by Marla Lunderberg “Thank you for your presentation. Does anyone have any questions?” A pregnant pause. The kind that sometimes tempts me to fill the silence with my own voice, my own questions. But after a moment, my computer screen shows a mic being unmuted. A student’s voice rings in my headphones. My student is …
Category Archives: Students
Hope College Academy of American Poets Prize 2020
By Pablo Peschiera About the Prize The Academy of American Poets (AAP) Prize program begin in 1955 at 10 schools, and now sponsors nearly 200 annual prizes for poetry at colleges and universities nationwide. Poets honored through the program have included Mark Doty, Louise Gluck, Joy Harjo, Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, Sylvia Plath, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, …
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Searching for Marriage: From Primary Sources to Digital Tools
Marriage. One of the world’s most traditional institutions, present in every culture, the same across centuries and millennia — at least until recently. Right? Um, not quite. In fact, as Hope students taking the new Cultural Heritage course “Marriage in the Modern Age” this semester could tell you, none of that is true. Everything from …
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Sneak Peek of Fall 2020 English Courses!
Check out your upper-level English options for next semester! Remember, registration starts the week of March 30. ENGL 248: Intro to Literary Studies – Dr. Emily Tucker We will explore a variety of texts from different genres, including poetry, short fiction, drama, and the novel. We will begin by focusing on methods of close reading …
Women of Faith and the First Women’s Rights Movement: Lessons for Today
Grace Goszkowicz, a student in Dr. Salah’s Cultural Heritage course “Marriage in the Modern Age,” shares her reflections below on a recent WGS & History event commemorating 100 years of women’s suffrage. This past Tuesday, I had the privilege of attending the talk given by guest speaker Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, an established historian …
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“A Lyric Never to be Forgotten”: A Day with Writers Marcelo Hernandez Castillo and Lesley Nneka Arimah
As Marcelo Hernandez Castillo dug through the photo gallery on his phone, searching for a picture of his son, I realized that the thin man who sat before me didn’t quite match my idea of the poet I had envisioned behind Cenzontle. The beautiful and surreal lyrics Castillo weaved through his 2018 book had prepared …
Going Home: Its Complexities and Possibilities
by Ernest & Ernesta Cole As the airplane began its final descent into Banjul International Airport, I was overcome by a feeling of nervous excitement. I was excited at the prospect of coming back to my adopted home, the place where my wife and I sought refuge at the height of the civil war in …
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Wolves, Spartans, Mockingbirds, Falling From the Sky: Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series Spring 2020 Preview
by Keri Haddrill & Claire Buck Snow and ice are threading their way into the atmosphere here in Holland, Michigan. That means it’s the season to curl up with a good book (or five), so let’s agree to only venture out from our Hobbit-holes, magical treehouses, or bedrooms under the stairs for bookstore runs and …
Writer as Witness: Finding Our Common Humanity
Welcome back! In this week’s post, we want to share an incredible project that the students in Professor Susanne Davis’s Introduction to Creative Writing class completed last semester. The English 253 class created podcasts as part of the course curriculum, aiming to delve into a range of common human experiences in order to deepen and …
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Is Literature a Vehicle for Learning Empathy?
As the fall semester draws to a close, two students — Paige Nelson and Isadora Baughman — offer their thought-provoking reflections on how they came to study literature and how it can enhance knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. More Than Fiction: How Stories Make Us Better People by Paige Nielsen My first exposure to literature was …
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