Rutgers English Department News
WHEREAS, Faculty, Teaching Assistants, Graduate Assistants, Post-Docs, and all other academic workers represented by the AAUP-AFT have been working without a contract since July 1, 2022;
whereas the quality of education, research, and public service at Rutgers depends on the quality of the working conditions of educators and researchers at Rutgers;
whereas these conditions have been undermined by salaries and stipends that have declined significantly in real terms, with inflation currently at 6.0%;
Evie Shockley has been named the winner of the 2023 Shelley Memorial Award. Established by the will of Mary P. Sears in 1930, The Shelley Memorial Award recognizes poetic genius and is bestowed upon one distinguished American poet each year.
Judges' Citation: Evie Shockley’s work is imbued with a particular kind of tenderness, for the world and for the self in the world. It’s a savvy tenderness wedded to a type of vigilance that continually tracks the lines of the political and the personal, documenting where they meet and where they later separate again. There is, as well, a keen recognition of how prosody can heighten the reader’s awareness of the fact that what is in front of them on the page has been curated so that the complexity of the presentation will echo the complexity of the human actions that make up the moral universe of the poem.
Read complete citation on the Poetry Society of America website.
Michelle Stevens, Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, and Professor of English and Latino and Caribbean Studies, is one of the four researchers highlighted by the Office of Researchers this month. To celebrate Black History Month, the Office for Research interviewed some of the many researchers from across Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey who are making an impact on the university and their field of study. The vital work being conducted represents the diversity of research within Rutgers, which is inclusive of STEM, arts, humanities and the social sciences. The faculty members featured in this Q&A story are not just leaders in their fields; they also represent the notions of diversity, equity, and inclusion that the university and the Office for Research strive to uphold.
Evie Shockley’s poem “The Blessings” was published in the February 13, 2023 issue of the The New Yorker. To read the poem online and to hear it read by Evie, click here.
The Introduction of consumer accessible AI technology has had no greater effect than in the classroom, where it is beginning to reshape the way we think about teaching and learning. It is easy to feel overwhelmed in this new and foreign educational landscape. Lauren Goodlad, a professor in the English Department and the chair of Critical AI, is quoted in the article Teaching in the Age of AI Means Getting Creative.
This Critical AI blog post by Anna Mills and Lauren Goodlad is also a good resource: Adapting College Writing for the Age of Large Language Models such as ChatGPT: Some Next Steps for Educators.
The Department of English at Rutgers University, which has a long history of scholarship and teaching in African American Literature and Literature of the African Diaspora, invites applications for two Cheryl A. Wall Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American and African Diaspora Literary Studies. We welcome applications from scholars pursuing research in these fields, broadly considered, and are especially interested in scholars engaged in black feminist critical approaches to literary and cultural study.
These Postdoctoral Associate fellowship positions have the possibility of renewal for a second year, and include an annual salary of $60,000, health benefits, as well as a $5,000 research stipend.
The recipients will each teach one course per academic year, serve as informal mentors to graduate students in the field, and participate in the intellectual life of the department.
Applicants must have the doctorate in hand by July 1st, 2023, and be no more than six years beyond the Ph.D.
Please submit a letter of interest, c.v., research proposal, and three letters of reference, through the Rutgers University application system (ROCS):https://jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/186241
Applications must be submitted by January 6, 2023. Interested parties may direct inquiries to Professor Carter Mathes at:
Congratulations to Aimee LaBrie, the 2022 Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize Adult category winner with her short story collection, "Rage and Other Cages"! Judging the finalists, Nancy Pearl said, "Each one of these three finalists was a strong contender and choosing the winning entry was difficult. In the end, I went with the book that spoke to me most strongly."
Aimee teaches creative writing at Rutgers and is the Senior Program Administrator for Writers House. Several of the stories in this winning collection were written in the class she took with Joyce Carol Oates and in England while supervising students during the study abroad program. Aimee’s short stories have appeared in the Minnesota Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, StoryQuarterly, Cimarron Review, Pleiades, Beloit Fiction Journal, Permafrost Magazine, and others. In 2020, her short story “Rage” won first place in Solstice Literary Magazine’s Annual Literary Contest and her novel in progress won the Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer Award. In 2007, her short story collection, Wonderful Girl, was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and published in a small print run (University of North Texas Press 2007). Her short fiction has been nominated four times for Pushcart Prizes. In 2012 she won first place in the Zoetrope: All-Story’s Short Fiction Competition.
Rutgers Student Affairs will dedicate a reading room of nearly 2,000 books from the personal library of Cheryl A. Wall, a longtime professor at the university and highly regarded scholar of African American literature, American literature, and feminist criticism. The new Dr. Cheryl A. Wall Reading Room is located in the Paul Robeson Cultural Center on Busch Campus. A ribbon-cutting and reception will be held from 4:30 pm to 7 pm, on Friday, Oct. 28, at the center which is named after distinguished Rutgers graduate Paul Robeson and serves as the center for Black student life in New Brunswick.
Enter the Two Sentence Horror Story Competition!
Any current Rutgers employee or student may enter. Your submission must be no longer than two sentences and must be an original story.
Here is an example:
His hand crept toward me. I found this inexplicable, as I had dumped the rest of him in the river just this morning.
To submit your entry, use this link by Monday October 17th by 8:00 AM: https://forms.gle/QMZprKRjcJTa9M4L7
A link for voting will be sent out, and open from 8:00 AM Tuesday, October 18 - 8:00 AM Monday, October 31, 2022 (Halloween)!
The two winners will be posted at noon on October 31st on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We may also post the runner ups!!
First prize - $50 to the Rutgers Bookstore
Second prize - $25 to the Rutgers Bookstore
Questions? Email Maria Knapp at
Ian Evans, who majored in English at Rutgers, was named Somerset County Teacher of the Year. Evans' teaching is influenced by his time at Rutgers. He helped institute the Writer's House Club at Hillsborough Middle School (HMS). The club is modeled after the Creative Writing program in the English Department. "No matter where you are, my goal is to help you get to where you want to be and show you the potential in yourself," Evans told Centraljersey.com. "I think of reading and writing as being very much like 'How can we help you communicate the amazing stories you have with the world outside of you?'"
By: Sean Wesen '22
Your ally, confident in their acrobatic abilities, leaps across the ledge and makes the one in a million mistake of loosing his grip. In a flash you quick draw your arcane focus, but can you cast the feather fall enchantment before he's a puddle on the bottom of the crevice?
You have been making small talk with the vault guard for a good while now and finally you can see your words infused with insidious magic have taken a hold of him as evidenced by his suddenly wild eyes darting to and fro. He can't tell ally from foe and suddenly bolts for the door. As you signal your fellow miscreants you smile knowing that the no one stands between you and treasures beyond your wildest dreams.
With the last of her energy you heals your broken body and you wake with a start. All around you your merry band of adventures lay beaten and unconscious. You are the last one standing and the levitating orb of flesh and eye stalks laughs maniacally. It seems as if all hope is lost, but you know this beast is on its last legs so to say, and if you can best it you have enough healing potions to stabilize your team. The odds aren't in your favor, but that doesn't stop you from raising you blade and charging forward with a mighty cry.
This year's Cheryl A. Wall Postdoctoral Fellows in African American and African Diaspora Literary Studies are Victor Peterson II and La-Toya Scott.
By: Sean Wesen '22
Whether you're a seasoned Rutgers student or an incoming freshman, the decision of what to major or minor in can be a stressful one, even if it's one you don't have to make for another few years. It’s a difficult balance between what you're good at, what's marketable, what's profitable, and what's fun. Perhaps you're in that situation right now and are researching the creative writing minor in hopes of finding your answer. If that's the case, while we can't make the decision for you, we would be happy to walk you through the creative writing minor to decide if it's the right fit for you.
By: Sean Wesen '22
Writers House welcomes you back to Rutgers! We hope your summer was a relaxing one and that you got some writing done and read books that you love. Now that you're back, we are happy to tell you that we have exciting things planned for the coming weeks.
Join us for a conversation about Southern history, the natural world, Black religious experience, and photographic practice, in conjunction with the exhibition Meeting Tonight: Two South Carolina African American Camp Meetings. Artist Holly Lynton and Rutgers professor Maurice Wallace discuss their collaboration on this project, which started in 2017. Lynton's photographs of camp meetings in the sacred outdoors are accompanied by Wallace's homiletical meditations. Together, image and text convey an emotional history and materialize a prayer for its undefined future.
Fall 2022
Welcome to the Department of English at Rutgers!
We are a vibrant group of scholars, teachers, students, and staff who are dedicated to the study of literature in English and to the arts of careful reading and effective writing. The largest unit in the School of Arts and Sciences, the English department encompasses multilingual language learners and those pursuing doctoral research, undergraduates taking their first courses in literary study and renowned poets and scholars at the forefront of their fields. Our department includes creative writers, book historians, literary theorists, film and media specialists, and experts in writing in English from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present, in the British Isles, the Americas, and across the globe.
- Congratulations Maurice Wallace, recipient of a Presidential Outstanding Faculty Scholar Award
- Congratulations Richard Miller, recipient of 2022 The Chancellor-Provost Award for Excellence in Teaching
- Congratulations to Named Chair Faculty
- David Orr's review of Rhyme’s Rooms in NY Times
- Jeffrey Lawrence - The Story of a Notebook: Sergio Chejfec