Angela Ball, a member of the USM English Program’s prestigious Center for Writers faculty, was inducted into the university centennial leacy circle. From 2013 to 2015, Dr. Ball was USM’s Moorman Distinguished Professor of Humanities. Her extensive vita includes six volumes of poetry and hundreds of individual poems in prestigious publications such as the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly. She has served as editor of the Mississippi Review and as a Poet-in-Residence at the University of Richmond; she’s been included in the Best American Poetry anthologies. She earned the Susan B. Herron Award for highest ranked fellow by the Mississippi Arts Council, along with multiple awards from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.
“I'm as dumbfounded as anyone that I have been doing this for so long,” she said. Dr. Ball recounts when, for an advanced composition class, she gave an assignment based on Studs Terkel's book of interviews, Work. “A student in that class interviewed a sanitation worker, who at length extolled the virtues of his job: ‘good pay and benefits, and best of all, you are always finding stuff! People throw out lots of valuable things.’ This is one of the best interviews I've read anywhere.”
It is experiences like these and others that bring Dr. Ball back to the classroom, what she sees as opportunities to “get out of myself, be surprised, help, and learn.”
This past August, Dr. Ball taught an intersession class in world literature, and a student woke her up to a detail in a story she has taught several times, misreading it because she had previously ignored it.
“The same class was asked, on the example of Jamaica Kincaid's brief story, "Girl," to impersonate a parent giving harsh advice,” Dr. Ball continued. “A Black student read an inspired list of things to avoid doing as a young Black man, a list that ended up dauntingly long. The class responded with a burst of appreciative finger-snaps.”
And there's nothing more satisfying for her as a teacher, she explains, than finding out a poem she’s helped a student edit has been published, or even an entire dissertation.
“Maybe there is something more satisfying,” she reconsidered. “To see a light go on somewhere inside a student who has struggled with writing and sees, "Yes, I can say things simply and clearly. "
Dr. Angela Ball discusses the latest assignment with students in a USM Center for Writers fall 2022 graduate seminar.
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