Faculty

"Because the news of the day distracts me, my recent work is concerned with the current events that ask my writing to speak out of and about this new century of ours. There, where accumulation relies both on a kind of lyricism as well as on devastation, where things and ideas stack up in expected places -- a corner, a flat surface -- and in unexpected ones, amidst objects and ruin, both private and public, my work finds its focus. I want writing to exist in response to the world in which it was built and to be part of that world. I am concerned with questions of voice, what is shaped by region and by landscape, by faith and faithlessness."

"For a number of years my energies have been engaged with Twentieth Century American, British, and World Literature-including poetry, fiction, and drama-but more recently, I have been drawn to the multidisciplinary dynamics of creativity as an aspect of both cultural and natural environments. A term that best describes this focus, perhaps, is 'bio-formalism,' with its suggestion that cultural artifacts, such as paintings, plays, and poems or choreography and compositions, are significantly shaped by, derived from, and dependent upon our individual biographies, our personal and commonly shared biology, and our place as creatures of consciousness within the larger and evolving biotic system. As a practical matter, this means that young writers in my classes are continually encouraged to explore the artistic and natural world around them as a way of discovering and articulating the intricacies of selfhood."

"I have most recently co-edited a collection of essays on the 19th-Century American Writer Elizabeth Stoddard. I am currently writing a series of non-fiction essays."

"I often think of clay hills, d'Adamo walking backwards, or riding his wagon full of seedlings, reciting proverbs and tales to those doing the planting, such as my father and grandfather. Come on boys, know the one about Cilacchiatt'-who tied chickens to his belt? End of the row and I'll tell you how he fared-jumping from a fifth floor window. Is it too much to ask of a poem that it sustain us, or our curiosity at least, to the end of the 'row'? Is it too much to ask for an instant of faith in Cilacchiatt's power to fly? In reading, writing, and teaching it strikes me as utterly indispensable."

"I am fascinated by narrative and the competing explanations of how it might work. My current research is on the ways film tells stories, in ways both surprisingly similar to and different from the way a novel might. Specifically, I work on the implications of point of view and reliability on theories of narrative across media."

"I'm currently working on a manuscript of poems entitled Mother Lode, about copper mining in Arizona. I'm also working on superstition in nineteenth-century British Romanticism, a project that has led me to look at the tragic dramas of William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley."

"I currently have three manuscripts in progress: a novel in the form of linked short stories, a young adult novel set in a fictional town called Twilight, Indiana, and a series of texts comprised of my feedback-marginalia, imagistic thoughts, end notes, etc.-to works written by students and professional writers. I began writing stories mostly because the works of other writers moved me-and because I wanted to be able to similarly move some potential reader who might find something I'd written in her hands. I am drawn to image and syntax and story, to the inexplicable thing that happens when our brains begin to negotiate and make sense of the language of others."

"I'm writing a memoir which has me thinking about the stories that our lives write. Memoir crams the writer into close proximity with their own experience, but the act of writing forces a distance that helps makes sense of it all. Maybe. Sometimes I'm not so sure. What draws me to memoir is the brazen honesty. Do I have the fortitude for it? Fiction allows a masquerade. A respite. Memoir shoves the writer under the lights where it gets hot and can get to feeling desolate, but that's where faith in the process must kick in to carry the writer back to safety."

"Good writing, on page, stage or screen, has provoked, consoled, delighted, moved and inspired me all my life, so creating it -- or helping someone else do so -- is the best way I can think of to justify myself."

"I received a B.A. from Knox and an M.F.A. from Texas State University. I recently moved to Galesburg from Austin, Texas, where I was an editor for the academic publisher PRO-ED. Previously, I lived in New York City, where I was an editor at Oxford University Press. Recent creative work has appeared in nthword and Front Porch. I am currently working on a book-length prose poem and a historical novel about a silver miner's wife who lived in Colorado in the late 1800s."

"My teaching interests include medieval and early modern literature, early women writers, gender and sexuality, and queer literature. My current research focuses on representations of physical size in early modern literature, with particular emphasis on how categories of largeness and smallness produce and drive eroticism in literary texts."

"I'm very interested in the nature of literary experience, which is affective as well as interpretative. What is this experience like? Why do we value it so highly? The heavy emphasis we place on interpretation has pushed questions about the affective dimension of literary experience to the periphery of literary studies. I'd like to nudge them a little closer to the center."

"My recent work focuses above all on the translation of contemporary drama, mostly from German, also from French. My translation of Swiss playwright Lukas Bärfuss' The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents has been produced in London and New York, and in 2011 I received grants from PEN and from the Howard Foundation to translate several more plays by Bärfuss. Early in 2014, Red Tape Theatre in Chicago will premiere my translation of hamlet is dead. no gravity by the Austrian writer Ewald Palmetshofer. Other playwrights whose work I've translated include Rebekka Kricheldorf, whose Rosa and Blanca I directed at Knox in 2008. Meanwhile, I continue to pursue research as a theatre historian, particularly in the area addressed by my 2003 book - the composition and behavior of theatre audiences."

"The goal of much recent scholarship on Puerto Rican national identity has been to clarify the ideological underpinnings of nationalist discourses. My aim is to further interrogate nationalism by addressing its silences. The many voices who imagined the nation generally assumed a Creole "brotherhood" as the true forgers of national and cultural identity. In spite of its anti-colonial impulse, Creole cultural nationalism did not welcome women or Afro-Puerto Ricans in the national brotherhood."