Professor Andrew Stauffer spoke to CBC Radio about Book Traces, his crowd-sourced web project to find drawings, marginalia, photos and anything else in copies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century books. The interview airs this week in Canada and is available for streaming online here. Read more about Book Traces below:
USA Today interviewed current Poet Laureate of the US and Emeritus Professor of English Charles Wright. You can listen to the story here.
Professors John O’Brien and Brad Pasanek spoke to UVA Today about their new web application for Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. The application – developed by O’Brien and Pasanek, with the help of students and the University Library’s Scholars’ Lab – includes two versions of Jefferson’s encyclopedic volume: one of the first 1784 printings, which he gave to the Marquis de Lafayette, and a 1787 copy whose pages are full of his handwritten annotations, revisions and personal thoughts.
Professor Gregory Orr spoke to Robin Young on Here and Now about living after an accidental shooting death. Orr reflects on the recent incident in which a 9-year-old girl accidentally shot and killed her instructor at an Arizona firing range, as well as his own tragic experience: when he was 12 years old, he killed a younger brother in a hunting accident. Orr reads from his own poetry and discusses finding meaning after an incomprehensible tragedy.
Listen to the interview here.
If you are an English major or potential English major, come out to The Great English Exposition this Wednesday at 7pm in Bryan Hall 229. This information session, sponsored by the English Department and UVa College Council, will include faculty sepakers, an introduction to our new specialist in Career Services, and exciting new updates about the major, including:
The New Undergraduate English Association
New Tracks in the Major
Spring Courses
The UVA Winter Reading Project
The Honors Program . The London Program . The BA/MA Program
…and more!
Rita Dove, Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the recipient of the 2014 Carole Weinstein Prize in Poetry. The prize was awarded at the 17th Annual Library of Virginia Literary Awards Celebration on October 18 at the Library of Virginia in Richmond. Established in 2005, the prize is awarded each year to a poet with strong connections to the commonwealth of Virginia. The $10,000 annual prize recognizes significant recent contribution to the art of poetry and is awarded on the basis of a range of achievement in the field of poetry.
Author James Salter spoke to UVA Today recently about his time in residence with the UVA English Department's Creative Writing Program. The Kapnick Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Program, established last year in the tradition of William Faulkner’s legendary residencies at the University in 1957 and ’58, aims to bring writers of international stature to Charlottesville for one semester to teach and engage with U.Va. students and the literary community.
Professor Lisa Russ Spaar is one of five finalists for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. These awards are some of the most prestigious American literary awards and are judged by a panel of critics and book review editors. Read more about the awards and other nominees here.
The English Department will host a community reading and discussion event this Wednesday at 7:00pm in the Bryan Hall Faculty Lounge. The Winter Read will bring together undergrads, graduate students, and professors to discuss Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Professors Clare Kinney, Stephen Cushman, and Victor Luftig will start off the event with a panel discussion, then participants will break into groups to discuss the book over pizza. Come one and all!
![MOSQUITOES [by William Faulkner]](https://english.as.virginia.edu/sites/english.as.virginia.edu/files/styles/publication_crop__180x250_/public/vander2.jpg?itok=CRKFR0a2)
Thursday, October 28th
Hannah Dierdorff and Nana Nyarko Boateng
Friday, October 29th
Tuesday, November 2nd
Thursday, November 4th
Katherine James and Sophia Saklikowski
Saturday, November 6th
Join us as we celebrate the release of Lisa Russ Spaar’s new poetry collection, Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: This career-spanning volume portrays in stunning fashion Lisa Russ Spaar’s exquisite obsessions: spiritual hunger, lingual pleasures, bodily decay. The “ringleader of a stunning lexicon” (Shenandoah), Spaar offers poems that are both colloquial and sumptuous, hyper-attuned to contemporary idiom while rooted in language’s primordial, earthy roots. Whether writing of the erotic or the divine, of anorexia or insomnia, of fairy tale or literary history, Spaar’s writing is unmistakably her own, a trove of music and magic like nothing else in contemporary poetry. In Madrigalia, her oeuvre is on full display; it is a showcase of her indispensable poetic gifts, a tribute to a writer both ascetic and ecstatic.
About the Author: Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of many collections of poetry, most recently Orexia (Persea, 2017), and a collection of essays, The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry. She is the editor of four poetry anthologies, most recently More Truly and More Strange: 100 Contemporary American Self-Portrait Poems. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, and the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry. She is a poetry columnist for Los Angeles Review of Books and professor of English at the University of Virginia.
