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Dr. Flanagan
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Professor of English
B.A., M.A., Ph. D. University of Michigan
Office: Preyer 203 Ext: 2434
email: Brenda Flanagan
Known internationally for her dramatic presentations of her stories and poems, Brenda Flanagan teaches creative writing, Caribbean and African-American literatures as well as literary analysis. In May 2006 she was named the first Armfield Professor of English. Professor Flanagan has won numerous awards for her fiction and drama in the United States and serves frequently as a cultural ambassador for the US Department of State, with recent visits to Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Chad, Panama and India.
She was the first Afro-Caribbean writer to be sent to Libya in 25 years, and the first speaker there since America and Libya resumed relations. She was also the first American writer to be sent to Central Asia since the demise of the Soviet Union. She holds a PH. D from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she won three major Hopwood awards—fiction, drama, and short story.
Flanagan has won three National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, four Global Partners to work with Czech surrealist writers, a Mellon Foundation Grant, a James Michener Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Michigan Grant for creative writing. In 2009, she received a literary nonfiction award from the North Carolina Arts Council to write a book on singer Nina Simone.
Among the many journals in which her fiction and poetry have appeared are the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, SABLE (England), Caliban, KONCH, Witness, The Indiana Review, The Bridge, Caribbean Studies Journal, and Caribbean Review. Her essays have appeared in American Legacy and Callaloo. When the Jumbiebird Calls, one of her plays, was successfully staged at the Bonstelle Theatre, Detroit. Her new collection of stories, In Praise of Island Women and Other Crimes (KaRu Press 2005) is available, as well as her prize-winning novel, You Alone Are Dancing (University of Michigan Press 1996.) Her work is also available on cd. A 2006 winner of a residency award from the North Carolina Writer's Network, Flanagan spent summer 2006 at Headlands in California completing a novel. Her new novel, Allah in the Islands, was recently published by Peepal Tree Press and her collection of short stories has been translated into Russian.
Professor Flanagan spent June 2008 at the Humanities Canter in Chapel Hill, North Carolina as a Jessie Dupont Fellow. And, in her role as cultural ambassador, she co-led a weeklong colloquium on African American Women Writers for Brazilian professors of American and English Literature in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, July 21-27, 2008.
Courses recently taught:
Courses for Fall 2009
ENG 101W, Writing About Literature
ENG 282, African American Literature
ENG 482, Ethnic American Women's Literature
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