Recent News
Over the years, Mary and Allan Kollar have generously supported the UW English department. Their most recent gift, the Kollar Teacher Community Support Fund, provides broad-based support for K-12 and post-secondary teacher education programming and activities. The fund is a major investment in teacher education and professional development for our department and writing programs.
The Kollar Teacher Community Support Fund addresses… Read more
This year’s roll call of exceptional student achievements features variety! Sure, you will see the standard publications of criticism, poetry and fiction. But also: an award-winning stage play, speculative fiction, a study of the impact of English language requirements on Turkish undergraduates, and an audio/visual project set in Piper’s Creek. The range of work our talented graduate students produce is truly remarkable. Congratulations to all (and various) hats in the ring!… Read more
Derek Sheffield (BA ’90, MFA ’99) wanted to let you know about the book he recently published with C Marie Fuhrman and Elizabeth Bradfield (BA ‘98): Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. Cascadia Field Guide features select UW English Alums and faculty, including Colleen J. McElroy, Linda Bierds, David Wagoner, and Frances McCue.
Says Derek:… Read more
Here we are again at English Matters’ semi-annual reading recommendations. We promise recommendations are coming! Scroll down to get right to them. Or, if you please, first indulge a goodbye in the form of preamble.
After a nearly decade long run as editor of the UW English Department Newsletter English Matters, I, Henry Laufenberg, will be retiring from higher education. This decision comes with, I suppose, the usual mix of emotions. I feel great fortune at having had the… Read more
Recognizing the power of stories, Assistant Professor Cristina Sánchez-Martín and PhD candidate Taiko Aoki-Marcial created a storytelling workshop and course for community members learning English as a second language (ESL). Grants from the Simpson Center for the Humanities in the UW College of Arts & Sciences, and Humanities Washington, supported the project, titled “Translationships: stories, languages, and communities." … Read more
On the occasion of the publication of E.J. Koh's (PhD 2023) debut novel, The Liberators, the University of Washington Magazine celebrates Koh's remarkable, award-winning achievements as an artist and scholar:
During her time as a UW graduate student, Koh published a critically acclaimed memoir, completed her novel and worked as a writer adapting the best-selling novel by Min Jin Lee, “Pachinko,” for an Apple TV+ series. “These works, combined with her dissertation, demonstrate a writer… Read more
The UW English Department welcomed celebrated poet Kaveh Akbar in conversation on Thursday, April 25, 3:30 p.m. in the Alder Auditorium. It was a wonderful, inspiring event; you can read more about it in this UW Daily article.
Kaveh Akbar's poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and… Read more
Professor Jesse Oak Taylor is quoted in a recent Seattle Times article titled "Frank Herbert’s Dune is a climate and environment story. Are you paying attention?" Read more here.
Brian Christian's (MFA 2008) most recent book of nonfiction, The Alignment Problem has been named as one of the "5 Best Books About Artificial Intelligence" by The New York Times. As the NYT reviewer writes:
If you’re going to read one book on artificial intelligence, this is the one. Though it was published in 2020, which in terms of A.I. is practically prehistory, I still think it’s fairer and more illuminating than almost anything published since. Its chief value is its… Read more
After winning the 2023 Thomas J. Lyon Award for Best Book in Western American Literary and Cultural Studies, Professor Chadwick Allen's book Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) has also won the 2024 Beatrice Medicine Award for Best Monograph from the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures, for its contribution to the field of Native American literary, cultural and linguistic studies.
Typically… Read more