Professor Laura Donnelly pictured above
Laura Donnelly
Assistant Professor
Education: BA from Hope College (a small school in southwest Michigan), MFA from Purdue University, PhD from Western Michigan University. Between my undergrad and grad work, there were three years of miscellany – working as a piano accompanist for my alma mater, waiting tables, and writing, writing, writing. Those years were also an education.
Courses Taught: I teach all levels of poetry here at Oswego. I’ve also taught fiction and nonfiction writing, intro to literature, and a course on gender and sexuality in poetry. I also spent several of my grad school years doing editorial work, and I’d love to teach a course on literary publishing in the future. So: I like a lot of things, from those baggy monsters of Victorian novels (I will try to convince you that Dickens is hilarious) to the politics of feminist and queer theory, but writing is my main love.
Favorite Writers: I was in the fifth grade the first time I stayed up all night reading a book – it was Madeleine L’Engel’s A Wrinkle in Time, or one of the other books in that series. I remember my window shade lightening, around 5am, and thinking, Might as well finish it now!
Some of the other writers that have kept me up, in no particular order: Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, Christine Schutt, Thomas Hardy, Jennifer Egan, Zadie Smith, Laura van den Berg, Elizabeth Bishop, John Keats, Jane Kenyon, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Louise Gluck, Marianne Boruch, Nancy Eimers, Alice Notley, Ann Carson, Annie Dillard, Mark Doty…
I love the Andy Goldsworthy documentary Rivers and Tides, the film Amélie, and everything by the playwright Tom Stoppard.
If I had to pair it down to, say, three books, they’d be different depending on the day you asked. Today, I’ll say Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Christine Schutt’s Florida, and Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III.
Other Interests: In addition to writing and reading, I’m drawn to music (I was originally a piano performance major in college), travel, gardening, animals, running, cross-country skiing, and knitting (which is a really great procrastination tool). I just hung a new bird feeder. I drink too much coffee. I periodically become obsessed with a TV show and bluster through several seasons at once: The Sopranos, Fawlty Towers, Sherlock, Orange is the New Black.
Come talk to me about poems, birds, literary journals, grad school, survival guides for introverts, negative capability, waiting tables, feminist/gender studies (and some awesome poets to read alongside these), the year after you graduate when you don’t know what you’re doing (or maybe you do? tell me about that too!), snow, more snow, when the ice will melt off the lake, (more) birds, wonder, awe, listening.
Click here to be taken to Professor Donnelly's official SUNY Oswego faculty page.
Laura Donnelly's chapbook, Nocturne - Shumann's Letters, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2010. Click the photo above to order a copy.
