On Friday, May 9 we celebrated graduating seniors by giving them books. The ceremony ended with a moving toast from Dr. Evan Radcliffe. To learn a little about these fantastic graduates and to get even more 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.
The department is so proud of these students and looks forward to wonderful things that they'll do in the years ahead.
Sam Allen
Book: Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
Faculty member: Evan Radcliffe
Reasoning: Sam, I chose Anthony Doerr’s 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See for you. I had in mind first your general interest in history, since the book offers a detailed view of its characters’ lives during the particular circumstances of World War II. But I also thought of the comments you made in the Harry Potter course about the significance of underdog kid characters like Neville Longbottom and Luna Lovegood. While Doerr’s novel isn’t a children’s book (and has only one slightly magical facet), it follows the parallel stories of a German boy and a French girl who have to find their way through a number of challenges and losses. It’s an engrossing and subtle story, and I hope you find it as interesting as I did.
Carlos Alvarez
Book: Teaching to Transgress, by bell hooks
Faculty member: Adrienne Perry
Reasoning: One of the truths of teaching is that our students are frequently our best teachers. Over the last three terms, I have been privileged to have you in my classes and, this term, to have you serve as the teaching assistant for Contemporary Literature and Film. During this time, I have learned alongside you and from you. Whether completing an assignment or facilitating a class discussion, you show us what it means to claim an education rooted in creativity, goodwill, and a passionate belief in the importance of ideas. I am thrilled that you are pursuing teaching because I know what a gifted, tenacious teacher and colleague you are and how much your students and peers will look up to and learn from you. Though our class focused on hooks’ ideas on love this term, I thought you might find Teaching to Transgress helpful as you start your teaching journey. Again and again, hooks reminds us that teaching and learning are pathways to freedom—a lesson you already embody and know.
Olivia Bernheisel
Book: Emily Raboteau, Lessons for Survival: Mothering against the Apocalypse
Faculty member: Jean Lutes
Reasoning: Olivia, when I taught you, I found your forthrightness, intellectual curiosity, and clear-eyed determination to right wrongs inspiring. I chose to give you Emily Raboteau’s Lessons for Survival: Mothering against ‘The Apocalypse’ – a series of autobiographical essays accompanied by photographs that was just published last year – because I was similarly inspired by Raboteau’s honesty and especially by her celebration of beauty and caregiving, even in the face of grave injustices.
Mary Bondurant
Book: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss
Faculty member: Lisa Sewell
Reasoning: Mary, in our poetry writing workshop, almost all the poems you wrote engaged beautifully and thoughtfully with the more-than-human world. They were informed by patience, curiosity and an admirable attentiveness as you observed and learned the names of plants, birds, animals and mosses. I remember your image of lying back against the moss in one poem particularly well and that’s why I’m giving you Robin Wall Kimmerer’s first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. As you already know, mosses are fascinating and ubiquitous – and in her book Kimmerer shares her knowledge of them as an ethnobotanist but also through the framework of indigenous ways of knowing. I hope this book feeds your quest for understanding and leads to more poems.
Madeleine Brooks
Book: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes
Faculty member: Mary Mullen
Reasoning: Madeleine, I so appreciate your original thinking, probing questions, and strength of character. I give you a copy of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes as an antidote to Sally Rooney’s women characters. I hope you appreciate the protagonist’s refusal to do what is expected of her and the affirmation that there is always another way. But, if you don’t, trust your instincts. I want you to enjoy the fantastical twists in the story and for them to inspire you to keep being creative and true to yourself.
Emma Cahill
Book: Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit
Faculty member: Cathy Staples
Reasoning: I wanted a book that would appeal to all the Emmas I’ve come to know: Emma, the newspaper writer; Emma, the alert, observer and recorder of the natural world; Emma of the imaginative flight; and Emma of the law school to come. The nature writer in you will revel in the role that the quest to find Orwell’s roses–in a remote inaccessible cottage–plays in the project of the book and the revelation of Orwell as writer and gardener. Your investigative impulse will find kinship with Orwell’s descent into the mines, and Solnit’s expose of the dark side of commercial roses. I imagine you will leap from these essays to reading more Orwell, more Solnit until it’s time to begin law school.
Will Corliss
Book: Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Faculty member: Travis Foster
Reasoning: Will, I selected The Count of Monte Cristo for you thinking of your future in the law. It’s a novel that wrestles deeply with the ideals of justice and the law, while also offering a cautionary reminder of how the pursuit of vengeance can distort even the noblest aims. Alexandre Dumas shows that true justice demands not only intellect and perseverance, but also mercy and self-awareness—qualities that you already exemplify in such abundance. All that, and it’s a rip-roaring page turner.
Camille Ferace
Book: Tana French, In the Woods
Faculty member: Mary Mullen
Reasoning: Camille, you have helped build community in the English department through your work on the Student Advisory council and have brought such good energy to the Reading and Community class these past two years. Because we didn’t end up choosing a thriller this year and I know how much you like them, I am giving you In the Woods by one of my favorite Irish writers, Tana French. I wish I could hear your smart reactions, character analysis, and predictions because I know they would transform my understanding of the book. I hope it provides some pleasure after all of your hard work here at Villanova and serves as a reminder of the joy that you helped foster in our community.
Frankie Joseph Frabizzio
Book: The Graphic Novel version of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower by Damian Duffy and John Jennings
Faculty member: Heather Hicks
Reasoning: Frankie, you have a remarkable number of talents and interests, so this was a challenge. Ultimately, I put three facts together in choosing as a book for you the graphic novel version of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower by Damian Duffy and John Jennings. (1) I know you are a talented comics artist, (2) One of your favorite books is the graphic memoir The Best We Could Do by Vietnamese-American author Thi Bui; and (3) You also have an interest in science fiction and fantasy, including apocalyptic narratives. Duffy and Jennings’s adaptation of Butler’s work has been widely admired, and Butler’s novel is one of the most influential apocalyptic texts of the contemporary era. I hope you enjoy it as a contribution to your already impressive knowledge of literature and graphic novels!
Emily Hanlon
Book: Enter Ghost, Isabella Hammad
Faculty member: Mary Mullen
Reasoning: Emily, it was so hard to choose a book for you because I know how much you enjoy reading genre fiction for pleasure but I have also witnessed your smart analysis of long novels like Middlemarch. I decided to give you Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad for two reasons. First, because I devoured it and I hope you find it as engaging as I did. Second, because I remember your critical and creative writing in Ghostly Matters and selfishly want to imagine your interpretations of this novel. I hope that you have much pleasure reading ahead but know that you are also a true intellectual: a deep thinker with much knowledge and wisdom to share with the world.
Will Harlan
Book: Clockers by Richard Price
Faculty member: Alan Drew
Reasoning: Will, in both Writing Detective Fiction and Writing the Traditional Novel, I was impressed by your ability to craft compelling, page-turning mysteries while simultaneously creating complex emotional characters who feel like real people living in the world. As a writer, you understand that we read because we care about people and that plot is a vehicle to illuminate your characters’ humanity. Richard Price is that kind of writer, one who can work within the limitations and expectations of genre fiction and yet elevate it to the “literary” through his thoughtful exploration of his characters. In Clockers, Price is in top form, sensitively portraying a small-time drug dealing “clocker” trapped in the dangerous world of economically depressed north New Jersey, and the disillusioned Jersey City homicide detective trying to find salvation through his work. When I started writing detective fiction, I found inspiration in Price’s work. I hope he can inspire your own writing as well.
Gabe Jimenez
Book: Just Kids, Patti Smith
Faculty member: Megan
Reasoning: What could be better than listening to music and reading? Reading this kick ass memoir about music! In Just Kids, Patti Smith chronicles her life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and the New York Music and arts scene in the 60s/70s in Cheslea in New York. If you haven’t read it already, I know this book will combine your interest in memoir as a genre and music. As you head off to the legal world, keep listening and writing (maybe even run into Patti Smith in NYC). You will be missed!
Amanda McKean
Book: Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi
Faculty member: Joe Drury
Reasoning: We read Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching in my British Gothic Fiction class. It’s a weird, hallucinatory, often confusing contemporary gothic novel, but Amanda loved it, maybe because, like Amanda, Oyeyemi is very smart and has a wonderful, mischievous, deadpan sense of humor. This is the novel Oyeyemi published after that. I’ve not read it yet, but it looks just as weird and wonderful. I am hoping she will read it and let me know what she thinks.
Riley Nelson
Book: A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor
Faculty member: Joe Drury
Reasoning: Neil MacGregor was director of the British Museum in London and this book draws on his knowledge and experience working with treasures from around the world. What makes it remarkable is the way it uses objects – much of them colonial loot – to tell a history of the world that decenters Europe and marginalizes great men, focusing on what they reveal gradual changes in everyday life across millennia. Riley wants to be a museum curator after she graduates. She is a beautiful writer and has a rich, complex sense of history.. I hope she will be inspired by the boldness and intelligence of this book.
Brandon Nesmith
Book: The Essential June Jordan
Faculty member: Adrienne Perry
Reasoning: Before I ever met you Brandon, I heard you were a poet. Not only did I hear you were a poet, I heard that you claimed that title proudly for yourself. This is not something I often hear students claiming; naturally I was intrigued. When we met, I appreciated that this title or role was not casual, but that you really were committed to poetry in the same way people are committed to caring about their oldest friends: spending time, listening closely, speaking truths. That poetry, like friendship, heightens the experience of everyday life and is inseparable from who we are and how we go about the world, especially as we try to make it better for ourselves and everybody else. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to spend much time with June Jordan—a writer of incredible breadth and love and political conviction—but I suspect this book of her essential poems will be in your go bag for years to come—as it is for so many readers and writers who still take inspiration from her work. I hope that as you read her poems, they will, in her words, “rally you” and that your poems, as you read them to her and others, will do the same and shimmer.
Ashley Oh
Book: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Faculty member: Crystal J. Lucky
Reasoning: I picked Zora Neale Hurston’s most recognized novel for you, Ashley, because of its ever-developing protagonist. Throughout the novel, Janie grows in spite of and because of her challenges, ultimately becoming a strong woman of courage, conviction, and care. By novel’s end, Janie is content with the life she has made. Her mind, soul, and body are integrated in peaceful harmony. I wish that for you, that as you leave Villanova and the daily life of being an English major, you will take your experiences, the good and the bad, the exciting and the mundane, and create a life that brings you joy and satisfaction. This is one of my favorite novels. I hope it becomes one of yours.
Catherine Piergiovanni
Book: Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Faculty member: Jean Lutes
Reasoning: The House of Mirth, first published in 1905, became a bestseller and made Edith Wharton famous. Wharton set her novel in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, an era that has a lot in common with our own historical moment: social upheaval, political corruption, an extreme gap between the rich and the poor, a deep preoccupation with luxury and reputation. The House of Mirth follows its beautiful protagonist, Lily Bart, on her troubled path through the rarefied big-money circles of New York. I chose this extraordinary, tragic novel for Catherine in part because the elegance and precision of Catherine’s prose style reminds me of Wharton’s. But I also chose it because I think this book will make Catherine angry–in a good way. Lily Bart is an unforgettable, deeply frustrating heroine, and most, if not all, of the injustices in her world persist today. We need serious thinkers with integrity and conviction–people like Catherine–more than ever. I’m grateful to have taught her, and I can’t wait to see what she does next.
Maddie Rhodes
Book: Jesmyn Ward, Let Us Descend
Faculty member: Jean Lutes
Reasoning: I chose Jesmyn Ward’s gorgeous, harrowing historical novel Let Us Descend for Maddie in honor of the joy I felt in teaching Maddie one of Ward’s earlier novels, Sing, Unburied, Sing, in a class I co-taught with Dr. Crystal Lucky. Ward’s latest novel, published in 2023, Let Us Descend takes its title from Dante’s Inferno. It follows, in detail, the terrible journey of a young, enslaved girl who is separated from her mother and sold by her father. It’s a tough read; Ward does not spare her readers from the hell of slavery. But unlike Dante, Ward imagines some paths out of hell. Let Us Descend conjures history, queer love, and joy. Maddie, despite her gentle manner, is a fearless, discerning reader, and I hope she will come to treasure Ward’s novel as much as I do.
Vanessa Rosado
Book: Marcia Douglas, Notes from a Writer’s Book of Cures and Spells
Faculty member: Chiji Akọma
Reasoning: First, I’m sorry that I’m not here to read this to you, Nessa!
I selected Marcia Douglas’ novel for you because she speaks across many languages–not in the literal sense, though there is Jamaican Creole coloring her narratives, but in the ways that she invokes different typologies of being that require the appreciation of many ways of being in the world. We’ve had quite a ride, from being in my Black British Literature and Film class to the more recent Senior Seminar where we explored Black Diaspora Identity. You showed great interest in the dynamics of language registers in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and in the mysteries and cultural evocations of santeria in the New World. I know that you are headed to Law School; I feel that your open-mindedness about our world will inspire you to explore all the paths of truth. Douglas’ novel is a fun read–it’s got spells to consider! It’s an imaginative meta-narrative on the relationship between the writer and her characters. There’s more you will find there, and if there’s someone I think that would enjoy the discovery, it’s you, Nessa. Fly high!
Matthew Sabol
Book: Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of the Earth, edited by George Wuerthner, Eileen Crist, and Tom Butler
Faculty member: Joseph Lennon
Reasoning: Matt, I chose for you this amazing collection of essays about wildness, Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of the Earth, to fan your interest in sustainability and encourage your own wild side! Your writing on ecological justice and representation last semester contrasted how the protagonists in Wolfwalkers moved through the woods with grace while the hunters sought to tame and destroy it. Your sensitivity, reverence, and grace shone through your comments and writing all semester, and I hope you enjoy the book and maybe particularly the essay by Sandra Lubarsky who sensitively writes about the naturalist Aldo Leopold, who both hunted and protected natural beauty.
Muneet Sheera
Book: Stephen King, Dr. Sleep
Faculty member: Travis
Reasoning: Muneet, I chose Doctor Sleep for you because your brilliant insights into The Shining helped our whole class see that novel—and the difficult questions it raises about addiction, recovery, and redemption—with greater depth and humanity. Knowing you had hoped to read the sequel, it feels right to send you forward with this story, which continues the exploration of suffering and healing. I hope it reminds you how much your intellect and compassion can matter to people whose lives you touch.
Sonia Singh
Book: A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki
Faculty member: Yumi Lee
Reasoning: Sonia, I know you have a passion for literature that highlights the urgent social and political issues of our day and helps us understand them in complex and deeply felt ways, and I think Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being will be a perfect book to draw you in this summer. It tells a story that touches on big questions and concepts - identity, migration, diaspora, language, depression, being in the position of the ‘other,’ histories of war, militarism, and imperialism, and climate disaster, to name a few - and is also an engrossing work of literary genius that hinges on the power of the written word. I hope you find inspiration in the story it tells as you finish this chapter of your academic journey and begin the next one.
Sophia Soberon
Book: The Testaments
Faculty member: Megan
Reasoning: This Spring in our senior seminar we read (and lived?) The Handmaid’s Tale and Sophia, as always, used her keen critical skills to help us all to understand Offred’s warning. As you head off to graduate school remember the lessons of the marketing Commander! Seriously, though, I hope that this sequel will help you to remember the solidarity of our time working together and help you to keep your eye on forming a better intersectional feminist future!
Kendall Taylor
Book: Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist
Faculty member: Yumi Lee
Reasoning: Kendall, I know from our class on Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary American Literature this past semester how much you love to dive into a story and turn it inside out, and The Intuitionist presents us with a strange, fascinating, slanted version of our world that I think will intrigue you, along with an unforgettable protagonist in Lila Mae Watson. I also know that you have an interest in book clubs and reading as an avenue for sparking questions and ideas about social justice, and I think this is a perfect book for both of those things! I hope it can help kickstart your first post-college book club.
Mickey Wilcox
Book: M. Nzadi Keita, Migration Letters
Faculty member: Lisa Sewell
Reasoning: Mickey, I know that you are a big fan of Tracy K. Smith and especially her book Wade in the Water for its unflinching look at history: the history of slavery, immigration, gender discrimination. You were especially inspired by Smith’s “letter” poems, which recovered the voices of free and enslaved people erased and buried by time. I hope you will be equally excited by this book of letter poems by M. Nzadi Keita. Her book Migration Letters draws on her experiences of being born in Philadelphia into a Black family and a Black culture transported from the American South by the Great Migration. I thought you would appreciate this book that also plunges into the unsung aspects of Black culture–especially since Keita is local to the area. I hope this book inspires you to explore your own history through poetry.
Kai Williams
Book: Erasure by Percival Everett
Faculty member: Adrienne Perry
Reasoning: Over the course of our work together—whether in classes, your honors thesis, or as your advisor—you have returned, with great passion and conviction, to books and movies authored by Black artists, about and for Black folks—from Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight to Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who’ve Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. This year, in your critical and creative work on Tyler Perry, you have used an intersectional analysis of race, class, and gender to read with and against Perry’s popular Madea franchise and his depictions of Black women, developing a set of thorny conclusions about representation that refuse to see his tropes in simple terms. I can think of no better fellow traveler for someone doing this kind of work than the literary polymath Percival Everett, who has fearlessly used irony and satire, among other approaches, to hack away at questions of representation and any trace of racial preciousness. That he can do this, in the case of Erasure or Trees, while making readers nearly wet their pants, is merely a dividend of his brilliance and ambition. And he is, in that way, one of your kindred spirits.
