In the video below, Anna Cotton sits down with Marjorie Maddox to talk about her recent book Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (Shanti Arts, 2022), an ekphrastic collection of poems and photographs created in collaboration with Karen Elias. Maddox wrote the poems; Elias took the photographs. The book pairs a total of sixteen images with […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: Olivia Kelly wrote this essay for a class I taught called Writing & Inquiry at the University of Tampa in fall of 2022. I’m delighted to share it with you. One day during my sophomore year of high school, I went to the nurse during lunch because I threw up. She asked […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: Brianna Moore wrote this essay in my Reading Globally & Locally course at the University of Tampa. I found it to be an excellent example of how deep reading transcends books and articles and applies to other sorts of texts, including music and lyrics. One of the most meaningful albums I’ve listened […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: Laycie Edwards wrote the following essay in my first-year writing and reading course at the University of Tampa. I was impressed by the work and am happy to share it with you. The short film, Reflexion (2012), depicts women’s struggles with self-esteem and their ideas of beauty by following a main character, […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: I wrote the following essay for students in a literature course I taught in which “autocritography” was a primary way that I asked students to engage with the course texts. I am currently writing a separate account of this approach and reflection on the way I implemented it, that I hope to […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: I designed and taught a first-year writing course on the theme of Fake News. I asked students to write four essays. The first grounded the course in an exploration of what truth is, why it matters, how to sort it out, and how to avoid being duped by those who would distort it. […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: I designed and taught a first-year writing course on the theme of Fake News. I asked students to write four essays. The first grounded the course in an exploration of what truth is, why it matters, how to sort it out, and how to avoid being duped by those who would distort […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: I designed and taught a first-year writing course on the theme of Fake News. I asked students to write four essays. The first grounded the course in an exploration of what truth is, why it matters, how to sort it out, and how to avoid being duped by those who would distort […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: I designed and taught a first-year writing course on the theme of Fake News. I asked students to write four essays. The first grounded the course in an exploration of what truth is, why it matters, how to sort it out, and how to avoid being duped by those who would distort […]
The situation in the poem “Talking with the Sun” by Joy Harjo is simple enough: Harjo, a Native American woman poet, feels a close kinship with the sun. She is in New York on the fourth day after the birth of her fourth granddaughter. Traditionally, this is the day the child would be presented to […]
In the spring of 2023, Grace McGahan took my Writing & Inquiry class at the University of Tampa. Like many students, she struggled on her first attempt to write an analysis essay. The assignment asked her to take a cultural text, pose an interpretive problem about it, and then, through a careful examination of textual […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: Ganna Mahmoud wrote this analysis of a short film in my Writing & Inquiry course (AWR 101) at the University of Tampa in Spring 2023. I am delighted to share it here on account of how well she conducts academic analysis in such an engaging and human “voice.” We often hear about […]
“This was the first book I have read that I wanted to talk about,” writes Jacob Perry.
In the video below, you can watch my recent conversation with Saida Agostini, poet and President of Funders for LGBTQ Issues, about her new book, let the dead in (Alan Squire, 2022). It is a book deeply rooted in Black Queer female Guyanese American experiences, which, in this instance, translates into poems of magic, family, […]
Editorial Note: Isabella Sanchez interviewed Celia Lisset Alvarez for my Poetry Writing II course at The University of Tampa in Spring 2021. I find their conversation incredibly engaging and meaningful, and I’m grateful for them allowing me to share it here. Isa wrote the following introduction. Cuban American scholar and poet Celia Lisset Alvarez is […]
One of the books that helped me the most when I was a student was Joseph Harris’s Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts (Utah State UP, now in the second edition). On the surface, the book lays out practical moves for working with sources in academic writing, moves like “forwarding,” “countering,” “remixing,” and so […]
Laughter echoing through the house, delicious aromas circulating the air, male sports comments shouted at the tv, the pitter-patter of children’s feet running to sneak into the kitchen, clanging of pots and pans, and the ding of an oven are all included in the first few minutes of the movie Soul Food. All of this […]
Do you want to make a million dollars this year? Are you tired of working for minimum wage? Do you want to escape the 9 to 5? What if I told you all of this is possible, and I’m going to teach you how to make this a reality for yourself . . . Enticing […]
Editor’s Note: In the fall 2020 semester, during the pandemic, Jessie Goldstein conducted a survey about her fellow students’ experiences and views of street art for a research essay in my Writing and Research class at the University of Tampa. For a follow-up assignment re-mediating the research (or putting it into a new medium) to […]
Editorial Note: In the Fall 2020 semester, Barbara Jane Reyes visited (by zoom) my class on Poetic Forms at the University of Tampa to talk about her latest book of poems, Letters to a Young Brown Girl—which, I believe, we were the first class ever to read. After our class conversation, Reyes generously sent me […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: Gabriela M. Gonzalez took my African American Literature course in the spring of 2020, the semester interrupted by the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. I so appreciated her final reflection about the course and what she learned that I wanted to share. Reading African American literature can be both gruesome and inspiring. […]
“Those are the heaviest songs and they / Have to be pried from the earth with shovels of grief.” I know those songs. I know a life of pain, and grief, and suffering. I know what it’s like to sing a song for death when the rest of the world sings songs of falling-in-love. I […]
We read Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli in my World Literature course in the spring of 2019. This piercing little book narrates her experience volunteering to translate for lawyers who are volunteering to help process asylum applications for child refugees from Central America who have arrived unaccompanied in […]
When the scholar James Chase Sanchez recently wrote on social media, “White supremacy will destroy us,” a white man I will call Chad responded with a well-intended paragraph. His comment is so dense with common misunderstandings of white supremacy that I find it instructive to unpack line by line. The full comment reads: Nah…theres way […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: Tenielle Mounts-Williams wrote this essay in my English Composition I course at Southeastern University in spring 2019. I found her writing moving, her message pressing, and her drawing striking. I am delighted to share her work with you. Don’t Touch, I’m Not Yours Imagine me washing my hair to start the day […]
In a July newsletter just posted to his website, Dr. James Dobson, one of the leading evangelical Christian voices in the United States, narrates his visit to one of the immigrant detention centers along the southern border, where the US Customs and Border Protection holds refugees who have fled from Central America and elsewhere to […]
In this interview, Rilee Oien talks with the poet Natalie Giarratano about Big Thicket Blues. Giarratano, who won the 2013 Liam Rector First Book Prize in Poetry, Leaving Clean, lives in Colorado with her partner, daughter, and dog. This conversation covers a number of topics, from specific poems in the book, to the poet’s childhood in Texas, […]
In this interview, Ireland Dempster talks with Marjorie Maddox about Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation, a captivating collection of poems exploring the human body’s physical, spiritual, and mental aspects. Describing her father’s unsuccessful heart transplant during the blizzard of 1993, Maddox walks the reader through her experience with losing her father and her journey of healing, often through surreal descriptions […]
My friend the poet Devon Balwit, in stepping away from social media, invited me to correspond by handwritten letters. Although I have written about how valuable such an act can be, I find it difficult to make time to practice it regularly, which probably makes it all the more important. Indeed, I have been edified […]
Corrigan Literary Review 