Letter from the chair/Reading disciplines/Mann lecture/Department news/Spring colloquia/Summer 2024 internships/Alum check-in:Geiser/Alumni news/Send me your news//

Letter from the Chair

On a recent Friday night in Los Angeles, four CWRU English faculty read from their fiction and poetry for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs 2025 conference. Rumor has it that 130 guests arrived to hear their work, and the work of other Cleveland collaborators. Also in attendance: senior English majors Susie Kim and Molly McLaughlin, there on an Experimental Humanities grant from the College of Arts and Sciences. Professor Caren Beilin plugged our graduate programming:

Come to Cleveland! You’ll find a warm, buzzing community of innovative writers, a world class museum (the Cleveland Museum of Art– down the street), and we’d invite you to work on a lit PhD with 5 years of funding while doing something spectacular with a creative dissertation. We are interested in hearing from you.

Professor Beilin commented to me: “We had a blast–and one thing this packed event in LA seemed to make clear: Cleveland is lit!”

English at CWRU ushers beauty into the world, upholds the need for empathy, strikes fearlessly into difficulty and complexity. We teach students habits of mind that can’t easily be replicated in the professional environments they’ll soon enter. To bring our values in line with our degree programs, and to emphasize our core strengths, the faculty have proposed new concentrations in Journalism and in Creative Writing. These illuminated pathways through the major will join our very popular Film concentration.

The next colloquium visitor this spring is Professor Yopie Prins from the University of Michigan on Friday, April 4th, sponsored by the Gary Stonum Colloquium Fund. Ada Limon, the poet laureate of the United States, visits us on Saturday, April 12th, followed by our own Bill Marling on April 18th. Our students take the spotlight on Friday, April 25th for their Capstone presentations.

On my way back from LA, a friend and colleague, Dr. Erika Olbricht, sent me this quotation from Thoreau’s Walden.

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe…

What an apt image for the spring currently arriving in fits and starts, and for the creative transformations that, in our writing as in the world, take patience and tenacity, and no small amount of hope.

–Walt Hunter

Reading Disciplines, Reading Students

Maybe you’ve already heard about the “elite college students who can’t read books.” You might have read Rose Horowitch’s article in The Atlantic this past October, or followed its many impassioned responses to the ends of the known internet. Maybe you’ve never read so many Tweets about so many students who are, apparently, reading so little.

We do face a literacy crisis in our time, and it’s not just about Columbia undergrads who can’t—don’t—won’t get through The Grapes of Wrath. (Neither did I, admittedly). Just about everyone everywhere is reading less—and reading worse—than we were ten years ago. You can read all the articles and all the Tweets, and learn only that we don’t know what to do about it.

This should be where we English faculty enter the scene, with expertise in the humanities that serves real humans. But too often those of us who teach composition can become as distracted as those undergraduates who lose track of the Joads just west of Amarillo. If we want to improve our teaching of reading and writing, argues Cassandra Phillips, we need to focus on the readers and writers.

Phillips, the 2024 Edward and Melinda S. Sadar Lecturer in Writing in the Disciplines, warns us that too much focus on the discipline(s) can risk looking past the writers themselves. In “Literacy and Materiality: Aligning Labor, Scholarship, and Teaching to Reach All Learners,” Phillips argues that the literacy crisis is less about students understanding texts, and more about us understanding our students.

Phillips is Professor of English for the College of General Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she also serves as the Writing Program and Developmental English Coordinator. But she began her teaching career at the two-year, open-enrollment UW Colleges, where she found that “our field wasn’t adequately [. . .] helping me do the job I was hired to do”—that is, to reach all writers.

Many of the readers and writers Phillips taught had encountered “barriers to learning and educational access that come from students’ cultural backgrounds, circumstances, or identities.” Nothing in her own graduate training prepared her to offer them the support they needed.

So she—and some likeminded colleagues—sought to fill that gap. Phillips is one of four coauthors (along with Joanne Baird Giordano, Holly Hassel, and Jennifer Heinert) of Reaching All Writers: A Pedagogical Guide for Evolving College Writing Classrooms (Utah State UP, 2023). Emphasizing reading and writing as “interconnected activities,” the text offers examples of “writing assignments to help students develop a wide range of skills for drawing from their learning as readers.”

As part of her visit to CWRU, Phillips also led a workshop for Writing Program faculty, bringing her research into conversation with faculty reports from the classroom—in other words, a bit of shop talk. For example, Nárcisz Fejes asks students in her Academic Inquiry Seminars to read for one hour without other distractions, and to reflect on the experience. Students are often surprised at how difficult—and how rewarding—they find that hour to be. Sharing these experiences, whether for students or instructors, can be a small but important step in addressing our challenges.

It’s a start—and a stance against some of the trends in higher education that have further complicated our best attempts at teaching literacy. At the institutional level, Phillips says, “developmental education traditionally helped students meet the gap between college instructors’ expectations and their prior learning experiences.” But that sort of education is collapsing: the thirteen UW College campuses, for instance, were absorbed into the broader Wisconsin system in 2019.

If those students face a variety of institutional uncertainties, so do many of their teachers. Phillips notes that “the majority of college literacy instructors experience unpredictable employment, a lack of orientation to the institution, and limited connection to the department or program.” Indeed, between 1975 and 2015 the number of tenure-line literacy instructors decreased from 45% to 30%. (Bickerstaff and Chavarin 2018, TYCA Workload survey)

Phillips argues that we need a better understanding of what those students and instructors need. Within the discipline of writing studies, Phillips says, most of the research seems to be about how texts should be read, not how students actually read. What we do know about those students and their literacy needs comes disproportionately from R1 universities. And these are only some of the challenges that students, instructors, and institutions face.

Our own Writing Program meets those challenges in different ways. One of them is the evolution, over the last four years, of the Sadar Lecture into a lecture and workshop. The resulting conversations with visiting scholars have become opportunities to rethink and refine our work, as well as informal celebrations of the work itself.

As Kim Emmons, Director of the Writing Program, puts it, “The addition of faculty workshops has meant that the scholarly insights of our distinguished visitors directly inform our programmatic and classroom activities. This year, Professor Phillips’s work reminded us to think broadly about the role of reading in the writing classroom, to understand the current landscape of student literacy, and to find ways to make our disciplinary ways of reading more legible for all students.

At the programmatic and institutional levels, that work continues. But in the meantime, even the individual instructor can make meaningful changes. We must recognize, Phillips argues, that “there is no such thing as a ‘good student.’ There is also no such thing as a ‘bad student.’ There are students who have more or fewer barriers to their learning; and there are students whose contributions and assets have been valued more or valued less by our educational system and disciplinary practices.”

In 2007, Marshall Gregory asked: “Do we teach disciplines or do we teach students? What difference does it make?” I remember reading and debating his article in my required pedagogy course—a single course—in graduate school. Many of those in my cohort reasonably answered: “Both.” Now in 2025, Cassandra Phillips reminds us that if we want our discipline to thrive, we must urgently seek to understand the students we wish to teach.

–Dave Lucas

Edward (ADL ‘64, MED ‘68) and Melinda Melton (FSM ‘66) Sadar established the Edward S. and Melinda Sadar Lecture in Writing in the Disciplines in Spring 2009 to showcase research and scholarship in writing across the disciplines, including the histories, cultures, and contexts of specific writing practices, writing instruction, and communicative technologies. Since 2021, the lecture has also included a workshop for Writing Program faculty. The event is held annually.

The Gertrude Mann Memorial Lecture

Iris Dunkle (’10) delivered the Gertrude Mann Memorial Lecture on Friday, January 24th, reading from her book Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb and talking about her process of writing biography and poetry.

Department News

A chapter from Caren Beilin‘s forthcoming novel Sea, Poison (New Directions, 2025) is the main text for the Dutch publication series, MsHeresies, which focuses on collaborative graphic design practices and the ornamental as a form of work critique. “A Manager,” which confronts the work of criminality in gynecology, is typeset together with edited printed matter from the archive of the Neapolitan feminist artist collective, Le Nemesiache, active between 1969 and 1995 in Italy.

Michele Tracy Berger was a guest on the podcast Writer Craft (‘Writing as a Black Woman in the Speculative Fiction Genre’).

George Blake will have an essay in Teaching the Rust Belt. This edited collection was officially accepted by Rutgers.

Cara Byrne and Kristin Kondrlik (’16) recently published their article “We Can Be Heroes”: Identification, Superheroes, and the Visual Communication of Agency in Online Children’s Books about Covid 19″ in Rhetoric of Health & Medicine.

Michael Clune is speaking at, and helped organize, a conference at the University of Chicago in early April called “The End of the University and the Future of Criticism.”

Joe DeLong‘s short story “Where It Takes Me” is a piece of speculative fiction online in The Fantastic Other.

Gusztav Demeter presented “Directed self-placement for multilingual writers: Providing student agency to placement into an ecology of first-year college writing” at The 20th Symposium on Second Language Writing in November.

Charlie Ericson has a poem out in JAKE.

Mary Grimm is interviewed by Laura Walter for Page Count, the Ohio Center of the Book podcast.

Jamie Hickner will co-facilitate a Spring 2025 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Discussions Series, with Valentino Zullo of Ursuline College. The series will focus on memoirs by three Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winners: Natasha Trethewey, Isabel Allende, and John Edgar Wideman. All discussions are open to the public and take place at the Cleveland Public Library’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Branch, 10601 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, on “third Wednesdays” from 4-5:45: Wednesday, 3/19, Memorial Drive, by Natasha Trethewey; Wednesday, 4/16,  Paula, by Isabel Allende; Wednesday, 5/21, Brothers and Keepers, by John Edgar Wideman.

Walt Hunter has a short article on the late poems of Stevens, Yeats, and Giovanni.

Just In Case: A CWRU Podcast: Listen to an interview with Bernard Jim about his research on the destruction of cities. Jim has conducted research about building demolition as it relates to societal notions of progress, the construction of identity and the American public’s relationship to the built environment

Amber Kidd successfully defended her dissertation titled “Post-Traumatic Modernism: A Framework for Formal and Narrative Experimentation through the Works of David Jones.”

The work of Kurt Koenigsberger and Dave Lucas is featured in art/sci student monthly.

Alexandra Magearu was invited to deliver a guest lecture, “Women and Children First: Reflections on Displacement,” at the Center for International Education at Lakeland Community College. Her lecture deconstructs the essentialist logic of the phrase “women and children” in refugee and conflict contexts by drawing on recent research on her Bessarabian family history, humanitarian representations of refugees, and Palestine.

William Marling‘s book From Ohio with Love: A Cold War Memoir is now available.

“The Long Road from Xinjiang,” written by Ben Mauk and Nyrola Elimä, has led directly to calls to action by lawmakers and activists, prompted extensive media coverage, and exerted pressure on Thailand not to deport its remaining Uyghur asylum seekers. The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China published a letter to UNHCR on the same day as the story’s publication, signed by 50 lawmakers from 26 parliaments, requesting UN intervention and citing this reporting in its announcement. The U.S. House Special Committee on the CCP cited the story in a letter addressed to the Thai ambassador to the U.S., noting in particular the story’s description of the Uyghurs’ detention and its revelation that other countries have offered to settle them. More than 20 members of French parliament and more than 20 members of the European Parliament for France raised similar concerns in a letter addressed to the Thai prime minister that cited this story exclusively.

In October, Marilyn Mobley was interviewed about her book, Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing, with poet Parneshia Jones at American Writers Museum in Chicago.

Todd Oakley‘s current open access article was published with his research group in the journal Lingua. Title: Shocking projections: The rise of the [x-shock] construction in macroeconomics.

Camila Ring‘s article, “Overhearing and Underseeing: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Accident of the Poem,” has been accepted for publication in Modern Philology.

Robin Beth Schaer will be taking part in the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Program (AWP) in Los Angeles, speaking on a multi-genre craft panel called “Our Own Name: Writing Jewishness Beyond Zionism, Assimilation & Fear” along with authors Moriel Rothman-Zecher, Irina Reyn, Courtney Zoffness, and Jennifer Gilmore.

On December 3rd, Rob Spadoni presented “Style in Star Trek,” a Faculty Work-in-Progress Lecture.

Lindsay Turner has six prose poems in issue 2.2 of Cleveland Review of Books.

Thrity Umrigar has a children’s picture book, Maya’s Holi, published by Scholastic.

Maggie Vinter is giving the keynote lecture at the 2025 UC-Irvine Premodern Graduate Humanities Conference, “Corporeality & Incorporation: The Body in Literature and Culture Pre-1800.”

Department Colloquia in Spring

“Postnaturalism and Monstrosity,” a Lecture by Michael Mayne. (Friday, January 31st)

“The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the African Imaginary: Transnational African Writing from Ralph Bunche to Teju Cole,” a Lecture by Jamie Hickner. (Friday, February 7th)

“Esoteric Art,” a Lecture by Michael Clune. (Friday, February 14th)

“Baconian Quacks & the Origins of Digital Media,” a Lecture by Whitney Trettien. (Friday, February 21st)

“Psyche in Sequence: Psychoanalysis, Comics, and the American Superhero,” a Lecture by Valentino Zullo. (Friday, February 28th)

Summer 2024 Internships

Five days before our first shoot, I received the news that I had been awarded an internship made possible by Tim O’Brien’s support. The director in me gave a sigh of relief. The producer in me was excited: Father could now come to life. As my Capstone project for my Bachelor of Arts in Screenwriting and Film Production, I directed the short film, Father, a story about a small-town priest who attempts to convert a young singer in exchange for piano lessons. This was an ambitious project from the jump: casting a priest, finding a church to film in, and sourcing proper equipment were all challenges in realizing a high-quality production.

Thanks to the funding, we were able to jump over many of these hurdles. Principally, purchasing makeup and hairspray allowed me to cast a student as the priest, the film’s main character, who was written to be nearly thirty years older. The makeup served to bring out graying hair as well as wrinkles and shadowing in his face. On top of this, a costume for him was purchased, including the clergy shirt, solid black shoes, and reading glasses. A student actor also made directing easier, since rehearsals were conducted on campus twice before shooting began.

In addition to props such as fake cigarettes and production design elements such as wooden crosses, a notable expense came from food, which was an important part of the film. Essentially, ingredients to make pizza from scratch were purchased and used to make three pizzas over the course of one shoot day. All three pizzas appeared in the film at various points.

Meals were also purchased in accordance with union rules, as would be the case on professional film sets, for the cast and crew on shoot days that exceeded eight hours. The two long days were important because of continuity, as the majority of the film takes place in those respective locations, the church and the priest’s house.

The largest projected expense from technical equipment was a camera, but after working with the CWRU Department of Music, I decided to check out a lower-end camera for free, alongside professional quality shotgun microphones. This decision allowed me to put the funding towards other facets of production, particularly audio. To record a high-quality mix, I purchased Logic Pro X, an industry standard audio editing software, which was also used to create and mix the film’s score. This software was used on set regularly to record live audio, voiceovers, and music for the film’s final scene.

With the funding that was left over from the actual production, I turned to distribution at a number of film festivals. I submitted to two that I felt would have a chance to screen Father. The film was accepted to and screened at the 2025 Short. Sweet. Film Fest, where my assistant director and co-cinematographer Helina VanBibber attended in my place. As I have moved to London, I will also look to screen at festivals in the United Kingdom and throughout Europe.

I am now in my second term at Queen Mary University London pursuing a Master of Arts in Film [Directing Fiction] with hopes to work as an independent filmmaker upon graduation.
–Saar Zutshi (’24)

Because of an internship last summer made possible by Tim O’Brien’s support, I was able to embark on a research project with one of the school’s psychology labs, the Lincoln Clinical Neuroscience Lab, on which I was the primary researcher preparing the materials to submit to the research approval board.  This project actually combines both English and Psychology: the project focuses on testing the use of fiction/writing in the development of empathy, perspective taking, and overall emotional development in adolescents. The goal of the study is to see if there is a difference between reading a piece of writing that is more nonfiction/non-interpersonal and a piece that is interpersonal on someone’s scores during post-measures that look for ability to absorb the story, be affected by the story, and also willingness to then help someone else in need. I applied my background as an English major in searching for pieces of fiction that would be able to appeal to the age groups from 12/13 to 18, would not be too short, but also would not take too long to read.

I started off by looking for flash fiction pieces that might evoke an emotive response amongst a varying group of ages, but ended turning to an age old favorite: “All is Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury. I felt that this piece had the best writing in addition to a story that hit the points we wanted: having to understand different people’s motives, maybe leading someone to think about helping another person in need, and also being of a good length. I then looked for a non-fiction piece of writing about a planet that would be the same length and found an informational piece to match.

The second most important part of the project that I applied my background as both an English and Cognitive Science major to was searching for research pre and post measures that I felt would most accurately paint a picture of the influence the pieces of writing might have on a participant. Something that I advocated for with the faculty head of my lab  and which she really appreciated, was seeing the effects of imagery on someone’s absorption. We made a separate group from the normal readers of interpersonal/non-interpersonal that would be primed to engage their sense of imagery before reading. My hypothesis is that there would be more absorption of the story in general and therefore the emotions one might feel by embodying the characters in the interpersonal group as opposed to the others.

Overall, the ability to apply the funds as a stipend to support this otherwise unpaid research project was instrumental in giving me the flexibility to spend time on the various parts of the project while also supporting myself on campus over the summer.
–Charlotte Goyal (’24)

Over the summer of 2024, I found myself in the company of people I would never have otherwise had the privilege of meeting were it not for the funding received from the Baker-Nord Center as well as funding from the English department made possible by Tim O’Brien’s support. My project, which consisted of collecting the stories of a handful of refugees in Ohio, pushed me to hone my interview skills and practice my writing and film photography, and introduced me to a robust community (both refugees and the network of people who assist refugees in Ohio) which had always been in my backyard. The conversations I had through this project have pollinated my Senior Capstone project and have affected my intended postgraduate trajectory such that I aim to continue working with refugees. The project was a good mix of hands-on work assisting USCRI (U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants), the refugee resettlement agency, with house setups, grant writing, and volunteering at events (like World Refugee Day). It was also flexible enough to let me foster relationships with a number of refugees at USCRI, one of whom I ended up interviewing, and lay the groundwork for future interviews through that organization.

Though I struggled to recruit people initially, I spread my net to include a refugee organization in Columbus, where I conducted an additional four interviews. Though this was not intended (and in the moment, it felt like my project was floundering), I am grateful to have had an excuse to drive to Columbus and broaden my network beyond the city limits of Cleveland. The organization I worked with in Columbus (CRIS Columbus), has stayed in touch, helping spread the word about free, remote, PTSD treatment through the CWRU PTSD lab and inviting me to return to do more interviews and be involved in events they are hosting. And my project itself seemed right at home with CRIS Columbus, being integrated into their refugee speakers bureau program which trains refugees to tell their stories and compensates them for speaking at local events.

G.K Chesterton writes in his essay, “On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family,” that the individual man (or woman) who goes to the large city in pursuit of greater humanity, is actually fleeing from the great humanity they have in their own backyard. Evidence of this was found abundantly in my project. It has taught me that humanity is everywhere, if only you look for it. In my reflections of the interviews I took, I frequently wrote that the experience of hearing these stories had the effect of making me feel more human. Now, my world feels larger having heard the stories of only five people. My community feels more diverse, more interesting, more profound, than before. Certainly this is because refugees are, here in the US at least, necessarily foreign. But I have a hunch that sitting down with anyone for thirty minutes to really hear their story would result in the broadening of my horizons.

I have always wanted to do good, but the way to do this has not always been clear to me. Psychology research has seemed detached from the people it is supposed to benefit. Journalism has seemed, at times, predatory—desiring only to rake up views rather than tell something real. The work I did this summer showed me an applicable way in which to have an impact in the world. The funding I received insulated me from the subversive market pressures, allowing me to carry this project out to its fullest form. And just as telling one’s own story is a way to take agency over one’s life, this interview project nurtured a sense of agency within me that I had not previously known.
–Carsten Torgeson (’24)

Alum Check In: Lauren Geiser (’11)

My poem, “The Seam in the Veil,” was published in the January/February issue of Cathexis Northwest Press. I have also had two other poems selected for forthcoming publication. One will be featured in The Broadkill Review (July 2025), and the other will appear in Liminal Spaces Magazine. 

While my career as an attorney in Los Angeles keeps me busy, it has been so gratifying to rediscover my love for writing (and reading!) poetry. I owe every bit of that to the English department at Case, and Sarah Gridley (former professor) in particular. Over the past few years I have sought out workshop classes through UCLA Extension and I also completed the “PocketMFA” program this past fall. Once an English major, always an English major.

Alumni News

Sarah Antine‘s story “The Sabbath Queen” has been published in Glint Literary Journal.

Evan Chaloupka (‘18) has been named as Fulbright Professor to Japan for 2025-6. Evan is currently the Program Chair for Writing at Franklin University, with an impressive list of publications in literature and disability studies.

Laura Evers (’20) and Emily Sferra Kapela offer advice at Inside Higher Ed for how to transition from an English PhD program to a role in career.development.

English alum (’72 ) Susie Gharib is featured in The Daily. She’ll be the convocation speaker this year in May.

Rust Belt Girl interviews alum William Heath.
Matt Hooke (’20) won a Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing Best in Business Award. He and other staff members at the Baltimore Business Journal won for their breaking news coverage of the Key Bridge Collapse. This is a national award with 1,103 entries from 181 news organizations (including big publications like the New York Times, ProPublica etc.).

Melissa Pompili (’19) is co-presenting with Dr. Jamie Hinojosa at the 2025 Teaching and Learning with AI conference in Orlando, Florida, May 28-30. The paper is titled “Writing for Funding: Integrating AI for Grant and Proposal Writing across Contexts.”

Укриття/Shelter is an interactive piece co-created by Nadia Tarnawsky and Vira Hanchar which examines ordinary life interrupted by air raid sirens, time spent in bomb shelters with puppets and the absurd destruction of war. It was performed as part of Cleveland Public Theatre’s Soft Launch Festival which seeks to reinvent what theatre and art can be–installation art, immersive and participatory performances, improvised music composition, solo shows disguised as multimedia breakdowns and yoga classes.

The 2nd edition of Alum (’88) John Vourlis‘s textbook Understanding Screenwriting is now out from publisher Kendall Hunt.

Send Me Your News!

If you have news you would like to share in a future newsletter, please send it to managing editor Susan Grimm (sxd290@case.edu). If you wish to be added to our mailing list, just let us know. The department also has a Facebook page on which six hundred of your classmates and profs are already sharing their news. Become a member of the community and post your own news. We want to know. The department will be posting here regularly too—news of colloquiums, readings, etc. We tweet @CWRUEnglish. We are cwruenglish on Instagram.