Jacob Donaldson’s “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” for the Ella Somerville Award in Poetry (Judge Ann Fisher-Wirth)

Vivian Lang’s “You and Henry, That One Time” for the Ella Somerville Award in Fiction (Judge Jack Pendarvis)

Kieran Lyons’s “Banyon” for the Bondurant Prize in Fiction (Judge Nic Brown)

Jessica Comola’s “Valentine” for the Bondurant Prize in Poetry (Judge Beth Spencer)

Congratulations to this year’s winners!

Education

• Ph.D., University of Connecticut (2012)
• M.A., Brown University (2008)
• B.A., Brown University (2008)

Selected Publications

• “Echoes of Britons on a Fenland Frontier in the Old English Andreas,” The Review of English Studies 61 (2010)
• “Booklet Ten of Peniarth 359: An Early Modern English Astrological Manual Encoded through Welsh Phonology,” Studia Celtica 45 (2011)
• “Antifeminist Tradition in Arthur and Gorlagon and the Quest to Understand Women,” Notes and Queries 59 (2012)
• “Apples on Willow Trees: a Metaphor for Grafting and Spiritual Succession in the Early Irish Saints’ Lives of Berach and Coemgen,” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 31 (2012)
• “The ‘Dark Welsh’ as Slaves and Slave Traders in Exeter Book Riddles 52 and 72,” forthcoming in English Studies (2013)
• Welsh Identity in Anglo-Saxon Literature, book manuscript in progress 

Education

• 1985 Ph.D., Princeton University, English
• 1980 B.A., Yale University, English

Teaching and Research Interests

• Medieval European literary and intellectual history
• criticism and theory

Recent publications

“Piers Plowman and Literary History.” In Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman. Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway, eds. Cambridge Uuniversity Press, forthcoming.

“Chaucer’s History-Effect.” In Answerable Style: Form, History, the Idea of the Literary in Late-Medieval England. Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway, eds. Ohio State University Press, 2013, 169-194.

“Eucharistic Miracle and Eucharistic Doubt.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42 (2012), 307-332.

“Preface to Fleming.” In Sacred and Profane in Chaucer and Medieval English Literature: Essays in Honour of John V. Fleming. Will Robbins and Robert Epstein, eds. University of Toronto Press, 2009, 205-20.

“Who Stole Robertson?” PMLA 124 (2009), 609-15.

“Literary History.” In Chaucer: Contemporary Appraoches. Susanna Fein and David Raybin, eds. Penn State University Press, 2009, 195-210

“Did the Middle Ages Believe in their Miracles?” Representations 103 (2008):1-29.

“Religious Dissent, Social Revolt, and ‘Ideology.’” In Christopher Dyer and Chris Wickham, eds. Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages: Essays on his Historical Themes. Past and Present Supplement 1. Oxford University Press, 2007, 205-16.

Shelf Awareness, Feb 11, 2013

Review: The Ecopoetry Anthology
The Ecopoetry Anthology by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, editors (Trinity University Press, $24.95 paperback, 9781595341464, February 12, 2013)

What drew us to the magnet of your dying?…
Voyager, chief of the pelagic world,…
Master of the whale-roads,
let the white wings of the gulls
spread out their cover.|
You have become like us,
disgraced and mortal.
These powerful lines are from Stanley Kunitz’s “The Wellfleet Whale,” one of the many poems in Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street’s rich and generous The Ecopoetry Anthology. Nature poetry has been around as long as poetry, Fisher-Wirth and Gray tell us, but, sometime around 1960, more people began to pay attention to an environment and nature in crisis–and poetry began to reflect this renewed attention.
“Poetry does not tamper with the world,” as William Carlos Williams wrote, “but moves it.” So here is an abundance of poems–praising songs, incantations, lists, elegies, rhapsodies, jeremiads–each in their very different ways bearing the power “to break through our dulled disregard, our carelessness, our despair, reawakening our sense of the vitality and beauty of nature.” All told, 320 poems by 208 poets–abundance indeed.
Part one presents poets, from Walt Whitman to Denise Levertov, who predate the environmental revolution. Next come 176 contemporaries, from A.R. Ammons to Robert Wrigley. It’s apropos that the first poem in this middle section is Ammons’s seminal piece, “Corson’s Inlet,” where he observes nature as he walks along his Jersey Shore dunes: “in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of/ primrose/ more or less dispersed.”
Fisher-Wirth and Gray have done a superb job of providing works by both well-known and lesser known poets. Alongside such luminaries as W.S. Merwin, Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver, one can discover beautiful and moving pieces by Patrick Lawler, Davis McCombs or Annie Boutelle. Some readers may be disappointed at the absence of a favorite poem, but most of the “great” nature pieces of the modern era are here, including Galway Kinnell’s overwhelming “The Bear,” Robert Bly’s moving prose poem “The Dead Seal” and Robert Hass’s mini-epic, “State of the Planet.” Hass also provides a wise introduction, noting that The Ecopoetry Anthology reveals the ways our “nature poetry developed toward an ecopoetics, toward the necessity of imagining a livable earth.” –Tom Lavoie
Shelf Talker: Here is bounty indeed–an innovative anthology drawing upon 150 years of American poetry about nature, animals and our precious environment.