Dr. Reggie Scott Young served as a member of the UL Lafayette English faculty until 2015 when he departed at the rank of Professor. He taught courses in creative writing courses (poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction), as well as American literature, contemporary poetry, a Blues literature course, various other courses in American ethnic literatures, and modern fiction. He is a member of the Macondo Writers' Workshop and his poems and stories have appeared in Louisiana Literature, Fifth Wednesday Journal, The Oxford American, The Christian Imagination: Essays on Literature and Writing, African American Review, The Christian Century, and the West Side Stories anthology. Many of his early creative efforts are set in his native Chicago West Side community that he has written about as “Bluesville,” and several of his more recent poems and stories explore differences in his experiences of living in a cultural community in the North that might be characterized as an “up South” environment to the particular region of the deep, deep South known as Acadiana. As a scholar, he compiled and edited Mozart and Leadbelly: Stories and Essays by Ernest J. Gaines (Knopf, with Marcia Gaudet), and co-edited This Louisiana Thing That Drives Me: The Legacy of Ernest J. Gaines (University of Louisiana Press, with Marcia Gaudet and Wiley Cash). His critical articles and essays have appeared in The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, Contemporary African American Literature: New Critical Essays, Multicultural Literature and Literacies: Making Space for Difference, August Wilson and Black Aesthetics, and other publications.

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Like Huck Finn, Dr. Young took off for the territories at the end of spring semester. In parting, Dr. Young had this to say:

"It has been a challenging fourteen years at UL Lafayette, but the experience has been a crucial part of my life's ongoing education."

Feel free to keep up with Dr. Young's activities by going to his personal website:

www.rybluesville.com

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Available from Reggie Scott Young via email request at

rybluesville.com@gmail.com,

Amazon.com, and other booksellers.

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Course Offerings

English 476-001: Nonfiction Workshop

(Topic: Writing the Personal I)

TR, 2-3:15 PM

English 476 Course Description Below

English 371: Modern African American Poetry and Poetics

TR, 9:3--10:45

English 333: Louisiana Literature

TR, 11-12:15 PM

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Past Course Descrptions

English 476 (Nonfiction Workshop):

Loosely titled “Writing the Personal I,” this is a course that invites both creative writers and non-creative writers to participate. As discussed in the latest edition of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, “’Creative nonfiction’ is a relatively new term… but examples of the form appear much earlier in American literature.” Today, work in the genre is much more “flexible and expansive” than earlier in its history and one of the goals of this course will be to explore some of the various possibilities of writing nonfiction narratives. Our central focus will be on the creation of essays that are developed around that little bugaboo we often discourage from creeping into critical writing and possibly the most problematic part of speech in the English language: the first person pronoun in all of its various forms. Participants will be asked to draw upon personal experiences, no matter how those experiences are rooted, to develop pieces of writing that will not have parenthetical citations and bibliographical references unless they are used as part of the process of storytelling. Although the experiences of so many of us in the academy are related our time spent in the academy as students and academic professionals, those are still valid experiences. (Zora Neale Hurston is an example of an academic who found an inventive way of turning her experiences as a researcher into art.) Aristotle defined the creative process for us long ago as one that entails exploration of possibility in the process of discovery through invention. We will employ those same basic principles in English 476. The goal is for each of us to learn something about ourselves (didn’t C.S, Lewis say that we “write to understand”?) and through the revelation of our discoveries allow for our readers to also learn something about themselves and the humanity that we all share. The course will operate as a workshop and will involve the process of producing the kind of works that Lee Gutkind, the editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction, characterizes as “true stories, well told.” Participants will be encouraged to write with the idea in mind of submission and during the semester we will examine some of the publishing opportunities that are available for writers in the field. Modestly priced books have been chosen for the course as opposed to more expensive handbooks. They include Suzanne Paola’s Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction, In Brief: Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones’s Short Takes on the Personal, and Lee Gutkind’s You Can’t Make this Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Creative Nonfiction and his In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction.

English 371 (Modern African American Poetry and Poetics):

This is a course designed for new and inexperienced readers of poetry as well as for more experienced readers who are interested in studying works by African American poets. It will also serve as a useful introduction to African American literature and some of the critical issues that are important to its study. The focus will be on literary issues regarding poetry and poetics as opposed to social history and race relations—the focus will be on writers and texts as opposed to issues that are external to the authors’ work as writers and the language of their poems. Most poets examined will be twentieth and twenty-first century writers, although there will be an examination of important forerunners such as Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton. The first major figure to receive extended discussion will be Paul Laurence Dunbar and other major figures will include Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Lucille Clifton, Amiri Baraka, Brenda Marie Osbey, Yusef Komunyakka, and Natasha Trethewey. Required anthologies are The Vintage Book of African American Poetry and Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep: An Anthology of African American Poetry (Both by Harper and Walton, and both are fairly inexpensive.) The final paper for the course will involve an examination of a collection by an assigned poet.

Fall 2014

English 675-001: African American Poetry and Poetics

(Graduate Seminar)

M/W 4-5:15 PM

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English 333: Louisiana Literature

M/W 2:30-3:45 PM

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For Spring 2015

Jeffery Renard Allen Reading

October 15, 2014

Ernest J. Gaines Center, 6:30 PM

"Jeffery Renard Allen, like Colson Whitehead in The Intuitionist and Walter Mosley in Blue Light, makes use of aspects of the culture without assuming race as a fundamental element of either characters or stories. These writers generate very different sets of metaphors and narrative approaches in places where one would expect to find the standard racial discourse. This is part of what makes their work disconcerting and problematic for reviewers and critics."

Keith Byerman,

Review of Rails Under My Back

Sample Works by

Jeffery Renard Allen

Jeffery Renard Allen's TOILET TRAINING

SONG OF THE SHANK excerpt

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Other books featuring work by

Reggie Scott Young