Department of English:Bookshelf
Recent Works by English Faculty
Our English department faculty members are award-winning teachers and scholars who have garnered some of the top accolades at ODU and in their fields, including the University Distinguished Teaching Award, the SCHEV Outstanding Faculty Award, the Teaching with Technology Award, the International Student Advisory Board Outstanding Faculty Member Award and many more. Our students are taught by National Book Award Finalists, PEN Award winners, and New York Times Bestsellers. Even the Poet Laureate of Virginia is on our faculty!
Selected Works by Recent Alumni
Among our alumni are published novelists, two Pulitzer-Prize nominees for journalism, a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award winner, and a Yaddo Fellowship recipient. Our alumni and students have had their stories, poetry, and reviews accepted for publication in journals and papers such as The Atlanta Constitution, Kalliope, African American Review, The Virginian Pilot, North American Review, Glimmer Train and American Literary Review. They have presented papers at a number of national conferences, including the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the Popular Culture Association of the South, and American Culture Association.
Hog Wild: The Battle for Workers' Rights at the World's Largest Slaughterhouse
Lynn Waltz, ’11, is a three-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and has been a professional journalist for more than twenty-five years. She is also an assistant professor of journalism at The Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications at Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia. Hog Wild is the story of the largest win of the 21st Century, but it is also about labor, the middle class, immigration and the high cost of putting meat on the table.
WHEN MY BROTHER WAS AN AZTEC
Natalie Diaz was born and raised on the Fort Mohave Indian Reservation in Needles, California. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia for four years, she returned to ODU to complete her MFA. She has been awarded the 2007 Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry and the 2007 Tobias Wolff Fiction Prize. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon. [extracted from 2010 festival brochure]
Overturned
Lamar Giles writes novels and short stories for teens and adults. He is the author of the 2015 Edgar® Award Nominee Fake ID, the 2016 Edgar® Award Nominee Endangered, and Overturned from Scholastic Press. He is a founding member of We Need Diverse Books and resides in Virginia with his wife. Check him out online at www.lamargiles.com or follow @LRGiles on Twitter.
Wedding Song
Farideh Goldin, '02, was born in 1953 in Shiraz, Iran, to a family of dayanim, the judges and leaders of the Jewish community. Later, attending an American-style university, she was torn between her loyalty to her family, who obeyed strict social, cultural and religious mores, and her western education that promoted individualism and self-reliance. Wedding Song reveals Farideh's struggle in balancing her two worlds.
This Heavy Silence
Nicole Mazzarella, '01, is the author of This Heavy Silence. The Chicago Sun-Times said of her first novel, "Simply put, This Heavy Silence is a great read...this is a complex and layered novel about the choices we make and the relationships we build. In [Mazzarella's] writing, she traverses universal ideas and builds characters that will be familiar to a broad cross-section of people, no matter who they are and what they believe."
Water Woman
enore Hart, 2000, has published poetry, short stories, nonfiction, reviews, and illustrations in The Apalachee Quarterly, Blackwater Review, Brutarian Magazine, Chesapeake Life, Delmarva Quarterly, The Flagler Review and others. Her work has been included in the anthologies In Good Company and Turnings: Writing on Women's Transformations, and her novel Waterwoman was a Barnes and Noble "Discover" title, and an alternate selection of the Literary Guild.