When Albert Pionke and Dan Novak first used COVE (Collective Organization for Virtual Education) for their courses, each immediately saw the vast possibilities, both pedagogical and scholarly, the system offered. For Novak, that meant providing his EN 349 students with a “custom-made and free anthology” during the height of the pandemic, and for Pionke it allowed his EN 537 class to “build a critical edition of a forgotten 19th century novel.” COVE is an online collection of material from all periods of literature, with a […]

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It was one of my students who notified me halfway through my last course of the day. It was March 12th, 2020, and the course was World Literature. Students and faculty had been on pins and needles throughout the week as news from Italy, Seattle, and New York grew increasingly dire. When my student raised his hand, I was expecting a question in relation to José Martí’s poetry, but, in retrospect, I should have been aware my students were tracking […]

Read More from Preparing for a Pandemic: Safety in Flexible Approaches

UA English Instructor Brian Whalen’s collection Semiotic Love [Stories] was published in 2020 by Awst Press and was chosen as one of the Best Indie Books of 2021 by Kirkus Reviews. Before coming to UA, Whalen earned a PhD from the State University of New York at Albany and an MFA from Iowa State University. He was awarded a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. In his fourth year at the Capstone, Whalen teaches creative writing and first-year composition courses. His […]

Read More from Brian Phillip Whalen’s Semiotic Love [Stories] 

By Pete Beatty Tuscaloosa briefly became a global fashion center in the summer of 2021 – at least on TikTok. Viral videos of aspiring sorority members grabbed millions of views as they explained the rush process, their house visits, and perhaps most importantly, their Outfits of The Day. While #BamaRush was not strictly an academic undertaking, it functioned as a real-time sociology experiment, capturing young people starting a new life stage, and fashioning new and different iterations of themselves – […]

Read More from Lauren Cardon’s Fashioning Character: Reading Between the Seams 

Originally from New Jersey, Brian Oliu received his MFA from UA. He has gone on to author three chapbooks, several works of nonfiction, and is currently Assistant Director of the First-Year Writing Program. Van Newell recently interviewed him about his latest work of nonfiction Body Drop: Notes on Fandom and Pain in Professional Wrestling. Many of us in the Department of English teach, discuss, and create narratives, but professional wrestling is not an area many of us are familiar with. […]

Read More from Brian Oliu Drops An Elbow Into The Heart of the Lyric Essay

Robin Behn’s latest book, Requiem for the Innocent: El Paso and Beyond (2020, George F. Thompson Publishing), is a poignant and elegant commemoration of the victims of the 2019 mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. The poems—jarring and provocative—are accompanied in the book by the photography of John Willis, all images of flowers of remembrance placed in the aftermath of the tragedy. However, the work is intended as a larger collaboration with the music of Matan Rubinstein, so that image, […]

Read More from What Art Can Do: Robin Behn’s Requiem for the Innocent

UA English professor Heather White’s Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life, was published in July 2021 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Professor White has edited several volumes of Marianne Moore’s poetry, including the New Collected Poems of Marianne Moore (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017), which won the 2019 Modern Language Association Prize for Best Scholarly Edition. Professor White has also published critical essays on Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, and Lorine Niedecker. Alongside the reading […]

Read More from Heather White’s Books Promiscuously Read

Many English faculty will already know Seth Stewart, a six-year veteran of the department. His approachable personality and continual faculty support—holding frequent teaching workshops and guidance sessions for his fellow teachers—make him a prominent and invaluable colleague. But along with his passionate commitment to teaching and faculty service, he is also an accomplished scholar with a substantial contribution to pioneering scholarly work on the lesser known but influential poet, John Wieners. Stewart’s newest book, Yours Presently: the Selected Letters of […]

Read More from Seth Stewart’s Yours Presently: Opening a New Chapter in History

Professor Jessica Fordham Kidd’s debut book, Bad Jamie, is a magical realist poetry collection that tells the story of the tragic everyman of its title character, who embodies family tension and connection to nature.   Jamie has complicated relationships with every character in the collection. Despite strong family ties, there are social and economic blocks that keep Jamie from fulfilling his role as a “good” dad, brother, and son. His addictions keep him from fully expressing his longing to be […]

Read More from Jessica Kidd’s Bad Jamie: Ties that Bind

Amber Buck is an assistant professor of composition and rhetoric in the University of Alabama’s Department of English. She received her Ph.D. in English and Writing Studies from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Buck specializes in digital literacies, multimodal composition, and social media. She recently co-edited a collection of essays on the multiple facets of Netflix, Netflix at the Nexus: Content, Practice, and Production in the Age of Streaming Television (Peter Lang, 2019). Can you explain the background of […]

Read More from Amber Buck’s Netflix at the Nexus