Writers@WRUV

Tony Magistrale, a professor of English and chair of the English Department at the University of Vermont, joined us Feb. 5 to read from his collection of poems What She Says About Love.

Listen to the show.

You’ll love the poetry. AND the great stories about Stephen King!

Magistrale has taught courses in writing and American literature at UVM since 1983, when he returned to the United States after a Fulbright post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Milan, Italy. He has lectured at many universities in North America and Western Europe, most recently serving as Visiting Professor of American Studies at the University of Augsburg, Germany.

He obtained a Ph.D at the University of Pittsburgh in 1981. He and his wife, Jennifer, and two sons, Christopher and Daniel, currently reside in South Burlington, Vermont.

Over the past two decades, Magistrale’s twenty books and numerous articles have covered a broad area of interests. He has published on the writing process, international study abroad, and his own poetry. But the majority of his books have centered on defining and tracing Anglo-American Gothicism, from its origins in eighteenth-century romanticism to its contemporary manifestations in popular culture, particularly in the work of Stephen King. Accordingly, a dozen of his scholarly books and many published journal articles have illuminated the genre’s narrative themes, psychological and social contexts, and historical development.

He is frequently cited in scholarly books dealing with the interdisciplinary aspects of American horror art, and has been interviewed and/or profiled on PBS television; ABC Radio, Australia; Vermont Public Radio; North Carolina Public Radio; and by the following national and international newspapers and magazines: The New Yorker, Cinescape, The National Review, The Miami Herald, The Boston Globe, Houston Chronicle, The Baltimore Sun, New York Daily News, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The St. Petersburg Times, Lighthouse Media One (London, England) and Oggi (Italy).

In 1997, Magistrale received the Kroespsch-Maurice Award for Excellence in Teaching at the University of Vermont. In 2001 he was presented the university’s George V. Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award. And in 2003 he received the Arts and Sciences Dean’s Lecture Award.

Most recently, his book of poems, What She Says About Love, was awarded The Bordighera Poetry Prize for 2007. It will be published as a bilingual edition in November 2008 by The Bordighera Press.

©Marion Ettlinger

For our first writer of the season, we’re pleased to announce that we’ll be welcoming into the studio Major Jackson, whose books of poems are Hoops (2006, Norton) and Leaving Saturn (2002, University of Georgia Press).

Jackson has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, and other literary magazines. Hoops was selected as a finalist for a NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry, and Leaving Saturn was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry.

His third volume of poetry, Holding Company, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.

Jackson earned a B.A. from Temple University and an M.F.A. from the University of Oregon. He has worked as the curator of literary arts at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia and the Mountain Writers’ Center in Portland, and has taught at Columbia University, Xavier University of Louisiana, New York University, and University of Massachusetts – Lowell as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence.

Today, he lives in Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Associate Professor at University of Vermont. He also serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.

Listen to the show.