Feb. 21, 2019
NORTH ADAMS, MASS. —Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts’ (MCLA) Department of English/Communications
announces this semester’s writer-in-residence will be Joanna Ruocco, an assistant
professor of English at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. She will offer
a reading on Wednesday, March 6, at 7:30 p.m. in MCLA Gallery 51.
This Spring 19 event is free and open to the public. The series is being coordinated
by Dr. Zack Finch, assistant professor of English, and Dr. Caren Beilin, also an assistant
professor of English at MCLA.
Ruocco’s areas of interest include 20th- and 21st-century innovative fiction and cross-genre
texts, as well as mass-market romance, and narrative theory. Ruocco, whose specialty
at Wake Forest is creative writing, also serves as the co-director of the Dillon Johnston
Writers Reading Series at that university.
According to Ruocco, she feels a sense of play when she writes. “Play is a kind of
open-focus, magical absorption. It’s what made all our childhood games of make-believe
and invention so vital and important,” she said.
“I love play because it’s so open, and I love constraint because it’s so closed. I
love to change my relationship to language by finding new ways into book projects,
and I love to repeat the romance-novel form again and again with slight variations,”
Ruocco added.
Ruocco’s book publications include “The Week” (The Elephants of British Columbia Press,
2017), “Field Glass,” a collaboration with Joanna Howard (Sidebrow Press, 2017), “Dark
Season,” as Joanna Lowell (Crimson Romance, Simon & Schuster, 2016), “Dan” (Dorothy,
a publishing project, 2014), “Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith” (FC2 / University
of Alabama Press, 2012), “A Compendium of Domestic Incidents” (Noemi Press, 2011),
“Man’s Companions” (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010), and “The Mothering Coven” (Ellipsis
Press, 2009).
She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Denver in Denver, Colo.; and her Master
of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Arts degrees from Brown University in Providence, R.I.
Spring 19 is sponsored by MCLA’s English/Communications Department. The series will
continue on Wednesday, March 6, at 7:30 p.m. in MCLA Gallery 51, with Spring 19 Writer-in-Residence
Joanna Ruocco, an assistant professor of English in creative writing at Wake Forest
University in Winston-Salem, N.C., and the co-director of that university’s Dillon
Johnston Writers Reading Series.
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) is the Commonwealth’s public liberal
arts college and a campus of the Massachusetts state university system. MCLA promotes
excellence in learning and teaching, innovative scholarship, intellectual creativity,
public service, applied knowledge, and active and responsible citizenship. MCLA graduates
are prepared to be practical problem solvers and engaged, resilient global citizens.
For more information, go to www.mcla.edu.
