Interested in putting your literary analysis and research skills to good use and writing for the media? Interesting in meeting Jennifer Wilson, a contributing essayist at The New York Times Book Review and a contributing writer at The Nation magazine? Come to "Going Public: A Guide for Humanists"--a writing workshop sponsored by the English department--on Wednesday, February 15 at 5:20 in Falvey 205. If you're interested in attending, RSVP here or follow the QR code on the poster.
Professor Cathy Staples's Nature Writing Workshop also took a trip to Rushton Farm to see owls. Take a look at photos from their experience below.
Photos from Professor Cathy Staples's Nature Writing Workshop trip to Rushton Farm for birdbanding during the peak fall migration of warblers.
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| 2022 Medallion of Excellence: Chloe Mikye Cherry |
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| George D. Murphy Award in Poetry, Winner: Qiao Kang |
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| Creative Writing Award Poetry, Runner-Up: Lily Switka |
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| English Department/Creative Writing Program Award in Prose Winner: Lily Renga |
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| English Honors Society |
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Core English Literature and Writing Seminar Most Distinguished Scholarly or Critical Essay: Megan Rigione
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Learn more about Professor Kamran Javadizadeh's residence at the James Merrill House in this article.
From the article:
"Oh, and 'yes, I've been working mostly in Merrill's secret study, the one you enter through a bookcase,' Javadizadeh says. 'How great is that? It's amazing. I've heard some of the (Merrill) fellows are more interested in the possibilities of a quiet space to work and maybe aren't particularly fans of Merrill or even poetry. For others like me, though, this is a magical opportunity because of how deeply we revere the man who lived and wrote here. You can certainly feel his presence.'"
Professor Javadizadeh will give a virtual reading from the Merrill House on Saturday, March 26 at 5:00 pm.
Tonight at 7:00 pm ET, catch Professor Tsering Wangmo Dhompa reading her poetry and answering questions as part of The Nation Poetry Reading Series. More information, including the link to register, available here.
If you have a piece of work that you're especially proud of, please consider submitting it for consideration for one of these awards.
The Margaret Powell Esmonde Memorial Award, which comes with a prize of $250, is given to the most distinguished scholarly or critical essay written by a graduate student in a Villanova English course within the last 12 months.
The Jerome J. Fischer Memorial Awards, which come with a prize of $250, are given to the most distinguished scholarly or critical essays written by undergraduate students at Villanova within the last 12 months.
Submissions for the Fischer Award must have been written either for a Villanova English course (all except ENG 1975) or for a Villanova Honors course (2000 level or higher) taught by a member of the Villanova English faculty. It is permissible to revise or expand papers beyond what was submitted for the course. Submissions may be excerpted from a senior Honors thesis.
The Core Literature and Writing Seminar Essay Award, which also comes with a prize of $250, is given to the most distinguished critical essay written for a Villanova Core Literature and Writing Seminar (ENG 1975) in the previous calendar year (i.e. in Spring or Fall 2021).
Format
In addition to their essay, students should include a cover page including the course and professor for which the paper was written, as well as their email and a local mailing address
Students should also submit the essay assignment or an approximation of the assignment.
Essays should be formatted in Times New Roman 12 (or equivalent font) and double-spaced.
For the Fischer Award, papers up to 6 pages will be considered separately from papers that are 6-15 pages. Longer papers are expected to engage scholarly sources.
Essays should be formatted in MLA or Chicago Style.
Only one submission per award is allowed.
Judges are looking for argumentative originality and rigor, elegance of writing,
and interpretive incisiveness. Submissions should be carefully proofread.
The deadline for submissions is Friday, April 8, 2022. Submissions should be emailed as an attachment to joseph.drury@villanova.edu.
For previous winners, as well as information about Jerome J. Fischer, see our department Awards page.
A BIPOC Writing Hangout will take place on Tuesday, February 15 from 7:00-9:00 pm online. Faculty of color in the English Department host this BIPOC writing hangout for Villanova community members who identify as people of color. Current students and alumni are welcome. Please feel free to bring friends to the semester's last hangout. Email Dr. Adrienne Perry at Adrienne.perry@villanvoa.edu for the meeting link.
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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
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.
For over 10 years, the Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal at UC Berkeley has been showcasing the best undergraduate research in literature and media from universities all over the world.
We are writing to issue a last-minute reminder for everyone to submit their papers for the Fall 2021 issue and would like to extend this call for papers to all interested undergraduates and recent graduates. We invite 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
For more information and full submission guidelines, or to view past issues of CLUJ, please visit our website’s submissions page.
Submissions for the Spring 2022 issue will be accepted until February 21st 11:59 p.m., Pacific Time.
The Point magazine features a conversation between Villanova alum, Jessica Swoboda, and Professor Javadizadeh, about criticism in public. In it, Professor Javadizadeh discusses his writing--both academic scholarship and his public writing.
Here's a taste:
"I’ve been thinking recently about something that the critic R. P. Blackmur said, which is that the thing that makes poetry poetry (and what distinguishes it from mere “verse”) is that it “adds to the stock of available reality.” And that feels like a sensible definition to me. I like that definition of poetry. I think that a critic, whether writing in an academic journal or whether writing in a sort of journalistic space for magazine or whatever, might help a reader see how a poem, for instance, has added to the stock of available reality. Here’s the new experience you can have while reading this poem. But I also think that the critic can, at times anyway, make their own writing do that for a reader."
Read the full interview here.
Professor Quigley published an essay, "What If?: New Insight into the Friendship of Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot" about her research on T. S. Eliot in the Los Angeles Review of Books. She has been working in a recently unsealed archive of letters between T. S. Eliot and Emily Hale at Princeton University. In Professor Quigley's words:
"Nearly two years ago, an archive of letters was unsealed at Princeton that radically changed the way scholars understand the life and work of T. S. Eliot. Two months later, with COVID-19 numbers soaring, this long-awaited archive slammed shut again. On Monday, October 18, 2021, I was the first external scholar finally to return to those papers. Unsurprisingly, the focus of readers so far has been on the shocking relationship memorialized in the letters between Eliot and Emily Hale, the American teacher with whom he was avowedly in love. But the Hale letters contain at least one other revelation, with profound and as yet unexplored consequences for the history of literary modernism. We now know more details about Eliot’s invitation to visit Woolf on the weekend that her death was announced in 1941. She had invited him on March 8, when she felt herself spiraling into depression again. He declined the invitation due to a cold. He wrote about the coincidence of the timing in a regretful letter to Hale."
Read the entire essay here.
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| T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf |
The English Dept and Program in Creative Writing present Two Poetry/Nature/Art Events on Thursday, Nov. 4:
Both events are ACS approved and masks are required.
ONE:
“A Bird, came down the Walk”: A poetry workshop focusing on birds.
with Nathalie Anderson
Thursday, Nov. 4, 4-5 pm
SAC 300
Please register using this Google Form: A Bird Came Down the Walk
Description of the workshop:
“A Bird, came down the Walk”:
A Workshop Celebrating Birds as Familiar and Unfamiliar Entities Through Poetry
Description: In this workshop, we’ll look at videos and photographs of birds to consider what we see that’s familiar, and what’s unexpected. We’ll try to find words for both sorts of observations, in poems that
both affirm and surprise.
Writing materials will be provided
TWO:
Birds of North America
Thursday Nov. 4, 6-7 pm
Falvey Library, Room 205
An artists talk and poetry reading to celebrate the publication of Birds of North America, an artists book
including miniature drawings/paintings of numerous North American birds, plus a series of poems
by Nathalie Anderson and Lisa Sewell that respond to the art and to each other.
Check out these photos from the Nature Writing Workshop bird banding trip to Rushton Farm on Wednesday, September 22. It's just one of many exciting things happening in Cathy Staples's Nature Writing Workshop course!
BIPOC Writing Hangouts begin on Thursday, September 9, at 7:00 pm on zoom. They will take place every other week.
They provide a supportive and informal space for self-identified BIPOC students, alumni, faculty, and staff. Writing prompts provided. Email Prof. Tsering Wangmo Dhompa for details.
On April 30, the department held its annual awards ceremony to celebrate the members of our 2021 English Honor Society, the winners of our creative writing and essay awards, and the winner of this year's Medallion of Excellence. The event was supposed to be held in the Driscoll Tent, but high winds meant we had to move the event indoors at the last minute to the Driscoll Auditorium!
Congratulations, first of all, to the 2021 English Honor Society (see below, left to right): Amanda Atkinson, Catherine Cook, Joe D'Antonio, Erin Fabian, Julia Mills, Julia Mills, Shavani Patel, Jessie Sardina, Dom Sceski, Julia Valenti, and Jackie Solomon. Also honored, but not pictured: Jamie McClelland and Ashley Park.
The winner of this year's Core English Literature and Writing Seminar Prize, for the most distinguished scholarly or critical essay written for a Core Seminar in 2020 was Walter McDonald, for his essay, "Female Independence Challenging Social Norms" in Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Walter's essay was written for Dr. Ruth Anolik's Spring 2020 course on "The Cultural Uses of Horror and Terror."
The judges for this award were Dr. Joe Drury and Prof. Robert O'Neil.
There were two winners for this year's Jerome J. Fischer Memorial Award, for the most distinguished scholarly or critical essays written by undergraduate students for an English course in the last year: Julia Valenti and Lily Switka.
Julia's essay, "Austen Adaptations and the 'Accomplished Woman," was written for Dr. Joe Drury's Fall 2020 Senior Seminar on "Jane Austen Then and Now."
Lily's essay, "Unrealistic Expectations: Miltonic Marriage and the Fall," was written for Dr. Lauren Shohet's Fall 2020 course on "Milton."
Ava Lundell also received an honorable mention for her essay, "Intimacy in Lament for Art O'Leary," written for Dr. Joseph Lennon's Fall 2020 course on "Irish Epics, Visions, and Hauntings."
The winner of this year's Margaret Esmonde Powell Memorial Award for the most distinguished essay by a graduate student written for an English course was Anne Jones. Her essay, "The Vexed Position of the Black Secret-Bearer: Concealments and Revelations in Hannah Crafts' The Bondwoman's Narrative," was written for Dr. Travis Foster's Fall 2020 course, "American Fiction Before 1900."
The winner of this year's George D. Murphy Award in Poetry was Madison Barber (below, second from right).
The winner of the Creative Writing Program's Award in Prose was Ashley Oh for her work, "Letter" (second from left). Pictured with them are Dr. Cathy Staples (left) and Dr. Tsering Wangmo (right).
The judges for the two creative writing awards were Dr. Alan Drew, Dr. Lisa Sewell, Dr. Adrienne Perry, and Dr. Tsering Wangmo. This year's visiting judge was the poet and educator Airea D. Matthews.
Finally, the winner of the 2021 English Medallion of Excellence was Shivani Patel, pictured with English department chair, Dr. Heather Hicks.
Congratulations, everyone!
Check out this terrific article, "Practicing Acknowledgment," by Villanova English alum Jess Swoboda ('15), which was just published in The Point.
Jess, pictured below with Dr. Megan Quigley, is currently enrolled in the University of Virginia PhD program.
Collision, a literary magazine based at the University of Pittsburgh, is currently open for submissions of undergraduate fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art. By submitting to the annual magazine, students will also be considered for the magazine's writing and cover art competitions.
Submissions for the annual magazine close Friday, February 19, but are read on a rolling basis. You can find more information about the magazine and our submission guidelines at www.collision.pitt.edu. Please direct any questions to editor in chief Hannah Woodruff at collision.pitt@gmail.com.
Laurel Moon, a national literary magazine based at Brandeis University, is accepting submissions for its next issue. For this issue, the editors will be accepting original, unpublished work written in English: up to five poems and three prose works from each author. They will also accept ten pieces of artwork and photography per submission.
The submission deadline for the upcoming issue is March 15, 2021. But the editors are offering one-on-one feedback to writers seeking guidance on any creative writing piece that they submit before February 20.
