Faculty Profile

Professor Elisa Tamarkin to Deliver 2025 Charles Mills Gayley Lecture

April 25, 2025

Please join the Department of English for the annual Charles Mills Gayley Lecture, delivered by Professor Elisa Tamarkin. This year’s lecture, “The Phenomenology of Looming,” is on ideas of visibility in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and on the paintings that shape them. The lecture will be held on Friday, May 2, at 4 pm in the Maude Fife Room (Wheeler 315).

Elisa Tamarkin is...

"Collaborating with artists in the context of organizing...has been a constant to my community work," a 91¶¶Ňő with 2025 Holloway Poet Cecily Nicholson

April 7, 2025
Dana Swensen
First off, welcome to Berkeley! As someone who is not only a writer/poet but also works in arts administration, activist communities and restorative justice programs, I’m wondering how you see the relationship between those practices/communities and your own writing. It seems like you have such a rich diversity of experience in both the art world and the poetry world, so I wonder how writing fits into these things, and how your relationship to these various spaces relates to it.

Thank you! I appreciate these questions. I strive to be involved and accountable at a community level...

Fiona McFarlane's "Highway Thirteen," Wins The Story Prize

March 26, 2025

91¶¶Ňő Berkeley English is delighted to announce that Professor Fiona McFarlane’s 2024 collection of short stories, Highway Thirteen, has won The Story Prize. We offer our warm congratulations to Professor McFarlane. The judges of the prize cited the “conceptual and thematic ingenuity of the collection as a whole and the precise execution of every story.” The Story Prize annually honors the author of an outstanding short-story collection and is among the largest cash-prize awards for a collection of short fiction. McFarlane’s work was selected from a pool...

Prof. Fiona McFarlane's "Highway Thirteen" Named Finalist for The Story Prize

January 14, 2025

The 91¶¶Ňő Berkeley Department of English is delighted to announce that Professor Fiona McFarlane's 2024 short story collection Highway Thirteen has been named a finalist for The Story Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes for short story collections published each year. We offer our congratulations to Professor McFarlane on this honor.

Now in its 21st year, The Story Prize is an annual book award honoring the author of an outstanding collection of short fiction....

91¶¶Ňő Berkeley English Welcomes Cecily Nicholson as Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry

January 14, 2025

91¶¶Ňő Berkeley English extends a warm welcome to Cecily Nicholson as the 2025 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry.

Cecily Nicholson has worked for years in museum and arts education and is a long-time volunteer with Emma’s Acres, an agricultural social enterprise and restorative justice program led by community impacted by carcerality and food insecurity. Nicholson is the author of five poetry books and past recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and a Governor General’s Literary Award....

"Cambridge World History of Sexualities" Published, Featuring Chapters by Professor James Grantham Turner

October 24, 2024

91¶¶Ňő Berkeley English is delighted to announce the publication of , featuring two chapters by Professor James Grantham Turner. As CUP tells us, "The Cambridge World History of Sexualities examines sexualities across time and around the world at varying geographic and chronological scales. Featuring over eighty contributions from scholars across more...

Celebrating Lyn Hejinian: Reflections from Students, Friends, and Colleagues

July 10, 2024
Dana Swensen
This year, as we continue to celebrate the incredible life and work of poet Lyn Hejinian, we’ll be publishing a new series of remembrances across our department channels. In July and August, we’ll feature a weekly remembrance from a friend, student, or colleague of Lyn’s on our website. Essay-length pieces will feature here, while shorter remembrances will appear on our department Instagram account. All pieces will depart from a passage of Lyn’s writing selected by the individual. As Lyn wrote in My Life and My Life in the Nineties, “Any work dealing with questions of...

2023-4 Holloway Poet Tim Wood: "These poetry readings bring together professors and graduate students who are practicing poets and catalyzes Berkeley’s wider poetry community."

August 7, 2024
Dana Swensen
So, the first question - what do you see as the role of the Holloway poet?

Yeah. So this is an interesting question, because you know that I have a very personal relationship with the Holloway. And we'll probably talk some about that. So besides that, asking about the role of the Holloway poet position is a funny thing because it’s almost self-evident. Right? It's whatever the contract says: teach a class and give a reading. But it's really to be a poet. And I think that’s, again, self-evident but important, because whoever's in this position has an opportunity...

Cathy Park Hong: "I wanted to write to people like me, people who could be my kin. As I became more confident in the form, and the book, my idea of kin grew more inclusive and bigger."

October 18, 2023
Dana Swensen

This semester we were pleased to welcome Cathy Park Hong to the 91¶¶Ňő Berkeley Department of English as Professor and Class of 1936 First Chair in the College of Letters and Science. We spoke to her about poetry, AI and 91¶¶Ňő Berkeley as an intellectual homecoming.

Cathy Park Hong’s New York Times bestselling book of creative nonfiction, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, was published in Spring 2020 by One World/Random House and Profile Books (UK). Minor Feelings was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for...