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Education

• PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2004
• MA, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999
• BA, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1997

Areas of Specialization

• 20th-Century American Literature
• Southern Literature
• Poetry

Recently Taught Courses

ENGL 427	Southern Literature
ENGL 429/SOST 405	Carolina Novelists
ENGL 752	Modern American Novel
ENGL 759	Southern Literature since 1900
SOST 301	Introduction to Southern Studies

Current Research Projects

My primary research project is called "Mind Matters: Representations of Intellectual Life in Southern Literature." This manuscript traces the beleaguered image of the intellectual in southern literature from its beginnings to the mid-twentieth century and then examines novels and memoirs by latter twentieth-century writers whose creative accomplishments revise the margins of southern literature by complicating that motif to interrogate the relationship between personal happiness and the life of the mind. Writers I'm studying include Doris Betts, Percival Everett, Ernest Gaines, Gail Godwin, Randall Kenan, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy. My other ongoing research projects include ones about New South verse memoirs, Waldensian-American life in Southern Appalachia, and representations of southern identity in popular films such as Deliverance, Smokey and the Bandit, and Talladega Nights. Closely related to my scholarly work on contemporary regional writers and their relationship to the academy is my own creative work in poetry and creative nonfiction.

Selected Publications

Selected Essays

• "How Michael Chitwood Minds the South." Iron Mountain Review. 24 (2008): 23-29.
• "Beyond the Wallpaper: Crossroads of Region, Gender, and Intellectual Life in the Fiction of Doris Betts and Gail Godwin." South Atlantic Review. 72.3 (2007): 1-16.
• "Ringing His Being: An Overview of Michael McFee's Career." Appalachian Heritage. 33.2 (2005): 9-13.
• "What Constitutes the Life of a Man: 'The Darkness of the Familiar' in Tim McLaurin's Keeper of the Moon." The Southern Quarterly. 41.4 (2003): 109-126.
• "Fiction of Mercy: Suffering Delight in Reynolds Price's The Promise of Rest." Mississippi Quarterly. 53.2 (2000): 251-264.

Selected Poetry Online

• "Coiffure," "Drinking with the poets on the dock," and "Watching Deliverance with My Students." Weber Studies. 23.3 (2007): 96-98. Available here.
• "Pond," "Growing Season," "Laundry," "Akhmatova, Collected in Translation," "The Tattered Last of the Hurricane," and "Posture for Prayer." North Carolina Poet of the Week, October 2-8, 2006. North Carolina Arts Council. Available here.
• "Adults Should Not Swim Alone" and "Catfish." Poetryfish. Autumn 2004. Available at poetryfish.com.
• "Tempest Following Fortunes." Amarillo Bay. 6.2 (2004). Available at amarillobay.org.
• "Daffodils Had Just Begun Nodding," "Motoring Home Down the Canal, I Heard the NPR Astronomer Claim," "Valentine," "Wardrobe," and "Woman in Hibernation." Poets Under 30 Feature. storySouth: the best from new south writers. Winter 2004. Available here.

Recent Presentations

• "'You Taste of America': Talladega Nights, Deliverance, and Southern Studies." Southerners in Contemporary Film Special Session. November 2008, South Atlantic MLA. Louisville, KY.
• "No Times Too Early: Love in the Fizzing Apocalypse of Walker Percy." Southern Comfort: Alcohol in Southern Literature Session. April 2008, Society for the Study of Southern Literature Conference. Williamsburg, VA.
• Panelist, Teaching Creative Writing Special Session with Elizabeth George. October 2007, Rocky Mountain MLA. Calgary, Canada.
• "Waldensians in Southern Appalachia." Where We Come From: Local Writers, Local Writing Session. March 2007: Appalachian Studies Association 30th Anniversary Conference. Maryville, TN.
• "'One drop/ Distillate of Carolina reality / Might have cured much': Minding the South in New South Verse Memoirs by Fred Chappell and Others." W. J. Cash and the Idea of Progress Special Session. November 2006, South Atlantic MLA Conference. Charlotte, NC.

Other Information

• Delegate-at-Large to Rocky Mountain MLA Executive Board (2009 - 2011).
• Chair, Southern Writers Speaker Series. Co-sponsored by the Friends of the Richland County Public Library and the USC Institute for Southern Studies.
• 2007: Readings and book signings by Pam Durban, Josephine Humphreys, Randall Kenan, Ron Rash, Dori Sanders, and George Singleton.
• 2008: Readings and signings by Dorothy Allison, John Holman, John Kessel, John Jakes, Jill McCorkle, and Mark Powell.
• Poetry Editorial Board Member for Weber: The Contemporary West (2007-present).