Fred D’Aguiar
Professor
Shanks 415
231-7759
fredd@vt.edu
The first thing you do as a black poet is unzip the suit of your black
skin and walk away from it. The second thing you do as a poet is find that
suit of yours that fits you oh so well and step right back into it. That
suit paints behind your eyelids so you see it when you dream. That suit
is osmotic: it lets out sweat, breathes for you – your biggest organ – and keeps out the
elements. All history is in that skin. Poetry plays your skin like an instrument – listen,
touch, taste, look, and sniff. Dream-skin. Skin-song. Human.
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Ed Falco
Professor, Director of Creative Writing and the MFA Program
Shanks 411
231-7743
ed.falco@vt.edu
edfalco.us
As an author and a teacher, I'm interested in both print and digital writing. My most recent books are The Family Corleone (a prequel to The Godfather, based on a screenplay by Mario Puzo) and the short story collection, Burning Man. Earlier books include the novel Saint John of the Five Boroughs; the short story collection, Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha: New and Selected Stories; the novel, Wolf Point; and a collection of literary and experimental short fictions, In the Park of Culture. My interest in digital writing (which is also called new media writing, hypertext, or electronic literature) dates back to the earliest days of personal computers, and I have a novel and a poetry collection available on CD from Eastgate Systems, as well as various works available online. My most recent piece of digital writing, "Chemical Landscapes, Digital Tales," was written in collaboration with the photographer, Mary Pinto, and is included in the Electronic Literature Organization's CD/Web anthology, The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume I. I also write plays, and a recent one, a two-hander entitled Possum Dreams, was read in New York at Urban Stages, with Edie Falco (she couldn't refuse) and John Benjamin Hickey as the principals.| top |
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Nikki Giovanni 
University Distinguished Professor
Gloria D. Smith Professor of Black Studies
Shanks 403
231-9453
The recognition of Middle Passage as our porthole to prolonged space travel is
a unique way to understand both slavery and space which I explore in Quilting
the Black Eyed Pea.These two apparent opposites, our shameful past and the
possibility of water and atmosphere on a distant star, must combine to make not
just poetry but a better theory of life. My primary interest is the evolution
of Black America and the impact of that evolving upon Earth. Rhythm and Blues
was born from a fusion of gospel and jazz. Fusions continue in many other aspects
of the Black experience whether it is food, clothing, painting, movies or any
other art. We even Rock the Vote these days. Charles Darwin went in search of
The Origins of the Species. Much of his work has been used against him and the
rest of us. I am in search of Darwin by land and sea to put together my theory
of luck and happenstance. If luck and happenstance are factors, then responsibility
has to change. My primary interest is in learning something new.
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Bob Hicok
Associate Professor
Shanks 243
231-4479
hicok@vt.edu
Bob Hicok's most recent poetry collection is Words for Empty, Words for Full. His previous collection, This Clumsy Living, was published by Pitt in 2007 and was awarded the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. He is the author of Insomnia Diary (Pitt, 2004), Animal Soul (Invisible Cities Press, 2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Plus Shipping (BOA Editions, 1998), and The Legend of Light (University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), which received the 1995 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and was named a 1997 ALA Booklist Notable Book of the Year. A recipient of three Pushcart Prizes, Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, his poetry has been selected for inclusion in four volumes of Best American Poetry. He recently received the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review and the Anne Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Review. Hicok is an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech.
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Jeff Mann
Associate Professor
Shanks 210
231-7706
jemann2@vt.edu
https://filebox.vt.edu/users/jemann2
My creative work ranges among several genres. In poetry, I often focus on the
complexities of love relationships or the countryside and culture of Southern
Appalachia, though lately I have also been examining the mythologies of Northern
Europe. My creative nonfiction deals with the gay/lesbian experience, especially
in Appalachia, as well as the vagaries of aging, the legacies of family, the
many facets of eroticism, and travel in both Europe and North America. My fiction
portrays the darker depths and intensities of gay male relationships. Much of
my creative writing is informed by my eager interests in Southern literature,
gay/lesbian literature, Appalachian folk culture, and Appalachian literature.
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 Erika Meitner
Assistant Professor
Shanks 410
231-7728
Meitner@vt.edu
www.erikameitner.com
As a poet and teacher of creative writing,
I am generally obsessed with unhinging and investigating the connections
between emotion, language, and story. I am more specifically
interested in different ways of constructing narratives — straight-up,
fractured, beat-boxed, lyric, winding, and metaphorically luminous
testimony-poems. Though it is deeply un-sexy, I preach the gospel
of syntactical energy. My work tends to deal with women’s
bodies and female sexuality, the perils and pleasures of adolescence,
urban peripheries and interstitial spaces. My writing is often
informed by my interests in very contemporary American poetry of all
schools and un-schools, poetry and performance, and ethnic American
fiction. In addition to being a poet, I moonlight as an academic. I’m
currently pursuing a doctorate in Religion and Culture, focusing on
Jewish Studies, at the University of Virginia. My research interests
include Jewish and Muslim women’s literature, the Jewish-American
novel, material religion, and new ritual.
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Lucinda Roy
Professor of English and Alumni Distinguished Professor
Shanks 413
231-6146
lroy@vt.edu
www.lucindaroy.net
I am a novelist and poet, so my primary focus is creative writing. I enjoy
working with writers on their novels, short stories, and poetry collections,
and I work best with those who are profoundly curious about themselves,
about their assumptions, and about the world around them. I am fascinated
by prosody and technique, and I believe that it is necessary for writers
to appreciate the power of language, the complexity of form, and the demands
of perspective before they can write anything meaningful. I am preoccupied
with the process that is involved when one transforms experience into artistic
expression, and I try to experiment with different genres to see how one’s
subject matter is altered by the limitations and potential inherent in
a particular form.
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Matthew Vollmer 
Assistant Professor of English
Shanks 431
231-8322
vollmer@vt.edu
www.matthewvollmer.com
I am primarily a fiction writer—the author of a collection of stories titled Future Missionaries of America. As a teacher and writer, I seek to cultivate—in myself and my students—an appetite for the countless ways that human consciousness can be represented, and thus the different forms that language—and story—can take. Recently, I’ve become increasingly interested in genre: how genre dictates the shape, sound and appearance of our information; how genre defines boundaries and sets limitations. It seems to me that if we acknowledge that the rules of the game are often dictated by our genres—categories in which particular types of communication-events take place, according to whatever prescripted patterns the genre in question demands—then the experience of inhabiting a particular genre, of understanding its conventions in order to discover ways to expand it, to break it apart and make something new, can be an incredibly liberating—if not essential—exercise for writers to engage in. It is, therefore, an activity I am committed to exploring further, both in the classroom and in my own writing.
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