Welcome to the Alumni page. For fellow alumni of the English Department, this is a place where you can check up on other alums. If you are an alumni, and wish to be included or have your information updated, please fill out our information form. For current students, feel free to browse through the alumni bios to get a sense for the kinds of jobs that English majors have obtained after graduation.

You may also consider donating to the English Department so we may continue to provide an outstanding education and extra opportunities for our students.

Spotlight Archive

Rachel Peckham wins the Marshall University Distinguished Artists and Scholars Award

Dr. Rachel Peckham is the latest recipient of the Marshall University Distinguished Artists and Scholars Award for junior faculty. She is an Assistant Professor of Non-Fiction at Marshall University and a PhD graduate of Ohio University's Creative Writing Program. The English Department congratulates Dr. Peckham on this award. Read the full story here.

Our Extended Family - Alumnus Professor Yasuo Hashiguchi of Hakata, Japan

In June 2011, our own Professor Amritjit Singh traveled to Japan as an invited speaker at a Black Studies conference in Kyoto and to give talks at several universities. During his two-week visit, Singh met at least three OU alumni, including Professor Yasuo Hashiguchi, a retired professor and former President of Fukuoka Jo Gakuin University Junior College. Impeccably dressed and an engaging speaker of English, Professor Hashiguchi still resides in Hakata-Fukuoka in southern Japan where this 87-year old distinguished academic served with distinction in many academic positions. His daughter Aoi Mori has followed in his footsteps and is currently a Professor of English at Hiroshima Jogakuin University in Hiroshima and is a scholar of African American Lit. Alerted by Aoi about Amrit Singh's lecture in Hakata on June 23 by Professor Keiko Miyamoto of Seinan Gakuin University, Professor Hashiguchi showed up for the lecture and accepted the invitation to stay on for the dinner.

A graduate of the U of Tokyo, Professor Hashiguchi attended OU with the support of the GARIOA program, a post-WWII program that included American financial assistance to students and others in U.S.-occupied territories. According to Professor Hashiguchi, this program is generally viewed as a precursor to the Fulbright Scholarly Exchange Program. At a traditional Japanese meal with other English professors in Fukuoka, Hashiguchi fondly and vividly recalled his time at OU between 1950 and 1951. He told Amrit Singh that there were only 4000 students attending Ohio University at that time. Currently, the University is host to nearly 26,000 students.

At OU, Professor Hashiguchi completed his M.Ed. in English Education, the highest degree offered then by OU, taking graduate level courses, among others, in American Literature, Tennyson and Browning (Seminar), American Lit, 1865-1945, British and American Poetry, and Educational Statistics. When asked by Professor Singh if he had an opportunity to travel in Ohio or neighboring states during his year at OU, Hashiguchi admitted that he was too serious a student to do so. He regrets that he did not spend more time enjoying the people and natural beauty of Ohio, because he was so focused on finishing his Master's degree in one year. In 1972, accompanied by his wife, Hashiguchi visited Colby College in Maine on a senior Fulbright fellowship and conducted his research on Sarah Orne Jewett. Today in Japan, Professor Hashiguchi is widely known as a Steinbeck buff and has met our own Steinbeck scholar Professor Robert DeMott many a time at conferences around the globe.

We wish Yasuo many more years of good health and intellectual adventures and are proud of all his achievements.

OU Alum Wins Teaching Award

Alum Wins 2010 Teaching Award

B.A. Houghton College ’92

M.F.A. Wichita State University ’96

Ph.D. Ohio University ’00

ERIE, Pa. – August 26, 2010 – Thomas Noyes, associate professor of English and creative writing at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, has won the college’s 2010 Council of Fellows Excellence in Teaching Award.

In addition to his classroom responsibilities, Noyes is chair of the college’s B.F.A. in Creative Writing degree program and consulting editor for Lake Effect, its literary journal.

Noyes has published two story collections, Behold Faith and Other Stories (Dufour, 2003) and Spooky Action at a Distance and Other Stories (Dufour, 2008). His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, and been recognized by literary organizations that include The New York Times Book Review, Kirkus Reviews, Stanford University Libraries, and The Association of Writers and Writing Programs. In 2009, Noyes was the recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Individual Fellowship.

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An Interview with Tom Noyes

Dr. Tom Noyes completed his PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing at Ohio University in 2000. He has taught at Indiana State University, Concordia College, and currently teaches at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. His work has appeared in a variety of literary journals and last year he published his second story collection, Spooky Action at a Distance and Other Stories. We recently caught up with him via a brief email interview.

Can you tell us a little about working at Penn State Erie?

It’s tough getting a creative writing job, and tougher getting a tenure-line creative writing job, and even tougher getting a tenure-line creative writing job at an institution that invests in and values literary art. So, professionally-speaking, I feel pretty lucky at the moment.

Your new book was nominated for a few awards before Dufour picked it up.

Before landing with Dufour Editions, the manuscript had been named runner-up for AWP's Grace Paley Prize and a finalist for Notre Dame University Press's Richard Sullivan Award. These close calls are nice on the one hand--they're affirming--but, on the other hand, they make me anxious and impatient. It was a relief when the book was taken. Now I can once again be anxious and impatient about writing fiction rather than things like book contracts, reader reports, and submission letters.

What’s next on your writing plate then?

In January, I was awarded a Pennsylvania Individual Artist's Grant that is going to allow me more writing time than usual in the coming months, so, in terms of my writing, I'm feeling cautiously optimistic about my next project.

And what is the new project?

Well, right now I’m still thinking in terms of another story collection, but this new collection would be anchored by a long, novella-type story. Who knows, though. To this point in my writing career, planning doesn’t seem to have much bearing on production.

You’ve been away from OU for a while now. What do you still carry around with you from your time in the program here.

Three things come to mind. First, OU was where I began to understand what kind of teacher I was going to be. Also, working on the editorial team of Quarter After Eight, I gained a lot of respect for editors, especially editors of shoestring-budget publications. Finally, I became a first-time father in Athens, so there was a lot I needed to hurry up and learn on that front. A lot I still need to hurry up and learn.

How has parenthood changed your writing life, both practically and creatively?

Well, of course, parenthood is another responsibility to juggle, and there’s no denying that sometimes it keeps me from writing when I’d like to be writing. That said, when I do get to write, I think I’m more focused now than I was before becoming a father. I know that I don’t have all the time in the world to sit there and fiddle around, so I probably spend the time I do have more productively, more intensely. And, of course, having a kid can be a pretty great thing for a writer in terms of seeing the world. Watching my kid grow up is like déjà vu—in a sense, I’m constantly reviewing and being reminded of my own history. On the other hand, I can’t help but be struck by the differences between the world in which she’s growing up and the world in which I grew up. In this sense, I think having a kid has increased my awareness, made me more alert, increased my sensitivity. As a parent, perhaps one feels doubly invested in watching history unfold.

What do you wish you would have known as a grad student that you know now as an academic professional?

Enjoy the time you have left as students. There's nothing like being a student in a great workshop or seminar. I like teaching a lot, but being a student is tough to beat. I miss it more than I thought I would.

How do you balance your personal writing goals with your other academic responsibilities?

I'm not sure I ever will achieve true balance between my teaching and my writing. If I'm honest, I'd have to admit that I always feel guilty about sacrificing one for the sake of the other; sometimes I feel like it's my writing that's suffering, and sometimes I feel like it's my teaching. The tug-of-war isn't always fun. That's academia, though.

U of Chicago Harper Fellow Desirae Matherly

Desirae Matherly (PhD ’04) is working her dream job. For the past three years she has been a Harper Fellow at the University of Chicago, a position that allows her interdisciplinary teaching opportunities in the humanities and plenty of time to write. Building on her recent publication success and the lessons she learned at Ohio University, Matherly is looking forward to her writing and teaching future.

Her essay, “Final: Comprehensive, Roughly,” an experimental work that lays the multiple choice, short answer, and essay exam form on top of an essay about education, poverty, and epistemology, was anthologized in the 2008 volume of The Best Creative Nonfiction. The essay was also a notable essay of 2007 in this year's Best American Essays. The essay began as a workshop piece during Matherly’s PhD studies at OU, and stands as a concrete example of the many valuable experiences she gained here in the English department.

“The English Department's mandatory doctoral colloquium [English 777] prepared me for the job market and publishing, and introduced me to the formality of a professional, academic meeting,” wrote Matherly in a recent email interview. She recalled a fellow PhD student describing the “stack of rejections waist high” that would prelude a first publication. She only wishes she would have started collecting those rejection letters sooner. “I wish that I'd been more willing to send essays out for publication as a grad student.” She explained. “I waited until my first year out, and given how long it takes to actually place something, beginning earlier would have been helpful.”

Matherly’s advice to current students: Submit. Attend conferences. Find a way to balance teaching responsibilities with your own work. “Whenever I can, I use my teaching as a way to help my own work along,” she wrote. “Finding the line between over-preparation and enthusiastic teaching is something we all have to do at some point.” In short, Matherly says, begin living like an academic.