by author, Rebecca Curtis. The reading will take place on Monday, October 15th, at 8 pm in the in the University Student Commons (Commonwealth A), 907 Floyd Avenue. Rebecca Curtis has a Masters in English from New York University and an MFA in fiction from Syracuse University. She is the author of Twenty Grand and Other Tales of Love & Money (Harpercollins 2007). Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Harper’s Bazaar, McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, Open City, N+1 and elsewhere, and her nonfiction has appeared in Jane Magazine. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation award and a Saltonstall Grant. She has taught writing in the MFA programs at St. Mary’s College of California and at the University of Kansas. She currently teaches in the writing program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn.
September 27, 2007
The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to announce that From the Book of Giants by Joshua Weiner was selected as the winner of the Tenth Annual Levis Reading Prize, awarded in the name of the late Larry Levis for the best first or second book of poetry published in the calendar year 2006. Mr. Weiner will receive an honorarium of $1000 and will be brought to Richmond all expenses paid for a reception and public reading to take place September 27th, 2007 at 8PM in the Virginia Commonwealth University Student Commons, Richmond Salons III/IV (907 Floyd Avenue). A reception will follow. This reading at VCU is sponsored by the Department of English and the Graduate Writers Association, with additional funding provide by the family of Larry Levis. It is free and open to the public.
September 14-16, 2007
The Department of English and College of Humanities and Sciences will host the annual meeting of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP), September 14-16, 2007. The conference topic is “Time and the Victorian Press.” Program chair for this year’s meeting is Prof. Mark Turner, King’s College, University of London. Highlights of the conference will include: (1) The Annual Wolff Lecture, this year by Joel H. Wiener, Professor of History at City University of New York; (2) The Colby Book Prize, an annual award for the book which makes the greatest contribution to the study of nineteenth-century periodicals, will be awarded to Prof. David Finkelstein of Edinburgh University, Scotland, for his book Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition (University of Toronto Press, 2006); and (3) An architectural walking tour led by Prof. Charles Brownell of the Department of Art History, VCU, 16 September, 9:30 am. Full information and registration forms may be found here.
June-August, 2007
The Department of English is taking these summer months to prepare for another great academic year. The MA program looks forward to an incoming class of 20 new students, while both the national-ranked MFA program and the new PhD program in Media, Art & Text will have 13 additional students respectively. Winners of the annual Levis Reading Prize and First Novelist Award will soon be announced, and the Department's distinguished Visiting Writers Series for 07-08 will host readings by such accalimed authors as CK Williams, Thomas Mallon, Terrance Hayes, Brett Lott and others.
2006-2007 Academic Year
April 26, 2007
The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to host a reading by award-winning author, Gerald Stern. The reading will take place off-campus, on Thursday, April 26th, at 8 pm at The 1708 Gallery (319 W. Broad St, -- just past Belvidere St.). Stern is the author of fourteen books of poetry including, This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award in 1998, and most recently Everything is Burning published in 2005. A collection of personal essays titled What I Can’t Bear Losing: Notes From a Life was released in the fall of 2003. He has taught at many universities and for fifteen years was senior poet at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, three National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships, the Lamont Poetry Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize. He was the first Poet Laureate of New Jersey and was the recipient of both the 2005 Wallace Steven Award for mastery for in the art of poetry and the 2005 National Jewish Book Award for poetry. In 2006 Stern was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
April 20, 2007
Nicholas Frankel recently co-chaired the 14th Biennial International Conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship, which took place at New York University 14-17th March. The full program for the conference-- featuring roughly 140 presenters and panelists from the US, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium and Japan -- can be found at www.textual.org.
April 16, 2007
The Department of English would like to congratulate David Wojahn. David's recent collection "Interrogation Palace: New & Selected Poems 1982-2004" (University of Pittsburgh Press) was just selected as one of three finalists for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry is awarded for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author. This year's prize has been awarded to Natasha Trethewey for her collection "Native Guard" (Houghton Mifflin). The other finalist besides David is Martin Espada, for his collection "The Republic of Poetry" (W.W. Norton). This is an enormous honor. On behalf of the English department, congratulations to David, our friend and colleague, for being included in such highly select company and for this remarkable recognition of his great work.
April 5, 2007
The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to host a reading by award-winning author, George Saunders. The reading will take place on Thursday, April 5th, at 8 pm in the in the University Student Commons (Commonwealth B), 907 Floyd Avenue. Saunders’ latest book, In Persuasion Nation, was published to wide acclaim. He has published
two collections of stories, Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and a children's story, The Very
Persistent Gappers of Frip. He is also the author of the novel The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil and
his fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Story, as well as in many other publications. He
won the National Magazine Award in 1994 for his story "The 400-pound CEO" and in 1996 for the story "Bounty." In April of last year, he was named a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow and, in October, a MacArthur
fellow. He has explored for oil in Sumatra, played guitar in a Texas bar band, and worked in a
slaughterhouse.
March 1, 2007
The Beholder, a series of short stories authored by Virginia Commonwealth University graduate students taking a creative writing class led by Dr. Susann Cokal, just been published on the Virginia Museum of Finae Arts' website. Using the Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun portrait of the Comte de Vaudreuil as inspiration, each member of the class selected a year in the life of the painting to create a short work of fiction. The students who produced this novel novel are: Chapter I, Lauren Maas; Chapter II, Kelsey Trom; Chapter III, Brian Castleberry; Chapter IV, Andrew Blossom; Chapter V, Yazmina Beverly; and Chapter VI, Courtney Fenner. Congratulations to Susann and to her students. Please take a few minutes and go to The Beholder.
February 22-23, 2007
The Department of English is proud to help co-sponsor VCU Jazz and their upcoming Langston Hughes
Project. The two day program is one of the most complex
artistic presentations to come via VCU Jazz, with
its multimedia aspects and its artists arriving in Richmond from
around the U.S. For more information about VCU Jazz and The Langston Hughes Project please check out their website.
February 7, 2007
The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to host a reading by award-winning poet, Charles Bernstein. The reading will take place on Wednesday, February 7th, at 7 pm in the Hibbs Building, Room 203, 900 Park Avenue. Bernstein is the author of thirty books of poetry and libretti, including Girly Man and Shadowtime. Bernstein’s poems and essays have been published in over five hundred magazines and periodicals. He is the founder of the Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY-Buffalo, where he was appointed a Distinguished Professor in 2002. Bernstein is now Donald T. Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2006, Bernstein was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
January 25, 2007
2007 VCU Visiting Writers Series: The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to host a reading by award-winning author, Joan Connor. The reading will take place on Thursday, January 25th, at 8 pm in the University Student Commons (Commonwealth B), 907 Floyd Avenue. Connor's most recent work, The World Before Mirrors, was the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize Winner. Her collection, History Lessons, won the Associated Writing Programs' Short Fiction Award. Her other two collections of short stories are Here on Old Route Seven and Other New England Stories and We Who Live Apart have also received widespread acclaim.
2007
As we begin a new year, the Department of English would like to congratulate four of its faculty for their recent publications.
Winnie Chan's new book, The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals of the 1890s (Routledge 2007) investigates the relationship between the proliferation of literary periodicals--she focuses on three of them, the Strand, the Yellow Book, and Black and White--and the increasing popularity of the short story. Chan's work reveals how "print culture and the politics of burgeoning modernism shaped a literary form that, in its oscillation between mass culture and high art, was in fact emblematic of early modernism."
Laura Browder's new book, Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America, explores the social meanings of armed womanhood in a culture where violence is associated with masculinity. Browder traces the phenomenon from Civil War cross-dressing spies to the present-day National Rifle Association's female-oriented marketing strategies, demonstrating how public discussions of gun-toting women find each successive era revealing its particular anxieties about women's sexuality and role as citizens.
The subject of Marcel Cornis-Pope's History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (Vol. II), is the literature of the "other Europe," focusing on on the "junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries." Marcel, who also co-edited Vol. I of this history (2004), not only edited the two volumes but he wrote essays for them, too. In this 500-page Vol. II, he wrote essays introducing each of the three divisions of the book--the literature of East-central Europe's cities, the literature of regional sites, and the literary reconstruction of imagined communities. .
Sachi Shimomura's book Odd Bodies and Visible Ends in Medieval Literature (published by Palgrave Macmillan in their New Middle Ages series) studies the way medieval audiences understood bodies--human bodies, both the saved and the damned, the secular and the sacred, and monster bodies, too. By describing the metaphorical use of bodies, Sachi offers new insights into specific literary works (most notably Chaucer’s Wife of Bath Tale and Gawain) while at the same time providing a better understanding of the impact of Christian eschatology on secular literature.
December 11, 2006
The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to host a reading by Claudia Emerson, recipient of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. This special reading will take place Monday, December 11th on VCU's campus in Hibbs Hall, room 403 at 2PM. Emerson was awarded the prize in recognition of her 2005 book, titled Late Wife, an autobiographical account of the break-up of her 19-year marriage and the start of her life with a new husband. Her publisher, Louisiana State University Press, nominated her for the recognition.
December 6, 2006
The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to host a reading by acclaimed poet, Piotr Sommer. Sommer will present a public reading tonight, December 6th at 8 pm in Richmond Salons IV of the University Student Commons, 907 Floyd Avenue. Piotr Sommer is from Warsaw, Poland, where he is a poet, translator, critic, and editor of the international journal Literatura na Swiecie [Literature in the World]. He is the author of eight collections of poetry, a translator of Seamus Heaney, John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Lowell, among others.
“Ennui,” a previously unpublished poem by Sylvia Plath, appeared Nov. 1 in Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts.Anna Journey, contributing editor of Blackbird and a student in the MFA in Creative Writing program at VCU, discovered the unpublished status of "Ennui" during research in the archives at Indiana University's Lilly Library. Journey, a published poet, is the author of a forthcoming scholarly article on "Ennui." (full text of VCU press release)
November 10, 2006
The Fifth Annual VCU First Novelist Award, for a book published in 2005, will go to Karen Fisher for her novel A Sudden Country, published by Random House. The award will be presented at the First Novelist Forum, to be held Friday, November 10, 2006 at VCU Student Commons at 7PM. Previous awards have gone to Lorraine Adams for Harbor, Michael Byers for Long for This World, Isabel Zuber for Salt,andMaribeth Fischer for The Language of Good-bye. For more details, please visit http://www.firstnovelist.vcu.edu
November 2, 2006
The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to host a reading by acclaimed poet, Ellen Bryant Voigt. Voigt will present a public reading from her forthcoming collection, Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006, on Thursday, November 2, at 8 pm in Richmond Salons I/II of the University Student Commons, 907 Floyd Avenue.
October 25, 2006
The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to host a reading by VCU’s own alum and acclaimed author, Sheri Reynolds. Reynolds will present a public reading from her new novel, Firefly Cloak, on Wednesday, October 25, at 8 pm in Richmond Salons III/IV of the University Student Commons, 907 Floyd Avenue.
September 28, 2006
The 9th Annual Levis Prize Reading, featuring Ron Slate. The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to announce that The Incentive of the Maggot by Ron Slate has been selected as the winner of the Ninth Annual Levis Reading Prize, awarded in the name of the late Larry Levis for the best first or second book of poetry published in the calendar year 2005. Mr. Slate will receive an honorarium of $1000 and will present a public reading of his work on Thursday, September 28th, at 8 p.m. in the Virginia Commonwealth University Student Commons, Richmond Salons I/II (907 Floyd Avenue). A reception will follow. Slate will also meet with interested students and faculty for a question and answer session on Friday, September 29th.
September 26, 2006
VCU Visiting Writers Series. We are pleased to have John Bresland, an award-winning fiction and nonfiction writer. Winner of the 2006 Tamarack Award for fiction, Bresland works in radio, video, and print. He has built homes, sold used cars, and translated French video games into English for a living. Several of John Bresland's radio essays have aired on public radio, and his video essay "Les Cruel Shoes" is a current feature of Blackbird. Two of his new essays can be read this Fall in Hotel Amerika and his latest short story, "The Cooler," will appear in the November issue of
Minnesota Monthly. Bresland will will present a public reading of his work on Tuesday, September 26th, at 7 p.m. in the Virginia Commonwealth University Student Commons, Commonwealth Ballroom (907 Floyd Avenue).
2005-2006 Academic Year
June 9, 2006
The latest issue of The Whale's Belly, "a newsletter for alumni and friends of the Virginia Commonwealth University Creative Writing Program," is up and ready for reading: http://www.has.vcu.edu/eng/graduate/whalesbelly/.
March 17, 2006
"Political Matters," volume 33 of Victorians Institute Journal, edited by David Latané, has been published, featuring essays on Victorian writers (Eliot, Grote, Gaskell, et alia), first publication of Wilkie Collins's diary for 1868, and reviews of recent scholarship.
January 26, 2006
The Fourth Annual VCU First Novelist Award will be presented to Lorraine Adams, author of Harbor, at 7 p.m. on February 10, at the W. E. Singleton Center for the Performing Arts on the VCU campus. The event is sponsored by the Department of English, the VCU School of Mass Communications, the VCU School of World Studies, eFollett VCU Bookstores, and Richmond writer and VCU alumnus David Baldacci (Total Control, Absolute Power).
January 25, 2006
The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Bryant Mangum, was published November 8, 2005, as part of the Random House Modern Library Classics series.
January 24, 2006
A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, edited by Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia, was just released by Blackwell Publishing.
January 10, 2006
The new interdisciplinary PhD in Media, Art, & Text received approval this morning from the State Council of Higher Education of Virginia (SCHEV). The program, offered jointly by the Department of English, the School of Mass Communications, and the School of the Arts, will admit its first class for fall 2006. For information, see http://www.has.vcu.edu/eng/matx/.
September 30, 2005
Tom De Haven's latest novel, It's Superman!, was published September 15 by Chronicle Books.
2004-2005 Academic Year
July 18, 2005
David Latané and Nicholas Frankel participated in the first NINES workshop on digital scholarship (July 11-15, 2005). NINES (networked interface for nineteenth-century electronic scholarship) is a Mellon Foundation-funded initiative that works closely with the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia.
May 16, 2005
Susann Cokal's latest novel, Breath and Bones, was published by Unbridled Books on May 12, 2005. It is her second novel.
November 5, 2004
Joshua Poteat (MFA '97) recently was awarded the Anhinga Press Poetry Prize for a first or second book for his first collection, Ornithology. He also recently received the National Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America (judged by Mary Oliver).
September 22, 2004
Clint McCown's latest novel, The Weatherman, was published by Graywolf Press on September 1, 2004. It is his third novel.
David Latané recently read a paper titled "Alaric Attila Watts, the Fraser's Portrait Gallery, and William Maginn" at "Image and Text, Image in Text," a conference hosted by the University of Gent, Belgium, July 2004. He has two essays forthcoming, "Perge, Signifer or Where Did William Maginn Stand" in Structures of Belief in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, ed. James Murphy (Dublin: Four Courts Press), and "Who Counts? Popularity, Modern Recovery, and the Early Nineteenth-Century Woman Poet," in Reading and Teaching Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century British Women Writers, ed. Shannon Wooden and Jeanne Moskal (Peter Lang, 2004). Other work has appeared this year in The Carlyle Encyclopedia, ed. by Mark Cumming (Fairleigh-Dickenson UP) and The Encyclopedia of Ireland (Yale UP) ed. Brian Lalor.
Richard Fine and Gregory Donovan, in addition to teaching in the seventh offering of the VCU summer program in Scotland, the Glasgow Artists and Writers Workshop, also interviewed a number of Scottish writers for a special feature on writing from Scotland to be published in an upcoming issue of Blackbird, for which Richard Fine is the contributing editor.
As senior literary editor of Blackbird, Gregory Donovan was invited to the 2004 Bread Loaf Writers'Conference, in Vermont, the nation's oldest conference, begun in 1926 as an idea originally put forward by Robert Frost. Donovan offered a lecture on contemporary online publishing, focusing on the Blackbird journal, which was presented "live" due to the excellent facilities of Middlebury College, which allow for projecting such online publications with stereo sound. He also met individually with a number of conference participants, and solicited work from individual faculty members. Following that, he visited the Vermont College Postgraduate Writers' Conference to deliver a similar lecture, although less technologically enhanced. While there, he recorded Beckian Fritz Goldberg reading some of her work previously published in Blackbird. Finally, he stopped off in Marshfield, Vermont, to record Ellen Bryant Voigt at her home, reading a new poem she will contribute to Blackbird's next issue, as well as engaged in an extensive interview.
August 20, 2004
The 7th Annual Levis Prize Reading, featuring David Daniel, will take place at 7 pm September 16, and the 3rd Annual VCU First Novelist Award, featuring Michael Byers, will take place at 7 pm September 17, both in the W. E. Singleton Center for the Performing Arts, 922 Park Avenue. (Note: This is change in venue. Please disregard any printed material that lists a different location.)
2003-2004 Academic Year
April 1, 2004
Department of English Technology Coordinator Michael Keller received VCU's Award for Innovative Excellence in Teaching, Learning and Technology at the University's Emerging Technologies Day March 31.
April 1, 2004
New Creative Writing faculty to begin fall 2004
Clint McCown will join the creative writing faculty in fiction as an associate professor, and Susann Cokal will join the creative writing faculty in fiction as an assistant professor, both in fall 2004. McCown, author of War Memorials and The Member-Guest and editor of the Beloit Fiction Journal, comes to VCU from Beloit College, Wisconsin, where he taught journalism, fiction writing, playwriting, screenwriting, and American and Scottish literature. Cokal, author of Mirabilis, comes to VCU from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.
April 1, 2004
New Composition & Rhetoric faculty to begin fall 2004
David Coogan will join the English faculty as an assistant professor in fall 2004. He comes to VCU from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he has conducted research on rhetoric and social change and taught courses in service learning, rhetoric, technical communication, composition, and literature.
January 27, 2004
Colleen Curran's (MFA '01) first novel, Whores on the Hill, has been purchased by Vintage Books and is scheduled to be released in fall 2004 or spring 2005. Recently, Colleen's work has won the JANE magazine fiction contest and has been included in the anthology The Dictionary of Failed Relationships: 26 Stories of Love Gone Wrong. Her short story "The Boss's Boyfriend" appears in Blackbird: and online journal of literature and the arts, Vol. 2, No, 2.
November 10, 2003
Agymah Kamau (MFA '92) has been selected as one of ten recipients of the 2003 Whiting Writers' Awards of $35,000 each. The prizes have been given to emerging writers yearly since 1985 by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. Kamau is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Oklahoma and is the author of the novels Flickering Shadows and Pictures of a Dying Man.
October 8, 2003
Jon Pineda's (MFA '00) poetry collection Birthmark has been selected as the first prize winner in the 2003 Crab Orchard Award Series sponsored by Crab Orchard Review and Southern Illinois University Press. It will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in April 2004.
October 6, 2003
The lecture and reading by Samuel R. Delaney scheduled for September 18-19, postponed due to Hurricane Isabel, has been rescheduled. The lecture, "History of the Word 'Queer,'" will be held Friday, November 14, at 8 pm in the Student Commons Capital Ballrooms. The reading will be held Saturday, November 15, at 1 pm in the Student Commons Commonwealth Ballroom.
August 25, 2003
Department of English Instructor Alexina Fagan spoke to the English faculty at Hampden-Sydney College on August 21, 2003. The title of her talk was "Understanding and Helping the ESL Student in the College Classroom."
2002-2003 Academic Year
July 15, 2003
Department of English Assistant Professor Janet Winston is finishing up her year as a Research Fellow at The Center for the Humanities at Oregon State University where she has been working on a book entitled Empire of the Imagination: Queen Victoria and Twentieth Century Culture. Last November she gave a lecture at the Center entitled "From Imperial Assemblage to Modernist Collage: Queen Victoria's Bloomsbury Make-Over."
July 7, 2003
Second First Novelist Award winner chosen
The Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and the James River Writers Festival of Richmond are pleased to announce that Isabel Zuber is the winner of the Second VCU First Novelist Award for her novel, Salt. Ms. Zuber will be on campus October 3, 2003, to read from Salt and to be part of a panel discussion about what it takes to bring a first novel to fruition. For more information, visit the web site of the James River Writers Festival at www.jrwf.org.
June 30, 2003
Victorians Institute Journal volume 21 (2003), edited by David Latane and Elisabeth Gruner (of the University of Richmond) will feature a special section titled "Ghosts of the Victorian," with essays on modern neo-Victorian literature and film. The journal will continue to publish contributions from contemporary novelists and poets responding to their reading of the Victorians, interdisciplinary essays on Victorian culture, and reviews of scholarly books.
June 28, 2003
From August 9 to 16, 2003, Department of English Associate Professor Gregory Donovan will be a writer in residence at the Writers' Center at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, leading a poetry workshop, giving a reading from his work, and delivering a lecture which will feature Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts.
May 16, 2003
Sixth Annual Levis Reading Prize winner chosen
The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to announce that Muse by Susan Aizenberg has been selected as the winner of the Sixth Annual Levis Reading Prize, awarded in the name of the late Larry Levis for the best first or second book of poetry published in the calendar year 2002. Ms. Aizenberg will receive an honorarium of $1000 and will be invited to Richmond all expenses paid for a reception and public reading in October, 2003. In addition, her work will be featured in the fall 2003 issue of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts, published by VCU and New Virginia Review, Inc.
Muse, a finalist in the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry for 2002, was published by Southern Illinois University Press. It is Ms. Aizenberg's first full-length collection. She is the coeditor (with Erin Belieu) of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women, a contributing editor to the Nebraska Review, and author of a chapbook-length collection of poems, Peru, which appears in Take Three: 2: AGNI New Poets Series. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Journal, AGNI, Chelsea, Prairie Schooner, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Aizenberg is currently an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.
last updated
July 9, 2008
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