The department is so proud of these students and looks forward to wonderful things that they'll do in the years ahead.
Izzy Catalanello
Book: Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit
Dear Izzy, what better book to give someone who so brilliantly analyzed modernist text, than this semi-biographical feminist work about George Orwell? Just as we thought so often together about the border between fiction and biography, Orwell’s Roses examines Orwell both though his life and through his garden–wondering about climate change on a tiny scale and the revolutionary thoughts that motivated both his professional and domestic life. How can one person make any difference? I know this question will motivate you as you keep reading throughout your life.
Faculty Member: Megan Quigley
Lauren Picard
Book: Postcolonial Love Poem
Lauren, throughout your time in “The Indigenous Atlantic” seminar, you weren’t afraid to ask the hard questions, and in your final essay for that course, you undertook analysis that pushed to discuss living under settler colonialism and the role of poetry in trying to imagine other worlds. Decolonization may not be a metaphor, but metaphors help us imagine decolonization. Your love of Billy Ray Belcourt’s poems leads me to give you Natalie Diaz’s work, Postcolonial Love Poem as an encouragement to keep searching for answers, and to keep believing that literature can help us find ways to do so.
Faculty Member: Kimberly Takahata
Julia Butch
Book: Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature by Farah Jasmine Griffin
Julia and I met, not in a classroom focused on English literature, but in the Political Science department discussing student leadership. I so appreciate her self-assured determination and focus on helping advance the academic careers of those who will come behind her. Julia’s understanding of legacy reminded me of the work Farah Jasmine Griffin has undertaken in her book, which beautifully weaves literary criticism, memoir, and socio-political commentary to investigate the contributions of some of the most important Black writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Because Julia has had the wisdom to combine the study of literature with that of the social sciences, I want to pass on to her the advice Griffin received from her late father: read until you understand the complexities of human interactions, and then read some more.
Faculty Member: Crystal J. Lucky
Cynthia Choo
Book: The Best We Could Do, Thi Bui
I was blessed to have Cynthia join me as a teaching assistant for my core English course “The New Classics” this past year, and for her I’ve chosen a book that I think fits that moniker, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do. This gorgeous graphic novel tells the story of several generations of the author’s family as they face the ruptures of colonialism and war in Vietnam and finally flee to the United States. Bui peels back the layers of unspoken trauma through watercolor-style visuals and evocative, honest prose that connect the mysteries of her own family dynamics to world-historical events, pushing readers to similarly place ourselves in the world that surrounds us. Cynthia, I hope this meditation on the importance of connections between generations inspires you as you continue on your path to a career as an educator – your future students will be lucky to learn from you and benefit from your brilliance, wisdom, and compassion, as we all have here at Villanova English.
Faculty Member: Yumi Lee
Karina Zakarian
Book: The Blessings by Elise Juska
It’s not often that you meet an undergraduate student who has written a novel, and even rarer to find one who is working on a whole series of novels. Karina took my Writing the Traditional Novel course her junior year, and I was impressed by her dedication to her writing and her commitment to honing her craft. While Karina’s The Vesperian Chronicles is a series of fantasy fiction, her writing is marked by her ability to create emotionally complex characters who leap off the page. While Elise Juska’s The Blessings is not fantasy fiction, it is a superbly written portrait of a close-knit Philadelphia family and their struggles. It is also a master class in character development, the kind of book that reminds us, as writers, to always think deeply about our characters and find their humanity.
Faculty Member: Alan Drew
Donovan Hill
Book: Leave the World Behind, Rumann Alam
Donovan took an environmental literature course with me and enjoyed both Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Helon Habila’s climate justice detective novel, Oil on Water. I also know Donovan writes speculative fiction and enjoys work that tries to imagine what happens to society and the world in the face of inexplicable apocalypse. I thought Rumann Alam’s newest novel Leave the World Behind might be a perfect summer read. Set in the near future, it explores what happens when a mysterious disaster causes a massive blackout on the east coast and a white family on vacation in the Hamptons has to provide shelter to the black owners of the Air BNB they are renting. I hope you enjoy this book Donovan and that it gives you some ideas about how to combine different literary genres. (Apparently, it’s also being made into a major motion picture, starring Ethan Hawke, Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali and Kevin Bacon.)
Faculty Member: Lisa Sewell
Adrianna Ogando
Book: The Man Who Could Move Clouds, Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Adrianna has been thinking a lot about her relationship to her mother and to her extended family in Puerto Rico (and the Dominican Republic), including how to preserve the memories of her grandmother. The Man Who Could Move Clouds is an intergenerational memoir by the Colombian American writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras. The book explores Rojas Contreras’s complex relationship with her mother and her extended family of curanderas in Colombia, in the aftermath of a head injury in which she loses her memory and must reconstruct her history between the US and Colombia.
Faculty Member: Michael Dowdy
Ava Lundell
Book: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf / Of One Woman or So by Olivia N’Gowfri
So many reasons why I’m gifting Woolf’s A Room with Kaleb Wilson’s Of One Woman or So. First of all, while Ava is studying and wandering around London next year getting her advanced degree, she can use Woolf’s thoughts about the British museum, Oxbridge, and English parks as a kind of feminist mapping of her new metropole. Second, Kabe Wilson writes as Oliva N’Gowfri (an anagram of Woolf, as is the title of his book) using every single word of A Room to reconsider Woolf’s ground-breaking feminist text from the position of a young Black British woman, working in the library and feeling an outsider from this academic life she inhabits. I cannot wait to hear what Ava will do in the years ahead, but I hope both Woolf, and Kaleb’s intersectional feminist reinterpretation of Woolf, will be her guides. You will be missed!
Faculty Member: Megan Quigley
Becca Jacobson
Book: The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks
Becca, for you I’ve chosen The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by the neurologist Oliver Sacks, which I thought would interest you partly because of your commitment to talking about disabilities thoughtfully. The book is Sacks’s accounts of a couple of dozen people with various neurological disorders whom he treated, but they’re much more than case histories. Sacks sees his patients with a novelist’s eye—he called his accounts “clinical tales”—and in his narratives he portrays their humanity, focusing not on what they lack but on what they have. I hope it offers you a perspective that you can draw on as an educator.
Faculty Member: Evan Radcliffe
Casey Conniff
Book: Hagseed, Margaret Atwood
I chose this novel for you, Casey, partly because I remember the paper you wrote about metatheatricality in Shakespeare’s Tempest. But I also selected it because you always shrewdly ask, “But what about the women?” Atwood’s novel depicts a Shakespeare class of incarcerated students putting on a production of The Tempest, and the characters and events of the outer narration adapt elements of the Shakespearean play. Most of Atwood’s adaptive inflections amplify what’s already present in the early-modern text, but the novel vigorously questions Miranda’s passivity – in engaging, entertaining ways that made me think of you. I hope you enjoy it!
Faculty Member: Lauren Shohet
Catherine Wood
Book: Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
Catherine, for you I’ve chosen Swallows and Amazons, by Arthur Ransome, which brings together elements both of the Odyssey and Harry Potter, which we read together in the same term. Like Harry Potter, it’s a novel for kids that’s part of a series, with kids at the center and with minimal adult supervision. Like the Odyssey, it features adventures and piracy while sailing—although it takes place in the English Lake District rather than the Mediterranean. But its most important difference from both the Odyssey and Harry Potter, and part of what makes it special, is how the characters largely create their own adventures through their own story-telling imaginations. I hope you enjoy it!
Faculty Member: Evan Radcliffe
Cecile Schuller
Book: Before Our Eyes, Eleanor Wilner
Cece, for you I have chosen Eleanor Wilner’s Before Our Eyes in honor of your beautiful rendering of “The Girl with the Bees in Her Hair,” and your fondness for her poetry. Within these pages you’ll find “Being as I Was, How Could I Help…” her retelling of the Romulus and Remus myth from the perspective of the wolf, a poem that will always remind me of your imaginative take from the perspective of the watchman/servant. May Eleanor’s imaginative flights inspire and remind you of your own. And here, too, I cannot help but think of your lovely poem about Stoneleigh’s Katsura tree, the green cathedral of that interior world which swept you back to childhood.
Faculty Member: Cathy Staples
Clare Sceski
Book: 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, James Shapiro
Clare, for you I’ve chosen 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, by the Columbia English professor James Shapiro. The book gives a close-grained and compelling view of Shakespeare in his world during that crucial year, the year he produced Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet. It recounts how Shakespeare’s theatre company took apart their old theatre and snuck the timber across London to build the new Globe, and what it would have been like to enter Whitehall Palace to perform before Queen Elizabeth, along with describing national issues such as the conflicts between the Queen and the Earl of Essex and the fears of invasion from Spain. It also includes valuable explorations of the four plays and Shakespeare’s development as a writer. I hope that, as a secondary-school teacher, you will find its portrayals and analyses appealing and useful with your own students.
Faculty Member: Evan Radcliffe
Elena Rouse
Book: Bluets, by Maggie Nelson
Elena approaches writing as a polymath. In Writing Creative Nonfiction and Editing and Literary Publishing, her work drew upon philosophy, song, poetry, image, and narrative to create texts that were deeply visual, often experimental, and full of voice. Reading her work, I felt myself in the presence of a specific, well-honed consciousness, one that was interested in sweeping philosophical questions on the nature of meaning and being. At the same time, her playfulness with diction and syntax brings her down to the smallest units of speech and of detail. I think Elena will find both a kindred spirit in Nelson’s Bluets–which deserves every bit of its cult status–and also find a permission slip to keep writing. Permission to follow and trust her own excellent impulses as she does so. Yes, a whole book can be written about a color, how it makes us feel, and where those feeling take us.
Faculty Member: Adrienne Perry
Elizabeth Corney
Book: Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
I taught Elizabeth in my “Women and Literature” course and have advised her in Writing and Rhetoric. I chose Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead because my most recent Women and Literature class enjoyed it so much. It was the class’s favorite book and I hope that Elizabeth enjoys it as much as my students.
Faculty Member: Ellen Bonds
Elizabeth Nacion
Book: Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, Victoria Chang
In the Intro to Creative Writing course in 2021 as well as in the Memoir class in 2022, Elizabeth explored the long-term effects of separation, silence, and sacrifice on immigrants and their families. I so appreciated how she wondered if memory and belonging were different for her grandfather and grandmother who left so much behind to build a home in the U.S. This is also a question raised by Victoria Chang in the nonfiction work Dear Memory. Through a collage of letters, poems, and essays Chang writes about memory, grief, and silence, I hope Elizabeth will feel the connections to be helpful when she returns to writing her work.
Faculty Member: Tsering Wangmo
Erin Neilsen
Outline by Rachel Cusk
Reasoning: I’ve had the pleasure of reading two really inspiring internship reports from Erin, who has done fantastic work as an intern for the Villanova School of Business (VSB) Mentor Program. Erin is so thoughtful and perceptive about the career goals she sets for herself and how she accomplishes them, I wanted to select a book about a working woman. She is also a very clear and crisp writer, who has worked hard on cultivating her writing skills, so I wanted to select a book noted for its brilliant prose style. With these qualities in mind, I chose Outline by Rachel Cusk. Cusk’s protagonist is a working woman whom we learn about through the conversations she has with others. The book is also set in Athens, Greece, so I hope it proves a mini-vacation to read it before she starts her post-graduation job!
Faculty Member: Heather Hicks
Fiona Gavin
Book: The Kissing Bug, Daisy Hernández
Fiona’s thesis examines recent memoirs of migration from Latin America to the US, and she’s interested in public policy work concerning immigration and public health. In The Kissing Bug, the Colombian American memoirist/journalist Daisy Hernández investigates how chagas (“the kissing bug”) disease impacts her immigrant family in New Jersey and the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Latin America infected with this deadly parasite who struggle to receive sufficient medical care.
Faculty Member: Michael Dowdy
Grace Kully
Book: Christina Crosby, A Body, Undone
Grace is passionate about Disability Studies and disability activism and this is a memoir by a dear former colleague of mine, the late Christina Crosby, which describes a terrible bicycle accident she had in middle age that left her quadriplegic and how she went about living her life with dignity in its wake. Given Grace’s own remarkable journey, I think she will find this book inspiring and galvanizing.
Faculty Member: Joe Drury
Gracie Petrelli
Book: Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Talents
Gracie and I had fun reading Butler’s Parable of the Sower together at the beginning of the pandemic, so I figured she might want to know what happens to Lauren and Earthseed in the sequel. I was grateful for Gracie’s leadership in that class, as well as her clarity of thought and generous spirit in end times, which turned out, thankfully, not to have been the end for any of us.
Faculty Member: Joe Drury
Jackie Carroll
Book: The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
I met Jackie her freshman year when she was one of the stars in my poetry writing workshop. I don’t really know what you’ve been reading lately, but given your passion for creative writing, performance, and social justice and your willingness to delve deeply and courageously into questions of gender and identity, I thought you would appreciate Nelson’s genre and gender blurring memoir. I hope you will be moved and inspired by Nelson’s beautifully rendered exploration of desire, identity, the meaning of “family,” and the limits and possibilities of love and language.
Faculty Member: Lisa Sewell
Jenna DeLeo
Book: Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell
Jenna, throughout the Foundations of Literature Class in English we did together a couple of years ago, you consistently raised questions about whose story was at stake: who could speak, how did the text position its reader to have or lack access to which points of view. I particularly remember your analysis of the Old-English Judith as a capable warrior in whatever arenas presented themselves as amenable. Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet speculatively explores the world of an insightful, sensitive, resourceful early-modern woman living in Stratford-upon-Avon while her playwright husband periodically departs to work in the London theater. I thought you’d respond to the way the novel thinks about separate, overlapping spheres of influence, interest, and capability. I hope you enjoy it!
Faculty Member: Lauren Shohet
Jessica Laino
Book: Stag’s Leap, by Sharon Olds
Vulnerability is Jessica’s superpower. I have admired her writing since our Writing Creative Nonfiction class in fall 2021, but what humbles me most is her ability to document deep feelings in a critical, self-aware way on the page. I often quote Toni Nelson, one of my former teachers: “It’s not a real emotion if it’s not more than one emotion at a time.” Jessica just gets this, and it shows in the psychological richness of her writing and editorial work. Her characters feel love and anger and longing and disdain and a whole bunch of things at once, yet artfully so, and they never lose sight of the world’s beauty. These qualities in Jessica’s work made me think immediately of Sharon Olds, a poet who is not afraid to lay it all out on the page, which she does stunningly in Stag’s Leap. I’m betting that Olds, like Taylor Swift, will become one of Jessica’s fellow travelers as she continues, like they do, into a life of writing and feeling.
Faculty Member: Adrienne Perry
Juliana Perri
Book: Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
Juliana has spent the year writing a fascinating Honors thesis about contemporary apocalyptic fiction written by women, specifically examining how it extrapolates on current violence against women. In her thesis, she notes that one of the authors she writes about, Naomi Klein, was inspired in part by the work of the earlier feminist science fiction writer Marge Piercy. For Juliana, I’ve chosen a book that I was quite fascinated by in graduate school, Piercy’s 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time. During Juliana’s thesis defense we talked as a group about utopian alternatives to the scathing portraits of violence Alderman and others offer. Piercy portrays a seering dystopian future in her novel, but she centers as an alternative a highly detailed utopian future that remains compelling. I’m pretty sure Juliana is going to enjoy reading this writer, who inspired a contemporary novelist about whom Juliana has written with such intelligence and passion.
Faculty Member: Heather Hicks
Katie Reed
Book: Real Life, Brandon Taylor
Katie wrote a stunning thesis about institutional violence, considering how seemingly beneficial sites like schools can cause harm. Brandon Taylor’s Real Life is a recent campus novel that I think Katie will enjoy. It not only provides more evidence for her argument, it also captures the desire for human connection that can heal this harm. Taylor defines “real life” as the somewhat messy “bumping up against other lives” in institutions but also outside of them.
Faculty Member: Mary Mullen
Keenlyn Kilgore
Book: The Marrow Thieves, Cherie Dimaline
Keenlyn, in our field trip to the Penn Museum, you asked the very polite and still carefully pointed question, “where do these objects come from?” The Marrow Thieves explores what happens when settlers continue to steal Indigenous peoples as objects, hoping to steal their bone marrow to recover the ability to dream. I chose this book for you because first, I think you’ll enjoy the book, but like your desire to keep pushing to see what’s possible, Dimaline’s novel also offers a glimpse into how love and community can coincide with colonialism and critique.
Faculty Member: Kimberly Takahata
Kelly Barker
Book: Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, by Claudia Rankine
Kelly wrote a terrific paper in our senior seminar on Rankine’s Citizen, exploring how Rankine made poetry out of what Roman Jakobson described as language’s “phatic function.” In Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Rankine explores the possibility that “a poem is a handshake,” a way of acknowledging mutual presence. I think Kelly will find inspiration and meaning in that book’s embodied sense of what it feels like to be human.
Faculty Member: Kamran Javadizadeh
Lauren Kourey
Book: Orange Horses, Maeve Kelly
It has been such a joy to have Lauren in several of my classes. In these classes, she has contributed many powerful insights about gender and feminism. Maeve Kelly, a founding member of the Federation of Women’s Organisations and the Limerick Refuge for Battered Wives, is one of my favorite Irish writers. I hope that Lauren enjoys Kelly’s recently reissued collection of short stories, Orange Horses, as much as I do and that they provide inspiration for a lifetime of feminist thought and practice.
Faculty Member: Mary Mullen
Lindsay Cook
Book: Susannah Calahan, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
Reasoning: Lindsay wrote me a terrific research paper for my Strange Cases class about Meg Mason’s sick lit classic, Sorrow and Bliss, using Annemarie Jutel’s work in diagnosis with great skill and intelligence.. This is another classic of the sick lit genre, this time a memoir that tells the story of the author’s sudden illness, diagnosis, and eventual recovery.
Faculty Member: Joe Drury
Madeline Lay
Book: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
While ostensibly writing a murder mystery in our Writing Detective Fiction class, Madeline brought a level of “literariness” to her novel-in-progress. Why Girl’s Lie is marked by allusions to Greek mythology and an exploration of private Catholic school culture and its gender dynamics. Her prose, too, is rich with contemplation and insight and digs into quiet tensions among her characters. I’m recommending Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead since she is among our most brilliant contemplative writers, a novelist whose prose is dotted with religious and secular allusions and rich in small detail and significant insight—and it’s just an incredibly beautiful book!
Faculty Member: Alan Drew
Molly Carriero
Book: The King of Bangkok by Claudio Sopranzetti, Sara Fabbri, and Chiara Natalucci
I came to know Molly not through a class, but as an ally in her work to bring into being Villanova’s first-ever officially sanctioned student group dedicated to reproductive justice. I got to witness her fierce diplomatic skills personally in conversations with administrators. I was impressed by her passion, determination, and commitment to social justice. The book I chose for her pays tribute to that passion and also to her interest in cross-cultural learning, since Molly will be traveling to Thailand as a Fulbright scholar later this year. The King of Bangkok is a collaborative graphic novel that distills recent Thai social history. Based on ten years of ethnographic research by an Italian anthropologist, it was first published in Italian. The Thai edition, which came out in 2019 shortly after the Italian version, was a bestseller. Because it seems to have a struck a chord with readers in the best position to know its worth, I thought Molly might enjoy the English translation of this ambitious and beautiful book.
Faculty Member: Jean Lutes
Rachel Reardon
Book: The Buddha in the Attic, by Julie Otsuka
Since fall 2022, I’ve had a chance to read Rachel’s creative writing, much of which has touched upon and imagined the lives of women. This semester, in Authors On and Off the Page, Rachel wrote a powerful short story centered around a Japanese woman named Tomoko—a character who truly came off the page and is close to Rachel’s heart. Meeting this wonderfully drawn character as she went about her day in a loveless, oppressive marriage circa 1950 made me think immediately of Julie Otsuka’s deft novel The Buddha in the Attic, which is inspired and informed by the lives of Japanese picture brides. Like Rachel, Otsuka braids personal history, research, deep care, and gorgeous images into the kind of story—and complex figures—that readers will never forget.
Faculty Member: Adrienne Perry
Sara Hecht
Book: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hong
Sara wrote an exceptional final essay in “Victorian Doubles” that moved between personal reflection and literary and cultural criticism to explore public and private selves. Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings is an essay collection that similarly combines memoir with literary and cultural criticism. I hope that Minor Feelings inspires Sara to keep writing in part by providing a different perspective on doubles.
Faculty Member: Mary Mullen
Sarina Sandwell
Book: Notes from a Writer’s Book of Cures and Spells, Marcia Douglas
I had the distinct pleasure of having Sarina in my Afrofuturism class (team-taught with Dr. Maghan Keita) and was struck by her intellectual capacity to engage the complexity of the Black experience, especially as framed by the subject matter of the course. Part of what shines through in that interdisciplinary class is Sarina’s investment in the language of texts, a recognition of her own positionality as a reader, and a willingness to enter into conversations with others in meaning-making. Marcia Douglas’ novel is a meta narrative on storytelling, on writing–a palimpsest of voices and discourses where reality is an extension of fiction. I chose this book for Sarina because of her strong and charming sense of self, a strength which allows her to nurture her creative self boldly and variously, crossing boundaries, and affirming self and community with intellectual vigor.
Faculty Member: Chiji Akọma
Audrey Trussell
Book: Obit, by Victoria Chang
Reasoning: Audrey wrote a terrific paper for our senior seminar on poetic form and melancholic states of grief, using John Keats and James Longenbach as her models. “Poems are not poems because they look like poems,” she wrote. In Obit, Chang seems to have taken that lesson to heart–she makes poems out of her own grief and does so by playing with our formal expectations of poetry. She also finds beauty in those formal experiments in a way that I think Audrey will appreciate.
Faculty Member: Kamran Javadizadeh
Trinity Murphy
Book: Cloud Cuckoo land by Anthony Doerr
Trinity, knowing how attuned you are to the intimacy of first-person perspective, the subtleties of a child’s consciousness, and the nuances of imagery and tone in Keegan’s Foster,
I think the figure of Doerr’s Anna in Cloud Cuckoo Land is one that will engage you. I suspect you’ll admire and identify with her enchantment with words, her daring, and her devotion to her sister. I glimpse bits of you in Anna. May your own calling for words and close reading continue to nurture your prose and poetry.
Faculty Member: Cathy Staples
