The 25-26 D.A. Brown Upper Level Essay Award:
Audrey Blandford ’26, “Lives Out of Sync in Giovanni’s Room,” submitted in Professor Solomon’s ENG 302 upper-division course.

The 25-26 D.A. Brown Core Level Essay Award:
Jordan Lang ’28, “Underlying Connotations: Natasha Trethewey’s ‘Beyond’ as a Linguistic Challenge to the Katrina Narrative,” submitted in Professor Farmer’s ENG 150 lower-division course.

About D.A. Brown:

The late D.A. Brown was a member of the English Department for many years. He was noted for his high standards, and on his retirement, a fund was established to recognize excellence in writing. Each year the English department recognizes exemplary writers in creative writing, 100-level literature courses, and 300-level literature courses in his name. 

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By Chris Brown, Chair of English

The first warm day of this spring, as I made my way toward the library, I could see through some open windows into a classroom on the first floor of Tribble.  Students were seated in a circle at their desks, their rapt attention focused on the center of the room, where Olga Valbuena stood with a modest paperback open in her hand.  I couldn’t hear a word of the Shakespeare I knew she was reciting aloud.  But I did know that those students were sharing an experience that has been formative for generations of Wake Forest students: learning to read and think about (and even sometimes sing aloud!) the Bard’s words under the tutelage of one of the university’s most gifted and passionate teachers.

Olga has taught Shakespeare and Early Modern literature for the English department for thirty years with gusto, gravity, and genuine love of language – coupled with a sharp sense of humor.  She structures her perennially popular classes with a comprehensive knowledge of the contexts, theoretical underpinnings, and luscious language that is uniquely Shakespearean.  Gale Sigal, a colleague in Early Modern studies, describes Olga’s “thrilling ability to attend to a word or object with precision and intensity as she frames the emotional universe dramatized by each play.  Olga connects issues from the Early Modern period to our contemporary moment, incorporating deep scholarship and theoretical concepts into her readings of the richness and subtlety of the words on the page.” 

Karen Stephan Borchert, one of Olga’s first students, recalls learning Shakespeare by listening to Elton John.  Olga told her class on the first day that the plays and poems made sense to her when she read them like rock and roll – lyric, rhythm, and beat.  That class “unlocked an entire universe for me,” Borchert says, when she “taught me to break down Shakespeare into its component parts, ‘like notes of music.’”  Olga “brings worlds of wisdom and humor to the classroom,” shares her English colleague Judith Madera.  “It’s easy to understand why she is so beloved by her students, past and present. Her passion for Shakespeare is infectious.”

Uniformly described by her peers at Wake Forest as brilliant and generous, Olga combined a razor-sharp intellect with unassuming grace from the moment she arrived on campus. Mary DeShazer, retired professor of English, remembers vividly how delighted she was, after Olga was hired, to encounter the depth of her literary and scholarly knowledge: “I could tell that she would be an outstanding teacher and a thoughtful colleague, as she has indeed been for more than three decades. Through her teaching, hundreds of students have become enamored of the Bard’s lyrical language and philosophical depth as well as his intricate plots and brilliant characterization.”

Olga inhabits the world of ideas.  As a scholar, she uncovered entire counter-histories of Lady Macbeth involving court espionage and geopolitical trade secrets; investigated the traffic of material goods between Mexico, Spain, and England, and how these connect to Early Modern placemaking; and interrogated the relationship between writing and subversive circuitry.  Gillian Overing, a longtime intellectual collaborator and friend, notes that the final products of Olga’s intellectual projects are “graceful and brilliant scholarship and classes that are always packed with eager students.  Olga is in love with Shakespeare, and glories in his language.”  She always has an easy and apt reference to even his most obscure work, and, if you are lucky, she might burst into recitation and performance at a dinner party and give the guests the same sense of the awe and pleasure her students enjoy.

Olga’s colleagues in the English Department look forward to that intellectual energy every spring, when our Honors students develop their theses.  Olga has been the director and steward of the department’s Honors program for what Herman Rapaport, Olga’s longtime next door neighbor in Tribble Hall, describes as “two incredible decades, helping shepherd our best majors’ best ideas with attention and kindness.”  Meeting with Olga about students’ progress as they sharpen their independent research projects distills all the pleasures of working with her: keen smarts; intellectual generosity; and deep care for her students.  The invigorating intellectual conversations she facilitates in their culminating thesis defenses are the intellectual highlight of our work with students every year.

Last spring, Karen Stephan Borchert, Olga’s former student, returned to campus with her teenage daughter Ady, a poetry lover, and had the chance to make an introduction to her favorite teacher from her time at Wake Forest.  After lots of reminiscing and catching up and hugs, as they left Olga’s office, Ady captured the sentiments of countless students and colleagues and friends who’ve had the good fortune of getting to know Olga even a little bit.  “Mom, that woman is kind of magical!” 

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H. Broadus Jones Senior Award for Excellence in English

Awarded to an outstanding senior major.

Recipient: Anne Jones

H. Broadus Jones Memorial Scholarship

Awarded to an outstanding rising senior major.

Recipient: Lucas Betancourt

H. Broadus Jones M.A. Student Award for Excellence in English

Awarded to an outstanding second-year student in our English MA Program.

Recipient: Mary Rhodes

Justus and Elizabeth C. Drake Scholarship

Awarded to an outstanding rising senior major. 

Recipient: Julia Knowles

Emily Crandall Shaw Scholarship in Liberal Arts

Awarded to an outstanding rising senior English major who shows talent in the arts as well as in literary study.

Recipient: Nina Clayton

Beulah Lassiter Raynor Scholarship

Awarded to two outstanding rising senior majors.

Recipient: Kenley McClure

Recipient: Emily Meinert

Jerry B. & Callie Irene Stone Award Honoring Professor Alonzo Kenion

Given to a student excelling in an English course formerly taught by Prof. Kenion.

Recipient: Ian Hutcherson

H. Broadus Jones Shakespeare Prize

Awarded to students whose oral and written work shows the greatest insight into Shakespeare.

Recipient: Anne Jones

D.A. Brown Award for Excellence in Creative Writing

Given to students who show talent in the art of creative writing.

Recipient: Bella Santos

Doyle Fosso Scholarship

Awarded to select English majors for positive academic performance

Recipient: Lauren Carpenter

Recipient: Sincere Fielder

Bashir El-Beshti Prize In Renaissance Studies

Distinguished student who fulfills Al-Beshti’s ideals of learning and scholarship in Renaissance studies

Recipient: Lexi Dean

Robert N. Shorter Medieval Prize

Exceptional student in Medieval Studies

Recipient: Emily Meinert

Claudia Kairoff Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Service

Recognizing outstanding students who have made rich contributions to the life and spirit of the department.

Recipient: Neriah Olivier

About the Awards:

H. Broadus Jones Awards

H. Broadus Jones was professor and chair of English for many years. He taught Shakespeare, Romantic poetry, and Victorian poetry at Wake Forest for much of the first half of the 20th Century. Each year, the English department gives several scholarships and awards in his name.

Justus and Elizabeth C. Drake Scholarship

Justus Drake was a professor of English at Wake Forest for a number of years. He taught American and Victorian literature. His wife, Elizabeth, was the administrative assistant to President Scales. The Drakes’ sons were Wake Forest alums, and they set up this scholarship in their parents’ memory to recognize the outstanding accomplishments of our rising senior majors.

Emily Crandall Shaw Scholarship in Liberal Arts

Emily Crandall Shaw and her husband Bynum Shaw, who was a professor of Journalism at Wake Forest, were Wake Forest alumni. After Mrs. Shaw’s death, Mr. Shaw set up this scholarship in her memory to recognize outstanding rising senior English majors who show talent in arts as well as in literary study.

Beulah Lassiter Raynor Scholarship

This award is named in honor of Beulah Lassiter Raynor, who taught in the English department from 1946 to 1979. The award has been endowed by her friends and former students, and recognizes outstanding rising senior majors from small towns in North Carolina.

Jerry B. & Callie Irene Stone Award Honoring Professor Alonzo Kenion

Alonzo “Al” Kenion taught at Wake Forest University from 1956 until 1983. He taught courses in 18th-century English literature and was a frequent teacher in our Interdisciplinary Honors program. The award is given to a student excelling in an English course formerly taught by Professor Kenion.

Robert N. Shorter Medieval Prize

Robert N. Shorter was the principal medievalist in the department of English for 41 years; he served as chair for three terms and associate graduate dean for four years. Professor Shorter was one of the founders of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies program and minor. He instituted the Medieval Studies Award in 1994 to recognize outstanding student achievement in all aspects of Medieval Studies and to encourage and support interdisciplinary work in the field. Professor Shorter specialized in Chaucer. His classes in Chaucer and in the Legend of Arthur were always packed with enthusiastic students. On his retiring in 1999, Professor Shorter gave a last Chaucer lecture and his closing words should be a lesson for all of us: “I never taught Chaucer; Chaucer taught me.” His legacy as an exemplary professor, colleague, and mentor is what we hope to uphold in the Wake Forest Medieval and Early Modern Studies program. The Medieval Studies Award was renamed the Robert N. Shorter Medieval Prize in 2003.

Bashir El-Beshti Prize in Renaissance Studies

The late Bashir El-Beshti was for many years one of the most beloved and esteemed members of our department. He was noted for his high standards in teaching and scholarship. A fund was established in his name to recognize distinguished students who fulfilled his ideals of learning. 

 Claudia Kairoff Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Service

Claudia Thomas Kairoff was a professor of eighteenth-century British literature at Wake Forest from 1986 until she retired in 2022. She was not only an award-winning teacher and nationally recognized scholar in her field, but also a model citizen and servant of the College during her long and distinguished career. She brought to every leadership role the same dedication, collaborative spirit, organizational skills, and attention to detail that characterized her work as a scholar. In 2023, the department established the Claudia Kairoff Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Service to recognize outstanding students who have made rich contributions to the life and spirit of the department.

Doyle Fosso Scholarship

Professor Doyle Fosso taught courses in Renaissance drama and poetry at Wake Forest from 1965 to 1995. He was a popular and excellent professor, and he was awarded the Reinhardt Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2000, nominated by his students from the class of 1990. After his death, an anonymous donor established the Doyle Fosso Scholarship in his honor.

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English Department alum Caroline Hallemann (’11), now a writer and editor for Town & Country Magazine, will be publishing her first book with Penguin Random House this summer. The non-fiction dual biography, The Kennedys and the Windsors, comes out in June. For more information, visit the publisher’s website.

“For nearly a century, two families an ocean apart have captured the world’s collective imagination: the British Windsors and the American Kennedys. Much ink has been spilled on their individual trysts, tragedies, and triumphs over the years, but no one has examined their powerful and intertwined legacies. Until now.

In The Kennedys and the Windsors, acclaimed journalist Caroline Hallemann unearths the story of two iconic families whose lives, ambitions, and respective reigns have mirrored each other in surprising ways. Through rich archival research and fresh interviews from insiders on both sides of the Atlantic, Hallemann reveals how an upstart Irish Catholic family with little access into elite New England society came to host dinner parties for a King and Queen, and forge an eventual path to the White House.”

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An early trailblazer of the interdisciplinary field known as BioArt and a founder of the Conceptual Poetry movement, Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia, a globally renowned bestseller, which won the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. After 25 years of effort, Bök recently completed his groundbreaking experiment, The Xenotext, combining literature with biology to engineer a deathless bacterium so that its DNA might become a durable archive that can store a poem about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Bök has exhibited his work at galleries around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, The Power Plant in Toronto, and the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. Bök is a Fellow in both the Royal Society of Canada for his contributions to the humanities and the Royal Canadian Geographic Society for his contributions to the biosciences. Bök has also received a nomination for the prestigious Oxford Professorship of Poetry and for the Prix Littéraire Bernard Heidsieck, Centre Pompidou. He currently teaches Fine Art in the School of Arts at Leeds Beckett University in Leeds, United Kingdom.

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Professor David Alff is Associate Professor of English at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). He is the author of The Wreckage of Intentions: Projects in British Culture, 1660-1730 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) and The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region (University of Chicago Press, 2024). His writing has appeared in Critical Inquiry, ELH, PMLA, Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Eighteenth Century, Philological Quarterly, and various critical collections. He has also written essays for The Washington Post, The Boston Review, Time, Avidly, and Book Post.

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Bathhouses, Battle Scars and Unicorns: Fiction and Belief in Early England

What does it mean to write “truth” or “fiction”? Medievalists have increasingly sought to date the rise of fiction to well before the advent of the modern novel, yet modern theorists of fiction who favor a later dating nevertheless make a good point: modern standards of literal, documentary truth differ from medieval ones. Nevertheless, medieval writers did care about distinguishing between truth and fiction: through texts ranging from Classical myths in philosophy books, to high seas adventures, to the lives of unlikely saints, they developed new vernacular terminology for self-conscious fictions, inviting modern readers to both question how we define fiction and scrutinize the modern understanding of “truth” and “fact” as prerequisites to fiction.  

Biography from Speaker’s Website:

“I study the earliest English literature. Most of my work considers how literary form tells cultural and intellectual histories. My current research ranges from the multilingual literary cultures of early medieval England and beyond, to medieval ideas about affect and emotion, to fictionality and poetic narratives of history.

My first book, Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry: The Poetics of Feeling (Cambridge University Press, 2023), offers a formal history of the complex conventions that reveal–but have also obscured–the importance of affective piety in early English devotional poetry. I’m also the author of Literary Form in Early Medieval England (Cambridge University Press, 2025), part of the Cambridge Elements series England in the Early Medieval World. I’m at work on a new monograph project, The Claims of Fiction in Early Medieval England, on the truth claims of the post-classical and proto-Romance fictions of pre-Conquest England. My work on the literary and intellectual cultures of the early medieval period has appeared in PMLA, Medium Ævum, Modern Philology, New Medieval Literatures, JEGP, and elsewhere.

I received my PhD from UC Berkeley, where I was supported by a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, after receiving my master’s from the University of Oxford. I currently teach medieval literature as an Associate Professor of English at William & Mary. I also serve as the chair of the Old English Forum Executive Committee at MLA, and as an editor for The Medieval Review.”

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The Storozynski Writing Fellowship, sponsored by the Health, Humanities, and Society (HHS) program in collaboration with the Creative Writing program, supports emerging writers whose work engages with themes such as physical and mental illness, healthcare, disability, and the body. Congratulations, Holly!

Since her time at WFU, Holly has been a Teaching Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill and the 2025 Erika Lindemann Fellow for their Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies program. She has recently received an Arts and Humanities research grant for the project “Forever Chemicals in North Carolina: A Story Archive.”

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