Drawing parallels to VCU’s recent graduation ceremony, David Coogan celebrates a recent graduation ceremony for the residents at the Richmond City Jail participating in Open Minds, the program that brings faculty and students into the jail for courses in the liberal arts. Read article at http://www.timesdispatch.com/opinion/their-opinion/columnists-blogs/guest-columnists/article_6f5c7011-0bd7-55b1-827b-900505d9faf3.html.
Well done, Dave!
Clint McCown’s novel Haints has received the Midwest Book Award for literary fiction.
Harrison Fletcher’s book Descanso for My Father just received a 2013 Independent Publisher Book Award Bronze Medal.
Congratulations Clint and Harrison!
This year’s prestigious Philip B. Meggs Memorial scholarship recipient Nikki Fernandes, who will receive a bachelor’s degree in English this week, found that a VCU community engagement program made her feel closer to her university. Nikki has volunteered at Church Hill Academy, a private high school for at-risk youth, and taught at the Richmond City Jail. She became involved in the latter effort through a service-learning course, Open Minds, taught by David Coogan, an associate professor in the Department of English.
Attending graduate school may be in her future, but first Nikki will take a teaching job at Church Hill Academy, matching her passion for teaching literature with her desire to help others. Through her work with Open Minds, Nikki met prisoners who have struggled after lacking guidance and opportunities when they were younger. Nikki sees a chance to prevent similar future difficulties for the kids she will teach at Church Hill.
See Tom Gresham’s full article in VCU News at http://news.vcu.edu/news/Service_Minds.
Check out the interview published by VCU News with Fitzgerald scholar Bryant Mangum about his latest book, F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context. Mangum teaches popular English department courses on Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Salinger, and The New Yorker magazine short stories, among others, and is widely recognized as one of VCU’s best teachers with awards from VCU, the Virginia State Council of Higher Education, and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. He is also the editor of Modern Library’s “The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald” and author of “A Fortune Yet: Money in the Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Short Stories.”
Congratulations, Bryant!
Founding co-general editors Joshua Eckhardt (English) and Sarah Meacham (History) launched the scholarly series British Virginia on April 25th with the publication of a sermon preached to the Virginia Company of London on the same date 404 years earlier. The sermon apparently started the company’s campaign to counter public scrutiny of the colony, especially its presumptions regarding native rulers. The new British Virginia editions of the sermon likewise seem to have started digital, peer-reviewed library publishing at VCU! A link to British Virginia’s library page is up on the English department’s website. Here is a link to the British Virginia blog wp.vcu.edu/britishvirginia and Facebook page www.facebook.com/BritishVirginiaVCU.
Congratulations Josh and Sarah!
Clint McCown’s novel Haints has been named as a finalist for the Midwest Book Award in the category of literary fiction. Congratulations, Clint!
Harrison Fletcher’s book Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life is a finalist in the 2013 Colorado Book Awards.
Also, a lyric essay, “The Sorrowful Mysteries,” is a finalist in the 2013 Thomas J. Hrushka Memorial Nonfiction Prize sponsored by Passages North.
Congratulations, Harrison!
David Wojahn has received the Poets’ prize for his book World Tree. The Poets’ prize is awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award year. Judging is done by a committee of about 20 American poets, who each nominate two books for the prize.
A reception will be held in May at the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York City where winners and finalists will read from their award-winning books. David shares the award this year with poet Robert Shaw.
The VCU Department of English ends its 2012-13 First Friday season with a lecture by Professor Nicholas Frankel, who will present “The Censoring of Oscar Wilde” on Friday, April 5, at 3:00pm in Hibbs 308. All First Friday events are free and open to the public.
Check out the interview published by VCU News with MFA Faculty fiction writer, Clint McCown, about his latest novel, Haints.
The circumstances of the novel are also the circumstances of my birth. A real-life tornado destroyed my hometown of Fayetteville, Tennessee on leap day, 1952, one week before I was born. Miraculously, only one person was killed . . .
Clint McCown
http://news.vcu.edu/news/QandA_with_Clint_McCown_author_of_Haints
Many of the department’s faculty attended the Modern Language Association’s Annual Meeting in Boston in January. Catherine Ingrassia presided over “Celebrity, Fame, Notoriety” and “Open Access? ECCO, EEBO, and Digital Resources,” both organized by the Division on Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature. Joshua Eckhardt presented in the latter panel. Along with Manushag Powell, Purdue University (West Lafayette, IN), Rivka Swenson organized and presided over two special sessions, “Scriblerians at Three Hundred” and “Early Women Tory Writers.” With Bernardo Piciche of VCU’s School of World Studies, Marcel Cornis-Pope presided over “Alternate Voices of the Mediterranean,” a program organized by the Division on Comparative Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature.
As a part of the VCU Visiting Writers Series, author Craig Nova and poet Tom Sleigh will be reading Thursday, March 14th at 7PM in the VCU Scott House. This event is free and open to the public.
Craig Nova is the award-winning author of twelve novels and one autobiography. His next novel, All the Dead Yale Men, the sequel to The Good Son, will be published in 2012. Nova’s writing has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, and Men’s Journal, among others.
He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2005 he was named Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
Tom Sleigh is the author of eight books of poetry, including Army Cats and Space Walk which won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Award. He has received the Shelley Prize from the PSA, a Fellowship from the American Academyin Berlin, the John Updike Award and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an Individual Writer’s Award from the Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fund, a Guggenheim grant, and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among many others. He teaches in the MFA Program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn.
The VCU Visiting Writers Series is sponsored by the Department of English of the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences and the Graduate Writers’ Association, with additional funding made possible through the generosity of James Branch Cabell Library Associates, Friends of the Library, the VCU Libraries, the VCU Honors College, Barnes & Noble @ VCU Bookstore, and the family of Larry Levis.
The VCU Department of English hosts a lecture by Professor Winnie Chan as a part on its ongoing “First Friday” lecture series. The lecture will take place Friday, March 1st at 3:00pm in Hibbs 308. Topic: “The ‘Curry Capital’ in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.” All First Friday events are free and open to the public.
Stand Magazine, the British literary quarterly with its North American office here at VCU, is currently celebrating Stand‘s 60th-Anniversary and heading towards the publication this year of the 200th issue. The latest issue, no. 198, includes new work by Geoffrey Hill, Simon Armitage. Michael Schmidt, and others.
Our congratulations go out to MA student Heather Fox whose article, “Teaching Writing Strategy for Short Essay Response: Is It Possible to Level One of the Playing Fields?” was accepted for publication in NOTES, A Journal of the Georgia and Carolinas College English Association. The article is from a paper written for Elizabeth Hodges’ Writing and Rhetoric class, Fall 2011. This will be Heather’s first publication.