The College of Charleston’s English department is experiencing a publishing explosion. In recent months, half a dozen authors have published new books, receiving wide acclaim.

English Professor Simon Lewis authored British and African Literature in Transnational Context. In it, he looks at how African identities have been written and rewritten in both British and African literature for decades and how these revisions have opened up new formulations of what it really means to be British or African. By examining the work of writers including Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, T. S. Eliot, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Zoe Wicomb, Yvette Christianse, and Chris van Wyk, he demonstrates how Britain’s former African colonies influence British culture just as much as African culture was influenced by British colonization.

English Professors Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee’s A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line explores the idea of form and the line. Their anthology gives seventy original answers that lead us deeper into the world of poetry, but also far out into the world at large: its people, its politics, and its ecology. The authors included here, emerging and established alike, write from a range of perspectives, in terms of both aesthetics and identity. Together, they offer a dynamic hybrid collection that captures a broad spectrum of poetic practice in the twenty-first century. Rosko also recently published Prop Rockery, which won the 2011 Akron Poetry Prize.

English Professor Susan Farrell published the Critical Companion to Tim O’Brien in which she looks at one of the greatest living American authors. He was drafted for service in Vietnam as soon as he graduated from Macalester College in 1968. His Vietnam War novels The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato are widely acknowledged as some of the best American war novels ever written. Critical Companion to Tim O’Brien is a comprehensive new resource for anyone interested in this author’s life, works, and achievements.

English Professor Bret Lott released Dead Low Tide, the long-awaited sequel to his best-selling novel The Hunt Club. Dead Low Tide is a classic literary page-turner about murder and family secrets that follows a young man sorting out his live in what turns out to be a dangerous place. The book is set in the South Carolina Lowcountry.

English Instructor John Warner penned The Funny Man, a novel that documents one individual’s slide from everyman to monster as a satire of our culture of celebrity. The funny man is a middling comic who develops a gimmick – delivering his routine with his fist in his mouth to the wrist – to attract audiences. He decides he doesn’t want his fist in his mouth anymore and as the novel opens, his life has fallen apart but he finds love with a celebrity.

English Professor Carol Ann Davis published Atlas Hour, a collection of poem-maps, sifts and selects moments in history and in the annals of art, bringing the stuff of every day into relationship with the great mysteries of existence: what we believe, who we love, whom and what we choose to hurt or leave unharmed. Atlas Hour embraces the works and lives of the painters Vermeer and Mark Rothko, Fra Angelico and Gerhard Richter, the anonymous child-artists of the Nazis’ Terezin transit camp and the poet’s own children.