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Lee Conell (MFA ’15) is 2020 Wallant Award recipient
Jan. 20, 2021—MFA graduate Lee Conell (MFA in Fiction/2015) has been awarded the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for her novel The Party Upstairs. The Edward Lewis Wallant Award is a national prize from the University of Hartford that recognizes an emerging author whose outstanding work shows kinship with Wallant’s writing. It is “one of the oldest and...
New Faculty Carlos A. Nugent wins American Literature’s Foerster Prize
Jan. 14, 2021—Congratulations to Carlos Alonso Nugent, winner of the 2020 Norman Foerster Prize for best essay of the year in American Literature: “Lost Archives, Lost Lands: Rereading New Mexico’s Imagined Environments”, published in volume 92, issue 2. Read the essay, freely available through the end of April, here. The prize committee offered this praise for the...
You Want To Read This Book!
Dec. 17, 2020—Postcards from the Gerund State by Professor Lorraine López A Recommendation by Professor of English Nancy Reisman If you’ve noticed that higher education is rich terrain for satire, or have pondered how educated, artistic women might navigate institutional absurdity, outmoded gender paradigms, white myopia, and bumbling racial and cultural erasures, all while reckoning with teaching...
Derrick Spires (Ph.D. ’12) wins MLA Prize
Dec. 17, 2020—Derrick Spires (Ph.D. Vanderbilt University ’12) received the prestigious Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book with his publication The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Dr. Spires is currently Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Cornell University.
Nate Marshall (CW Major) receives 21st Century Award
Dec. 4, 2020—Poet, spoken word artist, and Colorado College professor of English Nate Marshall, a much-loved alumnus of Vanderbilt UGCW, is the 2020 recipient of the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library. This award honors significant recent achievement in writing by a Chicago-based author. A fixture on Chicago’s literary scene, Marshall was born and raised...
You Want To Read This Book!
Dec. 1, 2020—Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas by Professor Candice Amich A Recommendation by Associate Professor of English Emily Lordi Professor Candice Amich’s new book Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas uses visceral descriptions and stunning analysis to show how contemporary artists across the Americas—in Chile, Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala, the United...
“The Grit and Glory of Dolly Parton” by Emily Lordi
Dec. 1, 2020—By Emily Lordi & Photographs by Craig McDean Nov. 30, 2020 More than 50 years into her legendary career, she’s still capturing America’s particular mythology — its dreams and its disappointments — like no other. IN JUNE OF 1967, Dolly Parton sat down for an interview with a Nashville writer named Everett Corbin. Parton was 21,...
Rachel Teukolsky releases “Picture World”
Oct. 23, 2020—Associate Professor of English Rachel Teukolsky released this month her latest publication, Picture World: Image, Aesthetics, and Victorian New Media. The modern media world came into being in the nineteenth century, when machines were harnessed to produce texts and images in unprecedented numbers. In the visual realm, new industrial techniques generated a deluge of affordable...
Emily Lordi releases “The Meaning of Soul”
Oct. 23, 2020—In The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience since the 1960s (Refiguring American Music), Emily J. Lordi. Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, proposes a new understanding of this famously elusive concept. In the 1960s, Lordi argues, soul came to signify a cultural belief in black resilience, which was enacted through musical practices—inventive cover...
Lorrie Moore featured in The New Yorker
Oct. 23, 2020—Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English Lorrie Moore is featured in The New Yorker’s September 28th issue with a new short story titled “Face-time“. In context of this story, the author went into conversation with the magazine’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, on bearing witness to suffering. Click here to read the full account.