Greetings from Department of English!

Greetings from the Department of English!

Dear Friends of the English Department, 

Welcome to Out of Iowa 2025! Our community of writers and readers and teachers and scholars is thriving, and we’re overjoyed to share our achievements with you. Our department is in good shape, as we continue to welcome new members and offer heartfelt farewells to those who have departed. And along the way we celebrate our remarkable students, faculty, and alumni.

I am particularly proud to welcome screenwriter, memoirist, translator, and novelist Zara Chowdhary; scholar of 19^th and 20^th c. Anglophone literature Cherrie Kwok; recent Iowa PhD recipients Justin Cosner and PJ Zaborowski; and creative writer and translator Julia Conrad (back to!) Iowa. These hires mark the continuing cross fertilization of critical and creative writing in our department, as well as our first forays into hiring on the Instructional Track. I have ensured our ITF hires that we are committed to equal treatment across tracks and are welcoming them into our community as fully participating members. All our faculty are committed to both writing and teaching writing and we respect and support each other in these endeavors. Below you will find bios for all these recent hires. 

This year’s newsletter also spotlights some of our more innovative and exciting undergraduate course offerings. We have tried to present a representative selection, from a literary history course on Norse Eddas to a creative writing course on science fiction to one of our publishing track courses on editorial practice. As you can see, our course offerings stretch across a range of creative and critical endeavor, and our students are enthusiastically engaged in the breadth of material we share with them.

This year we are also spotlighting three of our graduate students, whose work also exhibits great variety and creativity.  I’m especially proud of the work some of them are doing in translation studies, and we continue to work on formalizing a new PhD track in literary translation. We are also in the second year of our U2G program, which enables our most promising undergraduate majors to earn an MA in English along with their BA. In the coming years, we will be reforming our PhD program, accommodating more creative options and adapting our offerings to the current state of the market. 

Chairing this remarkably vibrant department is an honor and a pleasure that I am proud to share with you. I am always eager to meet with and hear from the many alumni and friends who receive this newsletter. Our students, both undergraduate and graduate, are eager to learn more about what they can do in the world with their English degrees, and, as always, we welcome any and all opportunities for internships, mentoring, or just making connections. Please feel free to reach out to me at any time for further information.

Finally, thanks to NWP grad Caelainn Barr, who composed this entire issue, and to our Graduate Program Academic Coordinator Tara Atkinson, for her assistance in layout and distribution.

Best wishes for the Holiday Season and the New Year.

Loren Glass
M.F. Carpenter Professor and Chair of English