Research & Innovation

Like the softened edge of a lit moon, Adele Steiner's poems reflect back the poet's sense of mystery and connection found in the world that surrounds her, from her own circle of family and friends, to the larger sphere where, in a Mexican cavern, Side to side/rock masses shifted to love one another/bone dry. She makes visible the intricacies of feeling and thought that exist below the surface of experience, where one goes on contemplating the birth of a child, a mother's death, the broken life of a war-damaged soldier, a Georgia O'Keefe flower, and the near-forgotten sting of a teenage girl's wayward sprung garter. These are poems that mark the passage of time as seen through an eye and heart that is always vigilant, ever moonlighting, day and night. --Marie Pavlicek-Wehrli, Recipient of a Maryland Individual Artist Award

Late night at the corner diner. Struggling with that character who just won't speak to you or searching for that perfect word. Laboring over gallons of coffee, greasy comfort food, and blank notebook pages. Called by the feelings or ideas that compel a writer to set down her thoughts whenever she can find the time, wondering whether there are others out there doing the same. This is why writers' workshops are so important-they are a place where one's passion and efforts can be shared, acknowledged, and improved in the presence of supportive, honest, risk-taking fellow writers. The goal of the "Write Here, Write Now" workshops is to provide such a place. Founded in Baltimore in 2005, the workshops have grown to explore various genres and serve the area's resurging literary arts scene. Welcome to the first anthology of select prose and poetry from these workshops. Readers will recognize themselves and their own journeys, and be inspired and moved by the honesty, beauty, and courage in this collection. Here is the reward for all those late nights, early mornings, and stolen moments of writing during the day. Remember to take it with you the next time you head to the diner. "I want to thank you all for a fantastic workshop experience. Each of you provided me with useful input. I have no doubt that my manuscript will be better off for it." - Fernando Quijano

Beginnings can be quite unusual, complex, and deceptive. The first major volume to focus on this critical but neglected topic, this collection brings together theoretical studies and critical analyses of beginnings in a wide range of narrative works spanning several centuries and genres. The authors, using diverse theoretical perspectives, ask what conventions structure our understanding of beginnings before we encounter them; how best to analyze and comprehend beginnings in historical, traditional, and postmodern works; and how endings are (often unexpectedly) related to beginnings.

This book examines the relationship between Jewish literature and the historical setting in which it was written. The types of literature analyzed in this study include ghost stories; Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Russian Jewish literature; plays; letters; poetry; even obituaries.

This second collection, a follow-up to Patrick Phillips's award-winning debut, navigates the course of the male experience, and particularly young fatherhood. Like Virgil's Aeneas, the book's central figure is in the middle time of life, a grown man with an aging father on his shoulders and a young son at his hand. Phillips's plainspoken and moving lyrics add an important voice to the poetry of home as he struggles to reconcile fatherhood and boyhood, present and past, and the ache of loving what must be lost.

Working with a varied and untraditional cast of characters--Wyatt Earp, Jack London, Clara Bow, Gertrude Stein, and Ida Lupino--author Marsha Orgeron examines the Hollywood ambitions of a fading western legend, a successful popular author, a poor Brooklyn girl turned flapper icon, a self-proclaimed avant-garde genius, and a frustrated actress on her way to becoming a director. Investigating their separate involvements with the expanding film industry, Orgeron illustrates the implications of film celebrity during the era in which cinema's impact was first felt. The aspirations of these individuals demonstrate the unifying role that the American motion picture capital played in shaping cultural notions of reputation, success, glamour, and visibility. Through extensive and unprecedented primary research and illuminating analyses of films, texts, and personal writings, each chapter provides new insight into its subject's dealings in the mythic city. Hollywood Ambitions affords a unique understanding of the tremendous diversity of the Hollywood experience and its allure in the first half of the cinematic century.

From the 1790s to the 1840s, the fear that Britain had become too effeminate to protect itself against the anarchic forces unleashed by the French Revolution produced in many British writers of the period a desire to portray strong leaders who could control the democratic and commercial forces of modernization. While it is commonplace in Romantic studies to emphasize that Romantic writers are interested in the solitary genius or hero who separates himself from the community to pursue his own creative visions, Daniela Garofalo argues instead that Romantic and early Victorian writers are interested in charismatic males--military heroes, tyrants, kings, and captains of industry--who organize modern political and economic communities, sometimes by example, and sometimes by direct engagement. Reading works by William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, William Hazlitt, Thomas Carlyle, and Charlotte Brontë, Garofalo shows how these leaders, endowed with an inherent virility rather than simply inherited rank, legitimize hierarchy anew for an age suffering from a crisis of authority.

Douglass and Melville addressed in their writings a range of issues that continue to resonate in American culture: the reach and limits of democracy; the nature of freedom; the roles of race, gender, and sexuality; and the place of the United States in the world. Yet they are rarely discussed together. In eighteen original essays, the contributors to this collection explore the convergences and divergences of these two extraordinary literary lives.