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Ed Falco’s most recent books are the poetry collection, Wolf Moon Blood Moon (LSU, 2017) and the novel, Transcendent Gardening (C&R Press, 2021). Earlier books include the novels Saint John of the Five Boroughs and Wolf Point; the short story collections, Burning Man and Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha: New and Selected Stories; a collection of literary and experimental short fictions, In the Park of Culture; one of the earliest hypertext novels, A Dream with Demons; and two crime novels, The Family Corleone (based in part on pages from unproduced screenplays by Mario Puzo), and Toughs, a historical novel that revolves around the life of Irish gangster, Vince Coll. Ed’s plays include Possum Dreams, which was produced by None Too Fragile Theatre in Akron, Ohio, and had an Off Off Broadway run at Shetler Studio Theatre 54, and The Cretans, which was produced as a radio play by the Virginia Tech School of the Arts. His awards include The Robert Penn Warren Prize in Poetry from The Southern Review, The Emily Clark Balch Prize in fiction from The Virginia Quarterly Review, multiple Virginia Commission of the Arts fellowships, a Yaddo residency, and an NEA Award in fiction. You can find Ed’s personal web pages here: edfalco.us.
I am a poet, librettist, and essayist who endeavors to build a meaningful life and career informed by the insights I have gained as a woman, a person of color, an immigrant from the Philippines born under the Marcos dictatorship, and as a naturalized U.S. citizen who lived undocumented in this country for nearly two decades. I am the author of Driving without a License, winner of the Kundiman Prize, and Decade of the Brain, which is forthcoming in January 2023. My practice is largely guided by linked poems, composite novels, and concept albums I grew up listening to—projects whose individual parts work toward a much larger, unified whole. As a librettist, my commissions for the Houston Grand Opera/HGOco and Washington Master Chorale include The Art of Our Healers, What Wings They Were, “On This Muddy Water”: Voices from the Houston Ship Channel, and From My Mother’s Mother. My poems have also been adapted by the acclaimed composers Melissa Dunphy (“American DREAMers: Stories of Immigration”) and Reinaldo Moya (“DREAM Song”). I am also co-editing an anthology of poetry and poetics under contract with HarperCollins/Harper Perennial. I also co-lead Undocupoets, a national nonprofit organization that advocate for poets who are currently or who were formerly undocumented and raise awareness about the structural barriers they face in the literary community. In 2021, Undocupoets was featured in the Scholastic children’s book, In the Spirit of a Dream: 13 Stories of American Immigrants of Color.
I teach with a student-centered approach, one deeply informed by my early experiences as an academic advisor who got to know students outside of the context of the classroom, and as someone who taught creative writing in the community through organizations like Writers in the Schools and Community-Word Project. I aim to cultivate environments of dialogue, exchange, collaboration, creativity, and innovation and carry with me the following credo from Toni Morrison: “I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.’”
Evan Lavender-Smith’s first book, From Old Notebooks, a cross-genre work combining elements of fiction, nonfiction, memoir, poetry, and philosophy, was listed on “Readers’ Favorite Books from Independent Presses” at Huffington Post, “Your Favorite Poets’ Favorite Books of Poetry” at Flavorwire, and several best-of-the-year lists. His second book, Avatar, an unpunctuated monologue delivered by a character floating in outer space, was a Small Press Distribution Bestseller. Lavender-Smith’s stories and essays have been noted in Best American Nonrequired Reading and Best American Essays, adapted for stage and radio, and translated into several languages. His writing has been praised in national and international media outlets, including Bookforum, The Guardian, Harper’s, The Irish Times, The Times Literary Supplement, and Vice.
As founding editor of Noemi Press and former editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol, Lavender-Smith has published and edited writing by Sherman Alexie, Frédéric Boyer, Éric Chevillard, Helen DeWitt, Rikki Ducornet, Michael Martone, Rick Moody, Antoine Volodine, and many others. With Carmen Giménez Smith, he performed the first complete English translation of “Canto del macho anciano” [“The Old Man’s Song”], a 6,500-word poem by Pablo de Rokha, recipient of Chile’s National Literature Prize. Lavender-Smith has served as a juror for the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, the Heinz Foundation, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, and he was recently elected to the Creative Writing Studies Organization’s Board of Directors. At Virginia Tech, he serves as a member of the advisory board to the Studio 72 Living–Learning Community, as a member of the University Faculty Senate, as Co-Director of the Glossolalia Literary Festival, and as President of Phi Beta Kappa’s Mu of Virginia Chapter.
A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and New Mexico State University, Lavender-Smith lives with his two children in Blacksburg, 12.7 miles away from the gravesite of his great-great-great-great grandmother, Rosanna Caldwell, whose nephew, Addison, was the first student to enroll at Virginia Tech.
Khadijah Queen is the author of six books of innovative poetry and hybrid prose, most recently Anodyne (Tin House 2020), winner of the William Carlos Williams award from the Poetry Society of America. Her verse play Non-Sequitur (Litmus Press) won the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women’s Performance Writing, which included a full staged production at Theaterlab NYC in 2015, directed by Fiona Templeton and performed by The Relationship theater company. Individual poems and prose appear in American Poetry Review, Fence, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Poets & Writers Magazine, The Poetry Review (UK) and widely elsewhere. A zuihitsu about the pandemic, “False Dawn,” appeared in Harper’s Magazine and was selected as a Notable Essay by Best American in 2020. Ekphrastic works include a poem commissioned by the Philadelphia Art Museum in honor of Jasper Johns’ Mind/Mirror exhibition in January 2022, and portions of her fourth book, Fearful Beloved (Argos Books 2015), were written during Queen’s participation in artist Ann Hamilton’s event of a thread installation at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. In 2022, she was awarded a $50,000 Disability Futures grant from United States Artists, and in 2023 will complete a residency fellowship in Italy, awarded by the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. A Cave Canem alum, she holds a PhD in English and Literary Arts from University of Denver.
I am a novelist, poet, and creative nonfiction writer currently at work on a speculative slave narrative novel trilogy and a collection of ekphrastic poems. (The Freedom Race, the first book in the novel trilogy, will be published in 2021.) I want to explore race and racism inside a literary sci-fi genre because it allows me to break free from the confines of contemporary politics and re-envision African Diasporic myth in ways I felt unable to do inside conventional mainstream literature. My six previous books include Lady Moses, a novel, The Humming Birds, a collection of poetry, and No Right to Remain Silent: What We’ve Learned from the Tragedy at Virginia Tech, a memoir-critique.
My Jamaican and British heritage, as well as my experience working in various regions around the world (these include Sierra Leone, Arkansas, London, Massachusetts, and, of course, Virginia) have had a profound impact on my aesthetic and my craft. I enjoy working with dedicated, socially-conscious writers on their novels, short stories, poetry collections, and creative nonfiction, but I work best with those who are attuned to the demands of their chosen genre, and deeply curious about themselves, their assumptions, and the world around them.
My approach to working with student-writers is partly modeled on the collaborations I’ve been fortunate enough to have with some outstanding editors. I am fascinated by prosody in poetry and technique in fiction, which is why I encourage writers to appreciate the complexity of form and the demands of perspective. I have experience working as a guest columnist/commentator for newspapers and journals like USA Today, The Guardian and the Chronicle of Higher Education, so I am accustomed to meeting tight deadlines, collaborating with shrewd editors, exploring controversial topics, and fielding responses from demanding readers. I believe that the selection of genre is one of the most underappreciated aspects of the writing process. When I have time, I also paint with oils. In my paintings, I often find myself, once again, drawn to an exploration of slavery and the Middle Passage.
I work with ancestors, historical reckoning, and the limits of language through poetry. My books (so far) include two collections with Deep Vellum, Winter Phoenix and Anon. As a performance artist, I tend to resist documentation of live events, but here is one: in Ljubljana, the audience circled my body in interlocking rings. They sang, at my request, a song by Elvis Presley. After some time, the AV technician flashed pink and red lights on the floor. I’ve been told pairs of men tend to walk out first, usually when the screaming begins.
Conversely, in the classroom, my persona as a teacher is tightly contained. I make space for silence, empathetic conversations that fold into justice, a decolonized heart, and the somatic knowledge writers can bring to the page. I want to live and love. I want freedom for the artist against all death machines. This is the core of my pedagogical practice alongside a lineage of poetry in exile. What is this war? What blood is on our hands? We have so much to do.
I am the author of two story collections, Future Missionaries of America and Gateway to Paradise, as well as Inscriptions for Headstones, a collection of essays (each of which is crafted as an epitaph unfolding in a single sentence), and Permanent Exhibit, a collection of lyric essays. With David Shields,I am co-editor of Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux Lectures, Quasi Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts. 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. 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.
Staff
MARIE TRIMMER
Graduate Programs Coordinator
Shanks 323A
(540) 231-4659
mtrimmer@vt.edu
My name is Marie Trimmer (she, her, hers), and I am the Graduate Programs Coordinator for the English Department. My hometown is Virginia Beach, and I am a ’93 Hokie. I handle all GTA paperwork – like independent study and force add requests, plans of study, and change of committee forms. I also generate contracts, enter job appointments and I-9 documentation, as well as tuition remission. I will set up your A/V access to classrooms when you are an instructor. If you have an issue or concern, I can coordinate between other offices on campus. I am your general guru, and my office is always filled with wisdom and snacks to share.
EVE TRAGER
Technical Support
Shanks 335
(540) 231-6566
etrager@vt.edu
Eve Trager is the Tech Support Coordinator in the English department. She provides help interfacing with the IT systems and infrastructure at Virginia Tech for faculty, staff, and GTAs. She will be working remotely most of the semester, so the best way to reach her is by email: etrager@vt.edu.
SANDRA ROSS
Fiscal Technician/Travel Coordinator
Shanks 329B
(540) 231-6983
sdavis60@vt.edu
BRIDGET SZERSZYNSKI
Administrative Assistant
Shanks 323
(540) 231-6501
bridgs9@vt.edu
I work in the Main Office. Assist faculty, students and visitors. Maintain room calendar, keys, maintenance requests, copying.
Moved to Blacksburg in 2010 and starting working in the English Department in 2011. Thought it would be for six weeks and I am still here 11 years later! And loving it!
