English Department

George Creeger, professor of English, emeritus, died Nov. 1 at the age of 89. Creeger joined the Wesleyan faculty in 1951 after receiving his BA at DePauw University, and his MA and Ph.D. at Yale. He taught American literature in the English Department for nearly 50 years. He was an expert on romantic poetry — particularly Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Keats, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, and on the works of Herman Melville. Creeger also brought some of his other passions into the classroom through courses on Early Connecticut Houses and Opera as Myth and Literature. He served as dean of…

Alex Gilvarry, visiting writer in English, was named a "5 Under 35" award recipient from the National Book Foundation. Gilvarry is the author of From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, published by Viking/Penguin Group in January 2012. He was selected for the award by 1993 National Book Award Finalist Amy Bloom, the Distinguished University Writer-in-Residence and Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing. Gilvarry was born in Staten Island, N.Y. in 1981. He holds an MFA from Hunter College and has been a Norman Mailer Fellow and a visiting scholar at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. His first novel,…

Matthew Garrett, assistant professor of English, is the author of Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form after the Constitution, published by Oxford University Press in April 2014. In Episodic Poetics, Garrett merges narrative theory with social and political history to explain the early American fascination with the episodic, piecemeal plot. Since Aristotle's Poetics, the episode has been a vexed category of literary analysis, troubling any easy view of the subsumption of unwieldy narrative parts into well-plotted wholes. Episodic Poeticsproposes a new method of reading and a new way of conceiving of literary history. The book combines theoretical reflection and historical rigor with careful…

The Board of Trustees recently conferred tenure to four Wesleyan faculty. Their promotions take effect July 1. They are: Lisa Cohen, associate professor of English; Abigail Hornstein, associate professor of economics; Miri Nakamura, associate professor of Asian languages and literatures; and Anna Shusterman, associate professor of psychology. Other tenure announcements may be released after the Board's May meeting. "Please join us in congratulating them on their impressive records of accomplishment," said Wesleyan President Michael Roth. Brief descriptions of their areas of research and teaching are below: Lisa Cohen joined the English Department’s creative writing faculty in Fall 2007. Her courses are…

Clifford Chase, visiting writer in the English Department, is the author of The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers and Other Wayward Deities published by Overlook Press on Feb. 6. The Tooth Fairy is a humorous memoir of a man torn between isolation and connection. Chase tells stories that have shaped his adulthood through intimate confessions, deadpan asides and observations on the fear and turmoil that defined the long decade after 9/11. He writes about his aging parents, whose disagreements sharpen as their health declines; his sexual confusion in his 20s; the joyful music of the B-52s; his beloved brother, lost tragically to AIDS;…

Marguerite Nguyen, assistant professor of English contributed a book chapter titled, “Like We Lost Our Citizenship: Vietnamese Americans, African Americans, and Hurricane Katrina," for the book Improbable Southerners: Asian Americans in the South, published by the University of Illinois Press in 2013.

Lily Saint, assistant professor of English, is the author of “You Kiss in Westerns: Cultural Translation in Moustapha Alassane’s Le Retour d’un Adventurer" published in The Journal of African Cinemas in October 2013.

Elizabeth Willis, professor of English, authored several poems recently: "Alive" is forthcoming in American Reader in 2014. "Ephemeral Stream" was posted on Poem-A-Day, Academy of American Poets online on Jan. 2, 2014. "Survey” was published in A Public Space No. 17 in 2013. "The Witch" is included in the forthcoming 100 Poems Your Teachers Don't Want You to Read anthology to be published by Penguin Putnam in 2015. "Watertown Is Ninety-Nine Percent Land" is included in the forthcoming Collected in One Fund Boston Benefit anthology to be published by Granary Books in 2014. "Oil and Water" included in the Oh Sandy!:…

Natasha Korda, professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, faculty fellow and professor of English, authored “Coverture and Its Discontents: Legal Fictions On and Off the Early Modern English Stage” published in Married Women and the Law in England and the Common Law World published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2013. She also is the author of “The Sign of the Last: Gender, Material Culture and Artisanal Nostalgia in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday” included in the special issue on “Medieval and Early Modern Artisan Culture” published in The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies in 2013.

Elizabeth Willis, the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing, professor of English, recently presented several poetry readings and talks. She read poetry at Hobart & William Smith College on Feb. 28; Ithaca College, Feb. 25; Maison de la Poesie, Paris, Jan. 22; the University of Toulouse, Jan. 16; at "Oh Sandy!: A Remembrance," Industry City in Brooklyn, N.Y on Nov. 10, 2013; and at Naropa University, July 9, 2013. Willis spoke on "Everybody's Autodidacticism: American Poetry and the Democratic Ideal" at the Conference on "Modernist Revolutions: Paradigns of the New and Circulations of the Word in American Poetry" at the University of Toulouse Jan. 16-17; and on "Notes on…

Tony Connor, professor of English, emeritus, is the author of The Empty Air, published by Anvil Press Poetry in 2013. Connor’s 10th collection is framed by military encounters. In the first poem a young man grapples with a malfunctioning machine-gun, while the author grapples with the poem he is making from this event, memory or fantasy. In the surrealistic sequence that ends the book, a strange army invades a country collapsing into societal and semantic dissolution. Connor’s abiding preoccupations continue into his eighties: his own life and the lives around him, passing time and its traps, poetry and its transfiguration…

Salvatore Scibona, the Frank B. Weeks Visiting Assistant Professor of English, is the winner of this year's Ellen Levine Fund for Writers Award for his novel-in-progress Where In the World Is William Wurs? The award is sponsored by the New York Community Trust and the Ellen Levine Fund for Writers. Members of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative nominated Scibona for the award, which comes with a $7,500 grant. Awards go an author who has previously published a print edition of one or two books of fiction, and who doesn't currently have a publishing contract for a second or third book of…

Professor Emeritus Creeger Remembered for Teaching Romantic Poetry

Gilvarry Named “5 Under 35” Award Winner from National Book Foundation

Garrett Offers First Literary-Historical Analysis of the Episode in New Book

Cohen, Hornstein, Nakamura, Shusterman Awarded Tenure

Chase’s Memoir Published; Reviewed in Multiple News Media

Nguyen’s Chapter on Vietnamese, African Americans’ Citizenship Published

Saint’s Article Published in African Cinema Journal

Willis’s Poetry Published in Several Journals, Anthologies

Korda Published in Common Law, Medieval Studies Publications

Willis Delivers Talks, Poetry Readings, Receives 2 Residencies

Connor Publishes 10th Poetry Collection

Scibona Honored with Writing, Book Publishing Award