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Paper, Press, and Pirkle: One Teacher Does it All

Amy Pirkle is a book artist and letterpress printer who runs her own small press, Perkolator Press. Her works can be found across the nation, with pieces in permanent collections at over 50 universities (Yale, Carnegie Mellon, and Duke, just to name a few). Despite Pirkle’s busy printing schedule, she still finds time to teach five classes at her alma mater, The University of Alabama. She teaches foundations art classes and book arts classes, and advises the New College Review, […]

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An Interview with Jason McCall

Jason McCall, English Instructor and poet, is the author of several books including Silver (Main Street Rag), I Can Explain (Finishing Line Press), and Dear Hero, (Winner of the 2012 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry prize). He received his Bachelors at The University of Alabama and holds an MFA from the University of Miami. With a background in classics and an interest in comics, hip-hop, and fantasy, McCall thinks of poetry as story telling. He uses candid language and mythology to […]

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Professor Michelle Robinson: Crossing Departments and Creating Change

Professor Michelle Robinson has been impacting students’ lives and reveling in the rich working environment at The University of Alabama since 2010. She received her PhD from the University of Louisville and spent time teaching at the secondary education level. Professor Robinson is an Assistant Professor at The University of Alabama in both the Department of English’s Composition, Rhetoric, and English Studies (CRES) graduate program, and the Department of Gender and Race Studies. With her passion for UA culture, innovative […]

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From The Chair

To the English Department Community, Greetings from Morgan Hall! I welcome this opportunity to share with you the current situation of the Department and our accomplishments over the past year. In 2014-2015 the English Department had 35 tenure-track faculty (10 Assistant Professors, 11 Associate Professors, and 14 Professors), two NTRC Assistant Professors, 44 Full-time Temporary Instructors and 27 Part-time Temporary Instructors. One Associate Professor served the College as Associate Dean. We hired four new TT assistant professors in 14-15 and […]

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What We’re Reading

Dr. Trudier Harris I just finished reading—for the second time—Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body (2003).  Parks is known primarily as a playwright, having won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Topdog/Underdog.  However, she ventures into the novel form for this narrative.  In somewhat of a reversal of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Billie Beede, the central character in this multiply narrated novel, travels with an assortment of companions from Texas to New Mexico to dig up her deceased mother’s body […]

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An Evolving Perspective: 16 Years with Carol Appling

After spending 16 years working for The University of Alabama Department of English, former Graduate Coordinator Carol Appling has said her goodbyes. In 1998, Appling took on the role as Program Assistant for Graduate Studies, where she worked solely with the MA/PhD programs. In 2006, she stepped up as the Graduate Coordinator, which allowed her to work with all of the programs. After graduating high school, Appling had intended to pursue a cosmetology career. She began classes in Business Education […]

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Carl Peterson: MFA Alumnus

As the world changes at an ever-increasing pace, professionals of all stripes find themselves changing careers and adapting their skills from their original degrees to new settings and contexts. Carl Peterson earned his Bachelors degree in journalism from Northwestern University and is an MFA Alumnus from The University of Alabama, where he earned his degree in Creative Writing. Although Peterson started by teaching English at The University of Alabama, he is now working for the private food and agricultural company […]

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An Unorthodox Path

Shea Henderson waits outside Starbucks among his fellow students for our meeting, holding The Crimson White and intently reading an article as I approach him. Like the majority of students at The University of Alabama, Shea Henderson’s backpack brims with textbooks and papers for his upcoming classes, however the difference between him and his peers is one of age. Shea Henderson has returned to college after sixteen years of working in a variety of different jobs to finish his education […]

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Graduate Student Takes on Creative Writing

Meghan Tear Plummer is a graduate student at The University of Alabama. She is currently in the MFA program on campus and loves every minute of it. Plummer grew up in Austin, Texas and moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana when she was 16 years old. She attended college in Tennessee at Sewanee: the University of the South. Plummer studied English for four years and then worked as an assistant editor at The Oxford American magazine. After writing for the magazine […]

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Dr. Heidi Staples: English Professor

Dr. Heidi Staples is a new faculty member in the Department of English, here at Alabama. A native Southerner, hailing from the Gulf Coastal Plain, Staples completed her MFA at Syracuse University and returned to the South for her PhD at the University of Georgia. She is the author of novel Guess Can Gallop and co-founded the Poets for Living Waters Foundation in response to the BP gulf oil spill. Staples’ work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Chicago Review, […]

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