Truth Sorting as a Personal Empathetic Commitment | Empathetic Information Literacy Essay 4 by Olivia Mann

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. […]

Investigating the Primary Catalyst of the Civil War | Empathetic Information Literacy Essay 3 by Olivia Mann

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 […]

Investigating the Reality of an Immigrant “Invasion” | Empathetic Information Literacy Essay 2 by Olivia Mann

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 […]

I Regret the Years I Believed the Lie that My Curls Were Somehow Less | A Survey on Black Hair by Kimberly Edmunds

Corrigan’s Editorial Note: Kimberly Edmunds conducted original survey research on Black hair as part of my Academic Writing & Research class (AWR 201) at the University of Tampa in Spring 2022. I am delighted to share her essay, followed by a video presentation of her findings. The photos included in this essay were gathered by […]

This World Was Not Built for Girls | A Short Film Analysis by Ganna Mahmoud

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 […]

"let the dead in" by Saida Agostini

Being Known Changes Our Relationship to Everything | A Conversation with Saida Agostini

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, […]

What Makes You a Poet Is How You Put It Back Together | A Conversation with Celia Lisset Alvarez

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 […]

What Soul Food Means to Us | A Survey of Three Generations of Family and Friends by Abbie Nock

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 […]

The Power of Street Art | A Creative Research Presentation by Jessie Goldstein

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 […]

Forms and Formal(istic) Choices in Letters to a Young Brown Girl, by Barbara Jane Reyes

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 […]

I Don’t Want to Be that Silent Friend | A Reflection on African American Literature by Gabriela M. Gonzalez

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. […]

A White Moderate Misunderstands White Supremacy

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 […]

Why Do Caucasian Americans Know So Little about People of Color? | An Essay by Tenielle Mounts-Williams

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 […]

I Want to Make White Folks Uncomfortable | A Conversation with Natalie Giarratano

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, […]

All News Is Local News | A Conversation with Marjorie Maddox

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 […]

Everything That Has Happened Around the World Is Part of Your Life | A Conversation with Emily Jungmin Yoon

I talked with Emily Jungmin Yoon (@EmilyYoon), poet, translator, and doctoral candidate in comparative literature at the University of Chicago, about her latest book, Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets—a tiny anthology of translations just out from Axis Press as part of a series on “Translating Feminisms.” Our conversation began by considering two related statements Yoon makes […]

The Divine Spark Can Be Found in the Embrace of Imperfection | A Conversation with Wendy Chin-Tanner

In this interview, James Shaw discusses with Wendy Chin-Tanner her brand-new book of poems, Anyone Will Tell You. Their conversation covers fertility and infertility, motherhood, and the struggle of two miscarriages. They also unpack how Chin-Tanner’s experience writing a graphic novel influences her poetry, the role of nature in poetry, the practicing of keeping a […]

The Last Jew in Afghanistan | A Conversation with M.E. Silverman

In this interview, Andrew Gillis asks the poet M.E. Silverman (@MESilverman_BLP and Blue Lyra Press) about his most recent book, The Floating Door, particularly regarding Silverman’s fascination with Zablon Simintov of Afghanistan, the thought process behind choices he made in his poetry, and how Jewish life in America compares to Jewish life in Afghanistan. Silverman also […]

English Majors Get Jobs

“My Passion for Literature Succumbed to Reality,” writes Bianca Vivion Brooks in an op-ed in The New York Times. While Brooks loves majoring in English—the reading, the writing, the thinking, the discussions—her family sacrificed for her to go to college and count on her to help out after graduating. She needs a decent, steady income. […]