Visiting professors leave mark on Anderson

Joseph Anderson’s time at Cornell College was deeply influenced not only by professors in the English and creative writing department, but also by three visiting professors, each of whom taught for a block.

Anderson worked closely with Tim Slover, a poet and playwright who teaches at Utah University and taught a playwriting course in 2013; Lily Hoang, an author who teaches at New Mexico State University and taught a course on fabulist fiction during Block 4; and Mira Rosenthal, a poet and translator who teaches at the University of North Florida and taught a course about literary translation during Block 5.

Rosenthal exposed Anderson to translation, and Anderson is going to attend the American Literary Translators Association Conference in October. Hoang’s fabulist style is similar to Anderson’s, he said, which made her course all the more influential for him. Slover helped him explore his love of theatre. Though he’d mostly directed classical plays, Slover’s course gave him the opportunity to do a more contemporary piece, which led to Anderson writing a play.

“I wouldn’t have been able to work so closely with visiting professors in small classes somewhere else,” he said. “Each of them had a huge impact on me.”

Anderson’s journey looks somewhat different from many other members of the class of 2015. For one thing, it started in 2005, when he was only 17, and included a chance meeting with a professor and a book deal. He started taking courses at a community college when he was 14, and then came to Cornell. He was passionate about writing, and he’d been an actor in the Genesius Guild in the Quad Cities, so he was soon drawn to English and creative writing professor Katy Stavreva, who is a scholar of early modern literature and theatre.

His experience with Stavreva was overwhelmingly positive, he said, but after a year he withdrew.

He stopped writing, and for several years worked in mental health treatment. He decided he needed to work on his writing again, and  eventually moved to Iowa City. It was there, while directing a production of “Cymbeline,” that he ran into Stavreva again. Conversations with Stavreva, as well as with a number of his Cornell alumni friends, resulted in his return to Cornell in 2013.

“I was in a different place,” he said, “and they convinced me to come back and try again.”

Outside the classroom, Anderson’s experience was shaped by his involvement with Chess and Games, a student organization for which he served as president his senior year. In the club, he found an inclusive, supportive group.

“I definitely found a community that accepts people regardless of diversifying factors under the umbrella of having fun and playing games,” he said.

Over the past two years Anderson has continued studying with Stavreva and developed a strong relationship with English and creative writing professor Glenn Freeman, his academic advisor, and Shena McAuliffe, the Robert P. Dana Emerging Writer Fellow at Cornell. After graduation, Anderson will take courses in creative writing at the University of Iowa, and after a year of courses, working, and writing, plans to apply to creative writing MFA programs with the long-term goal of becoming an English and creative writing professor.

The chance to work with so many different authors, and the second half of his senior seminar in which he wrote something he’s now trying to turn into a novella-length piece, helped strengthen his writing, he said.

“Glenn Freeman has encouraged me to grow in many aspects of my writing, from my poetry to my longer works,” Anderson said. “Glenn drives his students to embrace new and complex ideas, especially the ones that trouble the world of literature and English education at large.  It’s a unique experience dealing with someone willing to broach all manner of topics in a measured and worthwhile way.”