March 23, 2020

Jessica Sims is a senior English major and the recipient of the Black History in the Making Award for 2020. She’s a non-traditional student who loves reading, writing poetry and other forms of creative writing, loves music, enjoys trying her hand at photography, and loves “being the best single mom to a vivacious 9-year old that I can be.” She’s considering getting her masters so that she can be a teacher at the secondary level, but says “I will have to see what the future holds for me!”

March 5, 2020

March 2, 2020

The Richmond and Qatar-based independent press Diode Editions is proud to announce the publication of Prismatics: Larry Levis & Contemporary American Poetry...

February 21, 2020

Chloe is a junior English major, creative writing minor at VCU. She currently works in the nonprofit world, advocating for childhood literacy and foster care/adoption. She plans to be a high school English teacher upon graduating.

February 17, 2020

Kathleen Graber's The River Twice (Princeton University Press) has won the 2020 UNT Rilke Prize...

February 7, 2020

Caitlin Wilson is the 2019-2020 lead associate editor of Blackbird: an online journal for literature and the arts and in her second year of the M.F.A. program for poetry.

February 5, 2020

“My literature classes prepared me for the business world more than anything. I draw from my English degree all the time. I’m absolutely convinced my liberal arts background has been a great point of leverage for me...”

January 31, 2020

Rachel graduated from VCU in December 2017 with her B.A. in English and double minors in business and nonprofit management.

December 11, 2019

Three undergraduate students presented the culmination of their two-semester creative and scholarly research projects...

November 22, 2019

Adin Lears is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and started at VCU in the fall of 2018. She teaches classes on medieval literature, Chaucer, and much more.

November 15, 2019

Matteo Pangallo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and started at VCU in the fall of 2017. He teaches classes on Shakespeare, early modern drama, book history, and theater history.

November 12, 2019

Patricia (Patty) Smith is the author of The Year of Needy Girls (Kaylie Jones Books, 2017). She received her M.F.A. at VCU in 2001 and teaches American literature and creative writing at the Appomattox Regional Governor’s School in Petersburg, VA.

November 6, 2019

Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Ph.D., will give a special guest lecture.

November 6, 2019

Jenna Johnson is an Executive Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. While attending the 2019 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award event, she will participate on a panel about the process of publishing a debut novel, alongside her client Ling Ma, whose novel SEVERANCE won this year’s award.

November 1, 2019

Natalie Marie Salsbury graduated with a B.A. in English and a minor in Creative Writing from VCU in December 2018. She is the Administrative Specialist in the Dean's Office of College of Humanities and Sciences.

October 30, 2019

Jin Auh is a literary agent at The Wylie Agency. While attending the 2019 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award event, she will participate on a panel about the process of publishing a debut novel, alongside her client Ling Ma, whose novel Severance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) won this year’s award.

October 18, 2019

Dale Brumfield graduated from VCU with a B.F.A. in painting and printmaking in 1981 and graduated from the VCU M.F.A. program in Creative Writing in 2015. His tenth book has just been released.

September 30, 2019

September 20, 2019

April Sopkin is the 2019 Cabell First Novelist Award Fellow and in her third year of the M.F.A. program for fiction.

September 19, 2019

Joshua Eckhardt has authored a new book that examines the religious texts and books that surrounded the poems, sermons, and inscriptions of poet and preacher John Donne...

September 18, 2019

September 18, 2019

AJ White is the 2019 Levis Reading Prize coordinator and in his third year in the M.F.A. program for poetry.

September 16, 2019

Kathleen Graber, associate professor in the Department of English, has published a new collection of poems, The River Twice, (Princeton University Press, 2019)...

September 5, 2019

All VCU students, undergraduate and graduate, are invited to submit to the VCU Student Book-Collecting Contest...

September 5, 2019

Sonja Livingston has authored a new collection of essays, The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions into Devotion (University of Nebraska Press)...

August 16, 2019

August 14, 2019

August 13, 2019

August 12, 2019

July 30, 2019

July 9, 2019

Jenny Xie is the winner of the 2019 Levis Reading Prize...

July 2, 2019

Ling Ma has won the 2019 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award...

May 23, 2019

April 15, 2019

April 12, 2019

March 26, 2019

March 20, 2019

March 7, 2019

January 31, 2019

Acclaimed author, Yiyun Li, who teaches creative writing at Princeton University, is VCU’s 2019 Distinguished Visiting Writer...

February 25, 2019

February 21, 2019

January 7, 2019

VCU News' latest student spotlight feature focuses on VCU English major, Glynis Boyd Hughes . . .

October 22, 2018

The Library of Virginia on Saturday announced the winners of the 21st annual Library of Virginia Literary Awards...

October 8, 2018

VCU English alum, X.C. Atkins, has just published his debut collection of short stories. Grace Street Alley and Other Stories ...

August 27, 2018

We are pleased to announce that Hernán Díaz has won the 2018 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award for his novel, In the Distance...

August 20, 2018

We are pleased to announce an exciting and award-winning line up for our 2018-19 Visiting Writers Series...

August 19, 2018

Please welcome our Fall 2018 incoming MA in English class...

August 19, 2018

Please welcome our Fall 2018 incoming MFA in Creative Writing class...

August 19, 2018

Please welcome our Fall 2018 incoming PhD in Media, Art and Text class...

August 7, 2018

An update on several of our MATX alums and current PhD students...

July 17, 2018

Congratulations to the recipients of the 2018 undergraduate scholarships and awards...

July 13, 2018

Kaveh Akbar is the winner of the 2018 Levis Reading Prize for his poetry collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf...

July 13, 2018

Selected news from our MA in English program alumni...

July 6, 2018

Recent news from our MFA alumni...

June 1, 2018

The MFA program is pleased to formally announce the selections for next year’s specialized GTA positions...

May 28, 2018

PBS News Hour recently featured VCU English alum and prize-winning author Kevin Powers as a part of its Memorial Day coverage...

May 25, 2018

VCU MFA graduate Michele Young-Stone's latest novel, Lost in the Beehive follows a young woman growing up in the 1960s...

April 6, 2018

We are happy to report the following recent faculty and student accomplishments...

April 5, 2018

Adam Latham was awarded the 2018 Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto Short Fiction Prize for outstanding short fiction...

March 2, 2018

NBC Channel 12 did a story on the new diversion program Professor David Coogan launched...

February 28, 2018

Join us for the next English Faculty Forum: Wednesday (2/28) 12-1pm in Hibbs 308...

February 19, 2018

Congratulations go out to two MA in English program alums...

February 6, 2018

Solmaz Sharif has been named the winner of the 2017 Levis Reading Prize for her poetry collection, Look...

January 31, 2018

As a part of the VCU Visiting Writers series we welcome MFA alums Roselyn Elliott, Nathan Long, Emilia Phillips and Michele Young-Stone...

April 28, 2017

Monthly series of readings by VCU Department of English Graduate Students...

February 16, 2018

February 15, 2018

March 29, 2018

January 11, 2018

Welcome our Spring 2018 incoming MA class!!!

January 9, 2018

October 2, 2017

September 13, 2017

Jade Chang has won the 2017 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, which honors an outstanding debut novel published during a calendar year.

August 29, 2017

MATX PhD candidate Andrew Spencer has had two articles accepted for publication.

August 23, 2017

Creative nonfiction writer and essayist Sonja Livingston's essay "Like This, We Begin: An Essay in Two Photographs" has won the VanderMey Nonfiction Prize from Ruminate Magazine. 

August 19, 2017

August 18, 2017

August 18, 2017

Our incoming MA Class of Fall 2017...

August 16, 2017

Welcome the incoming MFAers of Fall 2017!

July 24, 2017

Jason Price's new book, Animals and Desire in South African Fiction: Biopolitics and the Resistance to Colonization (Palgrave 2017) discusses the political potential of affective experiences of desire as reflected in contemporary South African literature.

July 21, 2017

Sachi Shimomura and John Brinegar, along with Sachi's father, Osamu Shimomura, have collaborated to write a narrative of Osamu Shimomura's unexpected path to the Nobel Prize in an aptly titled book, Luminous Pursuit: Jellyfish, GFP, and the Unforeseen Path to the Nobel Prize (World Scientific 2017).

June 16, 2017

The Virginia Commonwealth University Department of English is saddened to report that Professor Emeritus Richard Karl Priebe passed away on June 9, 2017. 

June 12, 2017

English department graduates Erin Geraghty and Erica Ingram will share their knowledge of the English language by serving stints in the Peace Corps.

June 1, 2017

The following poetry collections have been listed as semi-finalists for the 2017 Levis Reading Prize:

June 28, 2017

The VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Committee announced mid-June the semi-finalists for the 2017 award:

July 19, 2017

New faculty member Matteo Pangallo (Assistant Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern English Literature) has just published his first monograph, Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater (U of Pennsylvania Press).

May 19, 2017

May 12, 2017

May 2017 graduates Taneasha White and Brandon Clarkson recently created online publishing platforms to highlight their own writing and that of others.

May 4, 2017

For 20 years, VCU students have benefited from the transformative experience of studying abroad...

April 27, 2017

Associate Professor David Coogan, author of Writing Our Way Out: Memoirs from Jail and founder and co-director of Open Minds, a program that enables college students to take courses in the arts and humanities with men and women incarcerated at the Richmond City Justice Center, will speak...

April 15, 2009

David Coogan’s Prison Writing Workshop proposal was accepted as one of VCU’s 10 Exemplary Projects, and submitted for national competition for inclusion on the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll.

April 11, 2017

Four graduates of the MA Program have been accepted into PhD programs...

April 10, 2017

Associate Professor and poet Kathleen Graber has been chosen to receive an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Only eight awards are given annually to honor writers of exceptional accomplishments.

April 10, 2017

English Associate Professor David Coogan, co-Director of the Open Minds project between VCU and the Richmond City Jail, has been invited to speak about his recent book, Writing Our Way Out: Memoirs from Jail, at the Faculty Scholarship Recognition event on Thursday, April 13th at 9:15 a.m. in the Student Commons, Commonwealth Ballrooms.

April 11, 2017

This lecture, sponsored by the VCU Department of English in conjunction with The Humanities Research Center and The Office of Multicultural Student Affairs, considers the notion of “Indian Country” in relationship to its shifting borders throughout the span of US history...

March 30, 2017

English alum Patty Smith (MFA/Fiction ’01), author of The Year of Needy Girls, is interviewed in the March 30th edition of VCU News.  Patty’s debut novel examines homophobia, false accusations and community unrest.

March 21, 2017

March 8, 2017

The Division of Community Engagement celebrates its 10th anniversary by highlighting VCU faculty who advance community-engaged teaching and scholarship. English Associate Professor David Coogan is featured on the DCE’s website for his work with Open Minds, a program that pairs VCU students with Richmond City Justice Center jail residents to share their stories in writing workshops. Of Dave’s contribution to our students and the community, Dr. Montse Fuentes writes, “David Coogan is an inspiration to all of us…. He is making a difference by with great passion promoting our community engagement mission. We are incredibly proud to have him in the College…”

February 24, 2017

Associate Professor Joshua Eckhardt announces that British Virginia has published two matching editions: type and photo facsimiles of the official Virginia Company response to the 1622 assault on the James: Edward Waterhouse’s Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affaires in Virginia. Colonial historians have long assigned modern editions of part of Waterhouse’s narrative. The British Virginia editions provide the entirety of this book, and they provide it for free.

February 24, 2017

Associate Professor Susann Cokal has been named one of Style Weekly’s 2017 Women in the Arts for her “dynamic and forward-thinking” commitment to the arts in the community.

February 9, 2017

A Butterfly in the Typewriter, Cory MacLauchin’s biography of John Kennedy Toole, Pulitzer prize-winning author of A Confederacy of Dunces, will be made into a feature film starring Susan Sarandon and Nick Offerman. The movie, shot entirely in the New Orleans area, is targeted for a 2018 release. 

May 4, 2016

Professor David Golumbia has joined forces with several other colleagues to compose a scathing internationally collaborative anti-Digital Humanities essay.

December 7, 2016

Clint McCown’s latest volume of poems, Total Balance Farm, has been published by Press 53. Of the book, poet Kevin Stein writes that “Clint McCown’s meditative locale is a menagerie of hawks and hummingbirds, eagles and turtles, a wife’s idle boot and the brown recluse who’ll find uneasy home in it.

December 7, 2016

Sonja Livingston’s book, Ladies Night at the Dreamland, has been selected as a Best Book of 2016 (Nonfiction) by Kirkus Reviews.

October 31, 2016

Gretchen Comba’s new collection of short stories, The Stillness of the Picture, has been published by Kore Press.  Comba’s fiction has appeared in a number of journals including Hayden’s Ferry Review and The North American Review.

October 11, 2016

Former VCU Professor and renown poet Larry Levis is the feature of a new documentary, “A Late Style of Fire.”  VCU MFA alum Michele Poulos is director and producer of “A Late Style of Fire,” which was also co-produced by Professor Greg Donovan.

March 10, 2016

Mary Flinn, a senior and founding editor of Blackbird, was honored as one of the 2016 Women in the Arts recipients at a luncheon held at the University of Richmond’s Modlin Center for the Arts on March 10, 2016.

February 18, 2016

January 19, 2016

Recently, folks gathered at Chop Suey Books to celebrate a new collection of poetry, “Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems” which marks a posthumous return by acclaimed poet and former VCU teacher Larry Levis. 

July 10, 2015

Sandra Lim is the winner of the 2015 Levis Reading Prize awarded by the Department of English and its MFA in Creative Writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University for her poetry collection The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014).

December 19, 2014

the college of humanities and sciences has introduced a new website, vcu.academicworks.com, with information and an online application process for the over 100 scholarship opportunities we offer to currently enrolled students. the system features a searchable database of opportunities and details the requirements for each. this system will offer a more student-centric experience, streamlines our administrative and fiscal managements of scholarships, and allows us to improve stewardship of our donors who invest in our students.

November 20, 2015

Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts announces its new Fall 2015 issue, v14n2.

December 9, 2014

It is with great sadness that we report the loss of colleague Claudia Emerson, who passed away December 4th after a courageous battle with cancer.  The tremendous impact she had on the literary arts is highlighted in VCU News as well as in the department’s online literary journal Blackbird. For all of her English department friends, colleagues and students, her death is a heartbreaking loss.

November 14, 2014

English MFA alum and VCU’s Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies Assistant Professor Liz Canfield fulfills her passion for activism by participating in Sanctuary, an offshoot of the Open Minds program. Open Minds, a joint venture between VCU and the Richmond City Jail, was founded in 2010 by English Associate Professor David Coogan. Canfield began teaching in Open Minds in the fall of 2011.

October 22, 2014

English Professor David Wojahn was one of eight poets commissioned by the National Archives, in partnership with the Academy of American Poets, to write a poem inspired by any record in possession of the National Archives.

June 1, 2009

MA Alum John Cyrus finished a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science at Louisiana State University (LSU) in May and will be starting as a tenure track Liaison Librarian on the faculty at LSU Health Science Center.

May 18, 2009

May 1, 2009

Kate Bradley (MFA/Fiction) was selected as one of the fiction winners of this year’s AWP Intro Journals Project (a competition for the discovery and publication of the best new works by students currently enrolled in the programs of AWP).

April 29, 2009

MATX student Lee Bloxom has been awarded an $8,000 grant to conduct an oral history of 20th century farm life on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. The announcement comes from The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the PNC Foundation who made the award jointly.

April 27, 2009

Clint McCown’s latest collection, Dead Languages, was nominated for several significant honors, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Yale Bollingen Prize, the Poet’s Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, the Bobbitt Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

May 4, 2009

Department of English faculty member Kathy Bassard has won a VCU Center for Teaching Excellence grant to create a Faculty Learning Community for next academic year.

May 18, 2009

April 2, 2020

Like many of our colleagues, VCU English Professor Nicholas Frankel had limited experience with online learning prior to the COVID-19 crisis...