English
Department
Florida State University
405 Williams Building
Tallahassee, Florida 32306-1580
Phone: 850 644 4230
Fax: 850 644 0811
The Department of English offers work leading to the Bachelor of Arts (BA), Master of Arts (MA), Master of Fine Arts (MFA), and Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degrees in English and American literature, creative writing, and rhetoric and composition. It also offers course work and degree options in a number of related fields including popular culture, folklore, critical theory, women's studies, and film studies. read more
Today is a red-letter day for Julianna Baggott! Her essay "Literary Murder" has been picked up for inclusion in Best Creative Nonfiction, W.W. Norton, 2009, a high honor indeed. And her new novel My Husband's Sweethearts which she wrote under the pen name Bridget Asher, comes out today. It has already garnered rave pre-pub reviews.
Dr. Kameelah Martin Samuel, a Florida State University alumni and Tatia Jacobson Jordan, a PhD candidate in American Literature, both have articles in the Summer 2008 peer-reviewed journal, Women Writers, edited by Dr. Kim Wells. Samuel’s article entitled "Hoodoo Ladies and High Conjurers: New Directions for an Old Archetype" and Jordan’s article entitled "Hearing, Writing, and Reading Voodoo: Cultural Memory in Voodoo Dreams and Voodoo Season" are featured along with Samuel’s interview of author Jewell Parker Rhodes. Samuel also co-edited the issue. These articles can be accessed at www.womenwriters.net.
PhD candidate Joel Weinbrot's story entitled "The Consequences of Sudden and Complete Oxygen Deprivation for the Actuary in Apartment 253 on the Morning a Pharmaceutical Sales Representative Missed Her Important Flight to LAX" may be found in the new issue of Barrelhouse (Issue 6).
The August issue of Esquire has a terrific article in it by our own David Vann -- "The Straight-A School Shooter." It's about Steve Kazmierczak, the school shooter at Northern Illinois. Esquire editor David Granger devotes his whole editor's letter to the piece and calls it "extraordinary" and "the most thorough portrait of a modern mass murderer imaginable."
The official program for the new, widely-praised production of Thomas Middleton's "The Revenger's Tragedy" at the Royal National Theatre (London) includes essays by Prof. Gary Taylor ("Middleton, Shakespeare and Caravaggio") and Prof. Celia Daileader ("Middleton's Vindication of Women"). Taylor also gave a platform performance at the National on June 4 on "Thomas Middleton: Our Other Shakespeare". Middleton's "Collected Works", published in England in November (and reprinted within 2 months), was Oxford's bestselling literature title for the fiscal year. Immediately hailed as a "monumental" scholarly achievement, the edition contains work by FSU faculty Taylor, Daileader, and Daniel Vitkus, by doctoral student Molly Hand, and by former doctoral student (now Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati) Trish Henley.
Kara Candito, (PhD, creative writing) has been awarded the 2008 Prairie Schooner Book Prize for her manuscript, Taste of Cherry. It will be published by University of Nebraska Press in the fall of 2009. She has also received a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, which will be held this August in Middlebury, VT.
Frank Giampietro, (PhD, creative writing) has won a Tennessee Williams and Donald Justice Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers' Conference held this July in Sewanee, Tennessee. His latest book review of Dean Young's Primitive Mentor will be published in the Sept./Oct. issue of American Book Review.
Eric Lee, PhD Candidate in Creative Writing has poems "Another Reason to be Poisoned" and "Magellan on the High Seas" forthcoming in Main Street Rag. His poem "The Body’s Numerous Positions" is forthcoming at Poetry Southeast, and his poem "Getting Inked" won the prize for best graduate poetry at the Gulf Coast Association of Creative Writing Teachers in Fairhope, AL where over a dozen MFA programs were represented.
PhD in Creative Writing student Holly Wilson's short-short, "Where's the Beauty, Jimmy?" appears in the spring issue of Narrative Magazine.
Steve Kistulentz (PhD, Creative Writing) had an essay "Feels Like Detroit" in the winter issue of River Teeth, a journal of non-fiction narrative. The essay examined the band the Romantics, one hit wonders and performers of "What I Like About You."
Cheryl Blake Price (PhD, Literature) has been selected as an annotator for the 19th century section of Routledge's Annotated Bibliography of English Studies (ABES). ABES is a searchable database of over 20,000 annotations in the field of literature. She have already completed several annotations, and the relaunch of the database should be coming soon!
Claire J. Smith, First Year Writing Program Assistant and 2006 MA, has an article, "You Just Can't Plan These Things," upcoming in Pregnancy Magazine this summer.
Literature PhD student William John Silverman, Jr. has a short
article on "Castration" in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Love,
Courtship, & Sexuality Through History, Volume 3: The Early Modern
Period. It was published in December by Greenwood Press.
MFA student Roger Turnau’s story "Darwin in Medical School," excerpted from his novel in progress, will appear in this year’s Berkeley Fiction Review. PhD Creative Writing student Jessica Pitchford's story, "The Leaving," appears in the current issue of the Arkansas Review. Her story, "This Grandee," is forthcoming in the summer issue of New Delta Review Travis Timmons, a 2008 M.A. in literature, has been employed for almost a year as a full-time English and Literature professor at Southwest Georgia Technical College in Thomasville, Georgia. His duties include teaching five classes a quarter (including online and dual enrollment courses). He teaches research, writing and a general survey of literature.
Creative writing professor Elizabeth Stuckey-French has won the $2,500 first prize in Narrative Magazine’s 2008 Love Story contest for her short story, "Interview with a Moron." Professor emeritus, Janet Burroway, won the $750 third prize for her story, "Blackout." Narrative Magazine is edited by former Esquire fiction editor Tom Jenks and Carol Edgarian.
S. E. Gontarski has just been named FSU's newest Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor, the highest honor given at FSU to its resident faculty. Only one Lawton Professorship is given annually, and in the fifty years that the award has been given, only five faculty in English have ever received this recognition. He joins David Kirby (2004), Janet Burroway (1996), George Harper (1980), Kellogg Wesley Hunt (1973), and William Hudson Rogers (1958) as distinguished recipients from English. Moreover, this will be the first time that two Lawton Professors have been members of the department of English simultaneously. Our congratulations to Stan, and our thanks for furthering our reputation for intellectual leadership within the university community.
Congratulations to Andrew Epstein, who has just won a University Graduate Teaching Award. This year of the thirty awards for teaching and advising at both graduate and undergraduate levels, only two were presented to faculty from the humanities area, so his selection seems particularly distinguished. Our thanks to him for bringing this exceptional recognition to our department.
Our Emeritus Professor and respected colleague, Sheila Ortiz-Taylor, received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing for 2008. Especially when combined with her Lamba Literary Award nomination for her new novel Assisted Living, Sheila has enjoyed a remarkable year. Congratulations to Sheila on this much-deserved success, and our thanks for bringing this recognition to our department.
David Kirby. received a National Book Award nomination for his career spanning book, House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems. Described as, "long-lined and often laugh-out-loud funny, these poems encompass many things, including the heated restlessness of youth, the mixed blessings of self-imposed exile, and the settled pleasures of home."
The journal Renaissance and Reformation has accepted for publication Molly Hand's article entitled "'Now is hell landed here upon the earth': Renaissance Poverty and Witchcraft in Thomas Middleton’s The Black Book."
PhD student Tom Cooper has stories coming out this Spring: "Old Gang," in the Beloit Fiction Journal, "Pokerface," in Lake Effect, and "How We Remember Coach Fontaine," in Bayou.
A number of FSU students have been nominated for 2008 Pushcart Prizes, including: Steve Kistulentz for "Reykjavík the Beautiful" in StoryQuarterly, Tom Cooper for "The Old Fashioned Way" in Opium, Fatima Rashid for "Dead Woman's Pass," published in the Florida Review, and Rose Bunch for Donkey Hammer" in "Gulf Coast." Nominations are made in December and announcements of those included in the Pushcart Prize Anthology are made in April.
Professor Elaine Treharne has been selected as an Obermann Scholar by the University of Iowa for their Obermann Center Summer 2008 Research Seminar, "Medieval Manuscript Studies and Contemporary Book Arts: Extreme Materialist Readings of Medieval Books."
The HOTT program faculty will be working with Palgrave/Macmillan to publish a new book series called "History of Text Technologies," with Gary Taylor as general editor and Elizabeth Spiller as one of three FSU faculty on the editorial board.
PhD student Samantha Levy has an essay "Nice, Jewish Boys" featured in the anthology Have I Got a Guy For You: What Really Happens When Mom Fixes You Up, now out from Adam's Media.
This year's graduate Academy of American Poets award winner was Frank Giampietro for his poem "Conception," which judge Denise Duhamel calls "a wonderfully tender poem, a modern day myth about how we come into this life." The two runners-up were Trevor Newberry for "Overnight Bullet Train to Nice" and Kara Candito for "Epic Poem Concerning the Poet's Coming of Age as Attis." In other Frank news, Frank's short short story, "Like This" will appear in the next issue of Black Warrior Review, and his non- fiction piece "The Short History of Bucky Beaver Productions" will appear in the next issue of Fence.
M.F.A. student Barrington Seetachitt’s short story, “My Panda,” appears in the current issue of Sycamore Review.
PhD candidate Dustin Anderson’s first book, Their Synaptic Selves was published by Verlag in January 2008. The book examines the cognitive shifts that memory events force in our everyday language and explores how authors like Samuel Beckett and James Joyce interpret these types of events, specifically discussing how spatialization and mapping affect memory.
Madalyn Aslan, a first-year student in the fiction PhD program, has an article "Your Child" forthcoming in April's issue of Parent & Child. Her first book, What's Your Sign (Penguin 2002), is going into its fourth printing.
The English Department launched the Graduate Certificate in Publishing and Editing fall semester 2004. We have now seen 31 students complete the 12-hour credential--and several more will finish up this term and next. Many of our graduates are working for state agencies, such as the Department of Education and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Others are managing editors of FSU-based journals or are working as editorial assistants in academic departments on campus; many of our graduates are working for local industries or doing free-lance editing; while others are taking their Certificates with them to law school, professional programs, and graduate school, to help leverage writing and publishing opportunities in those venues.
Director of Florida State University's graduate program in rhetoric and composition, Kathleen Yancey, officially took the presidential reins of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) during its recent annual convention in New York City. As the council's president-elect, she served as chairwoman of the convention program. The theme for 2007--"Mapping Diverse Literacies for the 21st Century"--helped draw more than 8,000 attendees, a record for the 97-year-old event.
"Today, literacy--the ability to read and write many different and diverse kinds of texts- is undergoing significant change," Yancey said. "We read books, create Web logs or 'blogs,' e-mail resumes to apply for jobs, and present our credentials in multiple texts that could include word-processed documents, streaming videos, podcasts and more. When it comes to reading and writing these new texts, it's literally a new world, and most of us will need considerable help navigating it."
The intersections of 21st-century culture, literacy and technologies--"diverse literacies"--have fashioned Yancey's own research. She is examining the role played by the means of delivery (e.g. through digital technologies) in shaping or misshaping students' use of syntax, organization and evidence in college compositions.
Oxford University Press will release Gary Taylor's edition of Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works on November 22, the first time that all of the plays, poems and manuscripts of "the other Shakespeare" have appeared in a single volume. This publication will be accompanied by the release of a companion volume of essays, also edited by Gary Taylor, titled Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture.
Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works also includes contributions by tenured faculty Celia Daileader and Dan Vitkus, assistant in the HOTT program Ilaria Andreoli, instructor Trish Thomas Henley, and graduate student Molly Hand.
This December, a government-approved publisher in Hanoi, The People's Public Security Publishing House, will release a Vietnamese language version of Robert Olen Butler's 1992 book, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. The book, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was banned in Vietnam, the country that inspired it--until now.
Butler, the Francis Eppes Professor of English served in Vietnam in 1971 as a counter-intelligence special agent for the U.S. Army, and later as a translator.
Rose Bunch (PhD in Fiction) has a story, "Donkey Hammer" in the upcoming issue (#20) of Gulf Coast.
Nikki Louis (PhD in Fiction) sends greetings from Seattle, where she's received a grant for a statewide tour of her Japanese American oral history play, Breaking the Silence. After brief stints in Vancouver, B.C. and San Francisco, she'll seek the peace and quiet of a residency at the Santa Fe Arts Institute in New Mexico to complete her creative dissertation.
The Atlantic has listed the FSU Creative Writing Program as one of the "Best of the Best."
In an article aptly titled "Where Great Writers Are Made," FSU is named one of the nation's top-10 graduate-level creative writing programs—on a list that includes premier universities such as Cornell University, Johns Hopkins, New York University and the University of Virginia.
FSU not only landed on the overall top-10 list of graduate programs but also among the top-five doctoral programs—the only school listed both places.
Anne Coldiron received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to participate in a summer seminar for professors. This seminar took place in Antwerp, at the Plantin Press, and Oxford, at the Bodleian Library, with additional site visits to archives and early printing presses in Brussels and London. The seminar, "The Reformation of the Book 1450-1700," investigated not only the
material technology of late-medieval and early modern book production, but the gradual re-forming of cultural and literary practices related to the production, dissemination, and reading of books.
