Novelist and professor Tayari Jones was recently featured in The New York Times, talking about her writing process, her return to Atlanta, and her latest novel Kin. Jones, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing, is the previous recipient of the a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and her book An American Marriage was the winner of the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Prof. Geraldine Higgins, Director of The Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature, spoke with the AJC’s Suzanne Van Atten on the 2026 Lectures, featuring Min Jin Lee. The first Asian American writer in the series, Lee is the author of Pachinko (2017) and Free Food for Millionaires (2022), as well as the upcoming novel America Hagwon (September, 2026). The full interview can be read here:
March 1st:“The Education of a Writer” delivered by Min Jin Lee. In this lecture, Lee will reflect on her own unlikely path to becoming a novelist and how her writing has been shaped by the education she received, both inside and outside the walls of the university.
March 2nd, “Writing American.” In this lecture, Min Jin Lee will explore what it means to be an American writer in the current moment, reflecting on both her own identity and experiences and how ideas about American literature have been shaped and reshaped over time.
March 3rd, “Writers and the World”— a Creativity Conversation in which Min Jin lee will be joined by acclaimed novelist Tayari Jones (An American Marriage, Kin) for a conversation about the creative process and the ways that culture, geography, and politics inflect their work.
The Ellmann Lectures are free and open to all; tickets required. Free tickets are available through the Schwartz Center Box Office online, by phone at (404) 727-5050, or in person.
Meet Abby Brown, who is currently a 2025-2026 Undergraduate Humanities Honors Fellow at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry! Abby is writing her honors thesis in non-fiction through the English and Creative Writing program. Here’s what she had to say:
“My project aims to illuminate the impacts of the death penalty and the larger carceral state on individuals with loved ones formerly executed or currently incarcerated. While I have personal convictions against the death penalty, my thesis is not argumentative. My goal is to convey these individuals’ unique experiences as honestly as possible. I have been interviewing mothers, pen pals, friends, activists, and others invested in death penalty work. My fellowship through the Fox Center has allowed me to bounce ideas off peers pursuing humanities theses. Conversations with my fellow fellows have been interesting, as all of our projects and fields of study are wildly different. My main takeaway from the fellowship thus far has been the value of trial and error. Hearing my peers share different iterations their ideas have gone through has helped me recognize the value of an adaptable mindset, especially during the thesis process.”
Renowned for his work on Georgia Civil Rights cold cases and his WABE series “Buried Truths,” Pulitzer-Prize winner and journalist Hank Klibanoff’s teaching is showcased in Emory Report.
Congratulations to Ghazala Hashmi on an incredible accomplishment!
She has just been elected as Virginia’s lieutenant governor! Hashmi earned her doctorate in Emory’s English department in 1992 with a dissertation titled William Carlos Williams and the American ground of “In the American Grain” and “Paterson.” Her advisor was Prof. Peter Dowell.
Most recently, she was elected to the Virginia Senate in 2019 and was then reelected in 2023.
Well done, Ghazala!
Photo:HashmiCampaign – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=149290578
Congratulations to Cameron Hart on an impressive year!
Cameron, a junior English major from Memphis, was one of just 15 students selected to study at the inaugural Folger Institute Undergraduate Spring Seminar, 2025. The program, titled “Whose Sovereignty?,” was led by Professor of English Urvashi Chakravarty (University of Toronto) and explored power and consent across political, social, sexual, racial, and economic spheres. Throughout the spring semester, Cameron engaged with modern and early contemporary texts, spoke with guest scholars, and visited the Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Her final seminar project was a podcast in collaboration with three peers from other institutions that reflected on the experience.
Last fall, Cameron was also admitted to Emory’s Scholarly Inquiry and Research Experience (SIRE) Program, a year-long program for first-time undergraduate researchers. As an assistant to Professor Patricia Cahill throughout the academic year, Cameron helped prepare an edition of Shakespeare’s 3 Henry VI, advanced databases and web platforms with the support of library staff, and worked on an independent research project. Cameron presented her research at the SIRE Symposium at the Emory Student Center in April 2025, exploring topics from the Popish Plot to a modern production of Shakespeare’s history plays staged on actual British battlefields.
Cameron plans to continue studying early modern literature and is especially interested in Shakespearean adaptations during the Restoration. After graduating from Emory, she hopes to pursue a PhD in English and is excited to see how her research interests continue to evolve. Well done, Cameron! –Contributions by Pat Cahill and Safa Wahidi
Congratulations to 2018 Ph.D. alum Richie Hofmann, who has been awarded a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2025 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poetry appears in two previous collections, A Hundred Lovers (2022) and Second Empire (2015), and his latest, The Bronze Arms will be published in February 2026. His work has also appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Yale Review. His honors include the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University.
Kylie Lee Baker, BA 2017, English and Creative Writing
Kylie Lee Baker (BA 2017, English/Creative Writing) is the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Keeper of Night duology, The Scarlet Alchemist duology, and the forthcoming adult horror Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng. She grew up in Boston and has since lived in Atlanta, Salamanca, and Seoul. Her writing is informed by her heritage (Japanese, Chinese, and Irish), as well as her experiences living abroad as both a student and teacher. She has a BA in creative writing and Spanish from Emory University and an MS in library and information science from Simmons University.
She recently spoke with Ross Knecht, Director of Undergraduate Studies, about her writing career and what she learned during her time at Emory. Here’s an excerpt from that conversation.
Could you talk about your career after having graduated from Emory?
I loved working with international students as an ESL tutor at Emory, so after graduation, I moved to South Korea and taught English at an elementary school through a government program. During this time, I submitted my first novel to literary agents. After a few months, I signed a contract with my agent Mary, who sent my novel to publishers. The publishing industry moves quite slowly, so I continued writing new books and planning for graduate school while I waited to hear back from publishers.
After two years in Korea, I returned to the U.S. and enrolled at Simmons University School of Library and Information Science, hoping to become an archivist. Shortly after I moved, my literary agent sold my debut novel at auction in a two-book deal to HarperCollins. I started revisions with my new editor and began writing the sequel. I was also a full-time graduate student and working part-time in circulation at a public library at this point, so my schedule was pretty full. My long-term goal was to become a full-time writer, but to also be prepared for a more stable career that I genuinely enjoyed. For me, this was archival work. I got to handle lots of historical documents and photographs during my studies, and even worked on an exhibit about the Salem Witch Trials with the Peabody Essex Museum.
After graduation, I continued to write and sell books while working in the Harvard Law School Library archives. After working there for a year and having sold my fifth book to a major publisher, I realized that my writing was becoming a financially viable career, so I decided to devote all my time and energy to it.
I’ve now been a full-time author for over a year. I’ve published four young adult fantasy novels with major publishers (with a fifth under contract), and also have two adult horror novels under contract that will publish in 2025 and 2026. My books have been translated into Italian, Spanish, French, Russian, and Ukrainian. Last year, my third novel (The Scarlet Alchemist) was a bestseller in the UK. I often get to travel for promotional activities, and have been lucky enough to meet some of my favorite authors like Grady Hendrix, Paul Tremblay, and Chloe Gong. I feel extremely lucky to have a career where I can be creative and spend all day doing what I love.
How did your experience in the English department and the Creative Writing program contribute to your career path?
My first novel, which helped me find my literary agent, was actually my senior thesis that I wrote when I was at Emory and revised with the help of my wonderful advisor and thesis committee. All of my work with my advisor, as well as in the writing center and with my peers in my creative writing workshops, was invaluable for helping me develop my craft.
I also found the discussions about the publishing industry in my classes extremely useful. Publishing is a very opaque industry with a lot of bad actors, so having a solid understanding of how to break into the industry served me very well.
My English major was also immensely helpful for my career in archives, even though I’m not currently employed in that field. Archival work involves quickly reading a large amount of information, summarizing it, and organizing it in a way that’s digestible to researchers. This came very naturally to me as an English major, and I think was part of what made archival work so fun.
Do you have any advice or comments you’d like to share with current students of English at Emory?
Don’t let anyone tell you that an English major is impractical! I always thought my Spanish major would be my “real” degree while my Creative Writing major was just for fun, but I have yet to earn a dime from speaking Spanish (even though I do enjoy it!). I have many friends who majored in seemingly more practical fields that later decided to completely change their careers.
Being good at creative writing also has more practical applications than you would think; I did very well in my Spanish literary translation course at Emory and firmly believe that it had more to do with my skill in creative writing than in Spanish. That being said, I do think that double majoring is never a bad idea. Both because it means you’re not putting all your eggs in one basket, and also because genuine interest in other subjects can inform and enrich your writing.
Also, take advantage of the writing center! There is no such thing as a writer who’s too good for outside feedback.
Emma Davenport has been named the inaugural winner of Victorian Poetry’s new early career prize for exemplary essays by untenured colleagues. The journal editor praised Emma’s work, saying “In this first year we received a number of very strong submissions, which were anonymized and then judged by a prize committee consisting of preeminent colleagues in the field (all full professors at top-tier institutions). Emma’s essay was chosen as the winner by unanimous and enthusiastic decision.”
Victorian Poetry is thrilled to announce that Emma Davenport (Emory University) is the inaugural winner of the journal’s new early career prize! Davenport’s forthcoming essay, “Crediting Women’s Poetic Labor: Paradise Lost and Toru Dutt’s ‘Our Casuarina Tree’,” offers a startling, skillful, and persuasive new reading of Dutt as an astute and critical reader of Paradise Lost. Building on evidence that Dutt knew Paradise Lost intimately, the essay shows us how Milton’s association of the Indian banyan tree with sin provides a rich intertext for Dutt to engage, answer, and revise. In a bravura close reading of the text, the author shifts our attention from the tree to the vine that is wrapped around it. Where most readers have read the vine as a figure for the snake—and Satan—in this account we see how Dutt associates the vine with Eve. Furthermore, through the association of Dutt’s name with an Indian vine (the Torulota or Tarulatta), the essay brilliantly demonstrates how Dutt reclaims India and the woman poet from Milton, by way of Milton’s own text. This poetic analysis complicates the binary logic in postcolonial scholarship on Dutt and makes a powerful argument about decolonizing our own analytic frames for reading colonial poetry. Richly researched, beautifully written, and highly original, this essay makes a dazzling new contribution to the project of undisciplining Victorian studies. Keep an eye out for its appearance in print very soon! Founded in 1962 to further the aesthetic study of the poetry of the Victorian period in Britain, Victorian Poetry today publishes articles from a broad range of conceptual angles and methodological approaches
