Senior Reading

 Please join us on Monday, April 23, 2012 at 4:30 pm in 138 Schar for a reading of creative work by Ashland University undergraduate students, featuring graduating senior Laura Huntington.  All types of creative work will be read--essays, short fiction, and poems. Please come and support creative writing at Ashland University and enjoy the work being done by our students.

Spring Readings

English Department Spring Readings Set for April

The readings will take place in Room 138 of the Dwight Schar College of Education Building and is free and open to the public. The readings begin at 4:30 p.m. followed by refreshments at 5:30 p.m.  For more information, please contact Kari Repuyan at 419.289.5110 or at krepuyan@ashland.edu.

 

JENNIFER HAIGH - FICTION - APRIL 9, 2012

Jennifer Haigh is a novelist and short story writer. Her novels – Faith, The Condition, Baker Towers and Mrs. Kimble have won both the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction and the PEN/L.L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England writer, and have been published in sixteen languages. Her short stories have been published in The Atlantic, Granta, The Saturday Evening Post and many other magazines. A native of western Pennsylvania, she earned her M.F.A. in fiction writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and now lives in the Boston area.

RICHARD HOFFMAN -NONFICTION - APRIL 16, 2012

Richard Hoffman is the author of Half the House: a Memoir, and the poetry collections, Without Paradise, Gold Star Road, winner of the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the 2008 Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club, and his latest, Emblem. A fiction writer as well, his Interference & Other Stories was published in 2009.  His work has appeared in Agni, Ascent, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, The Literary Review, Poetry, Witness and other magazines. His new memoir, Love & Fury, will be published by Beacon Press in Fall 2013. He teaches at Emerson College and currently serves as Chair of PEN New England.

Maura Grady Brings Film Studies to AU English

Maura Grady poses with her collection of Mad Men figures.

New English faculty member Maura Grady is piloting Ashland University’s screenwriting course, which replaced playwriting in the creative writing major.   She also teaches ENG371 Literature and Film, and is developing new courses in film history, theory, and production, with the goal of offering a major in film studies in conjunction with Ashland’s Journalism and Digital Media (JDM) department.  She earned a Ph.D. in English with a film studies dissertation from the University of California-Davis, and taught at the University of Nevada-Reno before coming to Ashland.   Her most recent publication is on the television show Mad Men, and she is revising her book about women in films about the workplace, a study that goes from the early film serial Hazards of Helen to The Devil Wears Prada (2006).  A big fan of film genre, such as film noir, science fiction, screwball comedy, westerns, melodrama, and slasher films, Grady teaches films such as James Cameron’s original Terminator in addition to more canonical film.  In her screenwriting class she is having students analyze Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi, famously produced on a shoestring budget of $7000, to learn how to make a successful feature film without breaking the bank.  While a major in film studies is still probably a few years away, current AU students can major in English and creative writing, study screenwriting and adaptation, and make their own films using the state-of-the-art digital equipment. 

Richard Hague to read November 7

The Ashland University English Department has set the Fall 2011 Reading Series that will include a poetry reading on November 7.  Spring readings will take place in April 2012.

The reading will take place in Room 138 of the Dwight Schar College of Education and is free and open to the public. The reading will begin at 4:30 p.m. followed by refreshments at 5:30 p.m.

Born and raised in Steubenville, Ohio, and later living alone in a trailer during the summers in rural Monroe County, Ohio, Richard Hague has experienced two distinct settings of Appalachian life—polluted mill town and isolated country ridge. The work in his latest book, “Learning How: Stories, Yarns & Tales,” arise from the cultural, economic, and political constructs he encountered there. Hague's latest poetry book is “Public Hearings,” poems social, satirical, and political. In some of his previous books he has written about physics, cosmology, and the development of the atomic bomb (“The Time It Takes Light”), urban gardening (“Garden”), the town/country split of his Appalachian upbringing (“Ripening, Mill and Smoke Marrow”), Appalachian landscape and culture (“Possible Debris”), creativity (“Burst: Poems Quickly and Lives of the Poem: Community & Connection in a Writing Life”), the presence of the past on the Ohio River (“A Week of Nights Down River”), and growing up, physically and culturally, in two places: (“Milltown Natural: Essays and Stories from a Life”), which was nominated for a National Book Award. His latest poetry manuscript is “During The Recent Extinctions: New and Selected Poems,” forthcoming from Dos Madres Press. It deals with the effects of human culture on the earth's flora and fauna, as well as on the spirit of humans themselves. He teaches young people at Purcell Marian High School in Cincinnati, where he has worked continuously since 1969, leads adult creativity and criticism workshops, and occasionally teaches courses in intertextual reading and in teaching poetry writing at The Institute for Professional Development and Graduate School of Education at Northeastern University in Boston. He has also taught at the Appalachian Writer’s Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky, at Edgecliff College, and at Xavier University. He is the winner of the Black Swamp Poetry Prize, the l982 Post-Corbett Award in Literary Arts in Cincinnati, two President’s Awards from The Ohio State University, three Individual Artist Fellowships in two genres from the Ohio Arts Council, the James Still Award in Short Fiction, the 2004 Poetry Book of the Year Award from the Appalachian Writers Association for “Alive in Hard Country,” and was named Ohio Co-Poet of the Year in 1985 for “Ripening” by the Ohio Poetry Day Association. His writing has appeared in dozens of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, Teachers & Writers, Ohio Journal, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Birmingham Poetry Review, Margie, Smartish Pace, Appalachian Journal, Now & Then, Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, and many others. He lives in Cincinnati with his wife, professor and potter Pam Korte, is father to two grown sons, Patrick and Brendan, and is proprietor of a small commercial organic enterprise, Erie Gardens.  

Ashland Grads Start Master’s Degrees Deep In the Heart of Texas

by Hilary Donatini

Recent graduates Lauren Schiely (2011) and Logan Fry (2010) are pursuing degrees in the Lone Star state. Schiely, an English and Creative Writing major at AU, is attending Texas State University in San Marcos, near Austin: “I am a student in Texas State’s Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Composition program. It’s a two-year program with about thirty students enrolled. I’m currently taking Studies in Rhetoric, Writing Center Theory and Practice, and a practicum for my graduate assistantship.” Lauren is teaching a developmental writing course and credits her work in the AU Writing Studio with giving her the confidence to lead the class. She also would like to raise current AU students’ awareness of the burgeoning field of Rhetoric and Composition:

I would like to share my ever-accumulating knowledge of the field of Rhetoric and Composition with English and Creative Writing students at AU who are considering graduate school. I wouldn’t have known to apply to this field if it weren’t for Sue Huff [director of the Writing Studio], and I think that many students are under the impression that the only two options are literature or creative writing master’s programs. Those are certainly great options, but I would be willing to answer questions for anyone looking to explore a different venue while remaining in the English department.

Logan Fry’s program is the Master of Fine Arts in English at the University of Texas – Austin, with an emphasis on Creative Writing in Poetry. Logan began his poetic career at Ashland, majoring in Creative Writing and English and minoring Philosophy. “This semester I'm taking three courses and am a teaching assistant in one,” he explains. 

I’m taking a course called Modern(ist) British Poetry, one called Literature for Writers, and a poetry workshop taught by Dean Young. It has encouraged me to be thinking about poetry (including my own) from a different perspective, one where the poem is not a stab in the dark toward Art but an engagement with a tradition and a set of guidelines—a set of guidelines that includes grinding these guidelines into dust with your boot heel, if that's what best serves your purposes in that particular case.

In addition to his course load, Logan is responsible for leading discussion sections and grading for Masterworks of Literature: British, a required class for every undergrad at UT: “We’re reading Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Pope, Austen, Woolf, Eliot, Pinter, and some other important and often very difficult writers. I'm learning a great deal about how to lead a classroom, but it's certainly a trial by fire.” He has already observed his growth as a poet and a student of literature: “Now I have learned enough to see that I have not learned nearly enough.” Logan and Lauren are both grateful to the AU professors who guided them through the application process and prepared them for the rigors of these programs.

These Ohio transplants have been enjoying the food, weather, and culture of the Austin area. The picture above was taken in one of the many local coffee shops where they socialize and work through their demanding but rewarding grad school tasks. We wish them well!

New Faculty Profile: Sharleen Mondal

by Linda Joyce Brown

The Department of English is delighted to welcome Dr. Sharleen Mondal to the faculty.  Before coming to Ashland, Dr. Mondal taught literature and writing at the University of Washington, where she earned both her M.A. and Ph.D.  In her research and teaching, Dr. Mondal’s interests lie in gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial literature and theory, and nineteenth-century British literature.  She is currently working on a book-length project on late nineteenth-century Indian feminist and Hindu convert to Christianity, Pandita Ramabai, and the Pentecostal Revival that took place at Ramabai's community for Indian women in the early twentieth century.

In the spring semester, Dr. Mondal will be teaching composition as well as two literature courses:  English 314, Women’s Literature, and English 411, the Victorian Period.  She is also working to develop a minor in gender studies, and she looks forward to speaking with students about courses they would like to see developed as part of the minor.  Dr. Mondal is passionate about AU's "accent on the individual" philosophy, and she notes, “I am very excited to be at an institution where individual students are valued and supported.”

An interview with Dr. Mondal was recently featured in The Collegian; to learn more about her research and teaching, you can access that interview here.  Her office is on the first floor of the Center for the Humanities in Bixler.  Please stop by and welcome Dr. Mondal to AU!

Ashland Grad Teaches at the Crossroads of the Blues

Upon graduating from Ashland, where she took every English class she could fit into her schedule and graduated with honors, Angie Cook joined Teach for America in the Mississippi Delta and writes:

"I teach third grade in Clarksdale, Mississippi—where all of my students live in poverty. I moved to Mississippi eager to help and learn, but I never anticipated the racial issues that still govern interactions in the Delta. As far as anyone was concerned, I was young, white, and Northern—none of which endeared me to students, parents, or co-workers. Some met me with skepticism, distrust, and even opposition. I had always considered myself sensitive and open to diversity, but this never prepared me for life in the Deep South. I have learned the power of humility, perseverance, and a bit of tough love. I understand hardships, sacrifice, and apathy in new ways. I have seen the best and the worst of public education, and still I have faith in the American dream and the potential of our poorest children. Best of all, I have won the acceptance, credibility, and respect of my new community. My students have had a positive experience with a person of a different race, socioeconomic class, and upbringing. And I have a new appreciation for the complexity of the human condition."

To learn more about Angie's experiences with Teach for America, you can read her blog here.