Department of English

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 I got to handle lots of historical documents and photographs during my studies, and even worked on an exhibit about the Salem Witch Trials with the Peabody Essex Museum.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.

You can read more about Kylie’s work and career at her website, https://www.kylieleebaker.com/

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

Marina Magloire has been awarded the National Women’s Studies Association’s 2024 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize for her book, We Pursue Our Magic: A Spiritual History of Black Feminism!  The prize includes $1,000 and recognition for groundbreaking monographs in women’s studies that makes significant multicultural feminist contributions to women of color/transnational scholarship.

Drawing on the collected archives of distinguished twentieth-century Black woman writers such as Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Lorraine Hansberry, and others, Marina Magloire traces a new history of Black feminist thought in relation to Afro-diasporic religion. Beginning in the 1930s with the pathbreaking ethnographic work of Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston in Haiti and ending with the present-day popularity of Afro-diasporic spiritual practices among Black women, she offers an alternative genealogy of Black feminism, characterized by its desire to reconnect with ancestrally centered religions like Vodou.

Magloire reveals the tension, discomfort, and doubt at the heart of each woman’s efforts to connect with ancestral spiritual practices. These revered writers are often regarded as unchanging monuments to Black womanhood, but Magloire argues that their feminism is rooted less in self-empowerment than in a fluid pursuit of community despite the inevitable conflicts wrought by racial capitalism. The subjects of this book all model a nuanced Black feminist praxis grounded in the difficult work of community building between Black women across barriers of class, culture, and time.

The prize is named in honor of Gloria Anzaldúa, an American scholar of Chicana feminism, cultural theory, and queer theory.

Congratulations to Emory Professor Kimberly Belflower, whose play “John Proctor is the Villain” is going to Broadway! The story is set in a rural high school in Georgia, where a group of students is studying The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witch trials. As they explore the character of John Proctor, the students start questioning the moral and ethical implications of his actions in the play.

Jericho Brown, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing, has been awarded a 2024 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship!  Also known as the “Genius Grants,” these Fellowships honor those who have dedicated themselves to their creative pursuits and are recognized for their originality.  The Foundation’s website lists the three criteria for selection as:  exceptional creativity; promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments, and potential for the Fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.  Prof. Brown joins 21 other luminaries this year, including filmmakers, activists, and scientists, and historians.

Elizabeth Barchas Prelogar, the 48th Solicitor General of the United States is featured in the October Issue of Vanity Fair.  Prelogar attended Emory University and majoring in English and Russian, and studied as a Fulbright Scholar.  She graduated summa cum laude in 2002.

Prelogar earned a master’s degree in creative writing as a Bobby Jones Scholar at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and went on to receive an M.Litt. with distinction, also from the University of St. Andrews.  She proceeded to Harvard Law School, where she graduated with her J.D., magna cum laude in 2008.

Since October 2021, she has led the office that represents the federal government’s interests before the Supreme Court. Often referred to as the “10th Justice,” the solicitor general of the United States is the most frequent advocate in the Supreme Court, serving as counsel in approximately three-quarters of all cases that are decided on the merits each year.

On September 20th, at 10:15 a.m., Professor of English and Creative Writing Tiphanie Yanique will give a reading of “Beach,” a new short story, influenced by feminist literary traditions, Decolonial forms, and the importance of water in Caribbean societies. The story is set on a composite island of the Virgin Islands during the Carnival season.

The reading is part of dECOlonial feelin project, an interdisciplinary and international symposium organized by the Virgin Islands Studies Collective, and focused on America’s colonies, starting with the Virgin Islands, using the methods of art, creative writing, archiving, philosophy, storytelling, and spiritual practice.  Other presenters at the event will include Dr. Hadiya Sewer, La Vaughn Belle, and Dr. Tami Navarro.

The symposium is open to the public, but RSVPs are required and seating is limited.  For more information, please contact vistudiescollective [at] gmail [dot] com.

English faculty member Mandy Suhr-Sytsma organized a September 14th field trip to the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historic Park’s Indigenous Celebration and the Mercer University McEachern Art Center’s  “Ocmulgee to Okmulgee” exhibit featuring work by three Muscogee artists: Johnnie Diacon, Kenneth Johnson, and Jamie Bennett. More than fifty Emory students and faculty members participated in the trip, including English faculty members Vani Kannan and Mandy Suhr-Sytsma, English graduate student Amelia Ali, and 28 undergraduate students from several English classes: Dr. Suhr-Sytsma’s courses on Native American Women’s literature and First-Year Writing: Native American Voices, Dr. Kannan’s First-Year Writing course on Cultural Rhetorics, and Dr. Keme’s courses on Muscogee Literature and Indigenous Literatures before 1850. The trip was supported by Emory’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies and two CFDE Community-Engaged Learnings Grants. Learn more about Indigenous Studies at Emory at https://native.emory.edu/. And be sure to come out for Emory’s third annual Muscogee Teach-In on Friday, November 8th.

Congratulations to Dan Sinykin, Associate Professor of English, who has been has been awarded a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant of $149,000. The funds will be used to continue work on the digital infrastructure for the Post45 Data Collective, a peer-reviewed, open-access repository for literary and cultural data after 1945. This stage will support the development of a comprehensive data style guide and set of protocols for interoperability with complementary datasets. The Post45 Data Collective is on a mission to make literary and cultural data free, open, and interoperable.

Meet the incoming class of graduate students for 2024!

Ebenezer (Eezer) Agu–African literature, poetry

Mara McDaniel–mimeograph poetry, archival research on 20th- and 21st-century American poetry

Aaron Obedkoff–the adjunct novel, academia, economics, and social justice

Alex Ramirez Amaya–20th- and 21st-century American literature, public humanities

Sarah Richman–early modern literature, environmental humanities

Brittany Whelan–18th-Century British literature; digital humanities