Wayne State University English Department

12/18/2025

Congratulations to Wayne State University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Department of English graduate students on another successful semester as they make progress towards their M.A. or Ph.D. degrees! Here's but a small sampling of their accomplishments during the fall semester!

12/14/2025

As the fall semester winds down, we'd like to take a moment to celebrate our wonderful faculty! Check out our Fall 25 Department of English Faculty Brag Book, put together by our fabulous social media team, Wayne State University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences undergraduates Lee Zarate and Kalayla Seehafer!

12/09/2025

Kudos to our own Robert Laidler, Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of English, Wayne State University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for his poem, “Jr,” being featured by the American Academy of Poets Poem-Day series!

Poem-a-Day is the original and only daily digital poetry series featuring over 250 new, previousl

10/15/2025

Congratulations to our own amazing Dr. Peter Marra on the publication of their book, Q***r Slashers (Indiana University Press 2025). What a perfect time of year for Wayne State University's Center for Gender and Sexuality to host a celebration of this new work. Details are below!

📚🎬 Q***r Slashers!

We're inviting you to “Q***r Slashers: A Celebration of LGBTQ+ Horror”, an evening dedicated to exploring the q***r sensibilities, subtexts, and aesthetics of the slasher genre.

🗓 Date: October 25, 2025
🕗 Time: 8:00 PM (approximately)
📍 Location: — the last remaining video rental store in Michigan

Join us for an informal gathering that celebrates both local film culture and q***r creativity. There is no cover fee, and attendees will receive 10% off all store purchases during the event.

Support local business, community spaces, and the vibrant intersections of q***rness and horror cinema. 💀🌈

10/13/2025

Big things are happening at Wayne State University! In collaboration with Michigan State University's Writing, Rhetoric, and Culture Department, WSU's Department of English is co-hosting this year's Conference on Community Writing, a bi-annual international meeting of the Coalition for Community Writing.

The event is designed to bring together educators, scholars, writers, socially conscious entrepreneurs, nonprofit partners, and community change makers for four days of intense programming. It offers workshops, panels, performances, presentations, networking opportunities, and field trips designed to explore and manifest the transformative potential of partnering across higher education, social innovation, and the public and nonprofit sectors.

The 2025 conference theme, “Designing Justice Across Space, Place, and Time” has been chosen to showcase Detroit’s continued legacy of community-writing oriented initiatives across neighborhoods, nonprofit organizations, schools and universities, as well as how that work overlaps with technical communication projects in business and industry. Conference participants will collaboratively exchange theoretical, pedagogical, and practical knowledge about community projects and initiatives with local practitioners.

More information about the Coalition for Community Writing and the 2025 Conference on Community Writing can be found at the link below.

https://communitywriting.org/conference-on-community-writing/

09/24/2025

What can you do with an English degree? The possibilities are endless! Check out "From classroom to industry: WSU English students gain hands-on experience at MiA" to see how English faculty Dr. Adrienne Jankens and Dr. Jared Grogan recently communicated the connections between an English degree and real-world opportunities at the Manufacturing in America trade show.
https://clas.wayne.edu/english/news/from-classroom-to-industry-wsu-english-students-gain-hands-on-experience-at-mia-67247?preview=true

08/25/2025

Wishing everyone a wonderful start to Fall 2025! The Department of English kicked off the new semester with two fantastic events.

The Writing Center and the Composition Learning Community were represented at this year's Festifall! Visitors to the Writing Center/CLC booth shared their writing anxieties on large posters. Dr. Chris Susak and CLC peer mentor Elena Andreopoulos engaged visitors in discussions about needed writing support and resources.

Dr. Nicole Varty, Professor of Teaching, described teaching circles to a group of 21 graduate students, part-time faculty, and full-time faculty in the English Department, at our Pizza and Teaching Circles event on Friday, August 23.

06/12/2025

Kudos to Wayne State University Creative Writing Professor Donovan Hohn! He and writer Francine Prose are relaunching the website and podcast this summer for Lapham Quarterly: A magazine of history and ideas. Check out this lovely write-up in the NYT.

Now attached to Bard College, the literary journal is about to publish new commentary and a popular historical feature. Next year: the print magazine.

05/29/2025

Twelve Wayne State students have been named as winners of the 2025 Wayne State Writing Awards, which honor excellence in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction.

05/29/2025

2025 winners of Wayne State University English Department scholarships

04/15/2025

Congratulations to Elizabeth Woelkers, Adeline Navarro and Jane Valente for outstanding research and writing, featured in volume two of the Rushton Journal of Undergraduate Humanities Research. Elizabeth Woelker’s essay, “Shadows and Seduction: Exploring the Duality of Night in Romeo and Juliet,” earned her the Best Essay Prize. Adeline Navarro and Jane Valente each earned honorable mentions for their respective essays, "Political Posters, Periperformativity, and Power: An Analysis of the Connections Between an Activist Movement's Image and Sound" and "The Implications of Jack Kerouac’s Modern Flâneur in On the Road." Adeline is a second-time awardee; she won the inaugural Rushton Journal Best Essay Prize for her 2024 essay, "Double Consciousness, Mirrors, and the Children Within Them: A Conceptual Reading of W. E. B. Du Bois's 'As the Crow Flies.'" Their papers reflect the best of humanities research, each exploring questions about the human condition through careful analysis of cultural works and using this analysis to better understand the social, political, cultural, and economic contexts in which the works were produced.

We asked Elizabeth, Adeline and Jane to share a little about themselves and their research projects. Their answers offer a glimpse of each author's unique perspectives on their work and together reflect a shared joy in their experiences at Wayne State University, a deep curiosity about the world around them, a palpable eagerness to learn from their professors and their peers, and a willigness to stretch their boundaries.

English alumni and faculty highlights at Wayne State University.