The English Department

Maxine Montgomery first met author and educator Gloria Naylor during her editorial work on "Conversations With Gloria Naylor" (UP Mississippi, 2004), a collection of fourteen personal and professional interviews that Naylor gave to various sources.

Digital technologies and new media literacy are opening up creative ways for writers at all levels to compose and distribute their work. When classroom assignments result in digital projects that combine writing, visuals, and audio texts, educators might struggle with how to assess these new texts fairly and accurately.

In her new book, "Downhome Gospel:African American Spiritual Activism in Wiregrass Country" (University Press of Mississippi, 2010), Jerrilyn McGregory returns to a Southern region and a Southern culture that she explored in her first book, Wiregrass Country (1997).

In the introduction to his recent publication, "Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature" (U of Pennsylvania P, 2010), Bruce Boehrer recounts the story of George Orwell sending his manuscript of Animal Farm to Dial Press in New York City for consideration to be published.

For Deborah Coxwell-Teague an answer to the question "What is a text?" can be found in the title of her new book: "Everything's a Text."

Stan Gontarski's most recent book project, "A Companion To Samuel Beckett" (Wiley/Blackwell, March 2010), joins his extensive library of works focused on Irish author Samuel Beckett, and it immediately generated excitement and praise among scholars and readers.

Leigh Edwards's book "Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity" (Indiana University Press, 2009) has garnered both high praise from popular culture scholars and a second printing of the book.

Meegan Kennedy was still taking in the news that she had been awarded tenure and a promotion to associate professor—delivered in a letter that she had just finished reading—when she sat and talked in her office about her other recent significant career accomplishment, the Jan. 2010 publication of her first book, "Revising the Clinic: Vision and Representation in Victorian Medical Narrative and the Novel".

How often does an author's inspiration for a book arrive more than 50 years before its creation? Professor David Kirby believes that the spark for his new biography on the dynamic, charismatic musician Little Richard flew from his little green Westinghouse radio back in 1955, when he first heard Richard's soul-shaking signature scream, "A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop, a-lop-bam-boom!"

Kristie Fleckenstein's new publication - Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom (Southern Illinois UP, 2009) - might sound a bit academic, even impersonal, to the layperson, but her purpose is quite the opposite: "to help students connect to their surroundings with an empathic eye, leading them to become compassionate participants, not indifferent observers."