Our Alumni - Their Accomplishments
Tom Hunley, Ph.D. 2003 - Tom is an assistant professor of English at Western Kentucky University and the director of Steel Toe Books (www.steeltoebooks.com). Since leaving FSU, he has had three poetry books published: The Tongue (Wind Publications 2004), Still, There's a Glimmer (WordTech Editions 2004), and My Life as a Minor Character (Pecan Grove Press 2005). His book of essays, Teaching Poetry Writing: A Five Canon Approach, forthcoming from Multilingual Matters LTD. 2007, has been excerpted in The Writer's Chronicle.
Rita Mae Reese, M.A. 2003 - Rita has won two AWP Intro Journals Project awards and a Discovery/The Nation award. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Verse Daily, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah and From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction. She is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction and is working on a novel.
Russ Franklin, Ph.D. 2000 - Russ is a Wallace Stegner and a Truman Capote fellow in fiction at Stanford University. His short stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Epoch, and Greensboro Review. He is a winner of the Quarterly West, novella competition. His short story "Night Flying" is anthologized in Air Fare: Stories, Poems and Essays on Flight.
Charlie Sweet, Ph.D. 1970 - Charlie Sweet, Ph.D., is a Foundation Professor of English and Theatre and Associate Director of the Teaching and Learning Center at Eastern Kentucky University. He has co-authored two books on pedagogy, It Works for Me! and It Works for Me, Too!, as well as a collection of mystery stories, Bloody Ground: Stories of Mystery and Intrigue from Kentucky and Private Eyes: A Writer's Guide to Private Investigating.
Kim Garcia, M.A. 1996 - Kim Garcia is the recipient of an AWP Intro Writing Award, a Hambidge Fellowship and an Oregon Individual Artist Grant. Her poetry collection Madonna Magdalene was published by Turning Point Books in the fall of 2006. Her work has appeared in The Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Atlanta Review, Rosebud, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, Mississippi Review, Brightleaf, Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops, Negative Capability, and Lullwater Review. She currently teaches creative writing at Boston College.
Stephen Graham Jones, Ph.D. 1998 - Stephen’s dissertation was his first novel, The Fast Red Road, followed by the books, All the Beautiful Sinners, The Bird is Gone, Bleed Into Me: A Book of Stories, Demon Theory and upcoming in 2008, the novel Ledfeather. His over ninety stories have appeared everywhere, from Writing Fiction to The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror. A past NEA Fellow, Texas Writers League Fellow, and winner of the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction and the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, Stephen is currently an Associate Professor of English at Texas Tech University, where he's twice won a President's Book Award. He was the first tribal member to earn a graduate degree from FSU in thirty-three years.
Susan E. Colón, Ph.D. 2002 - Dr. Colón is an Associate Professor of Literature in the Honors Program and Associate Dean of the Honors College at Baylor University. Her current research focuses on Victorian literature, religion, and ethics, in particular the relationship between theology and literary form. Her latest book, Victorian Parables (Continuum, 2012), explores how the synoptic parables are reinscribed in the fiction of Charles Dickens, Margaret Oliphant, and Charlotte Yonge. She has recently published articles about T. S. Eliot and the vice of acedia (sloth) and about the doctrine of reserve in Charlotte Yonge's fiction, and she has an article in progress about Margaret Oliphant's theological writings. Colón's first book, The Professional Ideal in Victorian Fiction (Palgrave 2007), considers how Victorian novels theorized, configured, and challenged professional ideals such as autonomy, mentorship, meritocracy, and the service ethic.
Jack Wang, Ph.D. 2006 - Jack is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College in New York, where he teaches advanced fiction writing, personal essay, writing the short novel, and the history and theory of the novel. He recently attended the Sewanee Writers' Conference and is currently at work on a novel.
Susanna Childress, Ph. D. - Susanna Childress won the Brittingham Poetry Prize for her collection, Jagged with Love (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), chosen by Billy Collins.
Denise Du Vernay, M.A. 2002 - Karma Waltonen, M.A. 2001 (Ph.D. UC Davis) - Denise and Karma have co-written a book called The Simpsons in the Classroom: Embiggening the Learning Experience with the Wisdom of Springfield (McFarland, 2010). The authors, both of whom have been teaching The Simpsons for over a decade, share exercises, prompts, and even syllabi that have proven successful in their own courses. Denise teaches humanities, speech, and writing at the Milwaukee School of Engineering in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Karma is a lecturer at the University of California Davis.
Lucinda Vickers, Ph.D. 1997 - In 2007, Lu published both her novel, Breathing Underwater (Alyson Books) and a nonfiction book, Weeki Wachee, City of Mermaids: A History of One of Florida’s Oldest Roadside Attractions.(University Press of Florida). Another book, Cypress Gardens, America’s Tropical Wonderland: How Dick Pope Invented Florida (UPF) is due out in the fall of 2010. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Salon, Apalachee Review, Saw Palm and various other journals. She has been awarded three Florida Individual Artist’s Fellowships for fiction.
Mark Yakich, Ph.D. 2006 - is the author of two, full-length poetry collections, Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (National Poetry Series, Penguin, 2004) and The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (Penguin, 2008). He has also published two chapbooks, The Making of Collateral Beauty (Tupelo, 2006) and Green Zone New Orleans (Press Street, 2008). He lives in New Orleans and at markyakich.com.
Peter P. Reed, Ph.D. 2005 - Dr. Peter P. Reed is currently Assistant Professor of early American literature and culture at the University of Mississippi. His scholarship focuses on early American and Atlantic drama, theatre, and popular culture. His most recent book-in-process, entitled Dancing on the Volcano: The Haitian Revolution and American Performance Cultures, investigates the impact of the Haitian Revolution on the stage and entertainments of the Americas, exploring a range of cultural expressions relevant to theatre and dramatic representation. His previous book, Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture (Palgrave, 2009), analyzes early American theatre and the roles of the young nation’s disempowered classes. It was nominated for the American Society for Theatre Research’s 2009 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History and the Theatre Library Association’s 2009 George Freedley Memorial Book Award. He has also published articles on early American and transnational literature and drama in numerous scholarly journals and edited collections.
Tammy Clewell, Ph.D. 2000 - Dr. Tammy Clewell graduated from Florida State with a Ph.D. in literature and is currently associate professor and graduate studies coordinator at Kent State University. Her book Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2009. It traces the emergence of a fundamentally new way of writing about individual and collective loss, demonstrating how a refusal of consolation and closure succeeds in promoting a progressive cultural politics crucial for reimagining gender, race, and sexuality. She has also published essays on modernism, psychoanalysis, and film in journals, including Modern Fiction Studies, Literature/Film Quarterly, Angelaki, College Literature, and The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Her essay on Freud and mourning received the 2001 CORST Prize awarded by the American Psychoanalytic Association. Professor Clewell is completing an edited collection entitled Modernism and Nostalgia (which includes a contribution by our own Dr. Barry J. Faulk) and working on a book-length study of literary studies in the age of neuroscience.
Trish Thomas Henley, Ph.D. 2007 - Dr Henley is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati. She is completing a book, Velvet Women Within: The Boy Actor and the Prostitute on the Early English Stage, which explores the intersection of early modern sexual ideology and queer desire on the all-male stage by analyzing the difference the body makes when performing the whore. She also recently co-edited (with our own Dr. Gary Taylor) The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton (forthcoming April 2012 from Oxford University Press). The handbook is the largest collection of new Middleton criticism ever assembled, and it provides a comprehensive, cutting-edge reaction to Oxford's Collected Works of Thomas Middleton. Dr. Henley has also recently published "Automated Marlowe: Hero and Leander 31-36" (Exemplaria 20), an article co-written with Bruce Boehrer.