The Crier

Buy Your Professor’s Book. No, Seriously.

The University has graduated a host of successful wordsmiths, here’s where to find them

Michael Butterscotch · Cultured · Jan 29, 2007

So, the last piece you read by a University of Michigan writer was “Death of a Salesman” in 12th grade AP English, right after you received your acceptance letter?

It’s time to catch up.

Arthur Miller may be the University’s most famous graduate of arts and letters, but there are plenty alumni and current faculty members with notable published work. For instance, Sweetland Writing Center instructor and recent MFA graduate Patrick O’Keefe won a 2006 Whiting Award for “The Hill Road.” And esteemed contemporary poet Marie Howe is here for the semester from Sarah Lawrence College.

If you’ve been in Ann Arbor for a while and haven’t checked out Thylias Moss or Linda Gregerson’s work — or Elizabeth Kostova, Eileen Pollack, Nicholas Delbanco and Keith Taylor — do it now. This is your reminder that you should while you still have a chance to catch some of these accomplished alums at their respective office hours.

Not only can you pick up University-graduate-penned novels and poetry collections at the State Street area bookstores, many writers also recite at the poetry and fiction events sponsored by the Zell Visiting Writers series and Shaman Drum.

Howe read last Monday at Rackham Assembly Hall, just hours after she arrived from New York. Alum Mary Gaitskill — best known for her National Book Award-nominated “Veronica” — read parts of her unfinished novel at the Residential College Auditorium in December. Most recently, alum and assistant English professor Laura Kasischke read passages from her new novel “Be Mine” last Tuesday at Shaman Drum.

This is your reminder that you should while you still have a chance to catch some of these accomplished alums at their respective office hours.

“Be Mine” — an erotic mystery of sorts involving Valentine’s notes and accidental death — was recently optioned for a screenplay adaptation by Bret Easton Ellis. The allure of an Ellis adaptation should be enough to interest students who live by “Less Than Zero,” a book that encapsulates the distinctive feeling of a college freshman home for his first disillusioning, drug-laden Christmas break. (A feeling you’ll finally relate to when you actually read the novel halfway through your junior year.)

“[The adaptation] is in the very, very preliminary works,” said Kasischke, who has published three novels and six collections of poetry.

Another one of her novels, “The Life Before Her Eyes,” has been adapted into director Vadim Perlman’s (“The House of Sand and Fog”) upcoming “In Bloom,” starring Uma Thurman and to be released this fall.

“Of all of my novels, I thought it would be the least likely to be film material,” she admitted.

Kasischke works with MFA graduate students and has taught creative writing at the Residential College. Due to her somewhat unexpected success, she is now on leave and busy promoting “Be Mine.”

“I was a creative writing major, and I knew I would publish and I was passionate about it — but I never would have thought it,” she said. “When I first came back three years ago, it was all very surreal, teaching with people who were my teachers.”

As for other published faculty, Kasischke recommended work by Lorna Goodison, Thylias Moss, Khaled Mattawa and Linda Gregerson.

Gregerson’s name may sound familiar. Renaissance concentrators and students simply fulfilling English requirements alike speak highly of her lectures, such as English 367, the Principal Plays of Shakespeare.

The weather is still perfect to grab a chapbook and settle into the cozy heat of the Hopwood room.

And if you follow Slate.com’s “Weekly Poem” staple, you may have noticed her poem “At the Window.” Featured in Slate in December, the poem is a sample from her latest collection, “Magnetic North,” to be released in March. She will also appear in a collection of essays on lyric poetry, “Radiant Lyre,” also set for March, and is revising a paper on Edmund Spenser’s Georgics, which she gave as a plenary address last year.

With courses to instruct, critical research (she’s received, among others, Mellon and Guggenheim fellowships) and other responsibilities, it’s a wonder she’s able to find time for writing on her own.

“I try to steal something for my own writing each day,” Gregerson said. “For me, [being a faculty member and a writer] is a really rich intersection — it’s a treat. The only dilemma is there aren’t enough hours in the day!”

Catching up on all of the aforementioned novels and poetry collections might take a while. But there’s no better time to do it. The weather is still perfect to grab a chapbook and settle into the cozy heat of the Hopwood room.

And on the off-chance you run out of texts, the room’s administrator, Andrea Beauchamp, and the friendlier Shaman Drum employees should be eager to point out more.