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Charif Shanahan plans to read from his forthcoming second collection of poetry for this year's Eamon McEneaney Memorial Reading. The reading takes place on Thursday, March 18 at 7:00 p.m. ET. This virtual event is free and open to the public.REGISTER HERE to attend!“I’m motivated by the unifying potential of the lyric poem, the way a voice...
Rita P. Davis, Chief Counsel to Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, will talk about her personal journey into activism from an English major, with a focus on the idea that “growth requires risk.” The talk will be followed by a live Q&A, moderated by associate professor Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon.REGISTER HERE to attend!Ms. Davis majored in...
Derrick R. Spires discusses his work in a Cornell Research feature titled "Black Activism and Early American Media:""Spires is currently at work on his second book, tentatively titled Serial Blackness: Periodical Culture in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. In it, he explores Black serial literature, which includes serialized novels...
Peter Shipman, a graduate student in the Department of English, has an op-ed featured in the Cornell Daily Sun, "Teaching in a Time of Crisis:" "The truth is that this pandemic isn’t just an extraordinary event which requires leniency and empathy on behalf of instructors — though it definitely is. It’s an event which has revealed a need to...
The Ithaca Voice reported on recipients of the Office of Engagement Initiatives' Engaged Research Grants in an article, "Cornell awards $192K in grants to Ithaca-based research projects touching on race, COVID-19." Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, an associate professor of literatures in English, is leading one of the four winning projects, "Trap Door...
Poet Valzhyna Mort and author Nafissa Thompson-Spires will read from their respective works for the Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading on Thursday, February 25 at 7:00 p.m. The annual reading features members of Cornell's distinguished creative writing faculty.REGISTER HERE to attend!Mort will read from her most recent poetry collection,...
Mukoma Wa Ngugi, associate professor of literatures in English, offers commentary in The Conversation article, "Amanda Gorman’s poetry shows why spoken word belongs in school:""If a country were a classroom, even when a poem might not heal it, it can suture it. It can be balm, waiting to heal, if only we can listen. A good poem understands that...
Born enslaved, Frederick Douglass emancipated himself at the age twenty and quickly became one of the preeminent intellectuals and activists of the nineteenth century. Although he never knew his birthdate, he chose to celebrate every year on February 14th.Together with libraries and digital scholarship centers around the country, we celebrate...
Ishion Hutchinson's poem, "Little Music," is featured in the January 2021 issue of Harper's Magazine:"What a lot of little music can do?The blind farmer Daylights in his cabbagerow, going crouched down between leafy skulls,knows. He rises indifferent, far-gazingas a fine haze disfigures the mountain..."Experience the full poem here.Ishion...
Since its inception the Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series has brought some of the most exciting and innovative award-winning authors to Cornell to read from their work, a fact unchanged by the shift to virtual events in the 2020-2021 academic year. The Spring 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: Together features an...
Christopher Berardino, an alumnus of Cornell's Creative Writing Program, has won Breakwater Review's 2021 fiction contest for his short story, “Dog Bait.”"This story operates so well on so many levels--it tells a tale that is sadly all too ignored and erased in American history: the mistreatment of Japanese Americans on all tiers of society. Here...
Derrick R. Spires, associate professor of English, is featured on the Society for U.S. Intellectual History blog in an interview titled "In Dialogue: The Politics of Black Freedom.“ Spires speaks about neighborly citizenship, a concept he developed in his MLA award-winning book, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the...
Adam Szetela, Ph.D. student in the English department, published an op-ed in The Boston Globe about "The problem with liberal echo chambers on college campuses:""A college campus should be a place where students, liberal or conservative, refine their ability to listen and respond to people on the other side. When I was knocking on doors for the...
Mukoma Wa Ngugi, associate professor of English, is one of the "10 best Kenyan writers that you should be reading right now," according to TUKO:"Kenya’s literature space is a hotbed for intellectuals, social commentators, activists, and artists. Apart from being read in Kenyan schools as part of the curriculum, the best Kenyan writers have used...
Carole Boyce Davies, Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, responds to a letter in the Cornell Daily Sun about the Cornell English department's request to change its name to the Department of Literatures in English:"Let us say instead that rather than claiming firsts, these are all unfinished decolonizing projects, still continuing even...
Caroline Levine, David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities, did an interview for the How to Read podcast on the unexpected benefits of predictability:"Do you want to live a predictable life? Can great art ever be predictable? Most people would probably say no to both, but Caroline Levine thinks predictability is more valuable than we...
A literary appreciation for writer and professor Alison Lurie (1926-2020), "An unsung 1966 L.A. satire shows the late novelist Alison Lurie at her wicked best," ran in the Los Angeles Times:"Alison Lurie, like her characters, embraced contrarieties. She spent most of her professional life in academia and yet wrote essays on fashion and children’s...
Derrick Spires, associate professor of English, has guest-edited a new special issue of American Literary History on the “Genealogies of Black Modernity:""Our task, then, was to deliberate over what something called modernity meant and means for and in African American literary history through the archive of Black writing and through the terms...
Chelsea Mikael Frazier, a faculty member in the English Department, is interviewed in the podcast series Temperature Check, in an episode titled, "How Beyoncé, Issa Rae, and other black women are leading the environment:""Host Andrew Simon and co-host Yessenia Funes start the sixth installment of Temperature Check – Grist’s new climate, race and...
Valzyhna Mort, assistant professor of English, is featured in the BBC podcast program The Documentary, in an episode titled, "Belarus across the barricades - part two:""For 100 days and counting protesters are calling for an end to the 26-year long rule of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus. Poet Valzhyna Mort records first-hand stories from her...
Valzyhna Mort, assistant professor of English, has an article in The Baffler entitled, "Come on Now, Boys," about the political prisoner Maxim Znak, a leading member of the Belarus opposition council:"I have lost sleep thinking about a man you do not know. In plain daylight, he was kidnapped in the cleanest city in Europe. Not the old, je ne sais...
An obituary of Alison Lurie, Frederic J. Whiton Professor of American Literature Emerita, ran in the New York Times:"Alison Lurie, Tart-Voiced Novelist of Manners, Dies at 94"Alison Lurie, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer whose mordant novels punctured pretension, deflated dogma and illuminated the staggering talent of smart people for self-...
Derrick Spires, associate professor of English, discusses how Black voices communicated in antebellum papers on The Academic Minute radio program:"Beginning roughly in the 1830s, black activists used pseudonyms to comment on culture, politics, science, and current events in papers such as Freedom’s Journal, Colored American, and Frederick...
Valzhyna Mort's new book, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, continues to draw praise. There is a piece on Mort in The New Yorker, "A Poet Reflects on Europe’s Last Dictatorship:""Growing up in Minsk, in the nineteen-eighties, the poet Valzhyna Mort spoke Russian at home and studied Belarusian in school. Now she has written a collection of poems...
Mukoma Wa Ngugi, associate professor of English, has an op-ed titled "There Are No Male Feminists" in EuroNews:"Being a man - masculinity, sexism, and patriarchy - is a multi-trillion-dollar industry. It is an ideology that feeds profit over humanity, and institutionalises the exploitation of women - according to Oxfam, unpaid women’s labour adds...