G. Douglas Atkins

Professor

3109 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2609
gdatkins@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Virginia)

Areas of Research

History and Composition of the personal and the familiar essay; "creative nonfiction"; T.S. Eliot; Restoration and eighteenth-century poetry and prose; reading and pedagogy; literature and religion.

Selected Publications

On the Familiar Essay: Challenging Academic Orthodoxies; Literary Paths to Religious Understanding: Essays on Dryden, Pope, Keats, George Eliot, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and E.B. White; T.S. Eliot and the Essay; Estranging the Familiar (Choice "Outstanding Academic Book of the Year"); Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth; Reading Essays: An Invitation; Reading Deconstruction/Deconstructive Reading (Choice "Outstanding Academic Book of the Year"); Geoffrey Hartman: Criticism as Answerable Style; The Faith of John Dryden: Change and Continuity; Quests of Difference: Reading Pope's Poems; co-editor of Writing and Reading Differently; co-editor of Contemporary Literary Theory; co-editor of Shakespeare and Deconstruction. Former series editor, Creative Nonfiction, Univ. of Illinois Press.

Professor Atkins is a Kemper award winner, and was a long-time Coordinator of Graduate Studies. He has received the Kenyon Review prize for literary excellence in nonfiction prose, Burlington-Northern Foundation Faculty Achievement Award for Outstanding Classroom Teaching, and Grier Award for Outstanding Teaching.

William J. Harris

Associate Professor

3106 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2534
wjh8@ku.edu

Areas of Research

American Literature, African American Literature, jazz studies, American poetry and creative writing.

Selected Publications

The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic (1985), Hey Fella Would You Mind Holding This Piano a Moment (1974), and In My Own Dark Way (1977).

Associate Professor Harris has also published poetry in fifty anthologies and some of the more recent work appears in Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (2004) and Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans Every Goodbye Ain't Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans (2006). He is the editor or co-editor of The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (1991, 2000), Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of African American Literary Tradition (1997) and a double issue of The African American Review on Amiri Baraka (Summer/Fall 2003). He is an editor or advisory editor for The African American Review, mixed blood, the University of Iowa Press Contemporary North American Poetry Series, Penn Sound: Amiri Baraka (website) and Modern American Poetry: Amiri Baraka (website).  His awards and fellowships include the College of the Liberal Arts Outstanding Teacher Award (Penn State), and the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship (Harvard University). He is a member of the Jazz Study Group at Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies.

Associate Professor Harris's Curriculum Vitae

Kenneth Irby

Associate Professor

2010 Wescoe Hall
785.864.3118
klirby@ku.edu

A.M. (Harvard), M.L.S. (California, Berkeley)

Areas of Research

Poetry

Selected Publications

Call Steps and Antiphonal and Fall to Fall and Ridge to Ridge: Poems 1990-2000

Professor Irby contributes to various anthologies; articles and reviews on contemporary poetry. Visiting Professor and Fulbright travel grant, Univ. of Copenhagen. Awards from the Fund for Poetry and the Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry. 

Michael L. Johnson

Professor

3001K Wescoe Hall
785.864.2507
newwestr@ku.edu

Areas of Research

Poetics, popular culture, modern poetry, New Journalism, technology and humanism, education, Western American culture.

Selected Publications

From Hell to Jackson Hole: A Poetic History of the American West; Hunger for the Wild: A Cultural History of America's Obsession with the Untamed West (2007).

Professor Johnson is the author of articles on poetics, popular culture, modern poetry; books on New Journalism, technology and humanism, education, Western American culture; books of poetry and poetic translations. He is the Director of the Freshman-Sophomore English Program. 

Professor Johnson's Curriculum Vitae

Paul Stephen Lim

Professor

3138 Wescoe Hall
785.864.3642
plim@ku.edu

M.A. (Kansas)

Areas of Research

Playwriting, Contemporary and Modern Drama.

Selected Publications

Conpersonas (1977); Points of Departure (1977); Some Arrivals, But Mostly Departures (1982); Flesh, Flash and Frank Harris (1984); Hatchet Club (1985); Homerica (1985); Woeman (1985); Mother Tongue (1992); Figures in Clay (1992); Report to the River (2002).

Professor Lim is the founder and artistic director of English Alternative Theatre (EAT), a producing organization based in the English Department devoted primarily to producing plays by students in its creative writing program. He was the Playwriting Chair for Region 5 of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival (2000-2003), and was on the KCACTF National Selection Team for Festival 36 (2003-2004). In 1996 he was awarded the Kennedy Center gold medallion for his work with student playwrights. He is also the winner of various university teaching awards, including the Conger-Gabel Teaching Professor (2001-2003), the Kemper Teaching Fellowship (2002), and the Chancellors Club Teaching Professorship (2005- ). He is presently writing a play about his father. Professor Lim's personal Website: http://www.paulstephenlim.com

Tom Lorenz

Associate Professor

3001H Wescoe Hall
785.864.2516
tlorenz@ku.edu

M.F.A. (Bowling Green)

Areas of Research

Creative writing

Selected Publications

Guys Like Us, Serious Living

Associate Professor Lorenz is a novelist and screenwriter. He is author of two novels, several short stories, and screenplays for motion pictures and television. He won the Sue Kaufman Prize for best first novel of 1980, awarded to Guys Like Us by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He currently serves as  Associate Chair of the English Department and is editor of Cottonwood Review.

Laura Moriarty

Assistant Professor

2023 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2558
lauramo@ku.edu

M.A. (Kansas)

Areas of Research

Fiction writing

Selected Publications

The Rest of Her Life (Hyperion, 2007), The Center of Everything (Hyperion, 2003), While I'm Falling (2009).

Assistant Professor Moriarty won Elle Magazine's Novel of the Year for The Rest of Her Life (2007). She was writer in Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy (2000-2001) and is a winner of the Carlin Graduate Teaching Award.

Assistant Professor Moriarty's Curriculum Vitae

Chester Sullivan

Associate Professor

3101 Wescoe Hall
785.864.3287
csull@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Texas Christian)

Areas of Research

Creative writing.

Selected Publications

Alligator Gar (1974), a novel; Sullivan's Hollow (1978), a regional history; Answered Prayers (1992), a novel; and numerous short stories, poems, and reviews.