Jim interviews members of Smart Barker: Mark Graybill and Dan Robinson, a band with numerous ties to Widener University. They talk about their newest album All the Rivers in Hades (released for streaming in October 2021).

We talk about Romantic period magazine culture with Dr. Christine Woody and Widener students Jattu Fahnbulleh, Cloë Di Flumeri, Stefan Cozza, and Seth Glickman. Together, they worked on a textual scholarship project about the 19th century periodical Blackwood's Edinburgh magazine and its running series Noctes Ambrosianae. We discover some striking parallels between magazine culture then and modern-day digital publishing. To learn more about textual scholarship courses at Widener, you can contact Dr. Woody at [email protected]. 

Jim Esch talks with Dr. Annalisa Castaldo about the canon and the presence (and absence) of women writers in it. Why have women been underrepresented in the canon? What kinds of writing and authors are being discovered and appreciated today? How has the canon changed for the better in the last 30 years? For show notes and links, check out englishsuitepodcast.blogspot.com. 

Matthew Lomas (class of 2021) asks some Widener alumni about their post-grad writing experiences. 

We recap a busy month of April for Widener English and Creative Writing. The episode also features original poems by Jessica Guzman, Courtney Bambrick, Jayne Thompson, Ken Pobo, and Jim Esch. 

Hear how Widener's undergraduate literary print journal came back from the dead after Covid19 shut it down, thanks to the efforts of advisor Dr. Jessica Guzman, Editor-in-Chief Ciana Bowers, technical advisor Jeannine Mcknight, and the Widener Ink staff. You'll also hear some of the creative work published in the magazine, read by students Ciana Bowers, Luke Curran, Naquawna Letman, Gabby Norris, and Aimee Schwartz. 

Widener University English professor Mark Graybill discusses the literary allure of baseball, reads baseball-themed literature by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Soto, and Don DeLillo, and shares his prognostications about the upcoming 2021 MLB season. 

Host Jim Esch talks with Widener English major Emma Irving. In three short years since graduating, Emma is already blazing a trail in publishing, creative writing, and literary community-building. A coordinator of workshops for the Widener Writers group on Facebook, Emma's creative writing (featured on this podcast) appears in the inaugural issue of Millennial Pulp Literary Magazine. For more information, see https://www.millennialpulp.com 

Undergraduate students Cloë di Flumeri and Christina Giska talk with Dr. Stephanie Schechner, Professor of French at Widener University, about her translation of Camille in October by Mireille Best, published by Seagull Books & distributed by University of Chicago Press. For more information, see https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/C/bo46675959.html