Research

My academic "research" consists primarily of creative activity. As a writer, I have published one novel, Where This Lake Is (White Pine Press, 1997), and I have two more in manuscript, The History of My Misfortunes, completed in 2000, and Notes from a Parallel Universe, completed in 2002. The last two no doubt need additional work.

I am at work on (and expect to complete soon) A Prayer for Foxes and Hens: Richmond County, Virginia, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Co-written with John A. Brown of Warsaw, Virginia, it is a book-length, eyewitness narrative account of a Voting Rights Act violation in a rural Virginia county and of that county’s citizens reaction to it, up to and through a high-profile federal court case. When that project is complete, I will be returing to a novel I began several years ago but had to put aside for other priorities, a fictional treatment of the “Herrin Massacre,” an incident that occurred in southern Illinois in the midst of a nationwide coal miners’ strike in 1923.

I am also serving as contributing editor for Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts.  In that capacity I am conducting, recording, and editing audio interviews of artists visiting VCUQ, and gathering, editing, and processing materials documenting their exhibitions for publication in Blackbird.   Additionally, I am working with fellow faculty to identify prominent Middle Eastern and South Asian poets for translation and publication in Blackbird, and to then facilitate that translation, and I am reviewing and editing fiction submissions for publication in Blackbird.