Professor Susanna Childress joins the English department in fall of 2008.  She graduated in 2007 from Florida State University with a PhD in English/Creative Writing.  Before coming to VU, she taught for a year at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.  

Professor Childress's teaching and research interests include poetry, creative writing, and medieval and early modern women's writing.  This fall, she will be teaching courses in literary studies and twentieth-century poetry.

Her creative dissertation, Hyssop, draws on Mary Sidney Herbert's Psalter to investigate hyssop as a means of cleansing and resilience in matters of familial and political tension.  Her first volume of poetry, Jagged with Love (2005), was published by the University of Wisconsin.

In addition to her doctoral degree, Professor Childress has earned dual degrees in writing and English literature from Indiana Wesleyan University.  She received a Master's in Creative Writing/Poetry from The University of Texas at Austin.  She is a postdoctoral fellow in the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts, a two-year teaching and research fellowship for professors at the start of their careers who are interested in the relationship between Christianity and the academic vocation.