This is the last newsletter you will be receiving from me, because as of July 1, I will be stepping down as department chair while remaining a member of the department’s faculty. I am delighted to announce that Dennis Denisoff, McFarlin Chair of Literature and Film, has agreed to be our next department chair. Professor Denisoff joined The University of Tulsa faculty in 2016, moving here from Ryerson University in Toronto. He is an internationally renowned scholar of Victorian literature, with an emphasis on areas including environmental humanities and gender, sexuality, and queer studies, being the author of six books and editor or co-editor of nine others. In addition to his scholarly accomplishments, Denisoff is also a published poet and novelist, a generous colleague, and a dedicated teacher, who served the department as our director of graduate studies from 2020 to 2022. We are lucky to have him as a member of our faculty, and we will be even more fortunate to have him lead the department.
English & Creative Writing is one of the most complex departments at TU, housing two graduate programs, the University Writing Program, two scholarly journals, and a two-track major. It is also home to a vibrant community of dedicated, brilliant faculty and highly engaged, creative students. Even as I look forward to handing over the responsibilities of chairing, I feel honored to have held this position for the past three and a half years. I benefited greatly from succeeding Professor Lars Engle, reaping the rewards of his years of expert stewardship and going to him often for advice. I also could not have done this job without the partnership of Professor Sara Beam as our writing program director and Professor Jeff Drouin as our most recent director of graduate studies. I look forward to supporting all three of them next year from my position among the department’s faculty.
Welcoming Newcomers
I have exciting news to convey regarding our cohort of instructors for next year. First, President Brad Carson has renewed his support for the initiative we launched this year of hiring four Tulsa Artist Fellows to teach for us as adjunct instructors. We are in the midst of hiring, or rehiring, an immensely talented, dedicated cohort from the Tulsa Artist Fellowship for next year.
Second, I am very happy to share the news that one of the Tulsa Artist Fellows who taught for us last year, Quraysh Ali Lansana, will be joining us for the next academic year as Visiting Associate Professor. Lansana continues an esteemed career as an author, scholar, teacher, and broadcast journalist. In addition to authoring 12 books of poetry or fiction and editing or coediting nine collections of nonfiction, he is the executive producer of KOSU/NPR’s Focus: Black Oklahoma Monthly program, an NAACP Image Award winner, and he received an Emmy Award in 2022 for his roles as host and consultant for the OETA/PBS documentary film Tulsa Race Massacre: 100 Years Later.
Third, I am delighted to announce that in January, Jennifer Croft and Boris Dralyuk began their three-year appointments as TU Presidential Professors housed in English & Creative Writing. This brief epistle cannot do justice to their many accomplishments, so I will note just a few. Dralyuk was, until recently, the executive editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and this year he was awarded the National Book Critics Circle’s Gregg Barrios Prize for his translation of Grey Bees by Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov. He has translated many other books by Ukrainian and Russian authors. His own book of poetry, My Hollywood and Other Poems, was published last year by Paul Dry Books. Croft, who is an alumna of our own department (BA ’01), is the author of works including Homesick: A Memoir (2022), which won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and has just been shortlisted for the James Tait Black prize in fiction. Her forthcoming Amadou: A Novel was supported by a Guggenheim fellowship. She has translated many works from Polish, Ukrainian, and Argentine Spanish, including Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, for which she received the Man Booker International Prize.
Lansana, Dralyuk, and Croft have already enriched our department immensely, and I am so grateful for the dedication and generosity they bring to the classroom, providing incomparable opportunities for our students. I look forward to working with all of them, along with our Tulsa Artist Fellow instructors, this fall.
Spring 2023 Newsletter
This sixth issue of our newsletter showcases our graduate students’ scholarly and organizational achievements in their most recent symposium, and it describes a new fellowship opportunity for our graduate students at The University of Tulsa’s Helmerich Center for American Research. It features a newly minted graduate of our bachelor’s degree program who returned to school after more than two decades and in the wake of several personal hardships, and it chats with Jana Gowan (BA ’03) about her career in library science and her most welcome return to TU. My thanks to our recent graduate Cara Grant, who conducted the interview with Rhonda Still, and to master’s student Danika Bryant, who wrote the article about the graduate student symposium. We hope you enjoy these articles.
Finding Continuity Amidst Change
It seems reasonable to conclude that a prevailing motif of my term as department chair has been change. Since I started in this position in January 2020, the department has (by my count) reported to three deans or interim deans of the Kendall College of Arts & Sciences, three deans or interim deans of the Graduate School, five provosts or interim provosts, and three presidents or interim presidents. Two of our faculty moved to administrative positions during this time, and we welcomed a new administrator, Provost George Justice, as a member of our faculty. Amidst austerity measures for support staff, the department has had three assistants and learned to share those assistants’ time with other departments. It also has seen the foundation of a new Honors College along with a department-level restructuring of the remaining undergraduate colleges, and it is now in the midst of planning a relocation to another building on campus, Chapman Hall. All this has occurred while the world endured the emergency phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, the faculty came together to initiate yet another change: a revision to our major and a renaming of the department to include creative writing.
One paradox, though, is that the department itself has remained remarkably stable. We have approximately the same number of majors that we did five years ago; we have not seen faculty departures from the university; and, in spite of pandemic-era shifts to online and then back to in-person teaching, our labors and intellectual passions remain largely the same. I think this continuity is emblematic of the work we do. The study and writing of literature, along with the other humanities and fine arts, entail a simultaneous engagement with past and future, creating or noting what is new, while also understanding and valuing what is old. This Janus-like gaze grants powers of both creativity and judgment, powers that are needed for our world’s present and future.
In contemplating the purpose of our field, I think often of a line from Ursula LeGuin in her 2014 speech accepting the National Book Award Foundation Medal: “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we can live now … We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.” As LeGuin describes it, some writers can envision and call us to a larger reality, a better future, but that power is embedded in the capacity to remember. It is therefore not such a surprise to me that the Department of English & Creative Writing has shown both constancy and steady growth during these past four years. I am similarly unsurprised, if always pleased, to see how our alumni flourish in so many endeavors. Just this past semester, I enjoyed a lunch and walk around campus with visiting alumna Jennifer Ashbaugh (BA ’04) while hearing about her work as a manager of cause marketing and sponsorship for the Susan G. Komen Foundation. I emailed with Albert Richardson (BA ’72) about his career in computer software and his reflections on artificial intelligence. I congratulated Lexie Tafoya (BA ’22) on landing her first job after graduation as a digital content producer for KTUL-TV in Tulsa, and I chatted with Chris Lierly (BA ’20) about his work as a federal meals program coordinator for the Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma. These are only a few of the many alumni I’ve had the pleasure of talking to recently, but the remarkable range of their occupations says much about where our literary studies lead us. One clear answer is: everywhere. That variety is possible, I would argue, because of our passion for the potential that words offer for not just world-describing, but world-making.
I have never met a student of literature who chose their course of study out of a desire to be a department chair. It is not the goal that drives us through the gauntlet of graduate school, let alone the tenure track. It is, however, a form of labor that underpins so many aspects of a department’s research, writing, and teaching – that is, the passions that drew us here in the first place. Just as I will be glad to have a little more time soon to write and teach, while I also continue in a recently acquired role of overseeing the university’s Tulsa Undergraduate Research Challenge, I am happy to have had the chance to serve as department chair, and to have done so with such supportive administrators, staff, colleagues, and students. Most of all, profuse thanks to our alumni, who in their emails, letters, and occasional visits have reminded me, over and over, of the value of what we do. Thank you for affirming our sense of purpose and for enlarging this department’s community well beyond the boundaries of Zink Hall.