Congratulations to MFAlum, Dana Crum, who won the the Eva Jane Romaine Coombe Writer’s Residency at The Seven Hills School. The Coombe Fellowship provides a one-year writing and teaching residency for a person contemplating or pursuing a career as writer. The fellowship includes an academic year stipend of $12,000, housing, and breakfast and lunch when school is in session. In addition to carrying out their own literary projects, the Writer-in-Residence teaches one creative writing elective each semester in the Upper School and maintains a presence on campus that allows for informal interaction with students and members of the community. During the tenure of the Fellowship, Crum plans to complete a poetry collection.
Latest Ron Smith (MFA) Poetry in Collection
Ron Smith has just published two poems in the anthology Kentucky: Poets of Place (April 2012, edited by Matthew Nickel). One piece is a loving parody of the work of Allen Tate, and the other is an homage to Robert Penn Warren. The latter, “A Negroni for the Master,” incorporates a memory of drinking with Warren in Vermont.
Professor Kathleen Graber Named a 2012 Recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship
Kathleen Graber, assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, has been named a 2012 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, one of the top awards available to artists in the United States and Canada.
Graber, who teaches in the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English in the College of Humanities & Sciences at VCU, received the honor in the Poetry category. Graber is the author of two collections of poetry, “Correspondence,” which was published in 2006, and “The Eternal City,” which was published in 2010. “The Eternal City” was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it was the winner of the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Poetry. She is currently working on a new collection of poems, tentatively titled “The River Twice.”
“We’re very proud of Professor Graber for earning this prestigious honor,” said VCU President Michael Rao, Ph.D. “Her poetry continues to attract attention from the highest ranks and represents the excellence of VCU’s faculty among their national and international peers.”
Jim Coleman, Ph.D., dean of the VCU College of Humanities & Sciences, said, “VCU’s Creative Writing Program is nationally and internationally recognized for the creative work of its faculty and students, and I am impressed by the enthusiasm of the students in the program and their academic engagement with their professors. This well-deserved award for Professor Graber confirms my belief that we have some of the best faculty and one of the strongest creative writing programs in the country.”
MFA Student Awarded Two Fellowships
MFA poetry student, Emilia Phillips, has been awarded a four-week Zoland Poetry fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center and a two-week fellowship at Virginia Center for Creative Arts, both for summer 2012.
Jennifer Rhee’s First Friday Presentation
The VCU Department of English hosts a lecture by Professor Jennifer Rhee as a part on its ongoing “First Friday” lecture series. The lecture will take place Friday, April 6th at 3:00pm in Hibbs 308. Topic: “Ryoji Ikeda’s Infinities: The Digital Subject and Privacy in the Age of Big Data.” All First Friday events are free and open to the public.
VCU Visiting Writers Series: Poets Dana Levin & Matthew Zapruder
As a part of the VCU Visiting Writers Series, poets Dana Levin and Matthew Zapruder will be reading at 8PM April 5th in the VCU Commons, Richmond Salons. This event is free and open to the public.
Dana Levin’s first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was published by American Poetry Review (Copper Canyon) and went on to receive nearly every award available to first books and emerging poets. Copper Canyon brought out her second book, Wedding Day, in 2005 and her third, Sky Burial, in 2011. The Los Angeles Times says of her work, “Dana Levin’s poems are extravagant…her mind keeps making unexpected connections and the poems push beyond convention…they surprise us.” Her work has appeared in many anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers, The Poet’s Child, This Art, American Poetry: The Next Generation, and in magazines such as The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Paris Review and The American Poetry Review. She currently teaches Creative Writing at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design.
Matthew Zapruder is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon, 2010), which was the Goodreads Readers’ Choice selection for poetry, and was also selected as one of the year’s top five poetry books by Publishers Weekly, as well as the 2010 Booklist Editors’ Choice for poetry, and the 2010 Northern California Independent Booksellers Association poetry book of the year. His poems, essays and translations have appeared in many publications, including Bomb, Slate, Poetry, Tin House, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Real Simple, and The Los Angeles Times. He has received a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, a William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Currently he works as an editor for Wave Books and teaches as a member of the core faculty of UCR-Palm Desert’s Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing.
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.
Book by VCU English Graduate Cory MacLauchlin
Cory MacLauchlin (VCU BA in English, 2002) has just published his book, Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces (Da Capo Press).
MacLauchlin draws on scores of new interviews with friends, family, and colleagues as well as full access to the extensive Toole archive at Tulane University, capturing his upbringing in New Orleans, his years in New York City, his frenzy of writing in Puerto Rico, his return to his beloved city, and his descent into paranoia and depression.
Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto Short Fiction Prize
Kelly Cherry
VCU is proud to host the inaugural winner of the Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto Short Fiction Prize for outstanding short fiction, author Kelly Cherry. The event will take place on March 28, 2012 at the VCU Scott House at 8PM. The prize is sponsored by the family of Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto in her memory to honor her devotion to the art of writing fiction, to expand the audience for outstanding short stories. Cherry will receive the award and give a joint reading with acclaimed short story writer, Ron Carlson.
Cherry’s award wining story, “On Familiar Terms,” was selected by the editors from fiction published in Blackbird in 2011. The story demanded our attention for innumerable reasons; a subtle narrative voice, a masterful compression of time, and an affectionate portrayal of character only lead the list. You can read the story at:
http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v10n1/fiction/cherry_k/terms_page.shtml
Kelly Cherry is the author of twenty books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction; eight chapbooks; and translations of two classical plays. Her recent titles include a collection of short stories titled The Woman Who (Boson Books, 2010), a memoir titled Girl in a Library: On Women Writers & the Writing Life (BkMk Press, 2009), and The Retreats of Thought: Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 2009). Cherry is the current Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Other honors include the Hanes Prize for Poetry from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, fellowships from the NEA and the Rockefeller Foundation, and a USIS Speaker Award to the Philippines.
Ron Carlson
Ron Carlson’s most recent book is the novel The Signal from Viking. His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harpers, The New Yorker, and other journals, as well as The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize series, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and other anthologies. Ron Carlson Writes a Story, his book on writing, is taught widely. He has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Cohen Prize at Ploughshares, the McGinnis Award at the Iowa Review, the Aspen Literary Award. His novel Five Skies was One Book Rhode Island in 2009. He is Director of the Graduate Program in Fiction at the University of California, Irvine.
~
The Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto Short Fiction Prize is sponsored by the family of Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto in her memory to honor her devotion to the art of writing fiction, to expand the audience for outstanding short stories, and to encourage literary excellence among writers early in their careers. $2,000 will be awarded periodically to the best work of short fiction published by Blackbird, with a particular emphasis on work by an emerging or underappreciated writer.
No application form or fee is required; all short fiction submitted to the journal is eligible. For more information, please see:
http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v10n2/tarumoto-prize.shtml
Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto was born September 21, 1945 in Richmond, Virginia. She died in October of 2007 after being struck in a pedestrian crosswalk in Carmel by the Sea, California. Her sustained interest in writing led to her fiction being published in a number of literary journals as well as winning several competitions, including the 1996 and 2000 Short Fiction contests sponsored by Richmond Magazine. She was a graduate of St. Gertrude’s High School in Richmond and of Virginia Commonwealth University(class of 1967), and in 1971 she received an MA in English from the University of Michigan.
While funding for the prize itself comes from an endowment established at VCU by her husband, David Tarumoto, the Department of English welcomes contributions in support of the inaugural celebration event as well as the outreach activities of the Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto Prize. Anyone wishing to make a donation is invited to visit the secure online contributions page:
Recent Success By Current MFA Students
Several of our current MFA students have had some notable accomplishments:
- Lea Marshall’s latest poems can be read at Moon Milk Review.
- Dick Hofheimer was awarded a fellowship by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
- Thomas Gresham’s story, “Nostalgia” was short-listed by The Masters Review.
- Chad Luibl was awarded the 2012-13 VCU Cabell First Novelist Fellowship.
Congrats to all!
VCU First Friday Lecture Series – Gretchen Soderlund
The VCU Department of English hosts a lecture by Professor Gretchen Soderlund as a part on its ongoing “First Friday” lecture series. The lecture will take place Friday, March 2nd at 3:00pm in Hibbs 308. Topic: “Sensationalism, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and Journalism Reform after 1885.” All First Friday events are free and open to the public.
Dr. Golumbia and Why Digital Humanities Hates Literary and Cultural Studies
This past week, Professor David Golumbia gave the his lecture “Why Digital Humanities Hates Literary and Cultural Studies” as a part of a series sponsored by the Literary and Cultural Studies program in the English Dept at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Below is a brief abstract:
Why Digital Humanities Hates Literary and Cultural Studies:
The Secret History, and What to Do About It
Digital Humanities (DH) frequently, even obsessively, talks of its intention to transform the Humanities in general, and literary and cultural studies in particular. Its certainty about the need for transformation is absolute enough that it apparently sees little need to specify what it does not want to transform, and so to indicate which parts of the existing disciplines it values at all. Read from the outside, it becomes hard to distinguish talk of transformation from talk of something like destruction.
In fact, other than a surface (but often explicitly and exclusively formal and/or bibliographic) interest in literary texts—and here almost always written texts to the exclusion of other forms of cultural production—there is little of literary and cultural studies as these fields are understood outside DH that appear to meet with DH approval: not their objects of study; not their methods of research and teaching; not their standards for tenure and promotion; not their conceptual orientations toward the world, toward culture, toward literature, or even toward “the digital” as such and the transformations associated with it.
Reflecting on the personal history that drew the speaker into the study of literature, and on the practices of DH as it is found at major research institutions who position themselves as leaders in DH, this talk argues that some of the guiding powers of DH (practitioners as well as funding bodies) see it as something like a tool with which to eliminate the close study of literature and culture, and most especially interpretation, from the work of the humanities. It seeks these goals not just because literary studies is allied with the purportedly far-left commitments of “Theory” and “Cultural Studies” writ large—commitments which DH attempts rhetorically both to claim and to reject—but perhaps even more worryingly, because of an implicit politics of the classroom and the world that the practice of interpretation itself arguably entails. As such, scholars of literary and cultural studies have every reason to ask of DH to which parts of our disciplines it is committed, and to insist that unless it can articulate those commitments, it has no claim to “transform” what we do, but rather must be seen at best as new discipline that must work harder to establish itself separately from literary and cultural studies. More disturbingly, it should at worst be seen as part of a sustained and wide-ranging effort to abolish interpretation from the contemporary University, an effort which scholars of interpretive disciplines have every reason—indeed a real duty—to reject.
VCU Professor David Latané on Charles Dickens
February 7 was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. His birth was celebrated around the world, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch wnated to do its part to recognize Dickens’ life and writings. They’ve done so with an extended piece, titled ”The Dickensian Aspect Still,” in the Sunday, February 18th edition, written by the English department’s own David Latané.
VCU Professor Richard Fine Moderates Southern Film Festival
Virginia Commonwealth University’s Southern Film Festival will show the film Shenandoah, featuring Jimmy Stewart and set in Virginia during the Civil War, on Saturday, February 25, at 1pm at the Museum of Fine Arts. A discussion following the showing will be moderated by VCU English department’s Richard Fine, who recently developed VCU’s course “Reading Film,” and will include University of Richmond’s President Ed Ayers.
VCU Professor Kathy Bassard Broadcast on “With Good Reason”
Just in the nick of time, I’ve learned that Kathy Bassard’s radio broadcast on “With Good Reason” will air
Saturday, Feb 11 on WCVE 88.9 FM at 4:30 p.m. &
Sunday, Feb. 12 at 7 p.m.
Monday, Feb. 13 at 12:30 a.m. on WAMU 88.5 FM.
Kathy will talk about her essay in The King James Bible after 400 Years (Cambridge UP, 2010).
People can also listen online at: http://withgoodreasonradio.org/2012/02/the-magna-carta-online/.
Good going, Kathy– Congratulations. We’ll tune in.
Terry Oggel
Chair, VCU Department of English
VCU Visiting Writers Series – poet Linda Gregerson and author Darin Strauss
As a part of the VCU Visiting Writers Series, poet Linda Gregerson and author Darin Strauss will be reading at 8pm February 9th in the VCU Commons, Richmond Salons. This event is free and open to the public. A Q&A session will immediately follow the reading.
Gregerson is the author of four poetry collections: Magnetic North, Waterborne, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, and Fire in the Conservatory. She has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poetry Society of America, and the Modern Poetry Association as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Mellon, and Bogliasco Foundations, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Magnetic North was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Waterborne won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep was a finalist for both The Poet’s Prize and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Granta, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Review (UK), and many other publications. She is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature.
Strauss is the international bestselling author of the New York Times Notable books Chang and Eng and The Real McCoy, and of the national bestseller More Than It Hurts You. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Half a Life. His work has been translated into fourteen languages and published in seventeen countries. Born in the Long Island town of Roslyn Harbor, Strauss attended Tufts University, where he studied with Jay Cantor. He is married to the journalist Susannah Meadows and is the father of identical twin boys. He currently resides in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches writing at New York University.
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.
For more information please visit us on the web at go.vcu.edu/readings or call 804-828-1329.