Keep your fingers crossed: Two books, edited and published by Open Letter, the nonprofit, literary translation press at the University of Rochester, have made it onto the longlist for the 2024 Barrios Book in Translation Prize. The honor is awarded annually by the National Book Critics Circle.

Melvill (Open Letter, October 2024) by Rodrigo Fresán, a work of fiction translated from Spanish by Will Vanderhyden ’13 (MA), and the nonfiction book Muzzle for Witches (Open Letter, September 2024) by the late Dubravka Ugresic, translated from Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać, both made in onto the so-called longlist, which comprises a select group of only 12 books. The winner will be announced around March 21 of next year.

Chad Post, who heads up Open Letter, is pleased about snagging two nominations this year—understandably so: The University’s translation press, while small, boasts a surprisingly large number of winning books and authors, among them Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse (2023) and National Book Award–winning translator Elisa Shua Dusapin (2021).

A Rochester home for (most of) Ugresic’s translated oeuvre

“I published Dubravka first in 2003 with Thank You for Not Reading at Dalkey,” says Post, who also manages the editorial activities at Dalkey Archive Press. Over the course of the next twenty years, the two—author and publisher—became good friends. Incidentally, her book Nobody’s Home was the first book Open Letter ever published.

Subsequently, Open Letter became the home for all of Ugresic’s works—past and future, except for three that are still under copyright with other presses. All told, Ugresic has penned more than a dozen books, including Karaoke Culture (Open Letter, 2011), which was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.

Politics, of course, has a way of seeping into the lives of authors and their literature. In 1991, when war broke out in the former Yugoslavia, Ugresic took a firm anti-nationalistic stand for which she was vilified in the Croation press, proclaimed a “traitor,” a “public enemy,” and a “witch.” As a result, she left Croatia in 1993 for the Netherlands, where she died in 2023, but not without using the experience for her latest book, published in translation posthumously.

The careful reader may have noticed that the National Book Critics Circle’s nomination announcement had two accents on Ugresic’s name, spelling it Ugrešić. Yet all her Open Letter covers omit the accents.

“As Dubravka said many times, ‘I don’t care how my name is pronounced and I don’t want all those little guys scaring off readers,’” Post recalls the author’s relaxed attitude vis-à-vis her name.

Rochester-trained alumnus nabs translation nomination

The second nominated work, Melvill, has not one but two Rochester connections: Open Letter is its publisher and Vanderhyden, the translator, is an alumnus of the University’s master of arts in literary translation program.

It’s precisely the work of literary translators that render international literature accessible to a wider audience. When selecting a foreign author to be published in translation, several factors come into play, according to Post. Just as important as the literary quality of the work itself is the translator attached to a particular book or author.

Post’s work almost always has a personal dimension. He taught (budding translator) Vanderhyden in two of his classes at Rochester—Introduction to Literary Publishing and Translation and World Literature. And while Post had met Fresán years ago, it was only when Vanderhyden promoted the author in one of his classes that Post started paying closer attention.

Vanderhyde’s interest in Fresán was serendipitous at first. Back in 2010, his brother had given him a copy of Kensington Gardens, Fresán’s only novel in English up until that point. Vanderhyden loved the book and felt a strong affinity for its references and style—a kind of synthesis of his own reading interests. The timing proved fortuitous, coinciding with his growing interest in translation.

“When I learned that none of his other books had been translated into English, I decided to take a stab at translating him myself,” says Vanderhyden. A couple of years later, after earning his master’s in literary translation studies at Rochester, he pitched his translation of The Bottom of the Sky to Post, which would become the 100th title translated by Open Letter.

Today the three of them are friends and Open Letter publishes now all of Fresán’s translated works—six to date.

In fact, Vanderhyden and Fresán have worked together on every one of his translated books. “We’re all a team,” says Post emphatically. “I would never ask anyone else to translate Fresán, and Rodrigo wouldn’t have it any other way.”

In Melvill (the author added the “e” later), Fresán writes about American novelist Herman Melville (1819–1891), best known for his 1851 epic novel Moby-Dick. Fresán’s approach is a work of fiction—an invented biography, a gothic novel of sorts, populated by ghosts. Open Letter bills it as “an evocation of a filial love,” containing “all the talent, humor, and immense culture found in the other great works from one of Spanish literature’s most ambitious writers.”

Open Letter’s podcast Two Month Review featured Vanderhyden chatting about translating Fresán’s style. More episodes about the book can be found online at Three Percent, a resource for international literature at the University of Rochester.

“Sussing out and recreating the underlying patterns” that make a writer’s style come alive in English are probably the biggest general challenges for a translator, according to Vanderhyden.

When it comes to Fresán, Vanderhyden is “pretty familiar with his style” and has a level of comfort and confidence with translating it. “But tracking down his incessant literary and pop culture references and recreating his ludic sensibility—his sense of humor, his tireless wordplay—in English are and will always be particularly challenging aspects of translating his work,” Vanderhyden says.

A challenge Venderhyden readily accepts—and that the National Book Critics Circle clearly noticed. We’ll know more come March. Until then, fingers crossed, tightly please.

South Korean poet and novelist Han Kang has won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for a poetic and unsettling body of work that “confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” according to the Nobel committee.

“Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way,” reads the opening line of The Vegetarian, about a woman who believes she is turning into a plant, first published in South Korea in 2007 and translated into English in 2015.

The novel continues:

To be frank, the first time I met her I wasn’t even attracted to her. Middling height; bobbed hair neither long nor short; jaundiced, sickly-looking skin; somewhat prominent cheekbones; her timid, sallow aspect told me all I needed to know.

Tracing a woman’s descent into mental illness and neglect by her family, The Vegetarian became the first Korean-language novel to snag the International Booker Prize for fiction. That was eight years ago and the honor put Han, now the author of 13 novels and novellas, on the map for international audiences, making her a viable Nobel Prize contender.

Of course, it’s the work of literary translators that make international literature accessible to a wider audience. That’s where Rochester’s connection to this year’s Nobel laureate starts, although not in the way you might expect.

Chad Post, who heads up Open Letter, the nonprofit, literary translation press at the University of Rochester, rejected Han’s The Vegetarian when her translator originally offered it to the press.

“There are a lot of other books that do the same thing, but in a more interesting way,” Post explains his lack of interest. Instead, he says, he prefers the works of two other Korean authors, Bae Suah and Ha Seong-Nan.

“I think, on a stylistic level, they’re more sophisticated,” he says.

But unlike twelve publishing houses that are still kicking themselves hard for turning down J.K. Rowling when she came knocking with her first Harry Potter manuscript, Post remains sanguine. “If you start doubting yourself like that, then you get into a weird mind space where you ask yourself ‘What are you publishing for? Are you publishing because you think this will win a prize? Or are you publishing because you think this is an amazing author?’” says Post.

A translation controversy

Choosing an author’s work to be published in translation comes down to several crucial factors beyond the quality of the work itself. Just as important, says Post, who also oversees the editorial activities at Dalkey Archive Press, is the translator who is attached to a particular book or author.

When it came to Han’s translator, Deborah Smith, he was thrown by a style that didn’t feel consistent across the translated manuscript of The Vegetarian. To be honest, he didn’t really love the book either.

Later, controversy ensued when critics noticed striking deviations from Han’s original Korean text compared to Smith’s English translation, which now suddenly had a British-Victorian tinge. Tim Parks, writing for The New York Review of Books, was the first to raise red flags about the translation in his article “Raw and Cooked,” mincing no words: “Sometimes this mix of the uptight and the colloquial creates an awkwardness at the limits of comprehensibility,” Parks lamented.

Smith, who is English, admitted freely that she had learned Korean only three years earlier, largely through translation work.

The popularity of Han’s novels, particularly The Vegetarian, got her translated into Swedish, which is likely the translation the Nobel judges read. “Of course, I don’t know what exactly they were reading,” notes Post. “As Anglophone readers, we just know what Han Kang sounds like via the lens of Deborah Smith.”

Admittedly, translating literature is always a balancing act: remain too literal and one risks missing clever word puns, subtle innuendo, sly satire, or meaning that is derived from a backdrop of shared experiences, understood only in a specific country or region. But stray too far from the text and you end up writing your own work, unfaithful to the original.

In the end, Post says, the public spat over Han’s (mis)translated work, which even spawned academic inquiry, shone a light on issues that needed to be addressed.

“It did elevate the conversation about what constitutes a good translation,” says Post.

In another twist, Open Letter’s rejection probably proved fortuitous for Han, admits Post. Hogarth, a bigger US publisher (and a Penguin Random House imprint) ended up taking on The Vegetarian instead.

“If we had published it, it probably wouldn’t have won any prizes,” Post says. “But coming from a big press with big money behind it, it was able to get a lot more attention.”

South Korea’s eyes on the Nobel Prize

While Han was by no means the favorite to win this year’s Nobel Prize, her success wasn’t a matter of chance.

About a decade ago, South Korea’s government went to work on showcasing Korean culture to the world, aiming for nothing less than the top literary award in the world. Playing the long game, the Korean Ministry of Culture started the Literature Translation Institute (LTI) of Korea, a well-funded program to help promote Korean literature, and established training for professional translators. The institute’s efforts ran the gamut from funding complete translations of literary works (even before they had a publisher), to promotional grants for Korean writers to tour abroad, to grants for international editors to visit Korea.

In 2016, The New Yorker asked provocatively, “Can a big government push bring the Nobel Prize in Literature to South Korea?”

We now know the answer.

Speaking of LTI Korea’s generous funding: Post was one of their invited editors. During a trip to Seoul in the winter of 2014, he not only met Deborah Smith, Han Kang’s eventual translator, but also numerous other Korean authors, agents, and publishers. As a result, Open Letter signed on the English translation of A Greater Music, by Korean author Bae Suah, which became the first book in the press’s Korean Series, funded by LTI Korea. Incidentally, the translator for that project was Deborah Smith.

As an aside, Post says it really wasn’t Korean literature (until now) that ended up attracting worldwide attention. Instead, the cultural phenomenon of K-pop—which hit stratospheric heights in 2012 with the international mega hit “Gangnam Style” by rapper Psy—became Korea’s strongest cultural ambassador, more so than any literary prize could hope to attract.

Yet, Korean literature is a force to be reckoned with. Today, Ha Seong-Nan is Open Letter’s best-known Korean author. “Her stories are psychologically creepy, and so gripping and weird in all the right ways,” says Post, who admits that he prefers the works of both Ha Seong-Nan and Bae Suah over those by Nobel Prize laureate Han.

“In terms of what they contribute to international literature, Ha and Bae are more challenging and innovative, leading to more original, better books,” says Post.

Including a so-called Translator’s Triptych of three titles, selected by translator Janet Hong (published this summer), Open Letter now has more South Korean contemporary female writers in English translation than any other press.

Was it a stupid move to reject Han?

“Not the first time that has happened,” Post laughs. “I mean, we stand by our editorial vision.”

The day before the announcement from Stockholm, The Guardian had picked Chinese author Can Xue, another translated author of Open Letter, as the most likely winner.

“We have a ton of authors who could or have been in the running for the Nobel Prize,” Post says. “You just you can’t win them all.”

Spring 2024 marked the beginning of a new concert series to connect the Eastman School of Music, located near downtown Rochester, to the surrounding community. ROC City Concerts, funded by the John and Mary Celentano Chamber Music Fund, brought performances of live chamber music to underserved populations throughout the city. Elinor Freer, an associate professor of piano and chamber music at Eastman, part of the University of Rochester, coordinated the inaugural season.

“ROC City Concerts celebrates the power of live music to transcend racial, economic, ethnic, and societal barriers,” says Freer. “All people, regardless of their current life circumstances or the choices they have made, deserve the chance to feel human, and experiencing live music is one of the best ways to feel alive. We at ROC City Concerts look forward to bringing our music out into the community and to connecting with many different types of listeners.”

A special ensemble comprising Eastman students and faculty, plus members of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, presented five concerts in April. A highlight was a performance at the Monroe County Jail. That event marked the first time Eastman musicians have held a concert in a correctional facility as well as the first time that music has ever been performed for members of Monroe County’s incarcerated population solely for the purpose of enjoyment.

ROC City Concerts also performed for unhoused veterans living at Richard’s House (part of the Veterans Outreach Center); residents and clients at East House (for substance abuse recovery); high school students at Villa of Hope School; and for those who benefit from Spiritus Christi Church’s Prison Outreach, Mental Health Center, and Grace of God Recovery House.

East House President and Chief Executive Officer Lindsay Gozzi-Theobald says, “Music is not just a melody; it’s a symphony of healing, capable of harmonizing emotions, fostering connection, and inspiring growth.” Gozzi-Theobald notes that East House is integrating “the transformative power of music” into its behavioral health programs and residential settings.

“Music connects us all through a shared experience where there are no barriers.”

At the time of the event, Gozzi-Theobald shared that it would “orchestrate a path towards holistic well-being, where every note resonates with purpose and every individual can find their unique rhythm of recovery. East House serves 1,250 people who are in recovery from mental health and substance use disorders every year, many of whom live at or below the poverty level and do not have easy access to the arts. Together, we are making our community a healthier, more accessible place to live.”

ROC City Concerts is aligned with the University of Rochester’s Live the Six initiative, led by its Office of Equity and Inclusion to combat all forms of hatred and racism. Community engagement is a major component of “Live the Six” and the cornerstone of the concert series.

A live-performance musical documentary written and co-created by University of Rochester International Theatre Program Artistic Director Nigel Maister was named a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize on Monday.

The work, Paper Pianos, a documentary-based, music-theatre hybrid, was described by the prize committee as a “socially urgent multimedia work that boldly melds music and audio documentary with first-person stories of refugees, exploring how music serves as solace and inspiration under conditions of displacement.”

Paper Pianos was specifically recognized by the prize committee for its music, which was composed by Mary Kouyoumdjian, a composer and documentarian with projects ranging from concert works to multimedia collaborations and film scores.

The Pulitzer Prize for Music, which recognizes distinguished musical composition by an American and premiered in the previous year, went to Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith), by Tyshawn Sorey.

For Paper Pianos, Kouyoumdjian and Maister, the Russell and Ruth Peck Artistic Director of the International Theatre Program, interviewed the protagonists of the documentary in Rochester and New York City. Their field recordings and Maister’s text formed the basis of the documentary’s narrative, which was interwoven with a live musical performance and intricate hand-drawn animations that depicted the dramatic emotional landscape of the displacement and resettlement of refugees.

The work’s narrative revolves around Afghan pianist Milad Yousufi, who fled to New York from Kabul, where the Taliban threatened death for pursuing music. The documentary takes its title from Yousufi’s story of teaching himself to play the piano in silence by painting piano keys on paper and hearing the music he was making only in his mind.

Maister was far from the only University connection to the piece.

When the work premiered in February 2023 at EMPAC, the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York, it was stage managed by alumnus Michael Wizorek ’22 and its lighting was designed by Seth Reiser, an adjunct lecturer in the International Theatre Program.

The music was performed by Alarm Will Sound, an acclaimed contemporary musical ensemble founded by graduates of the Eastman School of Music.

Paper Pianos is scheduled to launch in New York City in spring 2025 and later tour several venues across the United States.

The scholar made the British poet and “multimedia artist” accessible to a wide audience.

Morris Eaves, an English professor whose ceaseless and groundbreaking effort to digitize the illustrated poems of William Blake enabled widespread scholarship of the British poet’s work, died February 25 at the age of 79.

Family and friends describe his death as sudden and say a cause was not immediately known.

Eaves, who held one of the University’s Richard L. Turner Professorships of Humanities from 2010 to 2018, had been teaching two classes during the spring 2024 semester—Romantic Literature: Gothic Spirit, which explores the nexus of fantastical and terrifying works of British romanticism, and Media ABC, a historical introduction to media in a variety of forms.

He had been with the University of Rochester since 1986 and was known within the University community as much for his institutional knowledge as his devotion to the institution.

But Eaves was perhaps best known in academia for his scholarship on Blake and his pioneering preservation of Blake’s body of work in the internet age. His work on The William Blake Archive—an online initiative he pursued with two colleagues at other universities—has been the subject of scores of books, essays, and news articles.

Blake is most often remembered as a poet. But he was also a painter, engraver, and printmaker who has been called the first multimedia artist for his hand-produced books of elaborately illustrated poems.

The breadth of his work, however, posed a major challenge for students of Blake for nearly two centuries after his death in 1827. Students were seldom able to fully experience Blake because his artworks were scattered amongst collections around the world and his poems were typically reproduced without their illustrations.

Eaves and two other top Blake scholars—Robert Essick of the University of California and Joseph Viscomi of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—sought to change that in the early 1990s when they began exploring the then nascent territory of digital humanities.

“I don’t remember when we first heard about the internet,” Eaves told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle of the pursuit in 2004. “Someone suggested it might be a way for us to go. . . . We got into it not knowing what the hell we were doing.”

They figured it out, though, and then some.

With a $250,000 grant from the Getty Grant Program, they began securing access to thousands of pages of fragile and expensive Blake materials and mapping out the infrastructure for how to digitize them.

Their creation, The William Blake Archive, was conceived in 1993 and began publishing its first digital editions in 1995. The online archive enabled researchers for the first time to easily compare versions of Blake’s poems, paintings, and prints, something that previously would have required costly travel. The project later received support from major corporations and would become a model for digital humanities projects involving historical texts and images the world over.

In the ensuing years, Eaves further enhanced the archive by overseeing the digitization of every edition of Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, a peer-reviewed journal devoted to Blake research that Eaves had coedited since 1970.

“We were really pioneers in creating this project,” says Viscomi, who recalls Eaves as a “first-rate Blake scholar” who was “crucial and central” to the initiative. “If you’re teaching Blake or studying Blake, you come to The William Blake Archive.”

Eaves grew up in West Monroe, Louisiana, and married his high school sweetheart, Georgia, in 1964 while he was a student at Long Island University.

When he earned his doctorate from Tulane University in 1972, it made news in his hometown. Under the headline “Local man to receive doctorate,” The Ouachita Citizen reported that Eaves had successfully defended his dissertation on “Blake’s Artistic Strategy.”

Decades later, Eaves described in the journal he edited how a rebellious spirit drew him to Blake as a graduate student. He wrote that giving up studying the likes of William Faulkner for Blake was a “self-shocking move,” but explained that he was “young, reckless, and fascinated by pictures as well as texts and by processes as well as products.”

“This was the ’60s after all,” he wrote, “when people got up to things they might have suppressed in more sensible times.”

Eaves taught for 16 years at the University of New Mexico before joining the Rochester faculty, where he would establish himself as something of an elder statesman of the English department.

During his tenure at Rochester, Eaves served as chair of the department for eight years and sat on dozens of committees on a medley of issues, from those that advised on the use of technology in the classroom to theater study and university apparel.

“He had been on so many committees for so many years that his loss is a major loss for the department,” says Nigel Maister, the Russell and Ruth Peck Artistic Director of the International Theatre Program, who calls Eaves a mentor and father figure. “He had significantly built the department over decades.”

Colleagues and friends use words like “brilliant,” “irreverent,” “unpretentious,” and “cheerful” to describe Eaves.

“He once said to me, and this was the best thing he ever said to me, ‘We take the work seriously, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously,’” says Sarah Jones, the managing editor of Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, who worked closely with Eaves.

Those who knew Eaves and his wife refer to them as an “inseparable” couple with discerning tastes in travel and food. It was understood, they say, that anyone dining out with the pair left the dinner reservations to them. That could mean sitting down at a Michelin-rated restaurant or a hole-in-the-wall crab shack to write home about.

Eaves is survived by his wife; their two sons, Obadiah and Dashiell; and three grandchildren, Emmeline, Ezra, and August. Ezra is a first-year student at Rochester.

Crystal Sellers Battle began her musical journey in church, singing gospel as a youth with her father and siblings. But when she entered college to study voice, “I went into my very first voice lesson and was told by my teacher that I had to choose between singing gospel music or singing classical music,” she says.

Classical vocal training has been honed over centuries to protect the health and viability of the vocal cords. Thus, the teacher reasoned, gospel singing could limit Sellers Battle’s prospects for a long and successful career—as a classical singer. Later, as a doctoral student at Ohio State, Sellers Battle found a mentor who supported her aspirations, and she was able to make a major contribution toward advancing the study of gospel music through her dissertation, I Sing Because I’m Free: Developing a Systematic Vocal Pedagogy for the Modern Gospel Singer.

But Sellers Battle, who started in July 2022 as the inaugural associate dean of equity and inclusion at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, also knew that something unspoken was at play in the efforts of teachers to steer her away from gospel.

 
The world of music—a practice and an art form believed to be universal among cultures and societies and with ancient roots—is vast. Yet the doorway into schools of music in the United States has been narrow. Despite the rich musical traditions indigenous to this country—Mississippi Delta blues, bluegrass and Appalachian folk, the musics of Native Americans, jazz—university-level American schools of music proliferated around the turn of the last century to teach and disseminate Western classical music. And to do so was considered a means of cultural elevation.

That historical legacy places a unique burden on schools of music, including Eastman, striving to cultivate a more inclusive learning environment. Although Eastman and its elite peers have long since begun to diversify faculty and curricula, the remnants of that exclusionary past remain entrenched.

In June 2020—deep into the COVID-19 pandemic and in the cataclysmic aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by Minneapolis police officers—Jamal Rossi, the Joan and Martin Messinger Dean of the Eastman School, announced the formation of the Eastman Action Commission for Racial Justice. The mission of the 20-person group composed of students, faculty, staff, and alumni was to recommend “actionable, achievable, measurable, and sustainable” steps to accelerate the school’s work toward achieving a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive community. Working on a tight timeframe, the commission conducted surveys of alumni, students, and faculty, and released a 175-page report the following fall.

The opening lines of the report, which Rossi called “powerful and comprehensive,” read: “The Commission asserts that diversity, equity and inclusion at Eastman have failed to reach the level of highest priority at the School, noting that there has been little change in this regard since 1921.”

There has been only one full-time Black faculty member in the history of the school’s jazz program, for example, and only for a period of two years, in the 1990s. Meanwhile, “many Black alumni, while acknowledging the excellent education they received, cite harrowing and tragic experiences while students at the School,” the commission noted.

The position Sellers Battle now occupies, as well as the George Walker Center for Equity and Inclusion in Music, which she directs, are outgrowths of the commission’s work.

Q&A with Crystal Sellers Battle

The phrase “diversity, equity, and inclusion” has become pretty ubiquitous in recent years in higher education and in workplaces generally. What do each of these words mean to you? 

Sellers Battle: Diversity comes from our mere existence. We all came from different places. We were raised differently. We have different sexual preferences and identities. We have different socioeconomic statuses and backgrounds. We all have different stories related to our upbringing.

I don’t actually like to use the word diversity, because it’s not something we need to work toward. What we do need to work toward is equity and inclusion.

Equity is about everyone having the necessary resources for a successful outcome. I use this example: all full-ride scholarships are not created equal. A student who gets a full ride who came here from a low-income household has a very different experience than someone on a full ride whose parents are doctors. When it comes time to buy a tuxedo or a concert dress, the needs of those two students might not be the same. And to provide additional resources for one, in this case, does not take away from the other.

And I say that inclusion is about the eradication of compartments. For example, I have several identities and not just one. I’m Black, I’m female, I’m a mom, I’m married, I’m straight, I was born Christian, I grew up in a two-parent household, and I was a first-generation college student. You probably have several identities yourself. And what we’ve tended to do is to decide that because someone has a different identity than ours—in any single dimension—we’re going to put them in a compartment over somewhere in the corner. An inclusive environment is one where we’re all in the same container but there are no walls.

Based on your own experiences and knowledge of the history of American music schools, you’ve pointed out that music schools have some unique challenges in fostering inclusion. What are those?

Sellers Battle: What is really challenging in the very nature of the study of music and a higher education process is that it was built on the idea that one form of music, and one which makes up a very small portion of the world’s musics, is superior to any other. Based on that assumption, schools adopted one set of rules, and those were considered the only set of rules.

The assumption of Western classical music’s superiority is very deeply rooted, and it’s interesting how that came to be. Initially most of what is thought of as classical music was created either for church services or for social gatherings in people’s homes. Art song was written to be sung in people’s homes in liederabend—nights where people gathered to sing together. So there were popular and practical reasons for the creation of this music.

But then there became the study of it, coinciding with the rise of the modern research university. And with the study of the music came the theorizing about it. And that theorizing turns what might have once been a popular art form into a high-level art form. I would say that you could probably have theorized West African music, too. It’s just that it wasn’t done.

I think we, meaning music schools in general, have made progress in accepting everyone’s various identities as a person. But then we get to the study of music and eliminate their identities as musicians. For a lot of us, especially those of us who are African American, our entrée into music was not through the classical arena.

What are your top priorities as Eastman’s first designated leader for equity and inclusion?

Sellers Battle: Priority one is identifying what equity and inclusion mean for this institution. The definitions I offered are my general definitions, but the definitions are different for every institution based on priorities and historical contexts.

Priority number two is to make the George Walker Center into a space for students. There’s a belief here that “eat, sleep, music” is how you operate—and students tend to skip the sleep part. I have a rule: we’re not going to practice in this space; we’re going to use it to unwind and rejuvenate. It’s also going to address the needs of affinity groups. So there may be nights when we’re really focused on LGBTQ+ energies, or when our Black Students Union is reserving the space for an affinity moment. But I’m also trying to convey that the George Walker Center is a space for all. And in being a space for all, it’s going to bring some people together who wouldn’t necessarily have been together otherwise.

My third priority is to engage in conversations with faculty, staff, and students to help me see where faculty, staff, and students see themselves in this process. I want to make sure that we’re all engaged in thinking about what the process for change looks like.

Have you set longer-term goals?

Sellers Battle: I have a few ideas based on the commission report and other observations. We’re probably going to be looking at curricular restructuring but doing it in small segments rather than as a major overhaul. You cannot do an about-face without proper planning and time, or people are going to get hurt.

Leading a cultural shift seems like an extraordinarily complicated and challenging job. What are your thoughts on how to go about it?

Sellers Battle: Sometimes it’s really difficult to abandon tradition. A lot of people also think that the only way to enter into conversations about equity and inclusion is through the topic of race. It’s not. Let’s go back to my description of an inclusive space as a single container without walls. Sometimes I also use the analogy of a cruise ship. We’re all on the same ship, but there are many entryways.

My belief is that if you are not comfortable coming into this conversation through the door of race, then let’s have you enter through another door, which may be about age, or another which may be about religion, or gender, or a particular interest—whatever it is that’s going to get you into the space. Then we can begin the conversation.

Equity and inclusion is about much more than race. Let’s talk about the challenges of socioeconomic status, or religious identity, and all of these other dimensions to our identities. And then people who are not comfortable entering through the door of race are going to find out that there are some similarities between the challenges they face that are based on a particular aspect of their identity and the challenges faced by people that stem from race.

We’re not going to be able to eradicate institutionalized racism, or any other kind of structural inequity, in a day. But we can till the soil to break some of it up. And that takes work. A lot of work. But that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible work.

Editor’s note: This story was originally published on October 5, 2022. It has been updated to feature the video titled Breaking Down the Barriers of Gospel Music.

“Sometimes I wonder what it was exactly, that led me to pull The Dead Zone by Stephen King off of my parents’ bookshelf when I was in fourth grade,” says Jason Middleton. “It was the first ‘grown-up’ novel I ever read. There were certainly parts of it that I found kind of upsetting, but also magnetic. It almost felt as if the world was opening up in a new way.”

Middleton is an associate professor of English and of visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester. He also directs its film and media studies program. His captivation by King’s novel led to a lifelong love of horror films. Although horror is just one of the film genres Middleton has immersed himself in—both as a fan and a scholar—it’s a genre whose appeal he thinks is especially durable.

In horror, “normality is threatened by a monster,” he says. “What’s so wonderfully expansive about the horror genre is that the monster keeps forming and reforming in relation to the fears and anxieties of its time. And on the flip side, normality, and the depiction of normality, keeps evolving and changing based on the historical period as well.”

Work as the American nightmare

There have been some clear trends. In the post-World War II era, the monster was often a stand-in for anxieties about the atomic bomb. During the feminist movement of the 1970s, the monster often suggested anxieties about female power and female bodies.

That critique has extended into a new era—late capitalism, a phrase coined to describe a world of globalized commodification that’s both unsettling and absurd. The essays focus overwhelmingly on 21st-century horror films. Those depict a world of economic precarity and a hollowed-out middle class that make up “a new ‘normality’” of survival, or of just getting by. And even that bleak environment is vulnerable to new monsters that threaten what stability protagonists have been able to muster—or that they are striving to attain in the first place.

In Labors of Fear: The Modern Horror Film Goes to Work (University of Texas Press, 2023), Middleton has joined with Aviva Briefel, who teaches literature and film at Bowdoin College, to make the case that there’s been another kind of monster lurking in American horror films all along: the post-industrial world of work.

In the essay collection, which they coedit, Middleton and Briefel suggest that ambivalence about work is a theme that has roots stretching back to classic horror, when it usually came in the form of the mad scientist. In modern horror films, starting roughly in the 1970s, ambivalence evolved into a fuller critique. Middleton and Briefel describe the critique as reflecting “social fears and anxieties that took root in the 1970s and 1980s in response to deindustrialization, automation, globalized labor, union busting, and rising income inequality.”

An easy example is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a pathbreaking film that’s 50 years old this year. Rural, unemployed slaughterhouse workers are never shown performing slaughterhouse labor, but are shown “repeating the trained motions of this labor upon their human victims,” they write.

New categories of uncompensated work

Middleton is especially interested in forms of uncompensated work, which he argues fall disproportionately on groups that are already marginalized. He isn’t just talking about such uncompensated labor as housework or family caregiving. In his own contribution, “No Drama: Emotion Work in Midsommar,” Middleton explores “emotion work” in the 2019 film directed by Ari Aster.

He describes emotion work as “suppressing and modifying, and maybe not expressing one’s own feelings in order that a spouse or partner has the kind of optimal experience that they themselves expect to have in the relationship.” It has a long history in the quest of women to get by but has proven resilient even as women have achieved greater economic independence.

Midsommar (2019) depicts the arduous efforts of a 20-something female protagonist, Dani, to hold onto her relationship with her distant and disengaged boyfriend, Christian. The couple attends a summer festival in Sweden that turns out to be an annual ritual of a murderous cult.

Its horrors mirror Dani’s labors in preserving her attachment to Christian. But she also attains a level of power within the cult, and the film’s cathartic ending shows Dani ending the relationship by sacrificing Christian.

It’s actually a breakup story, Middleton explains. But in showing the slow, laboriousness process in which Dani comes to recognize Christian’s neglectfulness, it’s the inverse of many lighter breakup films. “It’s kind of the horror movie version of a breakup film like Eat Pray Love or Under the Tuscan Sun,” he says. “The semantic elements are mostly the same—travel, exotic location, meeting different people, food, all of these things. But whereas in those films, the work of a breakup is frictionless and fulfilling and idealized, Midsommar uses the horror genre to instead express the work of a breakup as just agonizing, laborious, and painful—and ultimately, in the end, cathartic.”

The horror of stagnation—and of leisure

The essays in the collection also demonstrate how the experience of economic precarity can differ along racial lines. Briefel’s essay, for example, is subtitled “The Hard Work of Leisure in Jordan Peele’s Us.”

“In a 2019 interview for Vanity Fair, Jordan Peele explained that one of his objectives in the film Us was to represent Black leisure,” Briefel begins. “Yet relaxation is a major source of horror in the film.” Us shows a Black family living with a constant threat of merely letting their guard down.

In another essay, Mikal Gaines, an assistant professor of English at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, coins a subgenre of “Buppie horror,” which reworks the conventional home-invasion thriller. Lakeview Terrace (2008) is an archetype, Gaines explains, of a subgenre that “seems to say that entry into a rarified class status historically reserved for whites must be paid in blood.”

For many white Americans, however, the threat is losing what they have—or living with the dread of having already lost. Middleton’s colleague at Rochester, Joel Burges, finds in David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 film It Follows a depiction of “the precarity of white working-class identity.” The film shows a group of young adult friends in a desolate and stagnant postindustrial Detroit. It’s a reworking of the stalker films of the 1970s and ’80s, explains Burges, like Middleton, an associate professor of English and of visual and cultural studies. It Follows adheres to the slasher convention of punishing people for sexual acts. Sexual encounters between the characters—men as well as women, in this film—infect characters with “It,” a stalker who lurks after them, and takes changing forms, but always of mangled middle- and working-class white bodies.

In these bodies, however, Burges found something beyond the slasher convention in which sex equals death. In It Follows, the work of getting by literally takes place mostly in low-level, dead-end service occupations that fill the young adults with dread to have. There’s emotion work, in other words, in surviving the bleak landscape through which “It” stalks victims. “Dread is slow,” Burges writes. “Its menace bears down on you with steadily intensifying pressure that never relents.”

Horror films in the post-COVID era

When Middleton and Briefel got started on their project, COVID-19 was sweeping across the globe. No one knew at the time just how much the pandemic would transform the world of work. Have these changes started to play out in horror films? And if so, how?

Says Middleton: “Something that I noticed during the last few years is that some really interesting horror movies take place not only entirely in a house, or entirely within an enclosed space, but entirely just a person and their laptop. For example, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021). The whole film is just from the perspective of an isolated teenage girl on her laptop, as she’s on it every night to do these internet challenges that grow increasingly dangerous and threatening as she does them.

“It’s just the horrific experience of being on the internet on your laptop all the time.”

One summer several years ago, Jennifer Grotz was in Italy, heading to Rome, when she received word that her dear friend and fellow poet Paul Otremba had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Once in the city, she made her way to the Santa Maria del Popolo basilica to view a painting of significance to them both: Caravaggio’s The Conversion of St. Paul.

Completed in 1601, the roughly seven-by-six-foot oil-on-canvas painting depicts the biblical scene in which Saul of Tarsus—en route to Damascus, tasked with seeking out and arresting the followers of Jesus—is suddenly stricken down and blinded by a bright light. He then hears the voice of Christ ask, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” The experience prompts Saul’s conversion to Christianity.

The drama of this life-altering moment for the man who would come to be known as Paul the Apostle is conveyed through Caravaggio’s use of chiaroscuro, a technique in the visual arts that employs strong contrasts between light and dark within a composition.

Contemplating the scene in front of her, Grotz called to mind Otremba, who had written “Surfing for Caravaggio’s Conversion of Paul” about the painting. Otremba’s work had been composed in response to his teacher, the American poet Stanley Plumly, who’d written his own poem, “Comment on Thom Gunn’s ‘In Santa Maria del Popolo’ Concerning Caravaggio’s The Conversion of St. Paul.” Plumly, in turn, was in dialogue with a contemporary of his, the English poet Thom Gunn, musing on the very same work of art.

“I was talking in my head to Paul and thinking about the conversations that we—all these poets—were having,” she says. “It became a useful way not only to process his illness, but also to use the figurative to think about the literal, and vice versa.”

Chiaroscuro through language

Grotz, who is a professor of English at the University of Rochester as well as an award-winning poet and translator, would eventually distill her meditations into a poem titled “The Conversion of Paul.”

The 79-line poem, dedicated to Otremba, is one of the more than three dozen entries comprising her fourth and latest collection of lyric poetry, Still Falling (Graywolf Press, 2023). The poem is also the one from which the book draws its title as well as the inspiration for the cover art, which features a crop of Caravaggio’s painting.

LISTEN: Jennifer Grotz reads “The Conversion of Paul” from Still Falling, her latest collection of poetry. Grotz made the recording at the request of her friend and fellow poet Paul Otremba before his death in 2019. Jump to the transcript of the poem.

Grotz considers herself an ekphrastic poetic. “I have at least one ekphrastic poem in every book I write,” she says. “It’s an ongoing practice.” Ekphrastic poetry, she explains, is poetry that responds to another work of art, usually in another medium.

The term comes from the Greek word for “description,” but successful ekphrastics goes beyond simply describing another work of art. “It has to think about it, quarrel with it, or use it to leap to something outside the frame or in the world.” (She cultivates this practice in her students, whom she dispatches to the University’s Memorial Art Gallery to contemplate and then write about a holding from the museum’s extensive collections.)

“The Conversion of Paul,” which is available to read on her website, is the main ekphrastic poem in Still Falling. In it, she vividly describes aspects of Caravaggio’s painting, including the sexual overtones (“the red cloak, crumpled like bed sheets” beneath Saul, “arms and legs / as if ready to be taken by God himself”), while toggling between lightness and darkness, both literal and figurative. According to Grotz, “The question becomes, what can only my medium of language do? Can I, for example, make chiaroscuro in language? If so, how?”

More urgently, though, Grotz uses her poem to engage in an ongoing dialogue with Otremba as well as with generations of artists and creators who’ve come before her—some identified directly, others implied:

A lot could be made of how Gunn, then Stan, then you
made a poem out of a painting, but Caravaggio
did it first, making the painting out of verses
from the Bible. All art traffics in some kind of translation.
Which might be another word for conversion.

“As a poet, I’m really interested in voice,” Grotz says, particularly as a means of connecting with the past and present. “Many of the poems in Still Falling were written during the pandemic, when I was alone in my house. I’ve never been more grateful for poetry as a means of conversation, a way to connect with other voices, including those of people I couldn’t talk to anymore.”

A seasoned poet contemplates time and place

Still Falling encapsulates the author’s poetic inquiry into the themes of loss, light, and legacy. The word “still,” suggesting both stagnation and continuity, is juxtaposed with “falling,” evoking a sense of perpetual motion and descent, shaded with the autumnal.

Grotz foregrounds her contemplations of time explicitly with the poems named for months, which appear in the collection in chronological order (“November,” “December,” “January,” “March,” “May,” and “August”). More implicitly, the seasons of life figure prominently throughout the book, which was spurred by a series of losses—including her father in 2015—around the time of the publication of her last book, Window Left Open.

“And then the pandemic came, and everyone seemed to enter this period of grief,” she says.

Grotz’s poetic journey is informed not only by time, but also by her surroundings. She spends nine months of the year living, writing, and teaching in the city of Rochester. References to local landmarks like the frozen Genesee River and the University’s River Campus during wintertime appear in her work, grounding them in the physical world.

Her summers are often spent in sunnier climes, such as Italy and France, where her writing takes on a different hue. “So, when you put them together in a book, it makes a sharp contrast,” she says.

The legacy of poetry

As a senior faculty member at Rochester and the director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences at Middlebury College in Vermont, Grotz is a custodian of the rich tradition of poetry at both institutions.

Bread Loaf, which was founded in 1926, is one of the country’s oldest writers’ conferences, with literary luminaries including Robert Frost, Louise Glück, and Philip Levine (among others) associated with the program. “It’s a distinctly American phenomenon, this movement of writers coming together to support, mentor, and train each other,” says Grotz.

Rochester also has a notable roster of poets affiliated with the University, be it as students, alumni, faculty, or guests. They include Hyam Plutzik, one of the first poet-professors in the country; Anthony Hecht, who was named the United States Poet Laurate after being on the Rochester faculty for more than two decades; Galway Kinnell ’49 (MA), whose 1982 book, Selected Poems, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; James Longenbach, a faculty member, poet-critic, and Guggenheim Fellow whose work garnered recognition from the American Academy of Poets and Letters; and Ilya Kaminsky, a deaf Ukrainian-American poet and a one-time undergraduate at Rochester.

Longenbach was among Grotz’s mentors. They first met at Bread Loaf in 1995, when he was delivering a lecture on the poetry of Jorie Graham, and she worked with him regularly after joining Rochester’s faculty in 2009. “There was no better person to correspond with about poems,” she said about Longenbach after he died of cancer in 2022.

Now Grotz carries the mantle of being the senior poet at Rochester. “I realize what a precious opportunity and experience it is to talk about poetry and poems with younger poets, to share what I know and to learn from them,” she says. “I count it as a privilege to continue that tradition at Rochester.”

The Conversion of Paul

—for Paul Otremba

Bewildered—something in me is made wild
from looking at it—but something
also chastened, subdued, because
it holds my gaze a long time. It is itself
a unit of time—one bewildering instant
caught by Caravaggio’s imagination—Saul
thrown off his horse, landing on his back,
taken aback, Saul becoming Paul, struck blind,
being spoken to by the light. It seems
none of us really cares for Gunn’s
take on the painting, defiant insistence
of being hardly enlightened, but I admire
the chiaroscuro-like contrast he makes
between Paul’s wide open arms
and the close-fisted prayers
of the old women he notices in the pews
when he turns away. But even if
Paul on the ground is still falling, both
are gestures of blind faith, as Stan calls
it. You call it a bar brawl, all this one-upmanship,
but in your poem you don’t take sides,
you give your own perspective, twenty-first century,
postmodern, belated. You ask what happens if
a hundred people hold the painting in their minds
at the same time. Will it gain a collective dullness,
a tarry film like too much smoke? But I like to think
it would sharpen the focus, deepen the saturation
of the red cloak, crumpled like bed sheets, beneath him.
A lot could be made of how Gunn, then Stan, then you
make a poem out of a painting, but Caravaggio
did it first, making the painting out of verses
from the Bible. All art traffics in some kind of translation.
Which might be another word for conversion. God says
Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? It is hard for thee
to kick against the pricks. Which makes me think
of the horse, who should be more visibly
shaken probably from such a flash of light.
No one seems to register how claustrophobic
it all is, difficult to believe it’s happening
outside, where there should be space
for all this stretching out, and the horse
wouldn’t have to raise one hoof so as not
to step on Paul. And the groomsman,
why isn’t he doing anything but
staring down? Like all Caravaggios,
it’s sexual, the arms and legs splayed as if
ready to be taken by God himself,
but it’s really an outsize gesture of shock.
I heard the news of your being sick, Paul,
when I was in Italy. If God himself
is the radiance that struck Saul into Paul,
then what is the darkness swimming around
everything? It makes one feel inside of something,
confined by such dark. Afterwards, the Bible says,
Paul was three days without sight, and
neither did eat nor drink. Now after chemo
you consume a thousand calorie shake
called The Hulk to keep from losing weight.
I went to see the painting when I was in Rome
in September. It is a pleasure to look at a painting
over time. To consider it along with others,
including you, my friend, over decades.
Something in the painting is insistently
itself, intractable, and yet inexhaustible meaning
keeps also being revealed. Paul, thinking of you
when I look at the painting changes it. I see you
vulnerable, surrendered, beautiful and young,
registering that something in you has changed
and what happens next happens to you alone.
And inside you. Conversion is a form of being saved,
like chemo is a form of cure, but it looks to me
like punishment, a singling out, ominous,
and experienced in the dark. When
I used to see the painting, I was an anonymous
bystander. Now I am helpless. It is
and you are, in the original sense, awful.
I can’t get inside the painting
like I suddenly and desperately want to,
to hold him, to help you get back up.
And now, for Paul, everything has changed.

Ezra Tawil, an English professor at the University of Rochester who had a knack for connecting with students and whose work helped define the “American style” of literature, is being remembered as a teacher of substance with a style all his own.

Tawil died January 23 of melanoma. He was 56.

As the director of graduate studies for the English department, Tawil mentored students with warmth and humility in equal measure. His approach, colleagues say, enabled him to bond with students in a way that set him apart.

Katherine Mannheimer, the chair of the Department of English, recalls Tawil leading sessions with groups of incoming students and deftly encouraging them to reveal themselves with a playful icebreaker: “Tell me something weird about yourself.”

“He got people to share the weirdest stuff—strange talents, obsessions, collections,” Mannheimer says. “I think it was because he was so open and warm and just set that tone.

“They trusted he would tell them all the weirdest stuff about himself and would accept whatever they said and think it was cool.”

Tawil was as much a serious scholar of early American literature as he was a student of American pop culture.

Anyone who entered his office on the fourth floor of Morey Hall in the days before he died would have found a copy of Henry Highland Garnet’s Address to the Slaves of the United States of America sitting on his desk, and an oversized copy of the iconic Life magazine cover depicting a rapt film audience wearing 3D glasses in 1952.

At the foot of his desk sat a gray dog bed reserved for Misha, his black therapy dog for whom he kept an Instagram page. Tawil maintained residences in Rochester and Manhattan, the latter being where he lived with his wife and their son.

Tawil was a skilled musician and gifted magician, pursuits he honed as a youngster and that continued to enchant him in adulthood. People closest to him recall Tawil as a boy making his pet bird disappear and reappear; as an adult, he’d intuitively shuffle a deck of cards while on department video conference calls.

“Ezra was somebody who I would say most people found impossible not be attracted to, not to want to be around, no matter how well or how little they knew him,” says John Michael, the John Hall Deane Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry at Rochester. “He had a special kind of warmth and energy, combined with a lot of insight and intelligence, and it made him really compelling and unique.”

Making American literature ‘fresh and exciting’

Tawil was born the fourth child and only son of Fred and Sally Tawil in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in the Syrian Jewish community there. At his bar mitzvah, he performed an elaborate magic show.

He graduated with high honors from Wesleyan University in 1989 and went on to earn a master’s degree and a doctorate in American civilization from Brown University.

Prior to joining the faculty at Rochester in 2011, he taught in English departments at Wesleyan, Harvard, and Columbia universities.

Tawil authored two books and edited two more during his career. Eight essays and articles he wrote appeared in a variety of scholarly journals and publications.

His first book, The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance (Cambridge University Press, 2006), makes a case for how the popular “frontier romance genre” of American fiction in the early 19th century provided the foundation for a seismic shift in racial thinking in the United States.

“By the mid-nineteenth century, when slavery emerges onto the national political stage . . . race had moved beneath the skin, into the blood, the essence,” read one review published by the University of Chicago Press. “All of this takes place silently, invisibly, except in the popular literature of the day where Tawil finds the evidence of the transformation at work.”

In his second book, Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Tawil confronted how Americans can claim “a national literature” distinguishable from other literatures written in English.

“Tawil makes a convincing case that the logic of style—adopting something but ‘wearing’ it differently—allowed post-Revolutionary Americans to grapple with their cultural indebtedness while making the case for their national uniqueness,” read one review.

The topic, colleagues say, in many ways mirrored Tawil’s approach to scholarship and pedagogy.

“That there is a particularly American style of literature is a very old topic,” Michael says. “But one of the things that characterized his work was his ability to return to a topic like that and make it both fresh and exciting.”

Tawil is survived by his wife, Kirsten Lentz; a 13-year-old son, Jules, and his sisters, Adrienne, Robin, and Joyce.

Sometimes, procrastination pays off—at least it did for Melissa Balmain.

Balmain, now an instructor in the Department of English at the University of Rochester, was writing the book Just Us: Adventures and Travels of a Mother and Daughter (Faber & Faber, 1998) when she learned that two friends from college were writing and sharing short comic poetry via email. Thinking she had discovered a fun way to procrastinate, Balmain contributed a few poems. Then a few more. And some more after that.

While she did manage to finish her book, she also started a new career as a light-verse poet.

“I was always writing some kind of poetry or lyrics, and it was almost always comic,” says Balmain. “But it wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I started writing a lot of comic poetry.”

She hasn’t stopped writing since. Her latest book, Satan Talks to His Therapist (Paul Dry Books, 2023), “explores the lighter side of dark times.” Those dark times, described by Balmain as a “descent to hell,” included climate change, crazy politics, and the modern plague, better known as COVID-19. Yet that descent is followed by a poetic effort to climb out from the depths, albeit with some side trips to Limbo along the way.

“Many of us have coped by relishing the good that’s in the world, whether that’s family, great works of art, or humor, even silliness,” says Balmain, who was experiencing some major changes in her personal life, including a looming empty nest. She herself embraced humor and silliness as a both a coping mechanism and creative fuel, which resulted in more than a few poignant observations that crop up in her latest book.

The collection opens with “On Looking at an MRI Cross-Section,” a poem juxtaposed with an image from an MRI scan of the author’s brain, one that was taken when Balmain was experiencing unusually severe headaches. While no brain abnormalities were discovered, Balmain nonetheless found the episode “a little bit paralyzing.”

“This is a very good example of seeking humor in a subject that is absolutely terrifying,” says Balmain. “The scan showed all these objects in my brain. Then I started to think how those freaky objects are the very things generating my poem.”

Satan Talks to His Therapist touches on a wide variety of topics, including Shakespeare, Niagara Falls, donuts, middle age, grief, birdwatching, and pandemic-era masks. Most of the 63 offerings are humorous—85 percent by Balmain’s estimation. That should be no surprise, considering how she’s wired. “I discovered pretty early on that if I was being funny, I got people’s attention,” explains Balmain. “It’s just natural for me to seek the humor in situations, sometimes as a coping mechanism.”

But don’t mistake comic poetry—or light verse—as something trivial or carefree. Balmain is constantly working to dispel that assumption. As she says, “My favorite kind of light verse wrestles with something true about the human experience, whether that’s society or human nature.”

Balmain has had her share of professional experiences that inform her writing. In addition to a brief stint as a mime during and after college, she’s been a journalist; newspaper columnist; college professor; and is now the editor-in-chief of America’s longest-running journal of comic verse, Light.

Once she discovered the satisfaction of light verse, Balmain got serious about the not-so-serious. She wrote two books of poems: Walking in on People (Able Muse Press, 2014) and The Witch Demands a Retraction: Fairy Tale Reboots for Adults (Humorist Books, 2021). Over the years, her writings, including prose, have also appeared in, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, among other outlets.

The groundwork for her success was laid in her early school years when she would read authors like Dorothy Parker, Erma Bombeck, and Russell Baker, and listen to the (often humorous) lyrics of Stephen Sondheim and Tom Lehrer. As an undergraduate at Princeton University, she took courses with writing luminaries, including John McPhee, Sandra Gilbert, Russell Banks, and Joyce Carol Oates. Her education continued after college, when she had opportunities to study with poets Dick Davis, Rhina P. Espaillat, Emily Grosholz, R.S. Gwynn, X.J. Kennedy, Joshua Mehigan, and Timothy Steele.

Having learned the craft of writing from accomplished writers and poets, Balmain’s career came full circle in 2010 when she joined the English department faculty at the University of Rochester as an adjunct instructor. Among the courses she teaches is a 200-level class on humor writing.

“It’s a matter of helping people to do the most they can with what they have. Will I be able to turn Debbie Downer into Tina Fey? Probably not,” says Balmain. “But I do think that with techniques that we study in class, it is possible for someone to be funnier on the page.”

One of those techniques—the most important one, according to Balmain—is generating surprise. “If it doesn’t surprise your readers, they’re not going to laugh.”

Laughter is one of the main objectives of her latest project. She’s working with the managing editor of Light to compile an anthology of the journal’s best poetry since 1992.

When she’s not editing and teaching, Balmain will continue writing. Because, as she says, “People who write poems are always writing poems.”

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