Tag: Department of English Linguistics and Communication

Claudia Emerson’s latest collection of poetry Secure the Shadow will be released in February 2012 by Louisiana State University Press. The collection contains historical pieces as well as poems centering on the deaths of the poet’s brother and father.

Emerson’s five books include “Late Wife,” winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and most recently, “Figure Studies.” Emerson has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Library of Congress and the Guggenheim Foundation. Former poet laureate of Virginia, she holds the Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at UMW.

Ben LaBreche, assistant professor in English, has been selected to receive the prestigious James Holly Hanford Award from the Milton Society of America.

The award recognizes a distinguished published article on John Milton, the 17th century poet and author of Paradise Lost, and will be shared this year by two recipients. LaBreche won the prize for his essay, “Espousing Liberty: The Gender of Liberalism and the Politics of Miltonic Divorce.” The essay, selected from among the more than 100 Miltonic articles published each year, appeared in English Literary History, a quarterly journal of The Johns Hopkins University for scholars and educators in English and American literature, literary history and theory. The Milton Society will present the award to LaBreche at the annual dinner meeting of the society at the Modern Language Association convention in Seattle in January 2012.

Read the full news release.

Mary Rigsby, professor of English, and Suzanne Sumner, professor of mathematics, gave an invited feature presentation at the Teaching Professor Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, held May 20-22, titled “BustingWalls and Overcoming Blahs:  Knotty Problems and Speed Dating.”  The Teaching Professor Conference is a premier international conference on teaching pedagogy at the college level, with 800 participants from 10 countries.

Rigsby and Sumner received this invitation because of their past participation in Teaching Professor conferences, and to share their

experiences as former directors of UMW’s Teaching Innovation Program.  In addition, Sumner is currently on the advisory board for the Teaching Professor Conference and reviewed  proposals for contributed sessions for the conference.

Claudia Emerson, English professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, will be inducted into the prestigious Fellowship of Southern Writers during its biennial meeting to be held during the April 14-16 Conference on Southern Literature.

Emerson will be welcomed into the fellowship alongside 11 other distinguished writers including Harper Lee, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller “To Kill a Mockingbird.” As part of Emerson’s induction, she will participate in a panel discussion of revision as an element of the writing process during the conference in Chattanooga, Tenn.

Emerson won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for “Late Wife.” She has written five books of poetry, with a sixth forthcoming. A former Virginia poet laureate who joined the UMW faculty in 1998, she holds the Arrington distinguished chair of poetry at Mary Washington. Emerson received the Donald Justice Award for poetry from the fellowship in 2009.

A highly selective organization that seeks to recognize and encourage literature in the South, the fellowship was founded in 1987 by a group of predominantly male writers that included James Dickey, John Hope Franklin, Walker Percy, Elizabeth Spencer, Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty.

New fellows are nominated by current members and elected by majority vote. Fellows are writers of fiction, poetry, drama, criticism and history. Most members have been fiction writers because of the powerhouse world of Southern fiction writing. However, Emerson said that is slowly changing. “As a female poet, it was harder to get in,” she said.

Members aren’t separated by their style of writing, so new ones are judged against all other Southern writers and editors, regardless of genre, Emerson said. “I’m very excited to see fellow writers and colleagues who are already in it and who are being inducted into it now,” Emerson said. “They don’t limit to creative writers necessarily.”

To be considered for membership, a writer must have been born and raised or have resided for a significant part of his or her life in the South, or have written works that in character and spirit embody aspects of the Southern experience.

Emerson said members also include historians, editors, biographers and critics, which is a unique trait for the fellowship. “It’s sort of a broader consideration of what it is to be a ‘writer’,” she said. “I’m excited and honored and always interested in being a part of something that’s trying to promote good writing.”

Emerson also is excited about attending the conference, where she will interact with many writers whom she admires. “I imagine there will be a couple of good parties where you can put on your party dress and meet people you’ve admired forever,” she said.

The fellowship holds its biennial meetings during the Chattanooga Arts & Education Council Conference on Southern Literature in Chattanooga, where the fellowship’s archives are held at the University of Tennessee Lupton Library. At their meeting, the fellows elect new members, bestow awards on established and emerging writers, and deliver readings and lectures.

Eric G. Lorentzen, associate professor of English, gave a talk, “Doing British Literature and Popular Culture: Critical Pedagogy in the University Literature Classroomd,” at the “Culturing the Popular” conference at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., in September.