Through its teaching, research, service, and outreach missions, the Virginia Tech English Department promotes the study of language and literature in all its forms. Underlying our mission is the recognition that individuals and societies create and transform themselves in and through language—that language is the primary means by which all people express themselves, make sense of the world, frame questions, deepen understanding, cultivate aesthetic awareness, solve problems, and take action.
About the department Spotlight on Achievement
The Department of English celebrates diversity in all aspects of community and work and recognizes that strength and excellence depend on diversity.
The National Writing Project has approved a grant to establish the Blue Ridge Writing Project. The first class of participants will meet in a summer 2009 Institute on campus. For more information, contact Aileen Murphy
Images by Richard Mallory Allnutt (c) 2007
Events
Visiting Writers and Scholars: Schedule
News
2009 Undergraduate Conference: "The Word and the World." View pictures here.
James Dubinsky has assumed the position of President of the Association for Business Communication.
Matthew Vollmer has published his first collection of short stories, Future Missionaries of America.
Kathleen Cooperstein has received the CLAHS Outstanding Senior Award.
Nikki Giovanni has won a 2009 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work–Poetry, for Hip Hop Speaks to Children. This is her 5th Image Award.
Diana George has published “Holy Cards/Immaginettes: The Extraordinary Literacy of Vernacular Religion ” (with Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori) in College Composition and Communication (60:2, December 2008: 250-284).
Diana George's article, “From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing,” has been anthologized in the new Norton Book of Composition Studies, ed. Susan Miller (W.W. Norton & Co., 2009, pp. 1429-1449).
Jim Dubinsky has won a 2009 Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Award from CEUT.
Peter Graham has won a 2009 Certificate of Teaching Excellence from CLAHS.
Christine Kiebuzinska has published “Postmemory in Austrian Post-Holocaust Literature” in Trajectories of Memory: Intergenerational Representations of the Holocaust in History and the Arts, Cambridge Scholars, 2008.
Nikki Giovanni has received an American Book Award for The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998 (HarperCollins 2003, 2007).
Ed Falco's "Meditation on Loss" has won The Southern Review's Robert Penn Warren Prize for Poetry (awarded annually for "the best work to appear in our pages").
Bob Hicok has been awarded a 2009 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been selected for The Best American Poetry 2009, The Best American Poetry 2008, and The Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the Small Presses.