Letter from the Chair
The summer is typically a slower time for academics, but I get to use my letter this month to announce a changing of the guard in the English department. I’m thrilled to share that Professor Chiyuma “Chi” Elliott stepped into the role of chair of the department on July 1. The author of four books of poetry and a monograph titled The Rural Harlem Renaissance (soon out from Oxford University Press), Professor Elliott is a tested leader with a national reputation for scholarship and creative writing. She has the experience and the vision to take the department to new heights.
She shared with me some thoughts on the strengths our students have and the value they bring: “I think my colleagues are used to how talented the students are here. But as someone newer to CWRU, it still feels like a miracle when someone spontaneously asks a question in a seminar about frame tales, syntax, or the difference between alliteration and consonance. It’s easy to care about this place and to want to work hard to make it even better.”
While Chi takes over Guilford 106, I’ll be the Senior Associate Dean of Faculty Academic Affairs in the College of Arts and Sciences, working with Dean David Gerdes to support the careers of faculty across the college. Teaching my American Literature survey–Melville through Morrison–will keep me a frequent visitor to Guilford, and I’ll maintain my job as poetry and fiction editor of The Atlantic magazine as well.
Over the last three years, the English department has brought together many of the very best writers at work today. Our research is nationally recognized and our teaching wins university-level awards. English colleagues have leadership roles in the faculty senate, the college executive committee, the Cleveland Humanities Collaborative, the Writing Resource Center, and the Posse program. English has hired five regular faculty since July 2022 and placed the Writing Program at the center of the department, extending our reach to the six thousand undergraduates who take Academic Inquiry Seminars and Communication-Intensive Seminars. A rough back-of-the-envelope count would put our faculty book publications or acceptances at a little more than a dozen over three years. That’s not to mention cover stories for the New York Times Magazine and poems in Poetry. Graduate students have published papers in flagship journals like English Literary History, attended the Institute for World Literature at Harvard, and accepted teaching positions at Oberlin College.
Our task as an English department is to teach students to read literature, to write beautifully and clearly, and to immerse themselves in the interlocking histories of fiction, poetry, film, and journalism. Our students are trained to admire the slow and careful process of developing a style, to understand the process by which that style enters the world, and to trace the effects that the creative imagination has on others. Whenever we struggle to find our values reflected in the wider culture, our mandate becomes all the more urgent. It is then that our duty to our students takes on the vital importance of maintaining a shelter for the human conscience and a living archive of thought and feeling.
Department News
Caren Beilin, Michele Berger, Robin Beth Schaer, and Lindsay Turner read at an Off-site Literary Event at AWP on Friday, March 28th.
Michele Berger is featured on Ideastream.
Barbara Burgess-Van Aken was the keynote speaker for the ACE Book Discussion Day on April 28th.
Congratulations to Cara Byrne, one of two recipients of the Carl F. Wittke Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
Cara Byrne, Vicki Daniel, Denna Iammarino, Kris Kelly, and Marion Wolfe presented on the development of Working Groups (with Reda Mohammed and Pouya Vakili), the well-received and lecturer-inspired method of professional development, at the Conference on College Composition and Communication.
Michael Clune‘s forthcoming novel Pan has been given a starred review by Publishers Weekly.
Students from Vicki Daniel’s AIQS 100: Dead Ends took a field trip to the East Cleveland Township Cemetery on April 15th and met with Nancy West, one of the cemetery’s caretakers. Vicki and some of her students also participated in the Theta Chi Graveyard Charge clean-up service at the cemetery on April 19th.
Hayden’s Ferry Review has published five of Joseph DeLong‘s visual poems and an interview with him as part of their online folio “Mixing up Media.”
Gusztav Demeter and Martha Schaffer presented the Writing Program’s work developing a new writing rubric for the AIQS argument essay at the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Emphasizing the process of creating a focus group, working from old SAGES rubrics, piloting, and workshopping the rubric, they offered other writing program leaders a way to build a rubric from the needs of students and faculty as well as the needs of program assessment.
Chiyuma Elliott was the fiction presenter at Literary Cleveland’s Spring 2025 Writing Retreat on May 24th.
Congratulations to Charlie Ericson who successfully defended his dissertation and is headed in the fall to teach at Oberlin College.
Congratulations to Charlie Goyal for receiving the Baker-Nord Institute’s Capstone award.
Mary Grimm has two pieces in Best Microfictions 2025.
Walt Hunter gave a talk in the ELH Speaker series at Johns Hopkins on Thursday, April 10th: “Nature’s Household Books: The Family and American Poetry.”
Kurt Koenigsberger is the inaugural recipient of the William Powell Jones Fund, an award made in honor of the former English department chair and dean of the college, William P. Jones.
Dave Lucas‘s “Love Poem for an Apocalypse” was part of the Knopf Poem-A-Day this April.
Alexandra Magearu was invited to deliver a presentation at “Are You A Refugee?,” a refugee support event organized on campus by Students for Refugees and East African Voices, Optimism, Knowledge, and Empowerment (EVOKE).
Ben Mauk‘s New York Times Magazine story “The Long Road from Xinjiang” is a finalist for the Dart Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma.
Graduating major Elizabeth Miller is featured in The Daily.
Marilyn Mobley presented a workshop “The Power of Writing” for the Creative Exchange at the Akron Black Artist Guild on Friday, May 23rd. Her session included a discussion of her spiritual memoir, The Strawberry Room and Other Places Where a Woman Finds Herself, and her new book Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing.
James Newlin chaired two seminar sessions at the most recent meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, in Boston (3/19-22/25). His seminars were on the topic of: “Rethinking Fidelity in Adaptations of Shakespeare.”
Xixin Qiu published a journal article in April with a colleague, titled “Non-finite clause use in disciplinary research writing: a formulaic sequence-based functional comparison between expert and student writers,” which appeared in the International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching.
On Saturday, March 23rd, two sections of Stephanie Redekop‘s AIQS seminar “13 Ways of Looking at Taylor Swift” visited the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. One of the curators led them on a private tour, and the visit informed and inspired students as they created their own mini museum exhibits for the course.
Lindsay Turner gave a reading at the MFA Program at the University of California, Irvine.
Thrity Umrigar was the keynote speaker at Las Positas College in California. She also taught a creative writing workshop while there.
English Prizes and Scholarships
The following students were awarded these prizes.The Senior Award winners:
The Harriet Pelton Perkins Prize to an outstanding student majoring in English
Elizabeth Miller
The Charles E. Clemens Award for talent and accomplishment in writing
Susie Kim
The Eleanor Leuser Award for outstanding writing for or about children by a student enrolled in a creative writing course at the university
Susie Kim
The Emily M. Hills Prize for the best essay written by a woman in the College of Arts & Sciences at the university
Ellie Tandy
The Continuing Student award winners:
The Edith Garber Krotinger Prize for excellence in creative writing
Jocelyn Hayes
The Eleanor Leuser Award for outstanding writing for or about children by a student enrolled in a creative writing course at the university
Jocelyn Hayes
The Emily M. Hills Prize for the best poem written by a woman in the College of Arts and Sciences at the university
Molly McLaughlin
The Finley Foster/Emily M. Hills Poetry Prize for the best poem or group of poems
Meredith Wiper (1st place)
Carrena Span (2nd place)
Poonam Agrawal (3rd place)
The Helen B. Sharnoff Award for formal poetry submitted by undergraduate students
Linnea Koops (1st place)
Jocelyn Hayes (2nd place)
The Holden Prize for Narrative/Creative Writing produced in an Academic Inquiry Seminar
Lucy Ma
The Holden Prize for Multimodal Writing produced in an Academic Inquiry Seminar
Katharina Staehr
The Karl Lemmerman Prize for the best paper by a first-year student
Graham Girone
The Nemet Scholarship for demonstration of excellence in creative writing
Fiona Brooks
Joy Fei
Hwi-On Lee
Arnav V. Reddy
Molly McLaughlin
Parker Butcher
Jocelyn Hayes
Matthew Lehman
Anthony Wiles
Cora Donoghue
Beckett Lauterbach
Martin McIntosh
Meredith Wiper
Writing Program Faculty and Student Awards
The Writing Program recently recognized and celebrated the accomplishments of student writers and writing faculty at Case Western Reserve University. These awards were detailed in The Daily.
Spring Semester Colloquium Visits
A Poetry Reading by Michael Snediker on March 21st.
Allison Schachter‘s lecture on March 28th: “Lorraine Hansberry, the Holocaust, and Race in Postwar American Intellectual Life.”
Yopie Prin‘s lecture on April 4th: “Sappho Echoes.”
William Marling‘s lecture on April 18th: “From Ohio with Love: A Cold War Memoir.”
Ada Limón Visit
Ada Limón visited the department in April, observing in the Gutenberg Annex and meeting with students.
Alumni News
Danny Anderson (’12) offers a selection of his publications on his new website.
Alum (’73) Anne Carlisle just participated on a 14-member faculty review panel for ACT via the American Council on Education. She reviewed English courses from ACT’s course program for their college credit equivalence ACTs. Anne also serves as adjunct faculty at both Colorado State University Global and University of Maryland Global Campus.
Alum (’14) Natalie Feng Lin’s substack is called “Up in the Air.” Here’s a recent post.
Back in March, Paul Hay (’10) appeared on the “Ideas” podcast, hosted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, to discuss the relevance of Vergil’s Aeneid to the modern world.
Kristin Bryant Rajan (’00) has been nominated for a Georgia Author of the Year Award for her chapbook Shadows.
Alum (’03) Brad Ricca‘s new book Lincoln’s Ghost: Houdini’s War on Spiritualism and the Dark Conspiracy Against the American Presidency will be available in October.
Brandy Schillace (’10) had a reading and book signing of her novel The Intermediaries on May 15th at the Goethe-Institut New York.
Michelle R. Smith (BA-English ~ Class of 1994, MA-English ~ Class of 2000) was just named the 2025-2027 Poet Laureate for Cleveland Heights and University Heights.
CWRU’s College Bulletin recognizes the accomplishments of our alum (’98) Marie Vibbert.
Allyson Wierenga graduated from CWRU with an MA in English in 2021. She defended her dissertation at Texas A&M University this spring and will be graduating with her PhD in English in August. Allyson has accepted a job as an Academic Advisor at the University of Tennessee.
Make the Most of Summer at CWRU
Spend your summer at CWRU—where you can study, grow and still have time for summer fun. With 100+ online and in-person courses, it’s the perfect time to catch up, get ahead or dive into something new. Stay on campus with housing and dining plans, and a full calendar of professional and social events. Learn more at summer.case.edu.
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.