Department of English | Department of English

News & Events

Congratulations to the 2013 RCTE Graduates!

Congratulations to all our 2013 RCTE graduates: Adrienne Crump, Jennifer Haley-Brown, Sarah Harris, Sara Howe, Londie Martin, Cruz Medina, Jessica Shumake, Mary Stroud, Elise Verzosa (Hurley), Jenna Vinson, and Cassie Wright. (not visible in this photo: Adela C. Licona, Ken McAllister and Cruz Medina.)

Teaching Award

Kudos to Elizabeth Labiner who won the 2013 Writing Program Johnnie Raye Harper Teaching Award.

Writing Program Fellowship winners

Three cheers for Ryan Winet and Pete Figler, both of whom are 2013 Writing Program Fellowship winners.

Assistant Editor for AZQ

Congratulations to Jordan Tracy who was selected by the Arizona Quarterly as the next Assistant Editor for 2013-2014.

Bookshelf

A Palace of Pearls by Jane Miller

In this book-length sequence, animated by a confrontation with her dead father, Jane Miller meditates on home, love, war and the responsibility of the poet. A Palace of Pearls is inspired by one of the most spectacular civilizations in history, the Arab kingdom of Al-Andalus—a Middle Age civilization where architecture, science and art flourished and Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived in relative harmony. The reader roams through "rooms," encountering Greek, Judaic, and Roman mythology, and...

Hemingway and the Black Renaissance ed. by Charles Scruggs and Edward Holcomb

Noted scholars [Holcomb and Scruggs] provide a solid framework for the study of the connections between Hemingway's writing and the literary works of black writers. The collection's unity relies on defining the "Black Renaissance" as encompassing not only the Harlem Renaissance but also teh subsequent advances in black literature sustaned through and beyond the war years, the Black Arts period, and "into the present transnational phase."—Choice Review

What You See in the Dark by Manuel Muñoz

“You’ll understand one day, her mother had said at the bus station. When you find a man of your own, you’ll know why you’ll run toward him.”

A penetrating look at people searching for meaning and authenticity in lives played out under watchful eyes, this thoroughly original work is intense and fascinating in its juxtapositions of tenderness and menace, violence and regret, and its atmosphere recreation of a place on a brink of change.

Crossing the River by Fenton Johnson

THE IDEA PULSED WITH ROMANCE, BUT THE ACT WAS RASH, RECKLESS – AND IRREVOCABLE.

Carrying her Confederate heritage like a flag, Martha Bragg Pickett was as stubborn as her red hair. And hungry for life. On a dare she crossed the river, leaving the safe, abstaining, Baptist, Southern side and venturing over to the dangerous, rowdy, Catholic Northern side. And when that proved less than thrilling, she marched her young self right into the (men only) Miracle Inn, which...

Vanishing Point by Ander Monson

In contemporary America, land of tell-all memoirs and endless reality television, what kind of person denies the opportunity to present himself in his own voice, to lead with “I”? How many layers of a life can be peeled back before the self vanishes?

In this provocative, witty series of meditations, Ander Monson faces down the idea of the memoir, grappling with the lure of self-interest and self-presentation. While setting out to describe the experience of serving as head juror at...

Genius Loci by Alison Deming

From a poet and essayist whose writing about nature has won her comparisons with Gary Snyder and Terry Tempest Williams comes a new collection that offers further evidence of her ability to trace the intersections of the human and nonhuman worlds. The title poem is a lyrical excavation of the city of Prague, where layers of history, culture and nature have accumulated to form “a genius loci”—a guardian spirit.

From Penguin.Com

Geography of the Heart by Fenton Johnson

With grace and affection, Johnson recounts the history of “how I fell in love, how I came to be with someone else, and how he came to death and how I helped, how in the end love enables us to continue beyond death.” At the same time, Johnson interweaves two stories: his own upbringing as the youngest of a Kentucky whiskey maker’s nine children, and that of his lover Larry Rose, the only child of German Jews, survivors of the Holocaust. Johnson’s writing has been described by Barbara...

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales edited by Kate Bernheimer

Props? Already on the ready. The slipper, the spindle, the seashell, the sword. The coach, the comb, the cauldron, the cape. The apple, the bread, and the porridge. And look, even simpler things in the dusty shadows, from earier iterations of these tales. The feather, the stone, the bucket of water; the knife, the bone, the bucket of blood. —from the foreword by Gregory Maguire

Contributors to this anthology include Kim Addonizio, Neil Gaiman, Hiromi Itō, Ilya Kaminsky, Jonathan Keats...

Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing by Damian Baca

Conventional scholarship on written communication positions the Western alphabet as a precondition for literacy. Thus, pictographic, non-verbal writing practices of Mesoamerica remain obscured by representations of lettered speech. This book examines how contemporary Mestiz@ scripts challenge alphabetic dominance, thereby undermining the colonized territories of "writing." Strategic weavings of Aztec and European inscription systems not only promote historically-grounded accounts of how...

Rope by Alison Deming

Alison Hawthorne Deming ’s fourth collection of poems follows the paths of imagination into meditations on salt, love, Hurricane Katrina, Greek myth, and the search for extraterrestrial life, all linked by the poet’s faith in art as an instrument for creating meaning, beauty, and continuity—virtues diminished by the velocity and violence of our historical moment. The final long poem “The Flight,” inspired by the works of A. R. Ammons, is a twenty-first century epic poised on the verge of our...

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