Letter from the chair/Welcome back lunch/Department news/New faculty/Ada Limon/September colloquia/Journey to publication/Alumni news/Send me your news//
Letter from the Chair
It was the middle of a Friday afternoon in late August and the atmosphere was buzzy in Guilford House. Over a plate of chicken wings and sliders, Laura Sarafian, a first-year student studying English and Dance, was chatting with a group of juniors and seniors. “I wouldn’t have talked if I didn’t feel so comfortable here,” Laura noted in passing as she skipped out to Friday afternoon dance practice. The English Welcome Back lunch is a tradition of departmental hospitality, an invitation to the CWRU community to join us as we begin again.
The lunch also marked a new beginning for several English faculty who have recently arrived: Caren Beilin, Assistant Professor; Chiyuma Elliott, Professor; Steven Justice, Distinguished Visiting Professor; and Ben Mauk, Wormser Chair of Journalism and Media Writing. They’ve expanded our course offerings in journalism and magazine writing, fiction writing, narrative and medicine, the Harlem Renaissance, William Langland—and that’s just for the coming academic year. In the Writing Program, new lecturers Michael Druffel, Xixin Qiu, Kevin Lucas, and Amy Sattler bring their expertise to our first-year writing and non-native speaker courses.
With their prominent research and award-winning work, our new faculty enhance the national reputation of the English department and advance its excellent record of teaching. On any given day in Guilford or Bellflower, students are preparing for their classes: Shakespeare, Black British literature, and Detective Fiction; new seminars on “Free Press and Protest” and “Rhetoric and the Art of Public Speaking”; graduate seminars on Milton’s Paradise Lost and The City in American Literature. First-year doctoral student Juliana Amir told me why she chose to study at CWRU over other competing programs:
The creative work and writing produced by the professors was inspiring. I was also drawn by the interdisciplinary approach, which allows students a limitless opportunity to learn and explore similar ideas from different fields.
The English department does not aspire to uniformity, that “hobgoblin of little minds.” We aim to transform the minds of students by encouraging them to explore, to respect the commitments of others, and to pursue the wayward course of the slightest hunch.
I asked Professor Elliott what it was like to join the English department at CWRU. (Keep an eye out for her forthcoming book, The Rural Harlem Renaissance.) Her reply captures my desire for this year and the years to come in Guilford House and Bellflower Hall: “I can’t wait to see what we dream up together.”
–Walt Hunter
Welcome Back Lunch!!
Friday, August 30th, 2024.
Department News
Juliana Amir‘s chapbook Mythic Perspectives just came out from Bottlecap Press.
Caren Beilin is included in the new Bloomsbury textbook Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (2024), particularly her piece “Freinds” (fanfic of Friends, the sitcom) for the chapter on “Creative Repurposing.”
George Blake‘s article “Addressing the injustice of Cuyahoga County’s pre-trial detention policy” recently appeared in The Land.
Cara Byrne participated in the 2024 Cleveland Humanities Collaborative Summer Faculty Seminar. Led by Dr. Derrick Williams, the focus this year was the male achievement gap, specifically the dwindling numbers of Black and African American men in higher education.
Michael Clune was named a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine, and is now listed on the masthead.
Classics major Silvana Corrales Cantelmi’s paper–“Beyond the Myth: Reassessing Rape and Revictimization in Ovid’s Metamorphoses”–has been accepted to the Ohio Classical Conference (OCC), where Silvana will present on a graduate student academic panel.
Vicki Daniel ran the 2024 virtual Graduate Student Conference for the Southern Association for the History of Medicine and Science on Friday, September 13.
Narcisz Fejes is now the Associate Director for Undergraduate Programming and Initiatives at the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities.
Mary Grimm has a new flash, “Painted on the Sky,” at Stirring.
In September, Jamie Hickner and Valentino Zullo will co-facilitate the first of four book discussions of the 2024 Anisfield-Wolf Award winners. On Tuesday, September 17, Monica Youn’s poetry collection, From From will be discussed. This discussion series is co-sponsored by Cleveland Public Library, the Ohio Center for the Book, The Cleveland Foundation, Ursuline College, and Case Western. Discussions take place at 6:30 p.m. at Bookhouse Brewing in Cleveland.
Walt Hunter discusses poetry’s place in the larger world.
Kristine Kelly presented “Shaping Sympathetic Classroom Communities: Interactive Games about Mental Health” at the Keystone DH conference in May.
English and French major Susie Kim discusses her internship in New York City with The Daily.
Dave Lucas took part in the First Wednesday Reader Series along with Roger Craik on September 4th in Youngstown.
Michelle Lyons-McFarland published “Review of On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations, by Stephen Ramsay” at ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830.
William Marling was a member of the organizing committee of the international conference “Aimer Charles Bukowski” at the Universite Bordeaux Montaigne on June 6-7. He also presented the closing paper, the first ever examination of Bukowski’s art: “Charles Bukowski’s drawings: sketching Europe in Los Angeles.”
Ben Mauk has a piece in The Nation, an essay on the life and work of the late anthropologist/political theorist James C. Scott.
Marilyn Mobley was interviewed at the Union Market Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC, about her new book, Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing (Temple University Press) on Thursday, September 5th. The interviewer/moderator in the photo is Dr. Dana Williams, Dean of Graduate Studies at Howard University, President of MLA, and immediate past president of the Toni Morrison Society.
Steve Pinkerton and Elysia Balavage will be speaking at “Literary Cleveland Presents: A Tribute to Franz Kafka,” an event that marks the centenary of Kafka’s death.
Campbell Pratt’s article, “Implications of Touch and the Importance of Nonsexual Intimacy in the Biographical Materials of Pedro Zamora,” was published in the Macksey Journal.
Lindsay Turner‘s first poetry book, Songs & Ballads, will be published in France in August as Chansons & Ballades (Joca Seria editions, translated by Stéphane Bouquet). The book was celebrated at the Écrivains en bord de mer festival in La Baule, France, where Turner gave a reading, and was reviewed in L’Humanité.
Thrity Umrigar is a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award in Fiction for her novel The Museum of Failures.
New Faculty in the English Department
Please join the department in welcoming these new faculty members for the 2024-2025 academic year.
Mark Your Calendar: April 2025!!
Ada Limón, Poet Laureate of the United States, will present at the English Colloquium on Saturday, April 12th, 2025.
September Colloquium Events
Steve Pinkerton‘s lecture: “The Profane Preacher and the Modern American Novel.” Friday, September 6th, 2024.
Arielle Zibrak‘s lecture: “Manifesting in the 19th Century: New Thought and the Emergence of Positive Thinking.” Friday, September 13th, 2024.
Journey to Publication
by Julia Bianco (’16)
It started with forcing my poor second grade teacher to read the 20-page short story I had written instead of the sentences he wanted for the vocab homework. And with a librarian who knew me by name and weekly trips to the town Book Barn, used paperbacks going for five cents apiece. It started without a question in my mind that I would write a story of my own some day.
It warped with pages upon pages of unrelatable high school required reading, the chore of it making me forget why I loved books in the first place. With the pounding pressure of the world to pick anything else, to backburner the big dream in favor of something more reasonable. I came to college with it buried, determined to shoehorn myself into science and math.
Luckily, dreams don’t stay quiet. Writing found me again in my freshman year, when a friend recruited me to write for The Observer. Writing for the paper– and eventually serving as News Editor and Director of Web and Multimedia– got me back in front of the keyboard and reminded me of the beauty of crafting a story. I also started taking English classes, earning minors in English and Creative Writing and getting the honor of learning from Professor Thirty Umrigar who taught me how to identify the building blocks of the storytelling I’d been absorbing my whole life.
After graduation, I made one more valiant attempt at the reasonable path, spending a year working as a reporter at a local TV news station before deciding that if I only got one life, I was going to knock it out of the park. Over the years, my love of storytelling had extended from books to television, and I decided to get my MS in TV Writing from Boston University.
During that time, I wrote my first novel, a sci-fi called Interlopers. It was, frankly, not good. I wrote it completely from the hip– no outline, just vibes– and the plot was a hot mess. But I finished it. This beautiful, book-shaped thing that I printed out at a local FedEx so I could hold it in my hands. My very own novel. My five cent paperback.
It was heartbreaking at the time, but in hindsight, I’m very glad that I wasn’t able to find a literary agent for Interlopers. It was my first pancake– messy and imperfect, but it helped me nail my recipe down. And it got me hooked on the novel-writing bug.
After graduate school, I moved to Los Angeles and started working in the entertainment industry, first at a management company, where I sent a lot of emails; then at a development company, where I also sent a lot of emails; and then, after COVID hit, at the same development company, sending a lot of emails from my living room. With more time on my hands, I dove into writing my second novel, an expansion on an idea I came up with during a CWRU creative writing seminar. Calamity was a very personal book, one that quickly became a repository for all of my early pandemic anxieties– more of a panic diary than something that could actually sell. But every writing project, whether it’s meant to be read or not, is a learning opportunity. I honed my sense of structure, voice, and character, all of which would come into play in my next book– Broken Coven.
Meanwhile, I made strides in my TV career, landing a job as an assistant on a multi-camera comedy on HBO Max. My first time in a TV writers’ room was a dream. You go to work every day and sit around a table with some of the smartest, funniest people you’ll ever meet, and then you just… create. There’s no better training as a writer for being light on your feet, quick to pivot, and able to hear notes.
There’s also no better reminder of the passion and fun that can come from writing something you really love, which is what led to Broken Coven. It was the book I wanted to see in the world– the voice-y characters and expansive fantasy I’d loved as a kid, mixed with the romance and angst I’d become obsessed with as a teenager, with a dash of the mysteries and thrillers I’d started reading as an adult.
And this time, I had the experience of writing two books under my belt. I knew I needed an extensive outline. I knew how to set deadlines for myself and work at the fast pace of TV. And, perhaps most importantly, I knew I could do it.
Writing Broken Coven was a three year on-and-off process, moving from outline to first draft to second draft as I balanced jobs in film and TV. The book went from good to great when I started working on a supernatural dramedy TV show with a similar voice and genre to my book. If writing is a muscle, I was doing Crossfit every day. I started coming into work two hours early every morning to write, and eventually, through many more edits and critique partners, I nailed down a draft that was ready to go to literary agents.
To be frank– trying to find an agent sucks. You will become obsessed with the sound of your email notification. You will reread your first 10 pages so many times that the words stop feeling real. You will question if any reasonable person would choose to do this. But eventually, you’ll get the break that makes it all worth it.
Mine came after doing a major revision at the request of an agent, who then gave me my first offer of representation. I wound up with seven agent offers total, and chose to sign with a wonderful agent at CAA.
If you’d asked me at the time what I thought the next part of this story would be, I’d have said more months of waiting as we repeated the querying process all over again, this time with publishing houses. But my rockstar of an agent had my first offer of publication within two weeks, and an auction going a couple weeks later. The whole thing was so surreal that I honestly barely remember it. At the end of my auction day, some friends and I went out to dinner to celebrate and I almost fell asleep at the table as the adrenaline of the last month all flew out of my body at once.
And now here I am, five months later. When I look back at my diary entries from a year ago, when I was getting near daily rejections from agents, I’m in awe of how far I’ve come. I’m editing my novel and plotting its sequel, and someday, someone will walk into a library and ask the librarian where they can pick it up.
Sometimes, being unreasonable pays off.
Bianco’s novel Broken Coven, a grounded contemporary fantasy about a Los Angeles-based witch coven, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2026.
Alumni News
The New York Times bestselling novel Long Drive Home, by Will Allison (’91), was adapted for the stage in September 2024 at Theatre Aspen’s Solo Flights 2024, an annual one-person play festival.
Ali Black has two poems in the Cleveland Review of Books.
Shelley Costa (’83) has a new Marian Warner mystery out.
Iris Dunkle (’10) is interviewed about Sanora Babb and her forthcoming biography: Riding Like the Wind:The Life of Sanora Babb on Access Utah.
Jasmine Gallup (’17) worked for INDY Week, a local alt-weekly newspaper in her hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina. In February, she quit her full-time job to travel abroad for a year. She was able to pursue her dream thanks to a freelance editing job that allows her to work remotely from anywhere.
Paul Hay (’10) has been promoted to Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at Hampden-Sydney College. His first monograph, Saeculum: Defining Historical Eras in Ancient Roman Thought, was published in 2023 by the University of Texas Press.
After teaching 23 years at the recently closed Notre Dame College, serving as department head for at least a decade and promoted to full professor there, Amy Kesegich (’01) has accepted a position as Visiting Professor of English at Lake Erie College.
After 42 years in education, the last 25 at Lynn University, Jeff Morgan (’99) has retired from full time teaching. In fall, he is slated to run a four week Robert Frost class at a local lifelong learning center and teach a Creative Writing class at Lynn, where he started months after earning his doctorate at Case, working closely with Roger Salomon and Bob Wallace, whose guidance led Morgan to four books, numerous essays, and too many poems to count.
Annie Nickoloff (’16) won several Ohio SPJ Awards! She got first for Best Reporter in Ohio for her magazine’s circulation size, along with first for Best feature reporting and 2nd for best aers reporting.
Here is alum (’70) Mary Turzillo’s latest book, which she co-wrote with SFPA Grandmaster Marge Simon. It is presently on the Elgin ballot: Cast from Darkness, Mind’s Eye Publications, December 2023.
Marie Vibbert (’10) is teaching a class on plot.
Alum (’88) John Vourlis‘s documentary The House Next Door was released officially on July 16th.
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 almost 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.