Check out our new blog at osuenglish.tumblr.com. And go ahead and “follow” us, as do The Paris Review, Doubleday Books, and many, many others, including students, staff, alumni, and all kinds of other fascinating folk out there in the blogosphere. And, of course, contact us if you have any questions or concerns, ideas for blog features, or, best, are eager to be featured yourself.  

We chose Tumblr as our blog platform partly because it has now become the leading blog platform for people under 35 and partly because it is so easy to use, but mostly because we are interested in not just serving as a repository for cool English department stuff but also in engaging the world with that stuff—engaging both our stakeholders (students, faculty, staff, alumni, etc) and the world at large. The Tumblr platform is a cross between social media and a more traditional, static blogsite, so it is an ideal platform for our purposes. 

The OSU English Tumblr blog launches  with a week-long feature on a pair of recent MFA alumni, the fiction writer Claire Vaye Watkins, whose first book, Battleborn, is receiving rave reviews and whose personal story is itself profoundly compelling (plus, she’s just been featured in Vogue[!]), and the poet Natalie Shapero, who, after graduating from the MFA program, went off to Chicago Law School, where she continued to publish while earning her law degree. At the end of this month, Natalie leaves her lawyering behind to return to poetry fulltime, as she begins a two-year stint as a poetry fellow at Kenyon College. Her first collection, No Object, comes out next Spring.

In Week Two, the blog will feature English professor Koritha Mitchell and focus not only on her new book, Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930, but also on her campus advocacy, the department’s BEAM program, and her interest in running.

Week 3 will feature Folklore Studies, including a wide-ranging, fascinating interview with Professor Noyes; Week 4: the world-class First-Year Writing Program. Beyond that, the schedule is still being worked out, but we have a commitment to feature over the course of this year and beyond as much as we can of the remarkable achievements of OSU’s English department. Two phenomenal English majors, Sydney Rogers and Megan Davis, will create content, conduct interviews, keep the site hip and stylish, and generally make sure the blog is running smoothly. 

Don’t be surprised to hear from us as we move forward!