Department of English News Archive
Mari Christmas (PhD 2018) a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award
Mari Christmas, our recent alum and now assistant professor at Allegheny College, was recently selected as one of the recipients of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. She will be giving a reading at NYU (hosted virtually) this Thursday, September 17 at 7pm. It will be a great event and it’s a wonderful chance to support one of our own.
This is an incredibly prestigious honor. Mari was one of six recipients of the award this year. You can read more about each of them on the Rona Jaffe Foundation site.
Full press release for the award and reading
Q&A with Wendy Roberts, a literary historian who made history
When Wendy Roberts published her new book in July, she accomplished a distinctive feat: Awakening Verse: The Poetics of Early American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press) is the first history of non-hymnal evangelical poetry in British North America.
What's non-hymnal evangelical poetry? It's written verse, Wendy explains below, that "didn’t conform to standards of taste; in fact, it explicitly rejected them. It wanted a mass audience; it refused elite language and claimed that the common person’s poetry was the language of heaven."
What's its relevance to today? "Literature and religious experience are deeply entwined, and that entanglement is important to American history."
Prof Erica Fretwell has a fascinating (and timely) publication in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food
“Black Power in the Kitchen” excavates African American women’s culinary writing, which has been relegated to the margins of the US and African American literary canon. This chapter provides an overview of key developments in the black female-authored cookbook from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. It examines early cookbooks that exploited the “Jemima Code” for their authors’ individual advancement, the community cookbook that served the larger goals of racial uplift, and the experimental and diasporic aesthetic of soul food writing. Authors under discussion include Malinda Russell, Abby Fisher, Freda DeKnight, and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, among others.
Congratulations To Our May 2020 English Department Graduates!
Click here to watch a message from our department to all of you.
Visit our Twitter account @UAlbanyEnglish to see some of our grads' posts.
Honoring Toni Morrison
The University at Albany celebrated the life and works of novelist Toni Morrison, whose distinctive literary voice forever changed American literature, with a series of events that began on Friday, Jan. 24.
Morrison, who died in August 2019, was the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at UAlbany from 1984-89. While at UAlbany, she wrote parts of Beloved, a landmark novel of 20th century literature.