Margaret Atwood. Neil Gaiman. Alice Walker. The University of Alabama Visiting Writers Series has brought notable voices to campus and fostered creative relationships with students and faculty alike since its inception in 1972. The immense task of scheduling and hosting visiting writers is where UA’s creative writing community and Assistant Director Sara Pirkle’s dedication shines. Sara Pirkle began her administrative work with the creative writing program back in Spring 2018 and has been instrumental in organizing events. Pirkle reflects on […]

Read More from Setting the Scene: Sara Pirkle and the University of Alabama Visiting Writers Series

The end of spring semester always brings with it a fleeting sense of conclusion. Another set of grades and the rush of students up and out of Tuscaloosa. Graduating seniors leave their final exams with a mixed sense of triumph, assuredness, and relief. Their graduation the next societal marker of progress they’ve met. Another checkmark or rung on whichever ubiquitous and linear metaphor we use to describe living. However, in The New Midlife Self-Writing, Dr. Emily O. Wittman documents and […]

Read More from Emily O. Wittman’s The New Midlife Self-Writing and Ongoing Optimism

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 […]

Read More from Flexible, Free, and Flipped: COVE in the Classroom 

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