Postcard from New Orleans

Listen to GW English Ph.D. Dolen Perkins-Valdez in discussion with NPR’s Lynn Neary on a recent episode of the radio show “Tell Me More.” Dolen is promoting her new book Wench, which is set at an Ohio resort where white male slaveholders take their enslaved black mistresses. The book is based on an actual resort…

Those of you who read University Diaries know that our own Margaret Soltan was recently interviewed by the BBC about Norman Maclean. You can listen to her interview here (scroll down a bit). Share on FacebookTweet

Judith Plotz is amazing, but you already knew that. One of our most beloved faculty members is retiring this year because, as she puts it, “Well, I thought I better retire when people were surprised I did rather than when it wasn’t surprising.” Jokes aside, Prof. Plotz has been inspiring students to follow their passions…

Now that we have officially announced that Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Edward P. Jones will be our first Wang Visiting Professor in Contemporary English Literature, I want to share with you one of my favorite passages from one of my favorite books. The Known World follows the complicated history that unfolds around a Virginia plantation, owned…

This feature is the beginning of a story entitled “Baby Danny” by Drew Welke, a student in Ginnie Hartman’s Intermediate Fiction 103 class. Usually, two people would have to stay in the shop late to close up, but today, Jack had been left alone. Everyone else was helping unload tents, tables, and chairs at a…

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…