This piece is the second in a series about graduate student poets in the Department of English at Berkeley. Lindsay Choi joined the English Department as a Ph.D. student in 2018 after completing their undergraduate work in English and Philosophy at Berkeley earlier that year. They are the author of Transverse (Futurepoem Books, 2021), which was a finalist for the...
Beth Piatote joins Berkeley English in Fall 2022 as an Associate Professor. Professor Piatote is a scholar of Native American/Indigenous literature and law; a creative writer of fiction, poetry, plays, and essays; and an Indigenous language revitalization activist/healer, specializing in Nez Perce language and literature. She is the author of Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature...
This piece is the first in a series about graduate student poets in the Department of English at Berkeley. Jessica Laser joined the English Department as a Ph.D. student in Fall 2017. She is the author of Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides (Letter Machine Editions, 2019) and Planet Drill, winner of the Other Futures award and forthcoming this winter from...
The English Department is thrilled to host Harmony Holiday as the visiting Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry for the 2022-23 academic year. As Holloway Lecturer, Holiday is teaching a semester-long creative writing workshop this fall and will be offering a featured reading in the Holloway Series. A dancer, curator, archivist, and experimental filmmaker as well as a poet,...
READ MORE Harmony Holiday named 2022 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry
An interview with Colleen Lye, co-editor of After Marx Here Lindsay Choi — English graduate student and co-coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Marxist Working Group at Cal — interviews Professor Colleen Lye about After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2022), a collection of essays which she co-edited with Christopher Nealon. In the resulting interview,...
READ MORE An interview with Colleen Lye on <I>After Marx</I>
Rebecca Munson passed away on Friday, August 13th. Rebecca was a recent (2015) graduate of our PhD program, and had been working as Assistant Director for Interdisciplinary Education at Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities. The Center has published a memorial notice, https://cdh.princeton.edu/updates/2021/08/15/rebecca-munson/. A contribution from James G. Turner. After hearing the shocking news I looked through hundreds of Rebecca’s...
Classically academic jobs are few and far between. At a place like Berkeley, you have to be trained to be a professor (and actually be one) before you are in a position to be an assistant or associate dean. At some other schools, it might be a career path of its own, separately. But I believe you should understand the work of faculty from inside before you move into this level of administration. Working on the administrative side….
Don’t be afraid to commit yourself to visions that are much bigger than you could ever realize by yourself. Your sustained commitment to the idea will have the effect of bringing other people along, and they will dedicate their own skills and resources to the project. When you see gaps or problems or absences, always ask “What if…” and allow yourself to imagine a solution that will reach out to people and offer them….
I think the appropriate reason to go into administration is from a desire to make something (e.g., experiences, processes, functionality) better. I see it as a mode of service. I would encourage undergraduate women who are interested in higher education administration, to get involved early (as a volunteer, intern, or committee member) in organizations or institutions where they can both contribute their insights and gain experience….
Davis Mendez Jesse Nathan English 166 Wallace Stevens’ “The Motive of Metaphor” Wallace Stevens’ “The Motive of Metaphor” is a collection of signs, which at least for this essay is a better description of the poem. Its reading is a confluence of its reader, the text, and the poet. In this confluence, the imagination navigates the ground and...
READ MORE Student Series: An essay by English major Davis Mendez
Headnote by Professor Eric Falci, followed by a tribute written by Mitch Breitwieser and Eric Falci upon John’s retirement in 2011. Former students and colleagues have organized a virtual celebration to be held on June 16th, 2020. Details and Zoom link included below, and on our Events page. Celebration of the Life of John Bishop June 16th (Bloomsday) 10 AM...
By Lucia Salazar and Francesca Hodges Professor Namwali Serpell’s debut novel, The Old Drift (2019), demonstrates her prowess as a fiction writer. It was an immediate success: a New York Times bestseller and recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction. The Old Drift discloses Serpell’s Zambian-American perspective and the multiplicity of her environments. “It is about Zambia”, she told us,...
READ MORE The Zambian-American Perspective: an Interview with Namwali Serpell
Students Emma Campbell, Kahyun Koh, and Anya Vertanessian asked Lyn Hejinian a series of questions about her career and life in the English Department. Who or what inspired you to pursue a career in poetry? How would you describe your poetic style? LH: I think the first inspiration was my father’s typewriter. On weekdays he worked in the administration at...
By Lucia Salazar Maxine Hong Kingston, the critically acclaimed author of The Woman Warrior (1976), China Men (1980), and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), graduated from UC Berkeley with an English degree in 1962 and returned as an English department faculty member in 1990. Her work has garnered a number of high-profile awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim...
READ MORE Maxine Hong Kingston: The Spearhead of Asian American Studies and Literature
By Julia Cunningham Joan Didion, a writer who first garnered great attention and praise for her literary essays about American subcultures of the 1960s, is one of many acclaimed authors to have started their careers at Berkeley. Sprinkled among fashion articles and makeup advertisements, much of Didion’s early writing originally appeared on the pages of the “women’s magazines” of her...
READ MORE Joan Didion: A Unique Sensibility in a Time of Gender Conformity
