The English department is currently developing an Advisory Board, chaired by Dr. Robert Cowser, a professor of English at St. Lawrence University and alumnus of our department. This group will have the following goals:

• To help the department attract top-quality students
• To increase the quality of the wide array of projects and programs associated with the department:
  • Three concentrations of the major (literature; writing; and film and digital media); the English and writing minors; and participation in interdisciplinary minors, such as Africana studies, medieval studies, women’s studies, film studies, legal studies, and peace studies

• New Orleans Review
• Reader’s Response and ReVisions (student publications)
• Sigma Tau Delta
• Summer programs in Dublin and Paris

• To help the department plan for new initiatives
• To enhance the reputation of the department
• To help the department with fund raising

For more information, please contact the department chair.

Members of the Advisory Board

Suzette Peychaud Bagneris

Suzette Bagneris, is a native New Orleanian.  She is a founding member of The Bagneris Firm, L.L.C.. Since its formation on January 9, 2004, the firm has been located in New Orleans; however, it has provided legal services to citizens throughout Louisiana.  The firm's founding attorney, graduate of St. Frances Cabrini Elementary School, Ursuline Academy High School, Loyola University (magna cum laude), and Loyola Law School. Ms. Bagneris attended Loyola Law School on a full academic scholarship and won awards for oral advocacy in the National Frederick Douglass moot court competition.

Bryan Batt

Bryan Batt (writer, actor, designer, civic activist) is the author of a new memoir, She Ain’t Heavy, She’s My Mother. As a Broadway veteran, his leading and principal roles include the 2005 revival of La Cage aux Folles, Beauty and the Beast, Seussical the Musical, Sunset Boulevard, Saturday Night Fever, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Starlight Express, and Cats.   Theatrically, Bryan is most proud of originating the role of Darius in both the N.Y. and L.A (Drama Logue Award) productions as well as the film adaptation of Paul Rudnick’s ground breaking comedy Jeffrey.  He also portrayed Salvatore Romano on AMC’s critically acclaimed dramatic series Mad Men. The hit series has been awarded six Emmys, three Golden Globes, and the Screen Actors Guild, as well as the Peabody award.

Bryan and his partner of twenty years, Tom Cianfichi, are the nationally recognized creative forces behind Hazelnut, a fine gift and home accessories shop in New Orleans. Hazelnut has been featured in the New York Times, House Beautiful, In Style, Traditional Home, Southern Accents, and other publications.

Mr. Batt, a civic activist, champions many causes, including Broadway Cares/ Equity Fights AIDS, Habitat For Humanity, Second Harvest Food Bank, the Human Rights Campaign (Equality Award), the SPCA, The Preservation Resource Center, The Point Foundation, N.O. AIDS Task Force (board member, Humanitas Award), and Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre (board member and interim Artistic Director).

J. Patrick Beauchamp

J. Patrick "Pat" Beauchamp is a member in the New Orleans office of McGlinchey Stafford PLLC. A member of the Louisiana Committee on Bar Admissions, Pat supervises testing on property law issues. In his practice, he specializes in real estate, asset finance and municipal finance. He has over thirty years of experience in real estate acquisitions and financings of maritime and energy assets. He advises clients in connection with revolving and term loan facilities, construction loans, syndicated loans, letter of credit facilities, restructurings and workouts. He also represents community development districts and economic development districts in connection with real estate development and infrastructure finance, and advises institutional clients on municipal finance matters including new market tax credit transactions.

Pat went to Loyola as an undergraduate and for law school.  His professional affiliations include the American Bar Association (Bar Admissions Committee - certification of attorneys for admission to the Louisiana Bar Association); Louisiana Bankers Association (Bank Counsel Section; served on study committee that drafted the 1991 Mennonite legislation); Louisiana State Bar Association; National Association of Bond Lawyers; and the New Orleans Bar Association.

Claudia Champagne

Claudia Champagne is a Loyola alumna and Associate Professor of English at Our Lady of Holy Cross College. She serves as the English Program Coordinator and the Literary Club Moderator.  Additionally, she is the faculty sponsor for Alpha Xi Nu, the OLHCC chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Honor Society.

Robert Cowser, Jr., Chair

Bob Cowser's first book, Dream Season, was a New York Times Book Review "Editor's Choice" and "Paperback Row" selection and listed among the Chronicle of Higher Education's best-ever college sports books. It garnered further praise in Sports Illustrated, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, and on NPR's "Only a Game." His second book, Scorekeeping, is a collection of coming-of-age essays. His third book, Green Fields, about the 1979 murder of one of his grade-school classmates and the execution of her killer in 2000, the first execution in Tennessee in 40 years, came out this year.

Cowser graduated summa cum laude from Loyola, earned a Masters in English at Marquette University, and a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Nebraska.

An academy of American Poets prizewinner and Pushcart Prize nominee, Cowser's work has appeared widely in American literary magazines, including the Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review, Sycamore Review, Brevity, Sonora Review and Creative Nonfiction. He is Professor of English at St. Lawrence University and an adjunct member of the faculty of Ashland University's Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts program.

Richard Ford

Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and raised there and in Arkansas and New Orleans.  He is the author of nine books of fiction and many essays.  He has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the PEN-Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the PEN-Malamud Prize for Excellence in the Short Story, as well as the Cavour Prize in Italy.  His work has been widely anthologized and translated into twenty-eight languages.  He is Commandeur in the French Order of Arts and Letters, is currently Professor in Trinity College, Dublin.  He lives with his wife Kristina Ford, in East Boothbay, Maine, and in New Orleans.

Andrew Fox

Andrew Fox is an author from New Orleans. He has written two comic novels, Fat White Vampire Blues and Bride of the Fat White Vampire. Both novels feature Jules Duchon, a morbidly obese vampire who resides in New Orleans and works as a taxi driver. His latest novel, The Good Humor Man, a satiric homage to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, also contains elements of horror.

Robert Ben Garant

Ben Garant was born in Cookeville, Tennessee. He spent the early nineties in New York City, doing three seasons of the comedy sketch show The State on MTV. He then wrote, produced, and occasionally appeared in three seasons of Viva Variety on Comedy Central.

Since relocating to Los Angeles, he has written feature films for Disney, Spyglass, Imagine, Warner Brothers, Columbia, Paramount, New Line, Dimension, and Universal Pictures, as well as Night at the Museum I and II for Twentieth Century Fox. He also wrote and directed the feature films Balls of Fury, and Reno 911: Miami. Screenwriting is his day job, but he is probably know best for his part-time job, playing Deputy Travis Junior on Comedy Central's Reno 911! -- which he also wrote, directed, and executive produced.

He has a "how to" book on screenwriting coming out next year -- entitled writing Movies for Fun and Profit -- with the words "FUN AND" crossed out on the cover. He has also led screen-writing workshops in New York, Los Angeles, Casper Wyoming, The Friars' Club, The Writer's Guild's Veterans Writing Workshop, Camp Pendleton, and for the CIA's writing club, "Invisible Ink."

Tim Gautreaux

Tim Gautreaux taught creative writing for thirty years at Southeastern Louisiana University and now lives half the year in the mountains of North Carolina.  His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, GQ, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and New Stories from the South.  His collections of stories are Same Place, Same Things and Welding with Children, and he has written three novels, The Next Step in the Dance, The Clearing, and The Missing. 

Henry Griffin

Henry Griffin, Artist-in-Residence, is a screenwriter and filmmaker from New Orleans. His first screenplay Rock Scissors Paper was optioned by Fox 2000 in 1996, which began an illustrious career as a professional screenwriter and script doctor. He has worked for Fox, DreamWorks, New Regency, and New Line Cinema. He wrote, directed, produced and acted in the 1999 short film, Mutiny, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Mutiny went on to win awards at South-by-Southwest, the Seattle International Film Festival, the Chicago International Film Festival, and the Message-to-Man Film Festival (St. Petersburg, Russia). It was also screened at the largest shorts market in the world, in Clermont-Ferrand, France. His 2004 film Tortured by Joy was featured on a DVD in the Believer Magazine. His music video for the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, "Complicated Life," has received over 60,000 hits on Youtube. Two of his films (the feature Flip Mavens and the short The Flavor of Plaid) are the result of student production exercises at UNO. He has published essays in the anthology Movies: The Ultimate Insider's Guide, alongside Woody Allen, Sidney Lumet, Milos Forman and Martin Scorsese. As an actor, he appeared in the 2000 film The Way of the Gun, and appears in the HBO series Treme.  

Minrose Gwin

Minrose Gwin, Kenan Eminent Professor of English, teaches courses at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in contemporary fiction and memoir, women’s literature, literature of the U.S. South, and memory studies.  She is the author of a novel, The Queen of Palmyra, and a memoir, Wishing for Snow.  Her scholarly books include The Woman in the Red Dress: Gender, Space, and Reading, The Feminine and Faulkner: Reading (Beyond) Sexual Difference, and Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature.   She edited A Woman’s Civil War by Cornelia McDonald, and is a co-editor of the Norton anthology The Literature of the American South and the Southern Literary Journal.  She is working on a book about the writing surrounding the assassination in 1963 of Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers and a second novel. 

Richard Hadley

After earning his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Rick Hadley went on to complete a both an MFA and a Ph.D. at the University of Southern California. In addition to his teaching duties at Loyola Marymount, Dr. Hadley is also the Director of the Graduate Programs in Film, Television, and Screenwriting. But, his true calling is in the classroom, where he mixes his knowledge of cinema with equal parts careful scholarship and wry humor. Over the years, his classes in film genres and film authors have delighted, and educated, students and colleagues alike.

As much as he enjoys watching films, Dr. Hadley also enjoys writing them. His film, Quotations from Chairman Stu, was screened at Edinburgh and many other film festivals. He has written documentaries on Woody Guthrie, Andrew Carnegie, Charles Lindbergh, Paul Robeson, Mao-Tse-Tung, and Samuel Adams for Nickelodeon's Award-winning show Against The Odds and the pilot Pop Quiz for the Disney Channel.

Andrew Horton  

Andrew Horton is the Jeanne H Smith Professor of Film and Video Studies at the University of Oklahoma, an award-winning screenwriter, and the author of twenty books on film, screenwriting and cultural studies including Screenwriting for a Global Market, Henry Bumstead and the World of Hollywood Art Direction, Writing the Character Centered Screenplay, The Films of Theo Angelopoulos, and Laughing out Load: Writing the Comedy Centered Screenplay.   His films include Brad Pitt’s first feature film, The Dark Side of the Sun, and the much awarded Something in Between.  He has given screenwriting workshops around the world, including in Norway, Germany, England, the Czech Republic, Greece, New Zealand, Switzerland, and throughout the United States.

The Library Journal wrote about his Character Centered Screenplay,  “Horton walks away with an Oscar in the valuable books for the prospective scripter category with his latest rendering.”

Andrew was a member of the Loyola English Department teaching film, literature and screenwriting classes, 1990-1998.

Karen Laborde

A painter, writer and native Texan, Karen Laborde grew up on a horse and cattle ranch in Oklahoma. She attended the University of Oklahoma, then entered Loyola as a junior, after which she married a New Orleans medical student. While rearing a family of four children, she was active in community volunteerism in Cleveland, OH; Nashville, TN; and New Orleans. As a nontraditional student, she re-entered Loyola and received her BA with honors in English.

Following graduation, she was the special projects staff writer for the New Orleans Publishing Group and the health columnist for New Orleans Magazine, for which she received a New Orleans Press Club Award. She began writing fiction, studying with writers including Ernest Gaines, Samantha Chang, Pam Houston, Robert Boswell, and James Nolan. Her short stories have been published in The Gettysburg Review, Short Story, and The Southwestern Review. She is now working on a collection of linked stories.

She studied at The New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts and is represented by the Soren-Christensen Gallery in New Orleans’ arts district. A recent exhibition, "Long Story Short," showcased her mixed media abstract paintings. Her work is in private and corporate collections, including Saks Fifth Avenue, Loyola University, The Shaw Group, and Orthopaedic Associates of New Orleans.

Joné E. Liuzza

Born and raised in Louisiana and a graduate of Loyola, Elam is a Pension Administrator, Business & Professional Consulting Services, Inc., at the companies of Becker & Suffern. Married with two daughters, she moved to the Northshore in 2000.

Joseph Looney

Joseph Looney joined Adams and Reese in 1991 after serving as a partner for many years in a general corporate law firm in New Orleans. He assisted in the opening of Adams and Reese's Jackson office and focuses his practice in the areas of patent law, trademarks, trade secrets, technology, computer law and other intellectual property law matters. He has worked for clients in the manufacturing, energy, international trade, communications and entertainment industries. He has litigated and provided appellate representation in cases involving trademark, copyright, computer law, trade secret, right of publicity and unfair competition in state and federal courts in Louisiana and Texas.  

Joe was for several years an adjunct professor for third-year law students and graduate students at Tulane Law School, where he has taught a course on entertainment law, and he lectures at seminars on computer law and technology and entertainment law issues. In his free time, Joe has written and performed music. He also enjoys playwriting and fiction-writing, mountaineering, and theology and philosophy.  

Valerie Martin

Valerie Martin was born in Sedalia, Missouri, and grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana, her mother’s family home, where her father was a sea captain. She is the author of nine novels, including Trespass, Mary Reilly, Italian Fever, and Property, three collections of short fiction, and a biography of St. Francis of Assisi, titled Salvation. She has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Kafka Prize (for Mary Reilly) and Britain’s Orange Prize (for Property). The Confessions of Edward Day, Martin’s latest novel, was published in 2009.  

Valerie Martin has taught in writing programs at Mt. Holyoke College, University of Massachusetts, and Sarah Lawrence College, among others. She resides in Dutchess County, New York, and is currently Visiting Professor of English at Mt. Holyoke College. 

Dorothy Duval Nelson

Dorothy Duval Nelson earned a Bachelor of Arts in German from Agnes Scott College, a Masters of Arts in German from Middlebury College, and a Juris Doctor from Loyola. She has taught German at the University of Florida, English in The Netherlands, and English as a Second Language at Tulane and Loyola Universities. Before her children were born she opened a solo law practice with the goal of specializing in immigration law.

As a volunteer her three passions have been historic preservation, literacy, and the promotion of international engagement, awareness, and education. In service to these causes she has served on the boards of the Alliance Française de la Nouvelle Orléans, the World Affairs Council of New Orleans (for which she served as President from 1999-2002 and as Executive Director from 2002-2007), the Honorary Consulate of Canada in New Orleans, the International School of Louisiana, the Preservation Resource Center, YMCA Educational Services, the LA Branch of the International Dyslexia Association, the  Louisiana Center for Dyslexia & Related Learning Disorders at Nicholls State University, and the Literacy Alliance of Greater New Orleans.

Rosary O’Neill

Rosary O’Neill, a former Loyola professor, is the author of twelve plays produced internationally by invitation of the American embassy in Paris, Bonn, Tibilisi, Georgia, Budapest, Hungary, London and Moscow. Her play Uncle Victor was chosen Best New American Drama by the Cort Theater, Hollywood, and celebrated in the Chekhov Now Festival in New York. Blackjack was selected for Alice's Fourth Floor Best New Play Series. She was founding artistic director at Southern Rep Theater from 1987 to 2002. She has been playwright-in-residence at the Sorbonne University, Paris; Tulane University, New Orleans; Defiance College, Ohio; and the University of Bonn, Germany. She is currently working on a screenplay as well as plays.

Ruth Salvaggio

Ruth Salvaggio, professor of English at the University of North Carolina, concentrates on theory and the literature and history of the 18th-century Atlantic world.  She has recently completed her fourth book, entitled Hearing Sappho in New Orleans, which follows poetic migrations along the path of the African slave trade and tracks them through ancient fragments set in a flooded city.  She is currently involved in uncovering and studying song and poetry of early Atlantic contact cultures, especially along the eastern and gulf coasts of the North America and in the Caribbean, and in extending studies of poetic contact to include the environment, as in her recent essay “The Burning Question of Poetic Form.”  Before going to UNC, she served as Director of Graduate Studies in the interdisciplinary American Studies Department at the University of New Mexico and as Director of the Women’s Studies Program at Purdue University. 

Fred Schaefer

Fred Schaefer is an independent producer with over 20 years experience in animation development and production. Most recently he served as supervising producer of The Secret Saturdays, a Cartoon Network Original Series. Previously he was SVP of animation for PorchLight Entertainment where he produced the Emmy Award-winning Discovery Kids series, Tutenstein, among others. Prior to joining PorchLight, he worked at Walt Disney Television Animation, where he was involved in the development of series, specials and direct-to-video movies. 

Marlene Sharp

Marlene Sharp is director of development at Rubicon Studios in Los Angeles, responsible for finding intellectual properties for the studio to develop across all platforms, along with seeking out production and co-production partners for new and existing properties. Sharp joined Rubicon from Two Twiggs & A Berry Productions, LLC, where she served as Co-CEO/Producer. During her tenure at Two Twigs, she developed and produced films, television programming, and games for distribution across both traditional and emerging media platforms. Prior to Two Twigs, Sharp was Producer/Manager of Distribution and Marketing at Enemes, Inc., a South Korean company with offices in Los Angeles, where she contributed to such well-know animated properties as Higglytown Heroes, Z-Squad, Da Jammies and Z-Squad. Sharp began her career in entertainment at Renaissance-Atlantic Films as Director of Development/Producer where she was involved in the production, development and marketing of children’s television series and video games including Power Rangers, Digimon and Heavy Gear, among others. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Drama/Communications from Loyola and earned a Master of Fine Arts in Musical Theatre from San Diego State University.

J. P. Telotte

J.P. Telotte, a graduate of Loyola, is Professor of Film and Media Studies and interim Chair in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech. He has published more than one hundred scholarly articles and ten books, including The Science Fiction Film, The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology, The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader, and this year’s Animating Space: From Mickey to WALL-E.  He teaches courses on film and television genres, film technology, and animation, co-edits the journal Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, and serves on the editorial boards of six other journals in film and television studies.

Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard. She was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, earned a B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in poetry from Hollins University, and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University.  In 2010, she published a stellar work of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Miller Williams

Born in the north Arkansas hills in 1930 and educated in the sciences, which he taught on the college level for twelve years, Miller Williams has served as Visiting Professor of U. S. Literature at the University of Chile and as Fulbright Professor of American Studies at the National University of Mexico.  For seven years he was a member of the poetry faculty at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.  In 1976 he was made a fellow of the American Academy in Rome.

He has represented the U. S. State Department on reading and lecturing tours throughout Latin America, Europe, and the Middle and Far East.  His stories, translations, poems, and critical essays have appeared in most of the seminal journals in English, and his poems have been translated into several languages.

Past-president of the American Literary Translators Association, founding editor of the New Orleans Review, founding director of the University of Arkansas Press, Latin American editor for the third edition of Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, and founder of the Poetry in the Prisons program, he retired in 2003 from the position of University Professor of English and Foreign Languages at the University of Arkansas.

His work has been recognized by the Henry Bellaman Poetry Prize, the Amy Lowell Award in Poetry from Harvard University, the New York Arts Fund Award for Significant Contribution to American Letters, the Prix de Rome for Literature and the Academy Award for Literature, both from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, honorary doctorates from Lander College and Hendrix College, the Poets’ Prize, the Charity Randall Citation for Contribution to Poetry as a Spoken Art from the International Poetry Forum, and the John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence.  In 1994 he was named Socio Benemerito dell’Associazione, Centro Romanesco Trilussa, Roma.  He was inaugural poet for the second inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton.   In 1999 the multinational editorial board of Voices International named him one of the best twenty poets in the world now writing in English, and he was selected by a board of teachers, librarians, and writers as one of the 500 most important poets of all languages in the twentieth century, for inclusion on the CD Poetry of Our Time.

His thirty-four books include a history of American railroads (with James Alan McPherson); translations from the work of Nicanor Parra and Giuseppe Gioachino Belli; critical works on John Crowe Ransom and John Ciardi; a standard reference on prosodics entitled Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms; a collection of stories, The Lives of Kelvin Fletcher; Making a Poem: Some Thoughts about Poetry and the People Who Write It; and several collections of his own poetry, the most recent of which are Points of Departure, The Ways We Touch, Some Jazz A While: Collected Poems, and Time and the Tilting Earth. Poems of Miller Williams is available on cassette from Spoken Arts, and the University of Missouri Press has published a collection of essays by thirteen scholars and poets, edited by Michael Burns, under the title Miller Williams and the Poetry of the Particular.

He and his daughter, singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, frequently perform a tandem gig entitled Poetry Said/ Poetry Sung, in which he reads a poem and she sings one of her songs, back and forth. They’ve done this all about the United States for very responsive audiences.

Gabrielle Wilson-Prout

Gabrielle Wilson-Prout, an alumnus of Loyola, worked as a clerk of the Orleans Parish Criminal court after law school.  She now has her own law office in New Orleans.

Warren Zanes

Warren Zanes joined his brother Dan Zanes' acclaimed Boston band the Del Fuegos while still in high school.  After releasing three recordings with the band, he quit the band to attend Loyola and, following that, the Universities of Wisconsin and Rochester, where he received two master's degrees and a doctorate. He taught at Manhattan's School of Visual Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology, Case Western Reserve University, and other American universities. For several years the Vice President of Education and Programs at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, Zanes is now Executive Director of Steven Van Zandt’s Rock and Roll Forever Foundation, focusing his efforts on a national curriculum project that will aim to bring the history of rock and roll into middle and high school classrooms. 

His books include an overview of Warner Bros. Records entitled Revolutions in Sound and the first volume in the celebrated 33 1/3 series, Dusty in Memphis. In addition, he edited the companion book to Peter Bogdanovich’s Grammy-winning film Runnin’ Down a Dream: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Waiting for a Train, a collection of writings on Jimmie Rodgers.  His writing has been published in the Oxford American, Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere.  As a solo performer, Zanes has released two recordings, Memory Girls and People That I’m Wrong For, with a third soon to be released.  Most recently, Zanes wrote liner notes for the first collection of George Harrison songs to be released on Apple and conducted interviews for the upcoming Martin Scorsese-directed film on the subject of Harrison’s life and work.