Summer Reading: Earth

The Flying Notebook With its spiraling metal body and white pages for wings my notebook flies over my bed while I sleep— a bird full of quotations and tiny images who loves the night’s dark rooms, glad now to be free of my scrutiny and my pen point. Tomorrow, it will go with me into…

from the latest edition of the GW student publication le culte du moi American Girls by Jane Shore The first of the dolls she asked for was Addy, a Negro slave escaped from the Civil War. Addy arrived at Emma’s sixth birthday party wearing her historically accurate dress, drawers, stockings, cap-toed boots, and carrying a…

GW English Professor Ayanna Thompson Professor Ayanna Thompson has been featured on the Shakespeare Unlimited Podcast, available on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s website. “Our own voices with our own tongues”: Shakespeare in Black and White is available for listening here. The library’s website describes the podcast: ‘In one of two podcasts on Shakespeare and the…

We at GW English hope that your Thanksgiving Break is a restful one surrounded by loved ones … and perhaps curled up with some of those books you’ve been wanting to read!  We’ll see you next week. Share on FacebookTweet

Below are some reflections on the GW English Department given by our former colleague Gail Kern Paster at Commencement in 2004. Professor Paster was the recipient of an honorary degree. Professor Paster joined the department in 1974, rising from the rank of instructor to full professor. An internationally acclaimed Shakespeare scholar, Paster left GW in…

As a little girl, the first poems I heard were from the fresh pages of the Shel Silverstein book Every Thing on It that my mom read to me by my bedside. What kept me reading Silverstein’s poems long after I could read them myself was that, beneath their kid-friendly language, poems like “Masks” speak…