On Friday, May 1st, 2026, we celebrated our graduating seniors with a book-giving ceremony in which each graduating senior was given a book by a faculty member who knew them and could speak to their academic strengths and interests. The ceremony concluded with a moving toast from Dr. Michael Dowdy. To learn a little more about these fantastic graduates and to get good recommendations for books to read this summer, this blog post includes the books faculty gave students and the reasons why below, as well as some pictures from the event.
Sophia Adams
Faculty Member: Megan Quigley
Book: Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses
Sophia this memoir thinking about the place of ‘moments of being’ through nature in a world in political crisis, connects to all the work that we’ve done together. My joy that our time together came full circle (Woolf in first year, Woolf TA in final year) was only matched by watching you become the educator I always knew you could be as you taught our ecco-feminist class so brilliantly. You will be terribly missed next year and I cannot wait to hear what you decide to do with your wonderfully perceptive skills of performance, writing, and reading.
Maria Andrinopoulos
Faculty Member: Lauren Shohet
Book: Karen Hesse, Out of the Dust
Maria, the beautiful poems you wrote for your creative-response midterm and final in our Shakespeare course put me in mind of Hesse’s knack of evoking character and narrative in lyric form. I find this novel both sad and affirming, thinking about what we can take forward from loss, which I also find a through-line in your writing this semester about the figures of Tiresias and especially your extended consideration of Medusa. I admire the tenacity with which you pursue multiple ways to think about loss, recuperation, and transformation across the different genres we’ve studied together–and this seems a rich set of interests to take with you into your post-college life.
Margaux Barrett
Faculty Member: Tsering Wangmo
Book: Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
Margaux, in our first class of writing poetry last semester, you mentioned it was your first poetry workshop. It was such a pleasure to witness the delight you got out of understanding the vocal realities in a poem. In your poems and your critical essays you are attentive to the linguistic effects of syntax and sound. This semester you wrote on how Raja Rao is able to capture the tempo of life in India by examining the melodic and intimate notes in his sentences in the novel Kanthapura. Your poems make me wish to pause a little longer to listen closely to the effect of sound as you point to the cracks. I thought of Ross Gay when I was selecting a book for you for the following reasons: his deeply observant eye, his ability to make us see and hear the world we live in, and his wisdom making us realize that gratitude also observes the pain of reality. I think you’ll find many reasons to sing when you read his poems.
M.T. Barry
Faculty Member: Travis Foster
Book: Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
In your excellent senior capstone project, MT, you argue that Moby-Dick’s 96th chapter, “The Try-Works,” must be read through both senses of vanity at once: the overreaching pride that fuels Ahab’s monomania and the futility that shadows everything the Pequod pursues. You show how Melville’s italicized “All is vanity” anchors the chapter in scripture even as the novel’s bleakness and incessant questioning unsettle scriptural authority. I chose Wharton’s The House of Mirth for you because Wharton draws from the same source. Wharton’s title comes from Ecclesiastes 7:4—“the heart of fools is in the house of mirth”—and the novel turns that verse into its plot: her protagonist, Lily Bart, moves through glittering houses of mirth that slowly reveal themselves as houses of foolish futility and loss. I chose this novel for you because your deep interest in the question—what happens when writers turn from reading scripture to crafting stories—is so urgent and significant, and I hope you never stop pursuing it.
Bianca Brucker
Faculty Member: Jean Lutes
Book: Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Bianca, I chose Bleak House by Charles Dickens for you because 1) I know you’re up for the challenge of reading this long novel, which juggles multiple storylines and dozens of characters, 2) I know you’re headed directly to law school and you have great interest in social justice, so I figured you would be fascinated by Bleak House, which is one of literary history’s great institutional take-downs of the legal system as an engine of human misery 3) the narrative voice of Esther Summerson in Bleak House expresses warm emotional connections and a grounded humanity that remind me of your own way in the world. The future needs your kindness, your work ethic, and your generous vision. I hope you enjoy Dickens’ unforgettable characters and find renewed resolve in his funny, maddening depiction of systemic injustices.
Lydia Chandler
Faculty Member: Lauren Shohet
Book: Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Light Years
Lydia, I chose this book for you because I hoped you’d enjoy it as a twentieth-century English counterpart to Alcott’s Little Women, which you’ve been writing about so interestingly in our senior seminar. I hope you’ll find the artistic endeavor and play of this girl-centered family as interesting as the Marches. I’ve been intrigued by your explorations as what counts as feminist agency, which in our adaptation seminar you’ve explored both analytically and by writing an admirable poem. This book is the first in a pentalogy, which takes the story from the interwar years of this volume up to the 1950s–perhaps you’ll be able to find space for more of these now that you’re heading out into a world without syllabi.
Isabel Choi
Faculty Member: Tsering Wangmo
Book: Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
It’s been such a joy to read your work in the memoir workshop this semester. I admire the flexibility of your mind and the generosity with which you approach texts, those we’ve read together in class and those written by your peers. In your own work, you play with different registers of time and space to call into question conventional understandings of temporality, family, and place, and also to get closer to the emotional skeleton of a memory. I’ve selected Dictee by Theresa Kyung Cha for you because of your brilliant use of fragments, because of your investigations into themes such as immigration and assimilation, and because of the many ways you allow questions and contradictions into your work not with the ambition to resolve them for the reader but to live with them for a bit, with compassion. In your work, as in Cha’s, the emotional and historical significance is palpable. I’m so grateful to have been your reader.
Catherine Donnelly
Faculty Member: Yumi Lee
Book: Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot
Cate, I know that at Villanova, you’ve spent just as much time out on the water as the coxswain of the rowing team as you have diving into books for all of your English classes. With this in mind, I chose Rita Bullwinkel’s 2024 debut novel Headshot for you – it’s a novel that follows eight young women traveling to a boxing tournament, bringing us into their minds and emotions and struggles as they prepare their bodies to compete in the ring. I wonder if the way the novel evokes the joy (and pain) of pushing yourself to greatness will resonate with your own experiences here at Villanova. It was a joy to get to know you and get to be part of your journey during your time here – I hope you enjoy this book, and that you keep on rowing and keep on reading as you move onto your next chapter.
Paige Durham
Faculty Member: Lauren Shohet
Book: Chloe Dalton, Raising Hare
Paige, Chloe Dalton’s patient consideration of wildness and domesticity, comfort and danger, makes me think of your own constellation of animal-wisdom, poetic energy, and readerly appreciation. It has been lovely getting to know you this year, and I’m impressed by your consistent engagement with whatever you read. I’ve appreciated your generosity in sharing your dog-knowledge and your compassion about dog problems! I hope Raising Hare will be a welcome companion as you journey further into the multi-species world, and the many different kinds of texts you read and write.
Mary Kate Farrell
Faculty Member: Brooke Hunter
Book: Roger Deakin, Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Great Britain
Mary Kate, I chose Roger Deakin’s Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Great Britain. It’s an account of Deakin swimming his way through the lakes, lochs, moats, and other wild landscapes of Great Britain, and about his encounter with the natural, more-than-human world that he meets on that aquatic adventure. It’s a book about swimming, communing with the world in its wildness, and the lessons one can learn if you follow water and flow with it, to paraphrase Deakin. It’s also a funny and thoughtful view of swimming as a metaphor for life that I thought you might enjoy as you start your own wild new adventure post Villanova.
Charlotte Finch
Faculty Member: Jean Lutes
Book: Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist
Charlotte, I chose Colson Whitehead’s bold, genre-busting first novel, The Intuitionist, for you. It has an irresistible premise: it is set in an alternate mid-20th century city where elevator inspection is a serious profession divided into two warring schools — the Empiricists (who inspect mechanically) and the Intuitionists (who inspect by feel and inner perception). It sounds absurd, I know, but somehow it totally works. Because you wrote about the novel James, Percival Everett’s retelling of Huck Finn, with such insight for my class, I thought you would enjoy Whitehead’s novel, whose protagonist is the city’s first Black woman elevator inspector. She navigates a white male bureaucracy while pursuing a mysterious design for the "perfect elevator." I think you’ll find this novel a rewarding ride, given your gifts as a close reader, your wry sense of humor, and your subtle approach to agency.
Mackenzee Fritz
Faculty Member: Mary Mullen
Book: Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Kenzee, I’ve loved your many contributions to two semesters of reading and community, where you showed your uncanny ability to not only evaluate but completely predict a plot. Because your predictions were the highlight of Anatomy of an Alibi–the book disappointed–I thought I’d give you another mystery to cleanse your palate. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a classic, famous for its surprising, genre-defying ending. There is no pressure to predict the twist, but after witnessing your careful and brilliant reading, I know you have it in you!
Kaitlin Gibson
Faculty Member: Mary Mullen
Book: Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September
Kaitlin, it’s been such a pleasure witnessing you deepen your interest in and knowledge of Irish women’s writing. I had a hard time deciding what to select for you because I know you’ve already read so many of my favorites and I wanted to get it just right. I decided on Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September, a haunting big house novel about coming of age in Ireland as the world collapses. My hunch is that you’ll be inspired by Bowen’s prose and find pockets of hope and defiance from the descriptions of the ruins.
Gabrielle Girault
Faculty Member: Yumi Lee
Book: Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other
Gaby, it’s been a blessing to have you in class during your time at Villanova - keeping in mind your sharp insights into characters and context and your keen observational eye for the ways literature serves as a reflection of the world, I chose Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other for you. It’s an absorbing, thought-provoking, and beautifully written novel that tells the intertwined stories of a multigenerational cast of characters navigating the challenges of modern life; I hope it will inspire you, as it inspired me, to think deeply about where and how we inhabit the world and form community with others. We’ve been so lucky to get to do that together with you over these past four years. Congratulations!
Abigail Glynn
Faculty Member: Joe Drury
Book: Curtis Sittenfeld, Eligible
Abby, I have loved having you in my classes over the last few years. You bring a bright, positive energy to everything you do and your work is always thoughtful and considered. I know you enjoyed the contemporary reimagining of Pride and Prejudice that we read at the end of our Jane Austen course last semester, so I thought I’d give you another one, this time set in Cincinnati, Ohio! It features Darcy as a hotshot brain surgeon and Elizabeth as a jaded New York reporter who has returned to her home town to help out with her tiresome family. Sittenfeld is a master of the preppy comedy and does a great line in embarrassing cocktail party chitchat, awkward social situations, and screwball banter between the two leads. I read it a while ago now, but I remember it fizzing along. I think you’ll find it a refreshing palate cleanser over the summer, as you prepare for the next chapter of your life. Congratulations!
Madeleine Guiliano
Faculty Member: Lauren Shohet
Book: Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
Maddie, I chose this vivid, beautiful graphic novel for you because I so admire the way you express yourself in multiple forms: drawing, creative prose (like your Ovid adaptation via Bad Bunny!), and analytic responses. Satrapi’s reflections on how young people engage the world also resonate, for me, with your insightful discussions of identity, trauma, and longing in characters we’ve encountered in both Shakespeare and Ovid. I feel like your own energy balances contemplation and collaboration–so your interest in multiple media working in concert makes sense. I hope you enjoy all the different dimensions of Persepolis.
Jenine Hazlewood
Faculty Member: Adrienne Perry
Book: Deesha Philyaw, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
When I taught for Writers in the Schools in Houston, the fourth graders and I would start every lesson with the following mantra: “I am a writer. My voice matters. My words can change the world.” In Writing Creative Nonfiction last year, I thought of this mantra when reading your work. Jenine is a writer. Her voice matters. Her words can change the world. Now I don’t just think it; I know. As a writer, you take creative and stylistic risks that push the boundaries of form, narrative, persona, memory, and movement through time. You are funny, poignant, and vulnerable as hell. As a reader, you so often offer the comment that moves my thinking forward into new, more exciting terrain. It’s been a profound delight, in other words, to spend time in classes with your brain. All of this also puts you in good company with other writers, and which is why I thought you might enjoy Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, a book Kirkus reviewers called “tender, fierce, proudly Black and beautiful.” We’re blessed to know you, Jenine, and to have had you among our ranks. As you head off into the coming year, I’ll give you a piece of advice from one of my beloved mentors. “Don’t look back. Don’t look down. Just fly.”
Kathleen Lewis
Faculty Member: Megan Quigley
Book: Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Katie! I hope you don’t already own White Teeth but it seemed to me that now that you’ve demonstrated that you are a Smith scholar by your Falvey Scholar award-winning research on Smith’s On Beauty, you should read her millennium book that was her big break out book! Katie, as you know, since the first moment you walked into my class as a first year and surprised me by your maturity, insights, and dead pan humor, it has been a delight working with you up through your honors thesis on the role of academic libraries, inclusivity, the american dream and the promise of universities.. I’m so excited for your opportunities at Suffolk law school and please always remember Villanova as your first home where you lived out your North-East coast campus novel dream. You will be missed!
Sinéad Masterson
Faculty Member: Cathy Staples
Book: Annabelle Abbs, Windswept: Walking the Paths
Sinéad, as poet and writer you know what it is to be in the hold of a landscape—that feeling of being almost inhabited by what surrounds you: a hillside, a spared tree or a grey mare come up to the pasture gate on which you are standing. And you well know that walking out-of-doors in all weathers sharpens the ear and eye, all the senses, even the uncanny ones. For these reasons, I think you’ll be intrigued by Annabel Abbs' fine book. As an English major, I suspect you’ll be surprised by the cast of women writers who walked and hiked. Some names you’ll know, i.e. Nan Shepherd and her beloved Cairngorm mountains from our Nature Writing Workshop, but also Frieda Lawrence, Daphne du Maurier, Simone de Beauvoir, Georgia O’Keefe, and British painter Gwen John. Annabel Abbs retraces the tracks of each woman’s journey on foot, noting the way that wild walking can fortify a woman’s artistic path and resolve. I hope this book will inspire you, Sinéad. It’s been a joy getting to know you, and reading your lovely work!
Zachary Murray
Faculty Member: Kamran Javadizadeh
Book: Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level
Zach, you wrote a terrific final paper for “25 Poems” about Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript,” which is the final poem in the collection I’ve chosen for you, The Spirit Level. Your essay movingly examined Heaney’s advice in the poem: he tells his reader to take the time to “drive out west,” a phrase whose many potential meanings you thought through with real sensitivity, and to keep the heart open to what it felt when one extended oneself in that way. I thought you might treasure a copy of the book which that poem concludes. The poems in this book provide a rich mosaic of the life that Heaney knew, a life that included ordinary pleasures and extraordinary political strife. I hope you’ll keep it close as you leave Villanova and “drive out west,” whether literally, metaphorically, or (what I recommend) both!
Wyatt Oatman
Faculty Member: Brooke Hunter
Book: Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
Wyatt, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is a story told through a letter from an aging father to his son. It’s a beautifully written musing on faith, family, and how enormous even the smallest moments of life can appear when viewed retrospectively. In Medieval Romance we read many narratives that used faith and retellings of the past to justify terrible actions. Gilead’s personal history and spiritual vision offer a counterview, however imperfect, to our class readings. As you take your first steps into the future after Villanova, I hope that you can enjoy the narrative of an old man recalling his time where you are now: at the beginning of a new narrative with so many wonderful possibilities.
Ella O’Shea
Faculty Member: Kamran Javadizadeh
Book: Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
Ella, I had the great pleasure of teaching you in your first year at Villanova–not in English but in ACS. At the end of that year, you wrote a lovely essay about Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. I so admired how vulnerable and searching that essay was–you used the novel’s shocking revelations about a group of boarding school students in a kind of alternate universe England of the late-twentieth century to reflect on what had surprised and challenged you in your first year away from home here at Villanova. That essay brought out some of your unique strengths as a student: your sensitivity of mind and curiosity about the world, your willingness to turn your gaze inward. For you I’ve chosen Ishiguro’s latest novel, Klara and the Sun–which I won’t spoil for you! Except to say that I think you might be drawn to its account of what it’s like to grow up and seek out friendship and truth in a world that can feel unknowable and strange..
Molly Pawlik
Faculty Member: Adrienne Perry
Book: Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds
Molly, one of the joys of this year has been getting to know you, your voice, and your story. I have been impressed and inspired by the way you dove into the English major as a junior, not to mention your critical thinking about the intersections between that major and your work in psychology. You understand—from the inside out—the way literature calls us to reckon with the complexity of human experience, both our own and others’. One of the writers I see as engaged in a rigorous inquiry of head and heart, like you, is the poet Sharon Olds. I began reading Olds in the 90s, and she has always struck me as fairly fearless, whether writing about a mother who funds a center for burn victims or the pain of watching a marriage of many years dissolve. Olds’ work is ruthlessly honest, emotional, yet generous, and deeply brilliant and surprising—much in the way your work operates. As you head to law school next year, I hope you can keep Olds and other poets and writers like her close, as they remind us of what it means to live a real life, an examined life, and the need to reckon with our pleasure and pain along the way. Congratulations!
Sean Rooney
Faculty Member: Alan Drew
Book: Borges, Collected Fictions
It was a pleasure getting to know you as a writer, both in Writing the Traditional Novel and in Writing the Short Story last fall. I was always struck by the quiet humor in your writing and the kindness with which you treated your characters. Your characters may have been screw ups, but they were screw ups a reader could root for and ultimately care about. In novel writing, your workshop comments often referenced Christopher Nolan films—even when the story we were workshopping wasn’t anything like a Nolan film! But that’s how I learned of your love for film and your desire to become a screenwriter. Nolan’s said that the work of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges has had a significant influence on his films. Both Borges and Nolan share a fascination with time, memory, and the instability of reality. Like Nolan’s screenplays, Borges writes intricate, maze-like narratives where timelines split, loop, or coexist, turning stories into intellectual puzzles. His stories often ask readers to question what’s real and how perception shapes truth. So, as you take off for Los Angeles to get your MFA in screenwriting (congrats, by the way!), I thought I’d send you packing with Borges’s Collected Fictions. Perhaps you will find inspiration--as Nolan did before you--in these mind-bending stories to create ones of your own.
J.P. Tampe
Faculty Member: Michael Dowdy
Book: Alejandro Zambra, Chilean Poet
For JP Tampe, Alejandro Zambra’s Chilean Poet (translated by Megan McDowell): In apology, or in the spirit of the dialectic, or simply in the audacious life-force of a tortured Chilean poet, a book of levity, love and love lost, youthly adventures and misadventures, to counterbalance the utter darkness of another book of dastardly Chilean poets on their own horrific endeavors—Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas—that you so brilliantly encountered and wrote about in such searching (and award-winning) fashion, I am pleased to give you Alejandro Zambra’s delightfully mischievous novel Chilean Poet, a book I think you’ll love as you enter your next chapter.
Michael Turner
Faculty Member: Joe Drury
Book: Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia.
Mike, I chose this for you because I thought you’d enjoy the hilarious insight it provides into the 1970s British music scene, including the extraordinary, baffling moment in the middle of the decade when glam rock gave way to punk. Like you, Kureishi is a stylist with a dry wit. I think you’ll enjoy the satirical bite of his representation of post-imperial Britain, his spot-on critique of the narcissism of the counter-culture and its relation to modern neoliberalism, and his playful repurposing of the Bildungsroman genre. I know you’re a Jane Austen fan, but I think you will get a kick out of this very different kind of English comic novel. Congratulations!
Ailish Wilson
Faculty Member: Travis Foster
Book: Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
