English Majors, Concentration in Creative Writing, and English Minors - Faculty

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English & Creative Writing
Faculty

		Michelle Ann Abate, assistant professor of English, and assistant editor of Children's Literature: (Johns Hopkins University Press); B.A., Canisius College; M.Phil. and Ph.D., City University of New York. Her research and teaching interests include children's literature, LGBTQ studies, U.S. literature and culture, U.S cinema, American women's writing, and cultural studies. ¬İMichelle is the author of the book, Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History (Temple University Press, 2008). In addition, she has published critical essays on a wide range of topics, including William Faulkner, Louisa May Alcott, Zona Gale, E. D. E. N. Southworth, Elizabeth Stoddard, Secunda Pastorum, and the genres of lesbian pulp fiction and young adult novels. In the photo (left), Abate is at Ollantaytambo in Peru, where she took a group of students in January 2007 in connection to her Short Term course on travel writing.


		T. J. Anderson, associate professor of English; B.A., University of Massachusetts; M.F.A., University of Michigan; Ph.D., S.U.N.Y. Binghamton. He is the author of At Last Round Up, and Notes to Make the Sound Come Right: Four Innovators of Jazz Poetry, and has published both poetry and poem translations. His research interests include jazz poetry, African American literature, and the work of Aimé Césaire.

		Aaron Baker, visiting assistant professor of English; B.A., M.A., Central Washington University; M.F.A., University of Virginia. He is the author of Mission Work, a book of poems (Houghton Mifflin, 2008), as well as essays, reviews, and short fiction. His various fellowships and awards include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing from Stanford University.

		Thomas Beller, visiting assistant professor of English; B.A., Vassar College; M.F.A., Columbia University. He is the author of a book of essays, How to Be a Man: Scenes from a Protracted Boyhead, The Sleep-Over Artist: A Novel, and Seduction Theory: Stories, and editor of With Love and Squalor: 14 Writers Respond to the Work of J.D. Salinger, Before and After: Stories From New York, and Personals: Dreams and Nightmares From the Lives of Twenty Young Writers. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many magazines and anthologies. He is the founding editor of Open City Magazine & Books, as well as Mrbellersneighborhood.com.

		Jen Boyle, (homepage) assistant professor; B.S. in physics from California Polytechnic University; B.A. in English from California State University, Fullerton. She completed her M.A. in Comparative Literature and Ph.D in English at the University of California, Irvine. Jen has published articles and book chapters on new media, perspective technics and affect in Milton, queer and transversal theory and film, becoming-animal and the Enlightenment, and technoculture and sexuality. She is completing a book, The Anamorphic Imaginary: Perspective Media and Embodiment in Early Modern Literature and Technoscience and editing a collection of essays, Reproducing Mnemosyne: Biopolitics, Technics, and Aesthetics. She is also collaborator-author of new media art installations, including "The Hollins Community Project" in collaboration with Virginia Tech. During 2006-07, she was the Carol G. Lederer Fellow at the Pembroke Center at Brown University, and has held a fellowship at the Folger Institute and been a scholar in residence at the Dibner Library in Washington D.C.

		R. H. W. Dillard, professor of English; B.A., Roanoke College; M.A. and Ph.D., University of Virginia; editor of The Hollins Critic and author of The Day I Stopped Dreaming About Barbara Steele and Other Poems; News of the Nile; After Borges; The Greeting: New & Selected Poems; The Book of Changes; Horror Films; The First Man on the Sun; Understanding George Garrett; Just Here, Just Now; Omniphobia; Sallies; and many stories, poems, essays, and literary translations. Professor Dillard has been named the 2007 winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP)/George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature. The award is given annually to a living individual who has demonstrated exceptional generosity to writers. The AWP will officially present the award to Dillard at their annual conference on March 1 in Atlanta.

		Cathryn Hankla, (homepage) professor of English; B.A., M.A., Hollins College. She is the poetry editor of The Hollins Critic and author of Phenomena, Learning the Mother Tongue, A Blue Moon in Poorwater, Afterimages, Negative History, Texas School Book Depository, Emerald City Blues, Poems for the Pardoned, The Land Between, and Last Exposures. Her essays, poems and stories have appeared in literary journals nationwide.

		Wayne Johnston, distinguished chair in creative writing; B.A., Memorial University of Newfoundland; M.A., University of New Brunswick; author of seven novels and one work of non-fiction, all of which have garnered critical praise and captured several awards. His latest book, Custodian of Paradise, was published to critical acclaim in Canada in the fall of 2006. It was nominated for a number of prizes and remained on the MacLean's national best seller list for six months after publication. It was released in the United States (published by W.W. Norton) in spring 2007, also to very favorable reviews. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, published in 1998, was a shortlist nominee for Britain’s most prestigious literary award for fiction, the Booker Prize. He adapted his third novel, The Divine Ryans, into a 1999 film starring Oscar-nominated actor Pete Postlethwaite. Subsequently, he won Best Screenplay at the Atlantic Film Festival.

		Pauline Kaldas, assistant professor of English; B.A., Clark University; M.A., University of Michigan; Ph.D., Binghamton University. Her works include Dinarzad's Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction (co-editor, 2004), Letters from Cairo, a travel memoir (Syracuse University Press, 2006), and Egyptian Compass, a collection of poetry (Custom Words, 2006). Her poems, stories, and essays have been published in various journals and anthologies, including Post-Gibran: Anthology of New Arab American Writing, The Poetry of Arab Women, Cultural Activisms, and The Family Track. Her interests include multicultural literature, immigrant literature, and Arab women writers.

		Jeanne Larsen, (homepage) director of the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing and professor of English; B.A., Oberlin College; M.A. Hollins College; Ph.D., University of Iowa; author of James Cook in Search of Terra Incognita: A Book of Poems, Brocade River Poems: Selected Works of the Tang Dynasty Courtesan Xue Tao, three novels, Silk Road, Bronze Mirror, and Manchu Palaces, and most recently Willow, Wine, Mirror, Moon: Women’s Poems from Tang China. She coedited Engendering the Word: Feminist Essays in Psychosexual Poetics, and is the winner of many grants and awards. Her creative nonfiction, essays, poems, poem translations, and short fiction appear regularly in various magazines nationwide. To read more about Professor Larsen, click here.

		Thorpe Moeckel, assistant professor of English; B.A., Bowdoin College-Brunswick; M.F.A., University of Virginia. His first full-length collection of poems, Odd Botany, won the 2000 Gerald Cable Award and was published in 2002 by Silverfish Review Press. Chapbooks include Meltlines, The Guessing Land, and Making a Map of the River. He earned his M.F.A. in 2002 at the University of Virginia, where he was a Jacob K. Javits and Henry Hoyns Fellow.

		Marilyn Moriarty, professor of English, Berry Professor of the Liberal Arts; B.A., M.A., University of Florida - Gainesville; Ph.D., University of California - Irvine. She has co-edited a collection of essays on architecture and literary theory, Critical Architecture and Contemporary Culture, annotated two Shakespeare plays for anthologies, and written a textbook, Writing Science through Critical Thinking. She also publishes poetry and short fiction; her book Moses Unchained won the A.W.P. creative nonfiction award. Her fiction has been published in Faultline, Mondo Greco, Nimrod, Peregrine, Phoebe, Quarterly West, and Thema.

		Julie Pfeiffer, associate professor of English; B.A., Carleton College; M.A., Ph.D., University of Connecticut; editor of the annual of the Children's Literature Association, Children's Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press). She has published on Charlotte Bronte, gender and children's literature, and on nineteenth-century revisions of Paradise Lost for children.

		Eric Trethewey, professor of English; B.A., Kentucky State University; M.A. University of New Orleans; Ph.D., Tulane University. He is the author of five collections of poems, Dreaming of Rivers, Evening Knowledge, The Long Road Home, Songs and Lamentations and Heart's Hornbook. Evening Knowledge was a winner in the 1990 Virginia Prize for Poetry. His literary scholarship includes articles on various writers, including Matthew Arnold and Joseph Conrad. His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, among them The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The Hudson Review, Poetry, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, The New Republic, The Southern Review and Canadian Literature. The Home Waltz, a screenplay, won the Virginia Governor’s Screenplay Competition.

		Marcy Trianosky, (homepage) lecturer in English and director of The Hollins Writing Center; B.A., University of Southern California; M.A., Radford University; M.A.L.S., Hollins University; Ph.D candidate, Indiana University of Pennsylvania; Post-Graduate Professional Teacher Licensure, High School English, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Education (2002-2007). Conference presentations and publications: "Tutors Speak: What Do We Want from Our Writing Center Directors?" The Writing Center Director’s Resource (2005); ”The Value of Recurring Tutorials: Building Relationships between ESL Students and Writing Center Tutors,” Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC); “ESL Writers in the Basic Writing Classroom: Pedagogical Challenges in the Small Institution,” CCCC (2004); “Writing Centers at Women’s Institutions,” SWCA (2003); "The Writing Center as a Site of Transformation,” CCCC (2003); “Killing the Angel of The Writing Center: Negotiating WAC/WPA Relationships,” Writing Program Administrators (WPA) Conference (2002); “WAC and the WC: What to Do When You Find Your Writing Center in the Thick of General Education Reform,” WPA and IWCA (2000); “Linking Tutoring and the First-Year Writing Requirement Across the Curriculum,” SWCA (2000); “A Day Revealed; Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway,” International Virginia Woolf Conference (1999).

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