Alumni news

Photo by Kristen Taylor

Lauren Rooker Cardwell, who graduated from the College in 2002 after working in the Department’s Area Program in Poetry Writing, has been involved in coordinating the arts programming at Magdalene, a recovery community for women with a criminal history of drug addiction and prostitution in Nashville. She has also published work in the past year in the National Literary Review (www.nationalliteraryreview.org), as part of an issue which also features work by Alfred Stieglitz and John Updike, as well as in the Cider Press Review (www.ciderpressreview.com).

The long-awaited second book of poetry, Bouquet of Hungers by Karl Dargen, who also graduated from the College in 2002 after working in the Area Program in Poetry Writing, has now officially been published by University of Georgia Press. According to Kevin Young, “In his follow-up to his welcome debut, The Listening, Kyle G. Dargan goes even further, venturing both literally and metaphorically into the heart of America. Urgent, musically fierce, and poetically unique, Bouquet of Hungers heralds a fresh voice in American writing, as varied and vibrant as the country Dargan inhabits, critiques, and makes his own.”

Bill Fallon (1981) writes: “Loved the newsletter. I kept up with writing after I graduated in 1981. (It sticks in my craw to write “was graduated,” which I believe is proper English.) I currently edit a couple of national trade magazines. My novel Cruel Town has been out a few years and is still available at AMAZON, ExLibris and other online sellers.” 

Richard Foerster (MA English 1972) has a new book of poetry out — his fifth — called The Burning of Troy (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2006). A former editor of Chelsea, he currently edits Chautauqua Literary Journal. While at U.Va., he studied creative writing with Alan Williamson and Peter Taylor.

Susan Tyler Hitchcock’s (PhD 1978) — Frankenstein: A Cultural History has just been published by W. W. Norton. Publisher’s Weekly writes: “Literary historian Hitchcock (Mad Mary Lamb: Lunacy and Murder in Literary London) leads readers on a guided tour of Frankenstein appearances in this colorful and consistently entertaining narrative. The history begins, appropriately, with the monster’s unlikely creation by Mary Shelley as a result of a ghost story challenge (also taken up by John William Polidori, whose tale of a vampire would later inspire Bram Stoker). Hitchcock then lays bare the publishing world of the 19th century, a veritable Wild West of unauthorized stage adaptations, parodies and continuations in which Frankenstein thrived. James Whale’s Karloff classic gets its due, as do the disturbing and innovative 1910 Edison Company production and the 1952 live television broadcast starring a drunk Lon Chaney Jr. Running throughout the book is the parallel story of the invocation of Frankenstein in the public discourse as a metaphor for subjects ranging from the Crimean war to genetically modified organisms. While some Frankenstein dilettantes might find the narrow focus of the book somewhat tedious, there are enough strange and delightful anecdotes to keep most readers engaged.”

Edward A Mullen (College, 1999) writes “I graduated from Virginia with an English degree in 1999 and went to work for soon to be Governor Mark Warner as a political aide. I stayed on with Warner through June of 2005 when I left the administration to get married and return to law school. I’ve just completed the first semester of my second year at UVa law school — it is wonderful to be back in Charlottesville.”

Ravi Shankar (College, 1996) poet in residence at Central Connecticut State University, has just co-edited and published Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East and Beyond, featuring over 400 poets from 55 countries writing in 40 different languages: It is available at Amazon.

“This extraordinary, library-in-one-volume: what a resource! Those to whom poetry is essential as the supreme use of language will find the work of many poets they have never before come to, and those readers who have limited themselves to prose have the opportunity to discover how the poet outreaches everything prose can illuminate in who and what we are, no matter where, on the map. Nine thematic groupings of the work bring us wonderfully, almost perilously close to ultimate experience in childhood, love, war, exile, the inextricable relations between politics and the personal, the tragic and the ironic, the wisdom in sorrow and humor, that only the most intense imagination can plumb. That of the poet. The realm of imagination is one. This anthology gives entry to its vast expression in the Middle East and Asia, including the changing sensibilities of poets in the ever-growing world of immigration. Assembled here not the Tower of Babel, but the astonishment and subtlety inherent in many languages and their experimental modes to expand the power of words. The introductions to each section offer perceptions engagingly, against which to place one’s own readings. The editors have boldly envisaged and compiled a beautiful achievement for world literature.” 
-Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Laureate

Stefan Sittig (College 1994, English/Drama double major) is a dance choreographer, fight director, actor, singer, and dancer in the Washington, D.C. area. His choreography and fight direction has appeared Off-Broadway, internationally in Canada and Uruguay and for several regional theatres in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. In the D.C. area, he has choreographed productions for The Kennedy Center, Studio Theatre, Metro Stage, Adventure Theatre, American Century Theatre and Open Circle Theatre, where the recent production of Jesus Christ Superstar that he choreographed and staged fights for, received 4 Helen Hayes Award nominations, including Outstanding Resident Musical. As an actor he has performed at Signature Theatre, Olney Theatre Center, The Studio Theatre, The Kennedy Center, Theatre Virginia, The Barksdale Theatre, Theatre IV, Heritage Repertory Theatre and Actor’s Theatre of Washington. He has used the skills he developed as an English major at U.Va. for writing several articles on Theatre and Movement/Choreography that have been published in several theatre journals, including The Fight Master, The Journal of the Society of American Fight Directors, The ATME (Association of Theatre Movement Educators) Journal and on FightingArts.com. He teaches Movement at The National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts in Georgetown and Acting I, II and Introduction to Theatre at the University of Maryland University College. For more information check out www.stefansittig.com

William Teale (BA, 1969), professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, received a grant of $2.7 million from the U.S. Department of Education to implement “Charting a Course to Literacy,” an Early Reading First project, in three inner city charter schools in Chicago. The work focuses on developing model classrooms of excellence to promote early reading and writing development among preschoolers. She notes “Thus, literature for four-year-olds is as much a part of the English major as is Shakespeare.”

We welcome news from our Department’s graduates. If you have news you would like to share, write to and we’ll include it in the next issue of our newsletter, which we will be issuing in spring 2008.