Rita Dove, Commonwealth Professor of English, has released the following statement on Maya Angelou's life and work:
Maya Angelou was indeed a phenomenal woman – rising from the ashes of a childhood that would have rendered many of us mute and enraged, she made her way in a world that all too often despised her kind – a black woman, tall, fierce, and most fearsome of all, unafraid.
Professor Andrew Stauffer traveled to Greece as a representative of the Byron Society of America, where he gave a lecture on Byron’s poetry to approximately 200 local citizens of Messolonghi.
Jerome McGann, University Professor and John Stewart Bryan Professor of English, has been elected to the American Philosophical Society. He becomes the eighth U.Va. scholar to join the ranks of the country’s first learned society, joining such previous members as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, and Robert Frost. Election to the society honors extraordinary accomplishments in all fields.
The Library of Congress will name Charles Wright, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Virginia, America's next poet laureate. Wright, whose work he once described as reckoning with “language, landscape, and the idea of God,” has formerly won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
Read more about Wright and his poetry at the New York Times article here.
Professor Lisa Woolfork has garnered a flurry of media attention with her popular 'Game of Thrones' course. The class, offered this summer as a four-week, discussion-based seminar, focuses on the Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning HBO series and George R. R. Martin's 'A Song of Ice and Fire' novels, on which the series is based. In their discussions, students analyzed the series in light of topics including racial and cultural allegory, gender roles and power, identity formation, and fan fiction.
Walter Sokel (1917-2014)
Professor Lisa Woolfork's recent summer class on 'Game of Thrones' continues to capture media attention. The following article in the Wall Street Journal gives an in depth look into the class, talking to students about their experiences immersing themselves in the 'Game of Thrones' world from a literary perspective. It also contains the exciting news that Professor Woolfork is considering offering the course again in different iterations, including possibly as a regular spring semester course.
Audrey Golden, a recent PhD and lecturer in the English Department, has been named third prize winner in the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest. Contestants include the winners of three dozen book collecting contests held at colleges and universities across the country. Her entry, “Pablo Neruda and the Global Politics of Poetry,” had won first place in the 50th Student Book Collecting Contest sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia last spring.
The press release from the Bibliographical Society of UVA explains further:
PhD candidate Andrew Ferguson was quoted in The Guardian speaking about the works of science-fiction author RA Lafferty. The article credits Ferguson, alongside fellow enthusiast Neil Gaiman, for rekindling interest in Lafferty, described in the article as "the most important science-fiction writer you've never heard of." Ferguson is currently writing a biography of the author for the University of Illinois Modern Masters of Science Fiction series and will chair a panel on Lafferty on 14 August at Loncon, the World Science Fiction Convention, being held at London's Docklands.
This fall, American author James Salter will teach and lecture for the semester as the University of Virginia’s Kapnick Foundation Distinguished Writer in Residence. The residency, which begins with Salter’s visit, exists to create an open, unconstrained conversation between students and a literary master.
![MOSQUITOES [by William Faulkner]](https://english.as.virginia.edu/sites/english.as.virginia.edu/files/styles/publication_crop__180x250_/public/vander2.jpg?itok=CRKFR0a2)
Saturday, August 27th
Join New Dominion for the release of Gregory Orr’s new poetry collection, Selected Books of the Beloved. This in-person event is ree and open to the public. For more than a decade, Gregory Orr has been writing toward “the Book:” an imagined tome containing every poem and song ever written. Drawing from a rich tradition of lyric poetry, Selected Books of the Beloved is the culmination of that project, and more—it is a celebration of the transformative power of poetry, and of our extraordinary capacity to feel and to love.
Friday, September 9th
Friday, November 18th
MFA Alum Alexis Shaitkin reads from her newly released second novel, Elsewhere.
