The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Four former Villanova English majors will discuss the work they do, the paths they took to their current jobs, and how their English studies contributed to their careers. The speakers will be Lawrence Flynn '17, Teaching Associate and MFA Candidate in Fiction at UMass Amherst; Lindsay Gallagher '22, Investment Banking Analyst at Barclays; Kashae Garland '22, Paralegal at The Faries Firm, Inc. and J.D. Candidate; and Amanda Gerstenfeld '20, Editorial Assistant at Yale University Press.  Please register for the Zoom event  here .

  On Wednesday, February 19 at 5:30 pm in Falvey 205 Dr. Greta LaFleur of Yale University will give a talk titled, "Beyond the Natural: Engineering Sexual Diversity in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century North America." The event is sponsored by the English Department and Program in Gender and Women's Studies and supported by the Esmonde Family Fund.  Dr. LaFleur is the author of The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins, 2018). They are currently finishing up a book of essays on birding, co-written with anthropologist Cal Biruk, for the Duke University Press Practices, as well as their second monograph, How Sex Became Good: The Feminist Movements and Racial Politics that Made Modern Sexuality (under contract, University of Chicago Press).  

 Olivia Martel '00, English, and MA '03, English, has just published her debut novel, How to Fly .  From Olivia's website:  "Twenty-nine-year-old Chelsea Pearl is thrown for a loop when her therapist asks her that one simple question. Always a helper, Chelsea isn’t one for self-reflection. She’s fooled herself into believing that planning social events for graduate students at elite Swank University and hanging with friends is enough. But is it? Even her two best friends—Raquel, a globe-trotting stunt woman, and Matteo, a former love interest—are worried about her lately... "Chelsea’s most challenging student, Ivana Volkov, has issues of her own and isn’t into Chelsea’s so-called help. When Chelsea finally meets a great guy, her ability to keep playing by the rules is threatened. He’s off limits, and she runs the risk of losing her job. But if she doesn’t take a chance, she fears she’ll stay stuck and miss out on growing into who she is really meant to be. "I...