Alumni News

Photo by Kristen Taylor

Sandra Beasley (BA, Area Program in Poetry Writing, 2002) whose award-winning book, Theories of Falling, selected by Marie Howe as the winner of the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize, has just been published, has also been named a 2008 winner of the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award for the DC area. In October, Poets & Writers will host a reading for Sandra in New York (in addition to a week’s worth of meetings with publishers and editors). For further information about Sandra’s reading schedule, visit her website: www.sandrabeasley.com

Paul Andrew Baker (MFA, fiction, 1999) died on March 19, 2008. After leaving Charlottesville, Paul attended the University of Chicago, receiving an MA in 2005 in Business Administration; he was living and working in Arlington, Virginia at the time of his death. Anyone wishing to contribute e-mails, pictures and comments for a book being compiled in Paul’s memory, to be presented to his family, may send them to Marc Archambeau at .

R. Bruce Bickley, Jr. (BA in English, College 1964) earned his Master’s (1965) and Ph.D. (1969) at Duke and has been teaching at another ACC companion-school, Florida State University, since 1969. He has published The Method of Melville’s Short Fiction (Duke P 1975), Joel Chandler Harris: A Biography and Critical Study (U Georgia P and other editions, 1978-2008), three additional books on the southern local colorist and trickster-tale gatherer, and numerous book chapters and articles on southern writers and folklore. He has also published two dozen essays in The Companion to Southern Literature (LSU P 2002), The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore (Greenwood P 2005), and Southern Writers: A New Biographical Dictionary (LSU P 2006). The Bickleys have four children. Passing along some family traditions, Bruce and his son John, a doctoral student in humanities and film at FSU, edited for the Penguin Classics series Harris's Nights with Uncle Remus (2003). Bruce also served for ten years as Associate Dean and Interim Dean of FSU’s College of Arts and Sciences and as Director of the University Honors Program for five years. In addition, he conducts professional writing workshops for state agencies and teaches an editing course each term for English’s new Graduate Certificate in Publishing and Editing. Bruce’s wife Karen (BA in English, Duke 1965; MA in English, U Penn, 1966) is Assistant Director of Academic and Professional Program Services for online and continuing education courses at FSU. 

Will Boast (MFA, fiction, 2007) and Peter Kline (MFA, poetry, 2006) have been awarded Stegner Fellowships at Stanford University. The Stegner Fellowship is a two-year creative writing fellowship; ten are awarded each year, five in fiction and five in poetry.

Kyle Dargan (BA, Area Program in Poetry Writing, 2002) has accepted a tenure-track job teaching creative writing as an Assistant Professor at American University. His newest book, BOUQUET OF HUNGERS, appeared from the University of Georgia Press last fall.

David Francis (BA, Area Program in Poetry Writing, 2004), recently went to New York to read as one of the runners-up of the prestigious Drenka Willen Prize for Poetry in Translation, donated by Harcourt Publishers. David, who received his MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and is currently in the U.Va. PhD program in Spanish, read from his Spanish translations of the poet Jose Asuncion Silva.

Jennifer Gillespie (BA English Languages and Literature, 2002) is associate editor of Ladybug Magazine, the literary magazine for young children, part of the Cricket Magazine Group in Chicago, IL. She continues to write poetry, a journey which began in Debra Nystrom’s class during her first year at U.Va., and has work forthcoming in Meridian, Borderlands, and Gargoyle magazines. She also taught a course “Indirection for the Poet” at the Newberry Library in Chicago this past fall.

Andrew Leahey (BA, English 2005) is an Assistant Editor at the All Music Guide, a web-based music database that provides editorial information for such clients as AOL, Billboard, MTV, and iTunes. He has conducted interviews with John Mayer, Herbie Hancock, Snow Patrol, and the Drive-By Truckers, although his lifelong dream of interviewing Bono has yet to be fully realized.

Bob Slentz-Kesler (B.A., English 1990) has self-published his novel Sylvia, Rachel, Meredith, Anna, set partly at the “fictional” Monroe Hill College.

Chloe Wigston Smith (PhD, 2007), received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to study at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware in the spring of 2009. She also received a short term fellowship from the Lewis Walpole Library in Connecticut.

Rivka Swenson presented a paper at the Modern Language Association meeting in December 2007 on aesthetic and political ambivalence in early 19th-century Scottish literature, and she presented a paper at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual meeting in spring 2008 on the limits of female homosocial discourse in Charlotte Lennox. By invitation, she also gave the inaugural lecture in the The Emerging New Scholars Series at Virginia Tech (“Nation, Narration, and Innovation in Brand-New Britain”). An essay on narratorial transvestism in Susanna Centlivre’s dramatic prologues and her play A Bold Stroke for a Wife appeared in the winter 2007 issue of The Journal of Narrative Theory (“‘A Soldier is Her Darling Character’: Susanna Centlivre, Desire, Difference, and Disguise”). Another essay, “Looking at Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela: Optics, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Gaze,” is forthcoming in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. In the fall, she begins a year-long postdoctoral fellowship at Emory University’s Fox Center for the Humanities.