Stephanie Whallon, ’98, an acclaimed production accountant in Los Angeles, returned to the University of Richmond in the fall of 2009 to teach a master class to creative writing students on writing for television.

English professors Elizabeth Outka and Kevin Pelletier brought literature written about the Civil War and World War I to life, both inside and outside of the classroom.

Richmond’s writer-in-residence tells students that he occasionally steps into a teaching role because he loves to help writers find their voices.

I could point to a moment where many interests and questions came together in such a way that they led me toward English as a career. In the spring of 1989, I took a course entitled “Challenges to the Canon” taught by professors Suzanne Jones and Louis Tremaine.

Professor of religion and literature, Terryl Givens, didn’t set out to be the United States’ preeminent Mormon scholar. As a student, he had studied comparative literature, learning Greek, German, Portuguese and Spanish and studying intellectual history, or the history of ideas.

I first came to poetry through music—Bob Dylan led to Charles Baudelaire, Neil Young to Emily Dickinson, Sam Cooke to Robert Hayden, Otis Redding to Gwendolyn Brooks. Which is really just to say that over time, I learned that the difference between poetry and music is minute.

The first time I saw Diane Ackerman, she was peddling her cruiser bicycle down Gateway Road on her way to Ryland Hall. Her jet-black pigtails seemed to rotate like airplane propellers from either side of her helmet. She was a fountain of energy and excitement.

"It was a gift as an undergraduate to learn about the craft of writing poetry from a poet of Mr. Salamun's caliber," says Caroline Keene about her class with Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun. "It was extraordinary to sit in a small classroom with him week after week, and not only learn from him, but hear his stories."

“If you want to be a writer, get rid of your TV. Get it out of your life right now.”

Although Allison Speicher, '08, has a remarkable academic record, her professors had to convince her to even apply to graduate school in the first place.