Just Published: Professor Kamran Javadizadeh on Emily Dickinson's letters

Professor Kamran Javadizadeh has a new essay in The New Yorker--"When Emily Dickinson Mailed it In." Check out the full essay here.

Friday, Nov. 4 at 2:00 pm, Alan Drew's The Recruit: A Conversation and Celebration

 On Friday, November 4 at 2:00 pm in Room 205 of Falvey Library, Professor Jean Lutes and Professor Alan Drew will discuss Professor Drew's latest novel, The Recruit. There will books for sale and a few lucky attendees will win a copy of the book in a raffle. More information here.

Bridges, Winter 2022 out now!

The new issue of Bridges, the product of Dr. Adrienne Perry and her students in Editing and Publishing is out now.

Editorial Staff/New Book Reviews: Elizabeth Nación, Donovan Hill, Chloe Cherry, Autumn Anderson, Juliana Peri, Adrianna Ogando, Grace Kully, Ava Lundell, Patrick Leggett, Sara Hecht, Caroline Schroder, Catherine Wood, Katie Reed, Billy Lay, Alex Marino (forthcoming). 

New Poetry: Caroline M. Mar, Kamakshi Ranjan, and Sonam Tsomo Chashutsang

New Prose: Kai da Luz

The Editor's Note:

Yesterday was a full moon, the first of 2022.

​

A dear friend who splits her time between Minnesota and Sweden wrote that Stockholm was empty today. Was it the full moon, she wondered, or was everyone in hiding—not just from the cold, but from the newest COVID-19 surge? On the phone with another friend recently, they dubbed 2022 the “junior year of the pandemic.” This winter, as the wind howls and the temperatures drop, as we check the number of cases in our counties and lay low—or maybe we don’t—it can be easy to forget that there are other meanings for surge.

 

What about a “powerful rush of an emotion or feeling?” A feeling like Black joy, maybe, that is fought hard for and nurtured in the face of chaos and uncertainty. Maybe that feeling is the love connecting two adult sisters in the review of Mary H. K. Choi's book Yolk. There may not be one word to describe the emotion that rushes through us as we watch a parent learning to write, practicing their alphabets, but Sonam Tsomo Chashutsang's poem “Unfinished” gets us closer. In this newest issue of Bridges there are floods of memory, the longing that characterizes nostalgia, and in Kamakshi Ranjan’s poem the warm buzz that accompanies coming home to our hive.

This issue reminds us of the need to reflect on how we label the world around us. As in Caroline M. Mar's poems, it invites us to consider naming and how the language we use demands definitions to come. "Slip knot," “good mothers,” “yonder,” or “interesting women.” Sometimes, like Kai da Luz, we have to conjure entirely new words (and worlds) because the ones we have just won’t do. At Bridges, we want to remember that reading is intimate because, like good conversation, it requires that we reach out in good faith and in anticipation of insight and connection. What about surge as the electricity of reading something that inspires or challenges? Another name for it could be connectivity, spark.

UC-Berkeley Vagabond Creative Writing Submission Opportunity

 The spirit of our department is multidisciplinary, which is exactly the essence of Vagabond Multilingual Journal. Whether a student is exploring the translation of a queer Cambodian novel into English, or expressing their cultural Chicano heritage through poetry, or engaging with film criticism to explore the representations of African American societies, these interdisciplinary but committed forms of writing are what Vagabond wants to highlight. It is for this reason that the Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal is proud to announce the return of Vagabond Multilingual Magazine, UC Berkeley's ONLY multilingual magazine (last published in 2014). 

We are dedicated to fostering diversity and unity through this magazine by giving a platform to students for them to share their voices and to embrace their cultural and linguistic legacies. Vagabond will publish multilingual/multicultural creative, academic, and critical projects including but not limited to:

• Translation
• Poetry
• Art criticism
• Prose
• Visual Art

For more information and full submission guidelines, please visit our Vagabond submissions page. To see older submissions from the original magazine, please visit Vagabond's original website. 

Submissions for the Spring 2022 issue will be accepted until February 21st 11:59 p.m., Pacific Time.

Job Opportunity! Editorial Assistant at Publishing Company in New York

Villanova English alum Jackie Douglass ('19) recently contacted us with information about an exciting job opportunity with her employer, Sourcebooks, an independent publishing company. The opening is for an editorial assistant in their New York office.

Responsibilities include:

• Oversee the project management, workflow, and planning of new and existing children’s and young adult titles, including setting schedules and meeting aggressive deadlines
• Ensure timely completion of series and solo projects developed and produced by New York children’s and young adult acquiring editors
• Research prepublication project and category competitive sets for sales, positioning, price, package, etc.
• Copywriting for launch, catalog pages, ARCs, other metadata maintenance
• Read, log and review incoming manuscripts and prepare them for submission
• Prepare materials for launches, presales, and sales conference
• Maintain a good relationship with agents and authors by being responsive, professional, and helpful
• Daily maintenance of NY office, including organization of materials, ordering office supplies, books
• Travel to Naperville, Illinois for quarterly sales meeting.

Qualifications:

• Excellent written and verbal skills
• Proficient in Excel and Power Point
• Good working knowledge on all children’s book categories from board book to young adult

For more information and to apply for the job, visit here.

Villanova Alums Discuss Careers in Publishing

What does a career in publishing look like? How does someone interested in jobs or internships in publishing get started? 

On Monday night, a packed room gathered to hear four, high-powered Villanova alumni answer these and other questions at an event organized by the English department, Communications, the Writing and Rhetoric Program and the Creative Writing Program. Cece Ryan, Publisher of People magazine and Senior VP at Meredith Corporation underscored that there are lots of different kinds of publishing (hint: it’s not all about books). According to Ryan, finding fulfilling work after Villanova should be an exhilarating process. Villanova students can feel both proud and prepared to meet their futures.

Gary Urda, senior vice-president for sales at Simon & Schuster, reminded the audience that publishing is a $26bn a year industry on the cutting edge of art and culture. Given the size of the industry, what percentage of jobs in this field are editorial? At Simon & Schuster, Urda estimated about 10 per cent. He then discussed the dynamic role that people with business, marketing, advertising, design, and legal backgrounds play in the publishing industry.

Bob Bender, VP and executive editor at Simon & Schuster, edits nonfiction and biography, including the bestselling Failure Is Not an Option, by Gene Kranz. When asked about the future of publishing and books, Bender said that the format changes, but the written word, and publishing, are here to stay. Bender was one of two English majors on the panel, though each of the panelists talked about how a love of books, reading, and curiosity are good skills for all publishing professionals to have.

Kelly Moran, a 2019 graduate and the other Villanova English major on the panel, landed her first internship in a literary agency while a student at Villanova. While the agency internship was a good experience, it helped her to see that editing might not be the best fit for her interests. Moran went on to complete a range of internships in New York and London, which ultimately led to her current position as a publicity assistant at St. Martin’s/Macmillan.

To launch a career in publishing, all of the panelists remarked on the importance of networking and building strong relationships. After a lively Q & A, students had a chance to mingle with the panelists and put these ideas into action. LinkedIn and Nova Network are good ways to connect with other alumni and professionals outside of these career events. In the meantime, the success of the evening was a reminder that publishing matters.  

Just Published! Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh on Claudia Rankine and Robert Lowell

Congratulations to Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh, whose article "The Atlantic Ocean Breaking On Our Heads: Claudia Rankine, Robert Lowell, and the Whiteness of the Lyric Subject," was just published in PMLA, the official journal of the Modern Language Association.

Dr. Javadizadeh said: "This essay began for me when I first read Rankine’s Citizen. I noticed that, tucked into the middle of her book, and in a moment that seemed to me like a reference to the Middle Passage and the history of slavery, Rankine used a phrase—“the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads”—that she was clearly (to me at least!) lifting and adapting from a poem by Robert Lowell. But I had no idea what the two moments had to do with each other—and no idea, therefore, why Rankine was turning to Lowell’s language to evoke the history of slavery. Lowell’s version of the phrase came in a poem called “Man and Wife,” part of his 1959 book Life Studies; both his poem and that book seem to be largely about crises in Lowell’s private life—and nothing to do, or at least nothing obviously to do, with anti-black racism, much less the history of slavery.

"So I started to dig around. Rankine had also said in an interview that she thought Lowell was struggling, in Life Studies, with the construction of whiteness, but that it was hard to find academic work about that. Lowell is one of the poets I work on most closely, and I knew that she was right that there wasn’t much scholarship on his whiteness. (So far as I knew, there wasn’t any!) But I didn’t know, in the first place, what Rankine was seeing when she remarked on this struggle in his work. I looked back to “Man and Wife,” and certain lines in the poem began to suggest to me a lingering anxiety about race. But it was when I went back to Lowell’s archive at Harvard and looked at drafts of the poem that my jaw dropped. Race, it turned out, was all over the early drafts of the poem. Rankine—who had never seen these drafts—had nevertheless intuited something genuinely lurking within the poem. She was right! And I could see, as Lowell revised those drafts into the published poem, how much of his poem’s explicit references to race—and all of its references to blackness—had been scrupulously cut away. I felt like I was seeing a poet whom I thought I knew very well through new eyes. And I had Rankine’s poetry to thank for that.

"That’s what got me started. What got me through the writing was a desire to figure out what Rankine’s intuition about Lowell meant for her own poetry, poetry that I also loved. Basically the challenge I saw Rankine facing was that, on the one hand, the kind of poetry that Lowell had written (introspective, autobiographical, personal) meant a great deal to her, but that, on the other, she had seen how that kind of poetry had been premised (in Lowell’s particular case but also more generally, for the kind of poetry that he represented) on a construction of whiteness that was responsible for historical violence against black people, and indeed for Rankine’s own marginalization. So: how could she write that kind of poetry without replicating its racism? Why would she even try? That’s what I tried to figure out. I learned a great deal in writing the essay: about Lowell, about Rankine, and indeed about my own relationship, as an Iranian-American who has been trained and has worked within predominately white institutions, to whiteness.

"One other thing I wanted to say: I’m deeply indebted to my colleagues in the Villanova English department for helping me do this work. In particular: Lisa Sewell invited me, once I began to talk to her about Rankine and Lowell, to contribute an essay into a volume she was coediting. And then once she saw what I was coming up with, she encouraged me to submit that essay to a journal first. I then brought a draft of the essay to a writing group made up of some other of my colleagues: Joe Drury, Travis Foster, Brooke Hunter, Mary Mullen, and Megan Quigley. They—along with Lisa, who kept editing the piece for her volume and where I’m happy to say another version of it will soon appear—gave me brilliant, crucial feedback. And they encouraged me to send it to PMLA, which was a vote of confidence I really needed at that moment."

Professional and Student Literary Editors Discuss How To Get Published

On Wednesday night, students had a chance to hear authors and editors talk about their experiences with the publication process. Author Robin Black shared her experience of having a short story turned down, only to have another journal pick the story up and praise it later. The lesson for Black: persistence matters. Rejection isn’t about whether we’re a “good” writer; it’s about finding a good fit.

Tia Parisi, editor of Villanova literary magazine Ellipsis, spoke about assuming that every move an author makes is intentional and the need to break down barriers between author and editor, as well as our assumptions about whether we have something valuable to contribute to a literary journal. 

The editor Travis Kurowski reminded the audience that there are a lot of ways to see our name in print—from blogs to journals. The goal of publishing, Kurowski suggested, is to create publics, places of community where literature can be celebrated and shared.

Pictured (left to right): Dr. Adrienne Perry, Travis Kurowski, and Tia Parisi.

Publish Your Research in Berkeley's Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal

The Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal (CLUJ) at the University of California, Berkeley. For over seven years, the Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal (CLUJ) is now accepting submissions for the Spring 2019 issue and is calling for papers to all interested undergraduates and recent graduates. The editors are interested in research papers from all those working in, around, or critically engaging with literary topics in a comparative nature.

Papers in any language are welcome. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Papers comparing at least two authors or texts
• Interdisciplinary research engaging multiples disciplines within the humanities
• Research engaging with literary theory and schools of criticism

Authors whose papers are selected for publication will receive free copies of the issue in which they are published. For more information and full submission guidelines, or to view past issues of CLUJ, please visit the journal submissions page.

Submissions for the Spring 2019 issue will be accepted until February 15th.

Opportunity for English Majors: Publishing Certificate from NYU

See the very helpful message below from a recent English major alumnus, Francesca Cocchi.

I’m writing to let you know about an excellent opportunity for Villanova English majors. For the first time, the Summer Publishing Institute at New York University will accept rising college seniors into its intensive six-credit program for aspiring magazine and book publishing professionals.

After graduating from Villanova in May, I attended the Summer Publishing Institute. Our class of just under 100 students from all over the world worked in small groups to launch mock magazines and book imprints. During the course of the program, we also attended daily lectures led by editors, publishers, marketing directors, publicists, literary agents, designers, and sales representatives from top companies in the business—Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Scholastic, Hachette, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Meredith, Time Inc., Hearst, and Condé Nast, to name a few.

Within a month of receiving my certificate from NYU, I landed seven job interviews in New York City, several of which turned into offers. Now, I’m an editorial assistant at Food Network Magazine—a dream first job where I get to read and write every day. I’m honored to say that my office is full of former English majors who bring the same creative energy I fostered at Villanova.

I hope other English majors at Villanova will consider applying to the Summer Publishing Institute (or similar programs at Columbia University, The University of Southern California, and the University of Denver). The creative writing and journalism workshops I took in college and my work in the Writing Center led me on the path to becoming an editor, and the Summer Publishing Institute provided me with the industry-specific skills and connections I needed to stand out in such a competitive field.

The priority application deadline (which applicants are encouraged to meet) is February 1, 2018. The final deadline is March 19, 2018. For more information, students may read the program’s online brochure.

NYU Summer Publishing Institute

The NYU School of Professional Studies Center for Publishing: Digital and Print Media is pleased to invite you to participate in an online information session about the Summer Publishing Institute, an immersive program for students who are graduating this May, rising college seniors, and young professionals who are interested in careers in digital and print media.

Summer Publishing Institute (SPI) Online Information Session November 16, 2017 7:00 PM ET Online Event

Join us online to learn more about our six-week summer program (June 4 - July 13, 2018), developed specifically for recent college graduates who are interested in careers in books and digital/magazine media. SPI, now entering its 40th year, annually features more than 150 leading industry executives who serve as faculty members and speakers. Students attend lectures and workshops that explore key publishing issues; visit some of the top book and digital/magazine media headquarters; and participate in a career fair. SPI awards six graduate credits to those who successfully complete the program. These credits may be applied to the MS in Publishing: Digital and Print Media, or to an advanced degree at another institution of higher education where the credits are deemed appropriate. Students may choose to apply to and attend both programs and enter the graduate program with six credits of advanced standing.

Click here to RSVP.  Once you RSVP, you will receive a confirmation email with a link that can be used to participate in the online information sessions.