Category: English Corner Professor Profiles

Q: What is your area of specialty?
A: Rhetoric and composition. I also have a background in creative writing (mainly poetry).

Q: What was the title of your master’s thesis or dissertation?
A: “Physical Training for the Body, and Philosophy for the Soul”: Reviewing the Literature of Embodied Rhetoric.

Q: What is your most recent publication?
A: My most recent publication is “Pictured with My Father,” a poem which appears in Rue Scribe.

Q: What is your favorite assignment to assign?
A: Either the profile essay or the fieldwork essay. These papers really allow students to apply our classroom theories to interesting aspects of their everyday lives.

Q: What was the last book you read?
A: Ficciones by Jorge Borges, which I revisited after reading it in Anna Oldfield’s magic realism class years ago. Spasibo, Anna!

Q: What are your favorite events on campus?
A: The theater productions, without question.

Q: Where is your favorite place to eat on campus?
A: Can we consider Irish cream Americanos food? Yes? Then Starbucks.

Q: What do you enjoy most about CCU?
A: The variety of backgrounds and worldviews of my students. I can honestly say I finish each semester having learned something new myself.

Q: What is your area of specialty?
A: Poetry. 

Q: What was the title of your master’s thesis or dissertation?
A: PhD dissertation: Byron, Hemans, and the Reviewers, 18-7-1835: Two Routes to Fame (1995). MFA thesis: Roll Call at the River (2002). 

Q: What is your most recent publication?
A: I recently assembled my third full-length collection of poems. Its title, which may change, is Candy. I published a chapbook titled Or Air and Earth in 2019 with Unicorn Press. I’ve published ten poems in literary journals (such as 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, and Four Way Review) since 2021.

Q: What is your favorite assignment to assign?
A: I enjoy the first poem assignment I give my students in Poetry I. It’s titled “The Kitchen Sink,” and it asks them to include a host of poetic techniques in a very short poem. It also throws them a curveball. But that’s a secret.

Q: What was the last book you read?
A: Nina Simone’s Gum by Warren Ellis.

Q: What are your favorite events on campus?
A: The Words to Say It Visiting Writers Series. Hosting accomplished writers on campus provides our students and faculty with a great opportunity for greater exposure to the diverse and vibrant (though often “hidden”) world of contemporary literature.

Q: Where is your favorite place to eat on campus?
A: My desk.

Q: What do you enjoy most about CCU?
A: The students. I’ve been blessed with some great ones over the years.

Q: What is your area of specialty?
A: Creative Writing, primarily Fiction

Q: What was the title of your master’s thesis or dissertation?
A: Here is something hopeful: That thesis (many revisions later) became my first book, which by then was titled, It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides.

Q: What is your most recent publication?
A: My most recent publication is the short story, Flock, which is up in a literary exhibit at Neon Door. https://neondoorlit.com/exhibit/flock-327

Q: What is your favorite assignment to assign?
A: In my multi-genre Creative Writing classes we do an image walk. It’s like a scavenger hunt for observable images around campus that fit predetermined criteria, and as we find them, we describe them exhaustively. We defamiliarizing them ala Victor Shklovsky who famously said the writer’s job is to defamiliarize what we think we know and “make the stone stoney again.” Aer our walk, we use our favorite clippings to assemble a poem that rhymes with, or is dissonant with, the quality of images we’re working with. Some of us have been searching for bright images, some sharp, or bumpy, etc. I love how the results come out. Many of us were staring at similar objects, and yet the poems are so different. Yet they are of a piece, since all the images within them share an overarching feature. We also do a community publication project at the end of those classes that delights me, but I can’t describe it, because each new class designs it. It’s always different.

Q: What was the last book you read?
A: Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr.

Q: What are your favorite events on campus?
A: Creative Writing hosts a reading series called Word to Say It that brings authors from all over the country and beyond to read from their books and talk with our students. I’m definitely biased, but I love the series and have been inspired by so many writers that have come through. I also enjoy attending plays, concerts, and lectures, the most memorable of which was Cornel West’s talk to inaugurate the Joyner Institute in 2016–that was thrilling.

Q: What is your favorite place to eat on campus?
A: My office. Heh.

Q: What do you enjoy most about CCU?
A: The people. And turtle pond.

Q: What is your area of specialty?
A: In a phrase: Non-standard Syntactic Variation. Broadly, I’m a combination of a sociolinguist, a theoretical syntactician, and perhaps a bit of a dialectologist. I usually combine these, as I study how social factors affect variation in sentence structure especially in Southern English and Appalachian English.

Q: What was the title of your master’s thesis or dissertation?
A: Dissertation: “This might could help us better understand syntactic variation: The double modal construction in Tennessee English”
MA Thesis: “What do yall think?: A study of language attitudes in the South”

Q: What is your most recent publication?
A: Dr. Childs and I have been collaborating for several years now on a study of subregional variation in Appalachian English among speakers under 30. My most recent publications from the project:
J. Daniel Hasty and Becky Childs. 2021. Investigating Appalachian Englishes: Subregional variation in the new Appalachia. Journal of Appalachian Studies 27.1: 69-88.
J. Daniel Hasty. 2020. Just what and where are Appalachian Englishes: Subregional language variation in Appalachia. In Kirk Hazen (ed.) Appalachian Englishes in the Twenty-first Century. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press, 3-19.

Q: What is your favorite assignment to assign?
A: In my ENGL 350 “Language Variation in North America” class, I have students do several rounds of sociolinguistic data collection, which they eventually write an article type paper on for the Final.

Q: What was the last book you read?
A: Rural voices: Language, identity, and social change across place, edited by Elizabeth Seale and Christine Mallinson (for a solicited book review). The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R Tolkien (for fun).

Q: What are your favorite events on campus?
A: I have really enjoyed running the English Futures Speaker Series.

Q: Where is your favorite place to eat on campus?
A: A sack lunch in my office.

Q: What do you enjoy most about CCU?
A: I like the growth in the university that I’ve seen since 2012.

Q: What is your area of specialty?
A: Fiction—short stories and novels.

Q: What was the title of your master’s thesis or dissertation?
A: My first book, Rabbit Punches, was my master’s thesis.

Q: What is your most recent publication?
A: My fourth book, Shadowselves, is my most recent project.

Q: What is your favorite assignment to assign?
A: I enjoy assigning a micro-fiction writing assignment because it emphasizes the importance of sentences in stories.

Q: What was the last book you read?
A: The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell by Brian Evenson.

Q: What are your favorite events on campus?
A: Any Words to Say It event.

Q: Where is your favorite place to eat on campus?
A: I almost never eat on campus. Sometimes I’ll eat a cracker in my office.

Q: What do you enjoy most about CCU?
A: Our kickass students.