Faculty & Staff
Johannes Göransson
I am interested in approaches to writing that crosses boundaries—such as genre conventions and linguistic borders—and blurs the demarcations of the autonomous text. I am the author of three books of my own writings: A New Quarantine Will Take My Place, Dear Ra and Pilot (Johann the Carousel Horse)—with one more forthcoming in 2011, The Entrance Pageant. I wrote a performance piece The Widow Party, which was performed at Links Hall in Chicago in 2008. I am also the translator of the works of several modern and contemporary Swedish and Finland Swedish poets and writers—including Aase Berg, Henry Parland and Johan Jönson.
As a teacher I like to bring students’ attention to a wide variety of texts and to help them develop interesting frameworks for reading and discussing these texts. A creative writing class should not be a normalizing workshop of finished products, but a site for exploration and interaction.
I have written critically about contemporary American and Swedish poetry, translation theory, the historical avant-garde, Sylvia Plath, and Gurlesque poetry and other neo-gothic aesthetics. In addition, I have a special interest in film, particularly the 1960s underground cinema of Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith.
Together with Joyelle McSweeney I publish Action Books; and together with McSweeney and John Woods, I edit the online zine Action, Yes.
356 O’Shaughnessy Hall
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
E-mail : johannesgoransson@gmail.com
Phone: 574-631-7618
Joyelle McSweeney
Specialty:
Poetry, Prose, Translation, Theory
Degrees:
B.A. magna cum laude, Harvard; M.Phil., Oxford University; M.F.A. University of Iowa Writers Workshop
Profile:
Joyelle McSweeney is the author of two hybrid-genre novels: Flet, a sci-fi (Fence, 2008) and Nylund, the Sarcographer (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007), a baroque-noir. She is also the author of two volumes of poetry, The Commandrine and Other Poems (Fence, 2004) and The Red Bird, which was chosen by Allen Grossman to inaugurate the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2001. With Johannes Göransson, she publishes Action Books and Action, Yes, a press and web-quarterly dedicated to international writing and hybrid forms.
McSweeney’s areas of interest and teaching include poetry, prose, and translation; performance and dramatic form; manifestos, art and politics; theory and media studies; mixed and intermedia art and writing; mixed, hypergenred and non-genred writing; disability studies and gender studies; as well as modern and contemporary literature and various avant gardes. She has written critical articles and manifestos on all of the above as well as review articles on such authors as Alice Notley, Hannah Weiner, Anne Carson, and Lyn Hejinian for such journals as the Boston Review, American Book Review, and boundary2. Other authors and artists of special interest include Antonin Artaud, Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, Kate Bernheimer, Roberto Bolaño, Pume Bylex, Hiromi Itō, and Aimé Césaire.
A new volume of poems and plays is forthcoming from Fence in Spring 2012.
Recent Publications:
“The Warm Mouth.” My Mother She Killed Me, My Father She Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales. New York: Penguin, 2010. (play)
Flet. New York: Fence Books, 2008. (novel)
Nylund, The Sarcographer. Vermont: Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007. (novel)
The Commandrine and Other Poems. New York: FenceBooks, 2004. (poems and play)
The Red Bird. New York: Fence Books, 2002. (poems)
356 O’Shaughnessy Hall
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
E-mail : Joyelle.McSweeney.5@nd.edu
Phone: 574-631-9870
Orlando Menes (Current Program Director)
Associate Professor Orlando Ricardo Menes’s poems have appeared in several prominent anthologies, as well as literary magazines such as Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Chelsea, Callaloo, Indiana Review, River Styx, Epoch, Spoon River Poetry Review, New Letters, Crab Orchard Review, and Green Mountains Review. He has published, besides his own poems, numerous translations of such poets as the Argentine Alfonsina Storni and the Cuban José Kozer. His third poetry collection, Furia, was published in 2005 by Milkweed Editions. Professor Menes is also the author of Rumba atop the Stones, published in 2001 by Peepal Tree Press (Leeds, England), in addition to being the editor of Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2004) and the forthcoming The Open Light: Poets from Notre Dame, 1991-2008 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).
356 O’Shaughnessy Hall
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
E-mail : Orlando.Menes.1@nd.edu
Phone: 574-631-4110
William O'Rourke
Professor William O'Rourke is the author of The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left (1972), Signs of the Literary Times: Essays, Reviews, Profiles 1970-1992 (1993), and Campaign America ’96: The View From the Couch (1997), and novels The Meekness of Isaac (1974), Idle Hands (1981), Criminal Tendencies (1987), and Notts (1996). He is the editor of On the Job: Fiction about Work by Contemporary American Writers (1977) and Notre Dame Review: The First Ten Years (2009). O'Rourke wrote a weekly political column for the Chicago Sun-Times from 2001-2005 and has been awarded two NEAs and a New York State Council on the Arts CAPS grant. He was the first James Thurber Writer-in-Residence at the Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio. His most recent book is On Having a Heart Attack: A Medical Memoir (2006). His blog is available at theviewfromthecouch.com.
356 O’Shaughnessy Hall
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
E-mail : o'rourke.1@nd.edu
Phone: 574-631-7377
Valerie Sayers
Valerie Sayers is the author of five novels: Who Do You Love and Brain Fever, both named “Notable Books of the Year” by the New York Times Book Review; Due East, which also appeared in five foreign editions; How I Got Him Back; and The Distance Between Us. A film, Due East, was based on Due East and How I Got Him Back. She has received a Pushcart Prize for fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship and has served on two NEA literature panels. Her stories, essays, and reviews appear widely and have been cited as “Notable” and “Distinguished” by, among others, Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays.
356 O’Shaughnessy Hall
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
E-mail : Valerie.L.Sayers.1@nd.edu
Phone: 574-631-7160
Steve Tomasula
Associate Professor Steve Tomasula is the author of the novels The Book of Portraiture (FC2); IN & OZ (Ministry of Whimsy Press); and VAS: An Opera in Flatland, an acclaimed novel of the biotech revolution that has recently been re-released in paper by The University of Chicago Press. His multimedia novel TOC was released by the University of Alabama Press/FC2.
Incorporating narrative forms of all kinds—from comic books, travelogues, journalism or code to Hong Kong action movies or science reports—Tomasula’s writing has been called a “reinvention of the novel,” combining an “attention to society in the tradition of Orwell, attention to language in the tradition of Beckett, and the humor of a Coover or Pynchon.” His writing often crosses visual as well as written genres, drawing on science and the arts to take up themes of how we represent what we think we know and how these representations shape our lives. His short fiction has been published widely, and most recently in McSweeney’s, The Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, and The Iowa Review, in which he received the Iowa Prize for the most distinguished work published in any genre.
Recent essays on body art, literature and culture can be found in Data Made Flesh (Routledge), Musing the Mosaic (SUNY), Leonardo (M.I.T.), and numerous other magazines. He holds a doctorate in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
356 O’Shaughnessy Hall
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
E-mail : tomasula.4@nd.edu
Phone: 574-631-7647
Staff
Coleen Hoover
Coleen Hoover is a proud South Bend native who is happy to discuss the reasons to live and be merry in the Midwest. She received her B.A. from Indiana University in 1991 in English and in 1992 the Excellence in Literature Award from the University. She has administered the Creative Writing Program since 2004.
340 O'Shaughnessy Hall
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
E-mail: hoover.14@nd.edu
Phone: 574-631-7526
