By Richard Milby
As winner of a 2020 Jefferson Fellowship, third year PhD student Cherrie Kwok might give you the impression that the award honors a small army of professors, colleagues, and close friends, rather than one exceptional graduate student in English.
"In the Time of Corona: The Solace of Art, Music and Literature in Dark Days"
Samuel Lemley is the sole winner of the Distinguished Graduate Teaching Award in the Arts and Humanities, among the highest honors that a graduate student can earn in recognition of their dedication to teaching at the University of Virginia.
The winner of the 2020 Henfield Prize, given to a creative writer in our graduate program for an excellent work of fiction is third-year poetry MFA student Aimee Seu for her story “Continued Existence.” The judge for this year’s award is the distinguished writer Dinaw Mengestu.
English Major Kristen Barrett earns Marshall Scholarship
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Please see the full announcement on the Poetry Society of America's website, here.
Cynthia Wall, William R. Kenan, Jr.
![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.
