Our faculty's wide range of research areas and publications offers students a variety of course options, from the traditional literary canon, to contemporary fiction and poetry writing classes offered by faculty in the Center for Writers.
Resources such as the Writing Center, a writing tutorial service, are free to all Southern Miss students.
Students at the graduate level have opportunities to teach a range of classes, from composition to world literature and literature surveys, to assist in the publication of journals housed in the department, and to serve as research assistants to individual faculty members.
The South Mississippi Writing Project in Hattiesburg and the Live Oak Writing Project on the Coast enable teachers to stay connected with the university community and to pursue further study.
> EVENTS
The Center for Writers will host Cafe Night this Saturday, November 21st from 7:00-9:00 p.m. at 206 Front Street in downtown Hattiesburg. Center writers and poets will read from their works, and PhD student Claudia Smith will read from her new book Put Your Head in My Lap, recently published by Future Tense Books.
> IN THE NEWS
Fall 2009
- Philip Kolin’s poem “Reading the Icons” received the Editor’s Choice Award this fall from The Penwood Review and can be read on their web site.
- Angela Ball’s poem, “Jazz,” will appear on the Best American Poetry website on September 4th. Ten of her poems, plus an interview, appear in the inaugural issue of Poetry South, a journal published annually by Yazoo River Press.
- Philip Kolin was honored at the Fall Convocation by being named a University Distinguished Professor. Read about it here.
- Nicolle Jordan has been named “Scholar in Residence” for the College of Arts & Letters’ Big Read.
- Former student Vincent Price has been accepted from a national pool of applicants to attend a new summer program at Rutgers University, the Rutgers English Diversity Institute
- Molly Clark Hillard has two articles coming out this fall: “Dickens’ Little Red Riding Hood and Other Waterside Characters” forthcoming in SEL: Studies in English Literature, and “‘A Perfect Form in Perfect Rest’: Spellbinding Narratives and Tennyson’s ‘Day Dream’” forthcoming in Narrative.
- We are proud to have hosted a conference, Fairy Tale Economies, organized by Molly Clark Hillard, on the Hattiesburg campus October 1-October 2, 2009.
- Jameela Lares will be attending a meeting of the Milton Variorum Project, at which she hopes to deliver a revision of her 587-page manuscript on important and influential commentary on Paradise Lost, books 11-12.
- Philip Kolin has published two books, and article and five poems in the past seven months, including an article entitled “Haunting America: Emmett Till in Music and Song” in Southern Cultures, published by the University of North Carolina Press.
- Frederick Barthelme’s novel Waveland was purchased by Editions Bourgeois in France for publication in 2010, and the memoir he co-authored with his brother and USM colleague Steven Barthelme, Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss, has been purchased by Audible for publication as an audio book in 2010.
- Felicity Palmer participated in a roundtable about African women writers organized by the Women’s Caucus of the ALA at the African Literature Association’s Annual Meeting in April.
- Sheri Hoem’s article “Laundering the Text: Barthes’s Criti-mythoetics” will be reprinted in a book by Routledge entitled Roland Barthes: Critical Evluations in Cultural Theory to be published in 2010.
