Department of English | Department of English

News & Events

Congratulations to the 2013 RCTE Graduates!

Congratulations to all our 2013 RCTE graduates: Adrienne Crump, Jennifer Haley-Brown, Sarah Harris, Sara Howe, Londie Martin, Cruz Medina, Jessica Shumake, Mary Stroud, Elise Verzosa (Hurley), Jenna Vinson, and Cassie Wright. (not visible in this photo: Adela C. Licona, Ken McAllister and Cruz Medina.)

Teaching Award

Kudos to Elizabeth Labiner who won the 2013 Writing Program Johnnie Raye Harper Teaching Award.

Writing Program Fellowship winners

Three cheers for Ryan Winet and Pete Figler, both of whom are 2013 Writing Program Fellowship winners.

Assistant Editor for AZQ

Congratulations to Jordan Tracy who was selected by the Arizona Quarterly as the next Assistant Editor for 2013-2014.

Bookshelf

Crossing the River by Fenton Johnson

THE IDEA PULSED WITH ROMANCE, BUT THE ACT WAS RASH, RECKLESS – AND IRREVOCABLE.

Carrying her Confederate heritage like a flag, Martha Bragg Pickett was as stubborn as her red hair. And hungry for life. On a dare she crossed the river, leaving the safe, abstaining, Baptist, Southern side and venturing over to the dangerous, rowdy, Catholic Northern side. And when that proved less than thrilling, she marched her young self right into the (men only) Miracle Inn, which...

Jack Kerouac is Pregnant: Stories by Aurelie Sheehan

Excerpt from “Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant”

How to Be a Passenger on a Motorcycle

The motorcycle owner gets on the bike. He’s stomped on the clutch or whatever that thing is, the choke maybe. He dons his big helmet, puts on his big black gloves, lifts his leg over the hulking machine. He situates himself on the seat, revs, adjusts the mirror, and looks at you, standing on the sidewalk like an orphan. You take the cue. You tentatively put on your helmet, a white one unlike his...

History Lesson for Girls by Aurelie Sheehan

In her follow-up to the critically acclaimed novel The Anxiety of Everyday Objects, Aurelie Sheehan presents a moving coming-of-age story set in the disturbingly reckless and often hilariously tacky 1970s. In 1975, Alison Glass, age thirteen, moves to Connecticut with her bohemian parents and her horse, Jazz. Shy, observant, and in a back brace for scoliosis, Alison finds strength in an unlikely friendship with Kate Hamilton, the charismatic but troubled daughter of an egomaniacal New Age...

Swamp Isthmus by Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Swamp Isthmus takes the stripped, lyric voice of Selenography, the first book of Wilkinson’s No Volta pentalogy, and confronts a pre-apocalyptic vision of American urban life. Here, the city and forest are one, as are the river and sewer. The ghost and the body are one, and the buildings and the trees, the sidewalks and the switchbacks all fuse. The poems in Swamp Isthmus create the flipside of the pastoral—the urban returns to the rural, their fates...

Ground|Water. The Art, Design and Science of a Dry River

Ellen McMahon, Ander Monson, Beth Weinstein Eds.

Ground|Water is an ode to a dry river, the kind of river most familiar to those who dwell in Southern Arizona. It is also an experiment in making something beautiful from something that has been desecrated. And it is a strong message about community and responsibility.

The Anxiety of Everyday Objects by Aurelie Sheehan

Excerpt from Chapter One

All good secretaries will eventually find truth in the hearts of men.

Winona Bartlett, Win to her friends, might not have been the world’s best secretary, but her nature was such that serving, subservience, and coffee service came easily, and, in fact, she felt there was an inherent good in doing things well, and this determination more than equaled her actual interest in the long-term prospects at Grecko Mauster Crill. She practiced her secretarial...

A Palace of Pearls by Jane Miller

In this book-length sequence, animated by a confrontation with her dead father, Jane Miller meditates on home, love, war and the responsibility of the poet. A Palace of Pearls is inspired by one of the most spectacular civilizations in history, the Arab kingdom of Al-Andalus—a Middle Age civilization where architecture, science and art flourished and Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived in relative harmony. The reader roams through "rooms," encountering Greek, Judaic, and Roman mythology, and...

Carter Clay: A Novel by Elizabeth Evans

Drunk, and driving a van down a Florida highway, Carter Clay, a Vietnam vet at loose ends, irrevocably shatters the lives of the Altiz family, killing Joe and seriously injuring his wife, Katherine, and their daughter, Jersey, in a hit-and-run accident. Horrified, Clay seeks redemption, while still concealing his culpability, by becoming the questionable caretaker of the two survivors' damaged lives--eventually imposing upon them the baggage of his past and his haphazard faith in God....

The Colors of Nature by Alison Deming

The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World is an anthology that doesn’t operate merely as a collection of essays and poems by writers of color and their reflections about the natural world. Rather, the anthology is a sophisticated argument expertly structured around the following question: “Why is there so little ‘nature writing’ by people of color?”—Oliver de la Paz

SCISSORS, PAPER, ROCK by Fenton Johnson

“SCISSORS, PAPER, ROCK is a book of insight and honest love; it has the lyricism of family legend, and the dead-on truthful ring of a report from the trenches. Fenton Johnson has made something wonderful here.”

Barbara Kingsolver, author of Pigs in Heaven

“The emotional power of SCISSORS, PAPER, ROCK resides on a plot of land in Kentucky…, [It] chronicles the courtships, the births, the deaths and the agonizing disappointments of two generations of the...

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