About Us

Writing and critical thinking are foundational skills for all majors on campus. Our department's First-Year Writing program and Writing Center offer innovative and collaborative instruction across the curriculum, employing our brightest graduate and undergraduate students as teachers and tutors in training. 

• The Normal School, our nationally recognized literary magazine staffed by graduate students, continues to earn accolades and is ranked alongside the most respected publications in the country such as the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, and the Harvard Review.
• The Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, our nationally recognized book contest named in honor of our beloved late U.S. Poet Laureate and Professor Emeritus Philip Levine, accepted a record 945 entries in 2015, keeping its grad student staff deeply engaged.
• Our five student organizations actively produce multiple publications of their own, and they take the lead in planning and presenting the department's dozens of scholarly and literary events, all open to the public.

• Career development in all of our degree programs is actively encouraged as our students present their scholarly and creative work at conferences.
• Our annual Young Writers' Conference brings 400+ high school students and teachers from the community to campus, with our grad students leading writing workshops and producing a youth journal.
• Our Undergraduate Conference on Multi-ethnic Literatures of the Americas is planned by grad students who provide an annual platform for undergrads to present their research.

As U.S. Poet Laureate emeritus Juan Felipe Herrera says, the Central Valley's rich literary history serves as an inspiration to readers worldwide. Our department takes that storytelling legacy seriously as it continues to train new readers, writers, and teachers of literature.

Dear President Saúl Jiménez-Sandoval,

We write to you as artists and humanists who care deeply about the power of language to shape or misshape our realities. Language links us as humans, but it can also humanize and individualize some groups at the expense of others and thereby enable and uphold oppressive, hierarchical structures. We who are trained to read and write critically and creatively—and this includes you, Mr. President—have an obligation to intervene where we see this happen. Your “Statement on Violence in the Middle East” (Oct. 16, 2023) requires such intervention. We take issue with it for its asymmetrical and decontextualized language as applied to Palestinians and Israelis.

The statement’s framing of “violence” as something solely inflicted by Hamas against the State of Israel obfuscates the history. As students of world history understand, the expiration of the British Mandate over Palestine in 1948 and the formation of the State of Israel resulted in the expulsion of over 700,000 Indigenous Palestinians from their ancestral lands. The violence of this dispossession, or Nakba, has been followed by the violence of occupation in Gaza and the West Bank since 1967. In the past twenty years, Israel has continued to build settlements in the West Bank in defiance of international law and to evict Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem. This is a violence for which Hamas cannot be blamed. At the same time, Israel has held Gaza under siege, controlling land, air, and water access, and severely limiting the daily lives of the people. From time to time, it has bombarded Gazans in egregiously outsized “retaliations” to rocket fire by Hamas. As legal scholar Noura Erakat has said, an occupying power cannot claim self-defense for its violences because it is responsible for the people it subjugates. These are manipulations of language that manipulate history and, in turn, manipulate the present reality before us.

For this reason we implore you to bear in mind what UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on Monday, Oct. 9 (on Indigenous People’s Day in the United States), that “the most recent violence does not come in a vacuum, but grows out of a long-standing conflict, with a 56- year-long occupation and no political end in sight.” We believe it is disingenuous not to condemn expulsion and occupation as a form of violence.

This is particularly important given that our campus publicly espouses its commitments to local Indigenous tribes. But these commitments need to be anchored in respect for Indigenous sovereignty, which should recognize the rights of Indigenous peoples globally. Many have begun to see Palestine as part of an ongoing colonial project that began in the late-15th century. As Canadian sociologist Muhannad Ayash puts it:

The same imperial project that brutalised millions of Black Africans, committed genocide against millions of Indigenous peoples across the Americas, in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, colonised Asia and Africa through unfathomable brutality and force, destroyed countless societies full of complexity and beauty, massacred civilians in its imperial wars in places like Vietnam and Iraq, dropped atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, created a neocolonial economic infrastructure that is continuously robbing the majority of the world’s population blind, and I can go on and on, but this project is ongoing and nowhere at this moment is this more visible than in Palestine. (Ayyash, Al Jazeera)

We also believe that antisemitism is abhorrent and that the attacks on synagogues in our community should never have happened. They speak of a dangerous conflation of Jewishness with the political ideology of Zionism. This also means that legitimate criticism of the policies of the Israeli government cannot be delegitimized as antisemitism, any more than criticism of the government of Saudi Arabia, or any other Muslim country, can be dismissed as Islamophobia. Indeed, we may point to a history of Jewish eloquence and activism on behalf of the rights of the Palestinian people, from the prolific lawyer-historian Dr. Alfred Lilienthal (beginning with What Price, Israel, in 1953) to Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, and other prominent intellectuals and academics of our time. For Jewish activism against violence perpetrated by the State of Israel in their name, there is no more informed and awe-inspiring group than Jewish Voice for Peace, whose members have put their bodies and their well-being on the line, often at great risk to themselves. Within Israel itself, we might point to such organizations as the non-profit B’Tselem in Jerusalem, which documents human rights violations against Palestinians. And since the attacks on Gaza began, Holocaust survivors have warned against genocide, among them the writer Marione Ingram and renowned genocide scholar Omer Bartov. The work, words, and flesh-and-blood reality of these truth-sayers belies the conflation of Jewishness with Zionist political ideology.

As to your statement’s invocation of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., while we, too, wish to extol the virtues of peace and love, we believe that it has become much too fashionable to selectively invoke Dr. King to sanitize the history of colonialism and anti-colonial struggle. Dr. King was a staunch anti-segregationist and anti-apartheid activist whose theoretical and historical insights would likely have found him a righteous supporter of Palestinian liberation, as David Palumbo-Liu of Stanford University has recently shown us.

Other quotations from Dr. King to select in this context include his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963) — “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed” — and his comment during a 1966 interview that “a riot is the language of the unheard.” Ultimately, we fear that your statement contributes to silencing the language of Palestinian liberation.

In fact, we may point to a long history of African American solidarity with Palestinians, from the 1960s to the present. As poet June Jordan declared after the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982: “I was born a Black woman/ and now/ I am become/ a Palestinian” (“Moving Toward Home“). Cori Bush, the first African American woman to serve in the House of Representatives from Missouri, has stood steadfastly alongside Rashida Tlaib in demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. And writers Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow) and Ta-Nehisi Coates (journalist for The Atlantic and author of Between the World and Me) recently engaged in an honest and inspiring conversation with historian Rashid Khalidi at PalFest. In Angela Davis’s words, “Palestine is a moral litmus test for the world.”

As university professors and leaders, what do we owe our students at a time when their country is directly funding and facilitating an ethnic cleansing in Gaza? A conversation, at the least. On Oct. 25, against the backdrop of intensified bombardments of Gaza, University Diversity Officer Dr. Rashanda Booker invited the campus to “Conversations that Matter,” only to send a follow-up email two days later with the subject heading, “Conversations that Matter — Postponed.” This, without a hint of irony. Dr. Booker offered no explanation for this postponement, and there has been no transparency concerning the formation of a “task force,” as referred to in the email.

Mr. President, we ask that you and your administration provide substance to your stated “hope” that “in the coming days and weeks we can have meaningful conversations and support each other by listening and leading with empathy.” We ask that you move beyond this nebulous realm of hope and prayers and tell us: What is your timeframe for these meaningful conversations? Who do you imagine will facilitate them? And how will you support your faculty and staff who take time outside of their contracts to show up for our students at a time when they are hungry for our perspective and our intellectual leadership? How will you protect students and employees who voice opinions that may not be popular with university donors? As scholars and artists, we assert our duty and power to honor the truth of our history and our present, to thoroughly measure that truth, and to not become empty vessels for propaganda to pass through unchallenged. We all owe Fresno State students the knowledge and courage to do the same. We owe our students the respect of communicating with them in clear, contextualized, sincere, and specific language.

We appreciate the compassion you express for Palestinian American students in your Nov. 13 statement. It does not, however, address the concerns we articulate here. We ask for a response to this letter from you, our President—a fellow humanist from whom we have reason to expect courageous moral and rhetorical leadership in critical times. We close with the words of Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, whose 2009 visit to Fresno State drew some 500 people from the community. She speaks of Iraq here, but her words about the dangerous misuses of language in academia apply today:

but that is not the language I live in
and so I cannot come.
I live in teaspoon, bucket, river, pain,
turtle sunning on a brick.
Forgive me. Culture is everything
right about now. But I cannot pretend
a scrap of investment in the language
that allows human beings to kill one another
systematically, abstractly, distantly.
The language wrapped around 37,000,
or whatever the number today,
dead and beautiful bodies thrown into holes
without any tiny, reasonable goodbye.

— from “Why I Could Not Accept Your Invitation” (2005)

Sincerely,

Samina Najmi, John Beynon, Steven Church, Venita Blackburn, Brenna Womer, Randa Jarrar, Ginny Crisco, Sean Gordon, Melanie Hernandez, Mai Der Vang, René M. Rodríguez-Astacio, Michele McConnell, Alison Mandaville, Bo Wang, Brynn Saito, William Arce, C. Lok Chua, Corrinne Hales

If students would like to reach out or have any questions, please email EnglishDeptFreeSpeech@gmail.com.

Statement of Solidarity with Black Lives Matter from members of Fresno State's English Department (PDF, 66k)

We, members of the English Department at Fresno State, condemn in the strongest possible terms the continued targeting of unarmed Black citizens by law enforcement throughout the country. We are angered by the latest spate of unprovoked violence: against Ahmaud Arbery, who was fatally shot by a former police officer while jogging; Breonna Taylor, an EMT saving lives during this pandemic, who was killed in her own home, and, most recently, George Floyd, asphyxiated by a white police officer while three others looked on.

We want our Black students, student allies, colleagues, and coworkers to know that they have our unequivocal support at this time of renewed grief in the African American community. You are seen and valued, and are a cherished, integral part of the Fresno State community. We stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives Week of Action.

We stand in solidarity with a commitment to fostering safe and inclusive learning environments, including teaching effective civic discourse practices, modeling and expecting rhetorical listening, and making space for the voices that have traditionally been silenced. We stand aligned with efforts to dismantle white supremacist ideologies as they necessitate a Black Lives Matter movement; this means, as examples, that we teach non-dominant literatures and histories; theories of race, social justice, oppression, resistance; and rhetorical approaches and genres to support efforts for a peaceful and just society.

We believe the law enforcement and criminal justice establishments as a whole must interrogate the extent to which they have internalized anti-Black mythologies that permit their members to perpetrate such violence, and, in most cases, to do so with complete impunity. We believe that it is within the purview of a concerned citizenry to hold its public safety officials to account, and to rectify policies and legislation that shield violent actors from appropriate legal recourse.

We recognize that we are all members of a racially hierarchized society in which anti-Black racism is the rot that corrupts our interactions with one another -- not only white and Black, but also the interactions between other minority groups and the African American community. The involvement of a nonwhite police officer in the death of George Floyd makes this fact painfully clear. We,who identify variously as African American, Asian American, Latinx, Arab American, Muslim, immigrant, as well as white, condemn the structures that pit peoples of color against one another, to be used as instruments of white supremacy, benefiting from the violent policing of Black bodies.We refuse to be enablers of anti-Black violence. We stand in support of productive direct social mobilization efforts, firm in our commitment to anti-racist education.

Our discipline teaches critical and creative thinking, reading, writing, and rhetoric. It emphasizes the use of our words to counteract violence. We use our voices now to affirm our support of the Black community at Fresno State, in the Central Valley, and in California; in Minnesota, Kentucky, and Georgia; throughout the United States, and beyond national borders.

 

In solidarity:

Samina Najmi, Melanie Hernandez, Alison Mandaville, Jefferson Beavers (staff), Kathleen Godfrey, Alexander Adkins Jaramillo, Tanya Nichols, Ruth Y. Jenkins, Melanie Kachadoorian, Brynn Saito, Jenny Krichevsky, John Beynon, John Hales, Corrinne Hales (emerita), Mai Der Vang, Tomaro Scadding, Lyn Johnson (retired), Randa Jarrar, Ginny Crisco, Steven Church, Jeremiah Henry, Linnea Alexander (emerita), J. Ashley Foster, Venita Blackburn, William Arcé, Bo Wang, Magda Gilewicz, Cheng-Lok Chua (emeritus), Reva E. Sias, Timothy Skeen, Chris Henson (emerita), Lisa Weston (Chair), Sara Salanitro (staff), Steve Adisasmito-Smith*

*This statement has been signed by those members of the department whom we were able to reach during summer break. It will be updated as needed.

 

Additional signatures from other departments:

Department of Art and Design: Martin Valencia (Chair), Joan Sharma, Stephanie Ryan, Luis Pelaez, Silvana Polgar, Saam Noonsuk, Paula Durette, Laura Meyer, Jamie Boley, Ed Gillum, Keith Jordan, Tracy Teran, Rusty Robison, Nick Potter, Yasmin Rodriguez, Vanessa Addison-Williams, Stephanie Bradshaw, Ronda Kelley, Laura Huisinga, Rebecca Barnes, Tonyefa Oyake, Chad Jones, Holly Sowles, Imelda Golik, Matt Hopson-Walker, Neil Chowdhury, Ana Stone, Kamy Martinez

Department of Theatre and Dance: Ruth Griffin

Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures: Rose Marie Kuhn, Paula Sanmartin

Statement on DACA repeal by the Fresno State English faculty
(first issued 9/20/2017; updated 3/7/2020)

We, the English Faculty at Fresno State, continue to condemn the decision by President Trump to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. We stand with our students whose lives are severely affected by that decision. The program has provided a pathway for students, here and around the country, to study and earn college degrees, to work, to contribute to their communities, and to plan for the future. The end to the DACA program imperils all those goals, and we believe that it will have a serious toll on our students' lives, minds, and bodies. As we await the 2020 Supreme Court decision on DACA, we continue to commit to the below statements.

To all our students, we say:

We stand in solidarity with undocumented students, Dreamers, and all students who are affected by the repeal of DACA.

We pledge our commitment to support and protect our students in any way possible. In addition to this statement of solidarity, the department is researching all the ways we can be in support of you and uphold the university administration's promises to defend students. We are seeking information and training that will enable us to help protect your rights against raids, etc. We are also committed to finding and disseminating resources to you, and aiding in your understanding of the materials. We encourage students to visit the Dream Success Center to access information and free immigration legal counseling. We will continue our participation in Fresno State's UndocuAlly trainings.

To our colleagues and to the administration:

We commend and fully support President Castro's commitment to continue to allow California residents who are Dreamers to pay in-state tuition; to maintain the DREAM loan program for financial aid; to offer legal services to our undocumented students; and to support campus-based student service centers.

We call on administration of California State University and, specifically, of California State University, Fresno to:

• guarantee student privacy by refusing to release information regarding the Immigration status of our students;
• refuse to comply with immigration authorities regarding deportations or raids;
• refuse I.C.E. physical access to all land owned or controlled by the CSU;
• offer over-break housing for students who cannot return home due to fear of deportation;
• find existing resources and/or continue to pursue special funds segregated from federal monies to support legal action on behalf of and guarantee in-state tuition for students previously deemed DACA recipients, as well as continue operation of campus-based Dream Centers;
• clarify what apparatus and protocols are in place to protect our students;
• offer trainings to the campus community in the event of unauthorized access.

To the administration, we ask the following questions and make a request:

• Does the university have a protocol for what will happen if government officials are on campus?
• How long will it take for our campus to mobilize to protect students?
• Are Fresno State Police trained and standing by to keep government officials from being on campus?
• If faculty participate in civil resistance and action, what is the university's commitment to its faculty and staff?
• We ask for the formation of a rapid response team comprised of faculty, staff, and administrators, with a centralized contact.

As teachers of English literature, we strive to share with our students texts that encourage us all to enter unexplored or otherwise inaccessible worlds of experience. Literary, rhetorical, and creative writing teaches compassion, teaches empathy. Our country's administration lacks compassion and empathy and has engaged in hateful rhetoric against immigrants, the undocumented, and Dreamers. This rhetoric and the resulting rescinding of DACA are a direct attack on many of our students' ability to work, study, and take advantage of the opportunities our university has to offer. The goal of such rhetoric stands in direct opposition to our goals as English professors. The end of DACA diminishes the future of our students and dangerously destabilizes their lives.

Signed:

The English Faculty at Fresno State 

First Statement on DACA repeal by the Fresno State English faculty

We, the undersigned English Faculty at Fresno State, condemn the decision by President Trump to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and stand with our students whose lives are severely affected by that decision. The program has provided a pathway for students, here and around the country, to study and earn college degrees, to work, to contribute to their communities, and to plan for the future. The end to the DACAprogram imperils all those goals, and we believe that it will have a serious toll on our students' lives, minds, and bodies.

To all our students, we say: We stand in solidarity with undocumented students, Dreamers, and all students who are affected by the repeal of DACA.

We pledge our commitment to support and protect our students in any way possible. In addition to this statement of solidarity, the department is researching all the ways we can be in support of you and uphold the university administration's promises to defend students. We are seeking information and training that will enable us to help protect your rights against raids, etc. We are also committed to finding and disseminating resources to you, and aiding in your understanding of the materials.

To our colleagues and to the administration:

We commend and fully support President Castro's commitment to continue to allow California residents who are Dreamers to pay in-state tuition; to maintain the DREAM loan program for financial aid; to offer legal services to our undocumented students; and to support campus-based student service centers.

We call on administration of California State University and, specifically, of California State University, Fresno to:

• guarantee student privacy by refusing to release information regarding the Immigration status of our students;
• refuse to comply with immigration authorities regarding deportations or raids;
• refuse I.C.E. physical access to all land owned or controlled by the CSU;
• offer over-break housing for students who cannot return home due to fear of deportation;
• find existing resources and/or continue to pursue special funds segregated from federal monies to support legal action on behalf of and guarantee in-state tuition for students previously deemed DACA recipients, as well as continue operation of campus-based Dream Centers.
• To clarify what apparatus and protocols are in place to protect our students
• Offer trainings to the campus community in the event of unauthorized access

To the administration, we ask the following questions and make a request:

• Does the university have a protocol for what will happen if government officials are on campus?
• How long will it take for our campus to mobilize to protect students?
• Are Fresno State Police trained and standing by to keep government officials from being on campus?
• If faculty participate in civil resistance and action, what is the university's commitment to its faculty and staff?
• We ask for the formation of a rapid response team comprised of faculty, staff, and administrators, with a centralized contact

As teachers of English literature, we strive to share with our students texts that encourage us all to enter unexplored or otherwise inaccessible worlds of experience. Literary, rhetorical, and creative writing teaches compassion, teaches empathy. Our country's administration lacks compassion and empathy and has engaged in hateful rhetoric against immigrants, the undocumented, and Dreamers. This rhetoric and the resulting rescinding of DACA are a direct attack on many of our students' ability to work, study, and take advantage of the opportunities our university has to offer. The goal of such rhetoric stands in direct opposition to our goals as English professors. The end of DACA diminishes the future of our students and dangerously destabilizes their lives.

Signed:

Randa Jarrar

Kathleen Godfrey

Alison Mandaville

Samina Najmi

Rubén Casas

Virginia Crisco

Steve Adisasmito-Smith

Chris Henson

Melanie Hernandez

Tom McNamara

J. Ashley Foster

Steven Church

Tim Skeen

Corrinne Hales

Magda Gilewicz

John Hales

Ruth Jenkins

Bo Wang

Lisa Weston

Reva Sias

John Beynon