The English Department welcomes Professor Mesha Maren to our faculty from the University of North Carolina where she served as the Kenan Visiting Writer Fellow. Maren earned her MFA from Queens College in Charlotte, NC. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation and the Kenan Visiting Writer Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She serves as a National Endowment of the Arts Writing Fellow at the Federal Prison Camp in Alderson, West Virginia.
Mesha Maren is the author of the novel Sugar Run (Algonquin Books). Her short stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Oxford American, Triquarterly, The Southern Review, Ecotone, Crazyhorse, and other journals.
Sugar Run:
“Startling…clever…brilliant.” —Charles Frazier, The New York Times Book Review“A heady admixture of explosive plot and taut, burnished prose…Mesha Maren writes like a force of nature.”—Lauren Groff
Maren spent time during the summer of 2019 making stops on the Sugar Run book tour which included a stop in Lenoir, NC and another one is planned for this Fall, October 6, in Burnsville, NC at the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival.
My teaching style involves a combination of close reading and hands-on experimentation. A typical day in one of my classes begins with a lively discussion of the assigned reading with a particular focus on craft techniques that leads to an in-class writing exercise that mirrors my lecture and our readings.
My advice for students interested in creative writing is that you must find and mine their own particular passion while also developing a detached and critical eye. Truman Capote once said, “Writers, at least those who take genuine risks, who are willing to bite the bullet and walk the plank, have a lot in common with another breed of lonely men—the guys who make a living shooting pool and dealing cards.” What Capote means is that while you are in the midst of your writing project you often cannot tell whether or not it will end up being any good. You have to keep going though, mining your passion, until you can get some perspective. And if it doesn’t work out the first time you have to be willing to gamble again.
I strongly believe that the human impulse to tell stories is one of our greatest attributes and that studying English hones not only our critical faculties but also our ability to communicate and empathize. When I entered college and realized that there was a special place called the English Department where people spent all of their time thinking and talking and writing about literature, I fell in love and never looked back.
What appealed to me most was the great variety that is represented in the department. I like the fact that the scholarly pursuits of the faculty members range from the examination of the intersections among information technologies and the arts to code-switching and narratives of medicine and state formation. I felt that the English Department at Duke would be a great place for me to continue to develop myself as an artist and scholar.
We are excited about the addition of Professor Mesha Maren to the Duke English faculty and look forward to her contributing to the department, especially in the area of creative writing. During the Fall 2019 semester, Professor Maren will be teaching English 110S: Introduction to Creative Writing.
English Department
