GW English’s fabulous alumni continue to win award and make headlines. The latest: GW PhD Dolen Perkins-Valdez is this recipient of a First Novelist Award given by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. The award, which was presented at the Association’s recent San Diego meeting, honors Perkins-Valdez for Wench (HarperCollins, 2010). According to…
Today’s Martin Luther King Jr. holiday is an occasion for national service, especially here in DC, where GW undergrads will be giving their time to various organizations and efforts. But the holiday is also an occasion for reflection. Today’s students might not think much about it, but African American literary studies as an academic discipline…
Congratulations to Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington Tilar Mazzeo for a full-page review of her recent book, The Secret of Chanel No. 5: The Intimate History of the World’s Most Famous Perfume, in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. (If you go to the Times site, you can also be directed to a Google Books excerpt…
January brings a new year, a new semester, and new faculty accomplishments. This time I have the pleasure of highlighting two books and a BBC documentary. (Re)Making Love: A Sex After Sixty Story is a new memoir by GWU Creative Writing faculty member Mary Tabor, author of the prize-winning short story collection The Woman Who…
It’s not often that a work of American literature makes the “Trending Topics” newsfeed at Twitter, but as of this writing, “Huckleberry Finn” is one of the most tweeted phrases online. You can read what some members of the GW English Department, myself included, had to say about the recent news that a forthcoming edition…
The English Department is very happy to welcome three new writers to the ranks of our Creative Writing faculty. All will be joining us this semester to teach our popular ENGL 1210 (formerly ENGL 81), Introduction to Creative Writing. LOUIS BAYARD is a graduate of Princeton and Northwestern universities. His novels include The Pale Blue…
I rang in the new year in rural West Virginia, far from cell phone towers or, for that matter, a satellite connection to transmit images of the ball dropping in Times Square. Although I felt a bit disconnected from my annual TV ritual, the night sky was dark enough for star-watching, a rarity in Washington…
The drab room you see to the left is our department lounge, named for the distinguished GW Professor Emeritus of English John Reesing, Jr. The lounge is small and cramped, a graveyard for the empty water jugs from our water cooler, and not all that inviting, despite the recent addition of a new microwave and…
The English Department had its gala Festivus event yesterday afternoon, and, no, we did not have peppermint martinis. In fact, the image above is there because I neglected to take any photos of the festivities. I was far too busy partaking of the delicious spread provided by my colleagues and laughing over the Department Trivia…
Karen Russell, a young American writer who was recently featured in The New Yorker‘s “20 Under 40” list of young American literary talents, reads tonight from her latest work. The reading, the last of the year in the English Department’s Jenny McKean Moore series, is at 8 in the Marvin Center Amphitheater. All are welcome….
