Greetings from Padelford Hall. Fall quarter is coming to a close this week, and students are busily taking final exams, completing group projects, and putting last touches on research papers. Administrators, too, face a flurry of pre-holiday deadlines, one of which, for me, is the need to hurry up and wrap gifts for my niece and nephew (shh, don’t tell them, they’re getting plush toys that I bought in Seoul, South Korea, while at a conference in November on “world literature and the digital… Read more
UW English Department alum Jane Wong (Ph.D 2016) has been named as the 2017 James W. Ray Distinguished Artist by the Artist Trust | Frye Art Museum Consortium.
Currently in its fourth year, the James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award of $50,000 is the largest cash… Read more
Juliet Shields has been promoted to the rank of Full Professor, and Priti Sandhu and Jesse Oak Taylor have been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor. Congratulations on promotions well-earned.
In additional personnel news, the English Department warmly… Read more
Not only professors won the Simpson Center’s Society of Scholars Fellowships (See Faculty Notes). Graduate student Elizabeth Janssen has also been awarded support for her dissertation project, Terms and Conditions: Race, Literary… Read more
English Department Chair Brian Reed recommends The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them, by Stephen Burt. “Burt is a first-rate literary critic, and The Poem Is You is perhaps her best book yet, a tour of sixty poems published since 1980. Short essays concisely introduce readers to the wild, weird,… Read more
Award-winning author Lucas M. Peters (BA, '03) recently penned and photographed the Moon Morocco Travel Guide (2017) with Avalon Publishing. His articles, essays, short stories, poems, photos, and videos have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Ploughshares, Transitions Abroad, The Voyage Report, and various other magazines and websites. He has been a travel consultant for… Read more
Since departing our fair institution, alumnus Timothy Ryan (B.A. Creative Writing ’79; B.A. Journalism; M.A. International Studies ’88) has made a busy career of global workers advocacy. Ryan is the Asia Regional Program Director for the Washington, DC based AFL-CIO Solidarity Center. In this position he is responsible for overseeing all Solidarity Center programs for Asia,… Read more
Alysse Hotz, like all of our graduate students working on Ph.D.s, pours blood, sweat, and we hope an absolutely minimal number of tears into her dissertation. What’s not so typical is Hotz’s living arrangement for much of this work. For as much of the year as can be made to work around her on-campus commitments, Hotz writes her dissertation on the road in her van. Why does she choose to, literally, park her laptop in dusty lots and campgrounds? Look to the horizon; our campus is surrounded… Read more
For nearly 35 years, the University of Washington and English Department played an integral role in the success of the Puget Sound Writing Project (PSWP), inspiring effective writing teachers and student writers from Vancouver to Bellingham. PSWP’s writing consultants ran writing institutes for K-12 faculty in Seattle, Tacoma, Burlington, South Whidbey Island, Peninsular, North Shore, and other districts. They consulted in local… Read more
I met Roger Sale in the summer of 1972, very shortly after I had arrived in Seattle from UC Berkeley as a new assistant professor. I first heard about him from Alan Fisher, another faculty member who was to become one of my closest friends. Alan had painted Roger as larger than life—though not in the most standard of ways. “Roger,” Alan told me, “will bet on anything. If two birds are sitting on a fence, he’ll take a bet on which one will fly away first.”
A few days later I met Roger… Read more
James Rushing Daniel received his Ph.D. in English, with specialization in Composition and Rhetoric, from the University of Wisconsin in 2012. Before arriving at the University of Washington, he served as Assistant Professor of English at Tennessee State University and Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing at Thomas Jefferson University (formerly Philadelphia University). In the English department’s Interdisciplinary… Read more