As Falvey’s Cat in the Stax, Rebecca writes articles covering a broad range of topics, from academics to hobbies to random events. All the while highlighting how Falvey Library can enhance your Villanova experience!

Happy Wednesday, Wildcats! We’re back with another Author Spotlight. I know life may be getting hectic as we near the end of the semester, but remember to take some time to take a break and relax. This month’s featured writer is a poet, so you can simply take a few minutes to read one poem at a time.

April is National Poetry Month, a time to recognize poets and poetry’s contribution to literature and culture. Established by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, National Poetry Month is now one of the largest literary celebrations in the world. Millions of readers, students, teachers, librarians, and publishers participate every year by recognizing poets and reading poetry. Therefore, it seems fitting that this month’s Author Spotlight should feature poet Carolyn Forché, who the University had the honor of hosting as a speaker last week for the 2024 Villanova Literary Festival.

Photo courtesy of Blue Flower Arts

Carolyn Forché is recognized as a “poet of witness,” a term she herself coined. She has published five books of poetry, and much of the poems in these works address political and social issues. However, her first volume, Gathering the Tribes, is a deeply personal work. It was published when she was 24 years-old and recounts experiences from her young adult life. It won the 1975 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Her next release was The Country Between Us which won the Lamont Prize of the Academy of American Poets in 1981. Forché is also the author of The Angel of History, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and The Blue Hour, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent collection of poetry is called In the Lateness of the World and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The poems in this collection meditate on migrations across oceans and borders but also between the past and present and life and death.

Forché has also written a memoir titled What You Have Heard is True, an account of her experiences in El Salvador during a time of political upheaval. Her visit to El Salvador sparked her work as a human rights activist, which can be seen in many of her early poems. Her anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, was praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice.” For her humans rights work and efforts to preserve memory and culture, she was presented the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award in 1998 in Stockholm. 

Carolyn Forché is not only a poet but a translator as well. She has translated the works of Claribel Alegría, Robert Desnos, Lasse Söderberg, Fernando Valverde and Mahmoud Darwish. Her translations of these poets have received great critical acclaim.

For all you poetry lovers out there, Carolyn Forché’s work will make you think and feel as she ties the political and poetic together to create memorable, though-provoking, and heart-wrenching poems.

Rebecca Amrick is a first-year graduate student in the English Department and a Graduate Assistant at Falvey Library.

As Falvey’s Cat in the Stax, Rebecca writes articles covering a broad range of topics, from academics to hobbies to random events. All the while highlighting how Falvey Library can enhance your Villanova experience!

Happy Wednesday, Wildcats! Spring is officially here! Yesterday, March 19, was the first day of spring. We’ve already had some warmer weather, and flowers are starting to bloom. Take some time to sit outside this week and enjoy the spring weather.

There’s nothing I love more than sitting outside reading a good book. Villanova’s campus is great because there are so many benches and chairs to sit on as well as large green spaces perfect for pulling out a blanket to lie down on. If you don’t have any books to read, might I suggest any novel written by Jane Austen?

This month’s Author Spotlight features renowned English novelist Jane Austen. Born on Dec. 16th, 1775, Austen wrote six complete novels during her lifetime before her death in 1817 at age 41. Her literary works are distinctly modern in their creation and exploration of ordinary characters and daily life in 18th and 19th century England.

Image from Archive Photos/Getty Images

Austen was the seventh out of eight children and only one of two daughters. Her father was a reverend who fostered an environment of learning. Although her family was large, they were close and affectionate with one another. Creating and acting out plays together was a favorite pastime for the family. By the time she was 12, Austen began writing her own stories. This collection of writings filled three whole notebooks and became known as her Juvenilia.

The first of her works to be published was Sense and Sensibility which was published in October 1811 and received immediate success and praise as the first edition completely sold out by 1813. This book tells the story of the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, who move into a relative’s country estate after their father’s death.

Perhaps Austen’s most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice (1813) was another instant success. This story follows Elizabeth Bennet, the daughter of a country gentleman, and the hate-to-love relationship she has with wealthy landowner Mr. Darcy.

Mansfield Park was the next book to be introduced to readers. Published in 1814, this novel was not received as well by critics as Austen’s earlier novels, but it was still incredibly popular with the public and actually became one of Austen’s best-selling books at the time. Mansfield Park is the most serious of her novels as it incorporates a discussion of religion and religious duty through the moral strength of its heroine, Fanny Price.

Austen’s Emma (1815) was the last novel to be published during her lifetime. A more comedic tale, Emma tells the story of its namesake, Emma Woodhouse, and the successes and failures she experiences in her attempts at matchmaking.

Fun Fact: Did you know that the 1995 film Clueless was actually inspired by Emma and is a contemporary take on the novel?

Image by Leah Newhouse from Pexels.com

Jane Austen’s final two finished novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were both published posthumously in 1817. Northanger Abbey satirizes Gothic novels through its heroine Catherine Moreland, whose love of Gothic thrillers influences her interpretations and clouds her rational judgement. Persuasion is about reawakened love and second chances when Anne Elliot meets her old love Captain Wentworth after rejecting his marriage proposal seven years prior.

Jane Austen’s literary masterpieces are still incredibly popular today, inspiring numerous movie adaptations and television shows and cementing their place in the English literary canon among the classics. Her stories all feature strong women engaging in journeys of self-discovery and finding enduring love in the process. Witty, light, realistic, and written in elegant prose, these novels have entertained readers for centuries. If you’re looking for something fun to read this spring, I definitely recommend a novel by this much beloved author.

Rebecca Amrick is a first year graduate student in the English Department and a Graduate Assistant at Falvey Library.

As Falvey’s Cat in the Stax, Rebecca writes articles covering a broad range of topics, from academics to hobbies to random events. All the while highlighting how Falvey Library can enhance your Villanova experience!

Happy Wednesday, Wildcats, and welcome to a new segment I’m introducing into the Cat in a Stax Blog: Author Spotlight. I love to read, it’s probably one of my favorite pastimes. And as an English grad student, I’m constantly introduced to writers and texts I might not have otherwise have heard of, let alone read. I want to use this platform to expand your readership and hopefully help you discover some new interests in literature. Every month, one Cat in the Stax post will be dedicated to informing about and celebrating a  writer whose work is available at here at Falvey. Our very first featured author? Zadie Smith.

Photo by David Levenson/Getty Images

Zadie Smith is a British writer whose work includes novels, essays, and short stories. She was born in London, England on Oct. 27, 1975 to a Jamaican mother and an English father. She studied English Literature at Cambridge University and graduated with her B.A. in 1998. In 2010, she became a tenured professor of Creative Writing at New York University. For Smith, fiction is “a medium that must always allow itself . . . the possibility of expressing intimate and inconvenient truths.” She explores many of these truths in her work, which often ponder questions of race, religion, and cultural identity.

Her debut novel, White Teeth, was published in 2000. It explores a contemporary multicultural London through the lives of three different, but connected, families. The book was an immediate literary sensation and won many awards, including the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book). Her second book, titled The Autograph Man, examines loss, obsession, and the nature of fame. This book won the 2003 Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction. It was also this same year that Granta magazine named Smith as one of 20 “Best of Young British Novelists” and published her short story Martha, Martha in their 2003 issue. On Beauty is Smith’s third novel (published in 2005), and tells the story of two families living in the fictional town of Wellington, Massachusetts. On Beauty won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction.

Smith is also the author of NW, a story focused on the friendship between two women in London that is tested by the trials and tribulations of adulthood, and Swing Time, which follows the lives of two aspiring dancers whose lives take drastically different turns. Smith’s most recent book, The Fraud, is set in Victorian London and based on the historical Tichborne Trial. The Fraud can be found on Falvey’s new Popular Reading Shelves.

Zadie Smith’s work includes essays and short stories as well. A collection of her short stories was published in 2019, titled Grand Union. She has three essay collections: Changing My Mind, Feel Free, and Intimations. Smith also wrote a play called The Wife of Willesden, a reimagining of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale from his Canterbury Tales.

If you’re looking to read something different that will make you think, definitely check out this incredible and prolific writer!

Rebecca Amrick is a first year graduate student in the English Department and a Graduate Assistant at Falvey Library.