As we near the end of a busy academic year, with what we hope are sunnier days ahead, I am again deeply grateful to our department’s faculty, staff, and graduate instructors for creating community and spaces of care for students.
I am especially proud of the way that we have continued to work together to build the department. Our revised undergraduate major (a three year long collective process led by Professor Jesse Oak Taylor) has been approved and we are at… Read more
Student Awards and Achievements
Endowed Scholarships and Fellowships
Through the thoughtful generosity of our alumni and wider community, scores of our deserving graduate students realize their goals and dreams. The ripple effects of sending our graduates out into the wider world are profound. In the words of College of Arts and Science Dean of Humanities (and beloved English Professor) Brian Reed:
The humanities open the world to students. They grant access to diverse histories, societies,… Read more
Alumni News and Notes
Rachel Arteaga (PhD 2016), along with co-editor, Rosemary Erickson, recently published Public Scholarship in Literary Studies, (2021, Amherst College Press). From the publisher:
"Rachel Arteaga and Rosemary Johnsen bring together accomplished public scholars who make significant contributions to literary scholarship, teaching, and the public good. The volume begins… Read more
Faculty Books
Chadwick Allen's new book Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts has been published from the University of Minnesota Press.
Typically represented as unsolved mysteries or ruins of a tragic past, Indigenous mounds have long been marginalized and misunderstood. In … Read more
Recent Book Publications: MFA Graduates
The University of Washington’s Creative Writing program faculty is loaded with prolific luminaries in their categories, with constant new books, awards, films, fellowships, collaborations, and other achievements. Beyond this faculty publishing prowess, though, lives another reason to be impressed: the Creative Writing program’s MFA admits and graduates outstanding writers with terrific… Read more
This year the UW English Department sees the retirement of three of our very best professors: Linda Bierds, Sydney Kaplan, and Mark Patterson. Though it is our good fortune that Linda Bierds and Sydney Kaplan will continue to teach on occasion with us through the UW post retirement rehire program, the void left by this triumvirate exiting will be obvious. Their academic achievements and contributions to their fields are unquestionably top-tier, as is their… Read more
This edition of the UW English Department’s Recommended Reading features novels selected by Professor Jessica Burstein. Dr. Burstein is an expert in modernism, and also teaches contemporary fiction. Dr. Burstein’s knowledge of late-Victorian through contemporary anglophone literature is both broad and deep. As such, the books she selects to teach make her graduate and undergraduate classes some of the most popular in the… Read more
David Russell Wagoner
1926–2021
“A Letter to an Old Poet”
Do you still believe, old man, you are a poet?
If so, what you must do is so obvious,
you shouldn’t need reminding. You should keep trying
to do whatever you haven’t done, or start
doing again what you didn’t manage to do
right in the first place. You should stay alive
as often as possible and keep yourself open
to anything out of place and everything
with… Read more