Virtual Events this Fall

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the founding of English Society and although we can't gather together in the Annex this semester, English Society is organizing a variety of virtual events that will allow us to come together as a community of readers and writers.

Afternoon Tea

Undergraduate English majors and English faculty are invited to join a bi-weekly Zoom meeting on Wednesdays from 12-1pm. Co-hosted by Maddie Allard (President of English Society) and Dr. Taryn Okuma (Faculty Advisor for English Society), Afternoon Tea will feature topics selected by majors, as well as the occasional round of literary trivia. The link to the Zoom meeting will be sent out to the English majors and faculty lists, but if you do not receive the link and would like to join, please email Maddie or Dr. Okuma.

The inaugural Afternoon Tea will take place on Wednesday, September 2nd. Join the Zoom call with your lunch and/or cup of tea and share your answer to the question: "What is the most recent book you've read, and how are you feeling about it?"

Monthly Book Discussions

Monthly book discussions are a long-standing tradition for English Society and are open to all members of the CUA community, as well as undergraduate and graduate alumni. This semester all of our meetings will take place via Zoom. To receive the link for a meeting, please register via the links for each book below:

Monday, September 21st, 8-9pm: Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night 
Monday, October 19th, 8-9pm: Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five 
Monday, November 9th, 8-9pm: Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day 

Fall Poetry Series

This fall English Society is excited to host an online poetry series featuring poets with strong ties to the Catholic University English Department. Hosted by Dr. Daniel Gibbons, each hour-long reading will include a brief interview and will be free and available to the public. To receive the link for a reading, please register via the link for each poet below:

Wednesday, September 23rd, 8-9pm: Amanda Auerbach
Amanda Auerbach joined the English department this fall as an Assistant Professor of English, specializing in trans-atlantic Romantic literature. Her collection of poems What Need Have We for Such as We was published by C&R Press in November 2019. Her poems have also appeared in literary magazines including the Paris Review and Kenyon Review. Register here.

"Amanda Auerbach’s What Need Have We for Such as We does not read like a debut collection—it has both the consistency and uniqueness of a well-developed poetic voice, and knows what it does and how. A central quality and tension of Auerbach’s poems is that they read as something very old made new—they have facets of the vision of William Blake, the coolness of Wallace Stevens, the probing wonder of Emily Dickinson, each reincarnated to the now." - Hannah VanderHart

Wednesday, October 21st, 8-9pm: Ryan Wilson 
Ryan Wilson is Adjunct Professor of English at Catholic University, teaching American literature and poetry, as well as a current Ph.D. candidate and the Editor-in-Chief of Literary Matters. His first volume of poems, The Stranger World, which was awarded the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, was published by Measure Press in June of 2017. Wilson’s poems, translations, and criticism appear widely, in periodicals such as First Things, Five Points, The Hopkins Review, The New Criterion, The Sewanee Review, and The Yale Review. Registration link will be available next month.

“Ryan Wilson’s mastery of traditional forms serves a fresh, distinctive poetry of candor and meditation: soulful rather than brittle, more observant than performative. The idiomatic, American blank verse of Wilson’s ‘Authority’ and ‘L’Estraneo’ is as fluent as that of Robert Frost, but with an oblique tenderness that reminds me of Frost’s friend Edward Thomas.” - Robert Pinsky

Wednesday, November 18th, 8-9pm: Andrew Calis
Andrew Calis received his Ph.D. in English from Catholic University in 2019 and teaches English at Archbishop Spalding High School in Severn, Md. His work has been published in Dappled Things, Presence and elsewhere. His collection Pilgrimages: Poems was published in February 2020. Register here.

"The poetry of Andrew Calis is sacramental in the truest sense: it radiates gold from a heart of invisible mystery. With all the intensity of Hopkins, he layers light on light in hopes of helping us to see." - James Matthew Wilson

English Society 2020-21 Officers

Madeline Allard, President
Anna Stephens, Co-Vice President
Rachel Wood, Co-Vice President
Anna Harvey, Secretary

Dr. Taryn Okuma, Faculty Advisor

English Society is also currently seeking a Graduate Student Advisor. If you are a current English graduate student at Catholic University and are interested in hearing more about the position, please email Dr. Okuma.

For more information about English Society

Please visit our website, join the "CUA English Society" Facebook group, or follow the English department on Twitter. Alumna Isabelle Rosini also wrote about English Society in the January 2019 issue of The Annex.