The English Department at Florida State University

The Department of English offers work leading to the Bachelor of Arts (BA), Master of Arts (MA), Master of Fine Arts (MFA), and Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degrees in English and American literature, creative writing, and rhetoric and composition. It also offers course work and degree options in a number of related fields including popular culture, folklore, critical theory, women's studies, and film studies. read more

Claire J. Smith, First Year Writing Program Assistant and 2006 MA, has an article, “You Just Can’t Plan These Things,” upcoming in Pregnancy Magazine this summer.

Silverman's book Literature PhD student William John Silverman, Jr. has a short article on "Castration" in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Love, Courtship, & Sexuality Through History, Volume 3: The Early Modern Period. It was published in December by Greenwood Press.

MFA student Roger Turnau’s story "Darwin in Medical School," excerpted from his novel in progress, will appear in this year’s Berkeley Fiction Review. PhD Creative Writing student Jessica Pitchford's story, "The Leaving," appears in the current issue of the Arkansas Review. Her story, "This Grandee," is forthcoming in the summer issue of New Delta Review Travis Timmons, a 2008 M.A. in literature, has been employed for almost a year as a full-time English and Literature professor at Southwest Georgia Technical College in Thomasville, Georgia. His duties include teaching five classes a quarter (including online and dual enrollment courses). He teaches research, writing and a general survey of literature.

Creative writing professor Elizabeth Stuckey-French has won the $2,500 first prize in Narrative Magazine’s 2008 Love Story contest for her short story, "Interview with a Moron." Professor emeritus, Janet Burroway, won the $750 third prize for her story, "Blackout." Narrative Magazine is edited by former Esquire fiction editor Tom Jenks and Carol Edgarian.

S. E. Gontarski has just been named FSU's newest Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor, the highest honor given at FSU to its resident faculty. Only one Lawton Professorship is given annually, and in the fifty years that the award has been given, only five faculty in English have ever received this recognition. He joins David Kirby (2004), Janet Burroway (1996), George Harper (1980), Kellogg Wesley Hunt (1973), and William Hudson Rogers (1958) as distinguished recipients from English. Moreover, this will be the first time that two Lawton Professors have been members of the department of English simultaneously. Our congratulations to Stan, and our thanks for furthering our reputation for intellectual leadership within the university community.

Congratulations to Andrew Epstein, who has just won a University Graduate Teaching Award. This year of the thirty awards for teaching and advising at both graduate and undergraduate levels, only two were presented to faculty from the humanities area, so his selection seems particularly distinguished. Our thanks to him for bringing this exceptional recognition to our department.

Andrew Epstein Our Emeritus Professor and respected colleague, Sheila Ortiz-Taylor, received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing for 2008. Especially when combined with her Lamba Literary Award nomination for her new novel Assisted Living, Sheila has enjoyed a remarkable year. Congratulations to Sheila on this much-deserved success, and our thanks for bringing this recognition to our department.

David Kirby. received a National Book Award nomination for his career spanning book, House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems. Described as, "long-lined and often laugh-out-loud funny, these poems encompass many things, including the heated restlessness of youth, the mixed blessings of self-imposed exile, and the settled pleasures of home."

The journal Renaissance and Reformation has accepted for publication Molly Hand's article entitled "'Now is hell landed here upon the earth': Renaissance Poverty and Witchcraft in Thomas Middleton’s The Black Book."

PhD student Tom Cooper has stories coming out this Spring: "Old Gang," in the Beloit Fiction Journal, "Pokerface," in Lake Effect, and "How We Remember Coach Fontaine," in Bayou.

A number of FSU students have been nominated for 2008 Pushcart Prizes, including: Steve Kistulentz for "Reykjavík the Beautiful" in StoryQuarterly, Tom Cooper for "The Old Fashioned Way" in Opium, Fatima Rashid for "Dead Woman's Pass," published in the Florida Review, and Rose Bunch for Donkey Hammer" in "Gulf Coast." Nominations are made in December and announcements of those included in the Pushcart Prize Anthology are made in April.

Professor Elaine Treharne has been selected as an Obermann Scholar by the University of Iowa for their Obermann Center Summer 2008 Research Seminar, "Medieval Manuscript Studies and Contemporary Book Arts: Extreme Materialist Readings of Medieval Books."

The HOTT program faculty will be working with Palgrave/Macmillan to publish a new book series called "History of Text Technologies," with Gary Taylor as general editor and Elizabeth Spiller as one of three FSU faculty on the editorial board.

PhD student Samantha Levy has an essay "Nice, Jewish Boys" featured in the anthology Have I Got a Guy For You: What Really Happens When Mom Fixes You Up, now out from Adam's Media.

This year's graduate Academy of American Poets award winner was Frank Giampietro for his poem "Conception," which judge Denise Duhamel calls "a wonderfully tender poem, a modern day myth about how we come into this life." The two runners-up were Trevor Newberry for "Overnight Bullet Train to Nice" and Kara Candito for "Epic Poem Concerning the Poet's Coming of Age as Attis." In other Frank news, Frank's short short story, "Like This" will appear in the next issue of Black Warrior Review, and his non- fiction piece "The Short History of Bucky Beaver Productions" will appear in the next issue of Fence.

M.F.A. student Barrington Seetachitt’s short story, “My Panda,” appears in the current issue of Sycamore Review.

PhD candidate Dustin Anderson’s first book, Their Synaptic Selves was published by Verlag in January 2008. The book examines the cognitive shifts that memory events force in our everyday language and explores how authors like Samuel Beckett and James Joyce interpret these types of events, specifically discussing how spatialization and mapping affect memory.

Madalyn Aslan, a first-year student in the fiction PhD program, has an article "Your Child" forthcoming in April's issue of Parent & Child. Her first book, What's Your Sign (Penguin 2002), is going into its fourth printing.

The English Department launched the Graduate Certificate in Publishing and Editing fall semester 2004. We have now seen 31 students complete the 12-hour credential--and several more will finish up this term and next. Many of our graduates are working for state agencies, such as the Department of Education and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Others are managing editors of FSU-based journals or are working as editorial assistants in academic departments on campus; many of our graduates are working for local industries or doing free-lance editing; while others are taking their Certificates with them to law school, professional programs, and graduate school, to help leverage writing and publishing opportunities in those venues.

Director of Florida State University's graduate program in rhetoric and composition, Kathleen Yancey, officially took the presidential reins of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) during its recent annual convention in New York City. As the council's president-elect, she served as chairwoman of the convention program. The theme for 2007--"Mapping Diverse Literacies for the 21st Century"--helped draw more than 8,000 attendees, a record for the 97-year-old event.

"Today, literacy--the ability to read and write many different and diverse kinds of texts- is undergoing significant change," Yancey said. "We read books, create Web logs or 'blogs,' e-mail resumes to apply for jobs, and present our credentials in multiple texts that could include word-processed documents, streaming videos, podcasts and more. When it comes to reading and writing these new texts, it's literally a new world, and most of us will need considerable help navigating it."

The intersections of 21st-century culture, literacy and technologies--"diverse literacies"--have fashioned Yancey's own research. She is examining the role played by the means of delivery (e.g. through digital technologies) in shaping or misshaping students' use of syntax, organization and evidence in college compositions.

Julianna Baggott, as N.E. Bode, has penned The Amazing Compendium of Edward Magorium, a prequel to Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, the motion picture about a magical toy store starring Dustin Hoffman and Natalie Portman.

Baggott describes the Compendium, a history of the store's 243-year-old proprietor, as "a 160-page chronological index, really, of all the famous people Magorium has influenced in his long life. It's quite a list, too, with luminaries such as Napoleon, Gandhi, Helen Keller, Churchhill, the Wright Brothers, Darwin, Einstein, authors Beatrix Potter and E.B. White and of course, Elvis." Scholastic and Walden Media authorized and published the book along with five other motion picture-inspired "Magorium" books by different authors.

Oxford University Press will release Gary Taylor's edition of Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works on November 22, the first time that all of the plays, poems and manuscripts of "the other Shakespeare" have appeared in a single volume. This publication will be accompanied by the release of a companion volume of essays, also edited by Gary Taylor, titled Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture.

Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works also includes contributions by tenured faculty Celia Daileader and Dan Vitkus, assistant in the HOTT program Ilaria Andreoli, instructor Trish Thomas Henley, and graduate student Molly Hand.

This December, a government-approved publisher in Hanoi, The People's Public Security Publishing House, will release a Vietnamese language version of Robert Olen Butler's 1992 book, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. The book, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was banned in Vietnam, the country that inspired it--until now.

Butler, the Francis Eppes Professor of English served in Vietnam in 1971 as a counter-intelligence special agent for the U.S. Army, and later as a translator.

Rose Bunch (PhD in Fiction) has a story, "Donkey Hammer" in the upcoming issue (#20) of Gulf Coast.

Nikki Louis (PhD in Fiction) sends greetings from Seattle, where she's received a grant for a statewide tour of her Japanese American oral history play, Breaking the Silence. After brief stints in Vancouver, B.C. and San Francisco, she'll seek the peace and quiet of a residency at the Santa Fe Arts Institute in New Mexico to complete her creative dissertation.

The Atlantic has listed the FSU Creative Writing Program as one of the "Best of the Best." In an article aptly titled "Where Great Writers Are Made," FSU is named one of the nation's top-10 graduate-level creative writing programs—on a list that includes premier universities such as Cornell University, Johns Hopkins, New York University and the University of Virginia. FSU not only landed on the overall top-10 list of graduate programs but also among the top-five doctoral programs—the only school listed both places.

Anne Coldiron received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to participate in a summer seminar for professors. This seminar took place in Antwerp, at the Plantin Press, and Oxford, at the Bodleian Library, with additional site visits to archives and early printing presses in Brussels and London. The seminar, "The Reformation of the Book 1450-1700," investigated not only the material technology of late-medieval and early modern book production, but the gradual re-forming of cultural and literary practices related to the production, dissemination, and reading of books.

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