English Department

Mason Creative Writing Professor Tania James is having an amazing year. Since her novel Loot was released by Knopf in June 2023, the accolades haven’t stopped.

In addition to being named to Oprah Magazine’s list of Native American Authors to Read Right Now, Mason alum Kelli Jo Ford’s debut novel, “Crooked Hallelujah,” was recently named one of the best books of 2020 by Publishers Weekly and is on the longlist for the 2021 Carnegie Medal for Fiction, among other accolades.

The annual Campus Legends and Lore Walking Tour takes the Mason community on a spooky stroll around Fairfax Campus with an educational twist.

Kevynne Dimaano, English major, spent her summer interning with the Library of Congress where she developed a puzzle game based on early 20th century newspaper rebuses.

Alaina Ruffin will not be the first, second, or third, but fourth person in her family to graduate from George Mason University. Her mother and two older cousins graduated from Mason in 2000, 2001, and 2013 respectively.

Hank Jones' writing credits that include shows such as Motown Magic, Family Reunion, The Neighborhood, Grown-ish, Bel-Air, Truth Be Told, The Game, Black-ish, The New Edition Story, and Dear White People. He is currently a writer and producer on ABC’s Will Trent.

Through a grant from Arts Fairfax, George Mason University students and faculty are helping youth in the Fairfax Detention Center express themselves through poetry.

Jennifer Linhart Wood is term Assistant Professor of English at George Mason University, where she teaches both literature and composition. She is the author of Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Drama and Travel: Uncanny Vibrations in the English Archive (Palgrave, 2019), which won the 2021 Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society’s David Bevington Award for Best New Book, and the editor of Dynamic Matter: Transforming Renaissance Objects (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022). She has articles published or forthcoming in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Shakespeare Studies, the Shakespearean International Yearbook, the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and various edited collections. Her current book project examines cues for music and sound effects in early modern dramatic texts.

New lab gives students access to best practices for writing, communication

When Mason alum Miriam Van Scott was working as a freelance writer in the mid-1990s, she was researching an article about the afterlife and realized what she needed was a compendium of all things related to the hell—so she wrote one.