Letter from the Chair
Life keeps moving. Faster in Fall, it seems. And because of that, the mornings when I can get up early and read something just for the fun of it—until light starts seeping in the bedroom windows—seem especially dear. This week, the book is an old friend (gifted to me by a friend) that’s sat on my shelf for years: Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. In it, Goldberg writes about the power of lists:
“Sometimes we sit down to write and can’t think of anything to write about. The blank page can be intimidating…. It is a good idea to have a page in your notebook where you jot down, as they come to you, ideas of topics to write about. It could be a line you heard…. It could be a flash of memory: your grandfather’s false teeth; how the lilacs smelled last June when you weren’t there; who you were in your saddle shoes at eight years old. It could be anything. Add to the list anytime you think of something. Then when you sit down to write, you can just grab a topic from the list and begin.” (19)
Maybe because I’ve been talking with Megan Jewell about the writers on her Experimental Poetry syllabus, the childhood shoes in Goldberg’s list about lists are what caught my attention. They remind me of something my late colleague Lyn Hejinian wrote in My Life back in 1980:
“Drinking Shirley Temple with my Mary Janes on, let’s say that every possibility awaits.”
I have so much news to share with you: about the vibrant Corita Kent silkscreen prints that Kathy Barrie and her design team hung in the Guilford Dining Room and Parlor, to the delight of the newly-returned undergrads who love the bright colors and modern energy; the HVAC repair that seems never to end, but that finally reached 80% efficiency just in time for the start of term; the grad students’ reading group (they voted to focus on the poetry of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning); the fun of celebrating Latricia Robinson-Allen’s 20th “Workiversary” with the English Department office staff in early September; and the lineup of Friday afternoon Colloquium talks (including The Nathaniel R. Howard Memorial Lecture that Dotun Akintoye, of ESPN, will give on September 19th about the problem of depicting interiority in nonfiction writing). Plus, we have two conferences that English Department folks are co-organizing on campus next month: on Poetry in the Age of Artificial Intelligence co-organized by Walt Hunter and doctoral candidate Ryan Pfeiffer (October 31st) and a Homecoming Week conference about Anisfield-Wolf Award-winning books—and strategies for teaching them—co-organized by Erika Olbricht and Susan Grimm (October 11th).
And this is the school’s bicentennial! We’ll keep you updated about these things and so much more in the coming year.
Also: we have a basket of free literary allusion buttons out in the hallway, by the English office door. These have been very popular with students (particularly the “Team Darcy” and “Team Grendel” ones). I’ve gotten a request for an Inferno themed button that’s stumping me…so if you have an idea for a very short Dante quote to put on a 1.25” circle, please share it (cxe145@case.edu).
All best,
Chi
Corita Kent
Corita Kent (1918-1986) was an American educator, peace activist, and celebrated pop artist. More than a dozen prints from her Circus Alphabet have recently been installed on the first floor of Guilford House – a most appropriate convergence of artwork by a woman artist, an educator, and lover of the printed word welcoming students to the English and Modern Languages and Literatures departments.
Born Frances Elizabeth Kent, Corita took the name Sister Corita Mary Kent when she became a sister of the Immaculate Heart, a religious order known to be very progressive and welcoming creativity. She studied at and taught at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles for decades, working in different media but eventually focusing on printmaking in the form of silkscreen prints or serigraphy. Kent’s emphasis on printing was partially due to her interest in democratic outreach, as she wished for affordable art for the masses. Her artwork, with its messages of love and peace, was particularly popular during the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1968 – 1969, a time of great world turmoil, Corita Kent produced a portfolio of silk screen prints she titled, “Damn Everything But the Circus” after a line from the poet e.e. cummings, later added to by a colleague of Corita’s. “Damn everything but the circus! … damn everything that is grim, dull, motionless, unrisking, inward turning, damn everything that won’t get into the circle, that won’t enjoy. That won’t throw its heart into the tension, surprise, fear and delight of the circus, the round world, the full existence….”
Kent used quotes from the widest range of poets, writers. and songwriters to embellish a full alphabet, drawing on historic precedents like medieval illuminated manuscripts where the main initial is decorated with fanciful creatures and sly visual references. Here she combines the gentility of Victorian advertisements in vogue during the time that Guilford House was built as the first women’s dormitory on campus, and the visceral excitement of circus acts. These prints have been acquired, one by one, from different sources – galleries, auctions, and estate sales — over the last five years.
Corita’s work became more focused on social justice with messages of tolerance, peace, and respect. Her activism drew the ire of the bishop of Los Angeles and eventually she left religious life, moving to Boston to continue her artistic work as a call to action.
Widely recognized during her career, she was named one of the “9 Women of the Year” by the LA Times and graced the cover of Time magazine. In 2024 Corita’s work was featured in the Venice Biennale in the Vatican’s exhibit, Con I miei occhi (With my Eyes). Examples of this portfolio are in the collections of prestigious museums – in the United States – Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum in New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC – as well as in important museums around the world. A major retrospective of her work was exhibited at Cleveland’s MOCA in 2014.
The Putnam Collection at CWRU is delighted to have found the perfect home for this remarkable artwork.
Kathleen Barrie, Director/Curator
Marilyn Burnett, Associate Curator
The New Gutenberg Annex News
by Kurt Koenigsberger
The inaugural grant from the Department’s new William Powell Jones grant supports a new course, to be offered for the first time in Spring 2025, titled “How to Do Things With Books.” The course introduces students to the book both as a conceptual unity of lexical content and aesthetic aspiration and as a technology that depends on discrete material processes. The Jones fund enabled the purchase of beautiful Art Deco wood type called “Monpassie” in 6-line and 10-line sizes, from McKellier Wood Type in Wales.
Pictured here setting and printing from the new Monpassie is lab intern Paige Erickson, who serves as the undergraduate teaching assistant preparing materials and testing assignments this fall.
“How to Do Things With Books” was proposed by Professor Kurt Koenigsberger as a four credit-hour course, including dedicated time in the New Gutenberg Annex book arts lab, and is rostered as English 233. It has cross-listings with Art Studio, World Literature, and Jewish Studies. The spring course will be co-taught with Dr. Barbara Mann, Stephen H. Hoffman Professor of Modern Hebrew.
September Colloquium
A surprise thank you to Walt Hunter before his lecture on Friday, September 12th: “Nature’s Household Books: The Family in American Poetry.”
Department News
Ageh Bedell, a new Writing Faculty member, has been awarded the Richard A. Bloom M.D. Award for Distinguished Teaching.
Caren Beilin‘s forthcoming novel, Sea, Poison, has received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly in advance of its publication this October– “Above all its tricks, this rewarding and uncompromising novel is distinguished by its deliriously wild writing.”
Michele Berger co-authored this op-ed that challenges rhetoric about the value of certain interdisciplinary degrees.
Cara Byrne’s book Visual Invasion: Visual Rhetorics in Public Health Writing for Children and Young Adults (co-authored with Kristin Kondrlik) will be coming out of Johns Hopkins University Press late next year.
Mary Grimm is interviewed by alum Erin Clair on her podcast “Happy You Asked.”
Walt Hunter is featured in The Daily.
Denna Iammarino has a piece coming out in The Sixteenth Century Journal–“Remixing Commonplaces and Makerspaces: Towards an Innovative, Engaged Pedagogy”–critiquing the reliance on the traditional research paper as the primary assessment tool in humanities classrooms and proposing assignments informed by maker culture—specifically, commonplace books.
Megan Jewell contributed an essay on Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s poem “Draft 2” to Restless Messengers: Poetry in Review as part of a symposium commemorating the recent publication of DuPlessis’s The Complete Drafts. (July 2025)
Kristine Kelly and Denna Iammarino co-instructed the seminar Multimodal Rhetoric, Digital Writing at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the Université de Montréal in May.
Alexandra Magearu’s short story, “The Visit,” was published in Sundial Magazine.
William Marling‘s paper delivered at U. Bordeaux on “Charles Bukowski and European Art” is on YouTube.
Marilyn Mobley is one of the partners on the planning committee with Literary Cleveland and Ohio Humanities for the year-long celebration of Toni Morrison.
James Newlin‘s book, Uncanny Fidelity: Recognizing Shakespeare in Twenty-First-Century Film and Television, was shortlisted for the SAA’s First Book Award.
In June, Xixin Qiu presented at the Consortium on Graduate Communication at the University of Michigan on his dissertation study of the disciplinary writing process of engineering graduate students.
Stephanie Redekop and Olivia Hobbs co-authored “Academic Research AND (Google OR Reddit): A Librarian-Faculty Collaboration to Improve Student Source Engagement” which has been published open access in Computers and Composition (vol. 77, 2025).
Cammy Ring, Brita Thielen, and Hayley Verdi co-authored an essay for the collection PhDing While Parenting: Surviving and Improving the Working Conditions of Graduate Student Parents, edited by Jackie Hoermann-Elliott and Jenna Morton-Aiken, which was released from Rutgers University Press:
In July, Robert Spadoni gave a lecture, “Style in Star Trek,” at the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio, as part of the exhibition, Star Trek & Worlds Beyond: From the Paramount Pictures Archive.
Thrity Umrigar was the keynote speaker at Las Positas College in California. She also taught a creative writing workshop while there.
Maggie Vinter‘s article “Tickling Shylock, the Laughing Animal” was published in English Literary Renaissance.
Lucas Yang’s summer internship at the Charles W. Chestnutt Archive is featured in The Daily.
Alums at Work
William N. Skirball Writers’ Center: A Day in the Life
by Laurie Kincer (’90)
Walk through the door of the William N. Skirball Writers’ Center – a 2000+ square foot wing of Cuyahoga County Public Library’s South Euclid-Lyndhurst Branch – and you’ll see a one-of-a-kind makerspace for writers in an Ohio public library.The Writers’ Center features a fireplace, groupings of couches and chairs, tables for working, two private writing rooms, a writer in residence office, a meeting room for public programs, a circulating collection of writing books and magazines, a kitchenette, and a staff desk.
Any day of the week, you might find a poetry, fiction, or memoir workshop; a self-publishing class; a drop-in writing group; an all-day writing conference; or maybe just writers bent quietly over laptops or notebooks.
Everything here is free and open to the public. It’s the largest, dedicated, staffed space for writers, with year-round free writing programs, at a public library in Ohio.
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I began running the Writers’ Center when it opened in 2015. Before 2015, this place and this job didn’t exist, except in the mind of then-Director Sari Feldman. I couldn’t have aimed for it or even dreamed it.
All I could do was take the next step that felt right, starting at CWRU’s Guilford House in 1987. I had a different last name (von Mehren) and began a master’s in English that would open just the right door eighteen years later. I learned from some unforgettable professors – P. K. Saha, Bill Siebenschuh, and Roger Salomon come immediately to mind – and met other students who remain friends.
I graduated in 1990 with an MA, then had two children, and re-entered the job market in 1998. The highlight reel:
- 1998 – Part-time (then full-time) children’s librarian at Lakewood Public Library, which surprised me as the most fun I’d ever had at a job and convinced me to make it a career.
- 2000 – So, I went to Kent State for a Master of Library and Information Science.
- 2003 – Started at Cuyahoga County Public Library as a teen librarian, in awe of young adult books like the eerily prescient Feed by M. T. Anderson (2002), about networked brain implants.
- 2005 – Dream job opened up: Literature Specialist at CCPL’s Mayfield Regional Library – and here’s where that MA from CWRU helped open a huge door. I got the job and jumped into the role, answering literature questions, hosting poetry readings, organizing National Novel Writing Month write-ins, and running a monthly writers’ group.
- 2011 – CCPL adopted three creative writing workshops that had been run by a local nonprofit, The Lit (FKA Poets’ and Writers’ League of Greater Cleveland), which was closing. The library asked me to keep the three workshops going and create more writing programs.
- 2015 – CCPL opened the William N. Skirball Writers’ Center.
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And this job is my idea of fun: working with writers, connecting them with resources and each other, celebrating their accomplishments, and spotlighting their books.
Take today, for example. It began with two writers coming in to use their reserved writing rooms. One of them got straight to work. The other chatted about Hemingway’s writing advice and then about #AmWriting, the lively drop-in writing/feedback sessions every Friday afternoon at the Writers’ Center.
Next, a writer whose group uses a writing room once a week stopped in to say that their trio would need to pause meeting because two of the members were healing from serious illnesses. After talking it through, she decided to continue the weekly reservation for her own writing since she can focus better at the library.
Then, a few minutes before 10 a.m., writers began arriving for week four of the six-week series of personal essay/memoir workshops led by a popular presenter. The series always fills to capacity, and writers drive from all over northeastern Ohio to participate. They talk and share, make discoveries and friends.
Meanwhile, an artist who lives near the library stopped in because, when he was here the other day for a passport, he noticed the “Writers’ Center” sign on the door. This morning, he arrived with a copy of his gorgeously illustrated, self-published first book.
By the time he left, he’d donated that copy to the library for our circulating collection and also agreed to be a panelist on an upcoming Self-Publishing Roundtable, our monthly panel of three local, self-published authors who talk and answer audience questions about their experience. Over the course of sixty-five roundtables, the panels have built community among writers while sharing valuable information.
When the artist said he wanted to find a traditional publisher for his next book, I told him about Anne Trubek, a former Oberlin College professor and author-turned-indie-book-publisher who teaches an online class on nonfiction book proposals. I also urged him to read her succinct and insightful So You Want to Publish a Book?, which delves into the nitty-gritty of publishing nonfiction from the publisher’s point of view.
As the artist talked about the sort of design he envisioned for his next book, I recommended Lynda Barry’s Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor, a lush graphic memoir full of edge-to-edge detail in saturated color. I also suggested that he begin paying attention to who’s publishing books like his and reading the acknowledgments pages in those books for the names of potential agents to query.
Finally, I showed him a YouTube video, “Create Your Query Letter with Brandi Larsen,” a talk given in Michigan by the Writers’ Center’s 2024 Writer in Residence. Brandi, a former Penguin Random House executive, has an insider’s perspective on publishing and shares it generously in the two-hour video.
All this in the space of a Tuesday morning.
So, what did I get to do this afternoon? I corresponded with a local author (whose new book I love) to set up an author event and book signing this fall. I prepared to host 160 registrants here for the Great Lakes Fiction Writers’ annual fiction conference, “Cleveland Rocks Writing,” on Saturday. I emailed a writer about teaching a class in January 2026 and chatted with more writers who came for writing rooms. Like I said, fun.
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By the time you read this, the fiction conference will be history, but we’re hosting an all-day conference with Ohio Poetry Association on November 15. You’re invited! Look it up and check out all our writing events, Events – Cuyahoga County Public Library.
This fall, the Writers’ Center celebrates its tenth anniversary, marking an unforgettable decade for me, too. It’s been a privilege to meet, support, and work with people who care about words, stories, writing, and writers. And the price for everything at the Writers’ Center is always right: free.
Alumni News
CWRU alum Ali Black is the winner of the 2025 Cleveland Arts Prize (Emerging Artist – Literature).
After four books of literary criticism, this is Alum (’99) Jeff Morgan’s first book of poetry, The Universe Project, a collaboration with three other poets, published by Finishing Line Press out of Kentucky.
Christine Mueri (’11) was recently named the Director of Communications for the Iowa State University Foundation, where she spends most days writing, talking about writing, and finding creative ways to share the Iowa State story with donors and friends.
On Wednesday, September 17th, Brad Ricca (’02) was the storyteller at “Superman Saves Cleveland,” a Cleveland Stories Dinner Party.
Christopher Urban (’07) has a story in Harper’s.
Marie Vibbert (’10) had a book launch of Andrei and the Hellcats at Loganberry Books on Wednesday, July 2nd.
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.