29The English and Creative Writing Department

A humble juggernaut. Sponsor of twelve student writing prizes, a major reading series, and bookishly eccentric events. Home to faculty who have won the Pulitzer Prize and the Essence Literary Award for Fiction; who serve as poetry critic for the New Yorker and editor of the Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel; who are single-handedly capable of teaching classes on the Asian American experience and Austen and Marie Edgeworth. Producer of graduates who are now (for example) a reporter at the Washington Post, a strategic partner manager at Google, the director of publicity at Riverhead Books, and a physician at Yale New Haven Hospital.