Jane Zwart


Jane Zwart

Education

Professor Zwart received her B.A. from Calvin College in 2000, with majors in English and art history. She then went on to study at Boston University, where she received her M.A. and Ph.D. in English, writing her dissertation on rewritings of the Scarlet Letter.

Biography

Favorite books

  • Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
  • Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
  • If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino
  • Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
  • Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
  • To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
  • The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Vladimir Nabokov
  • A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry

Hobbies

  • running and sometimes walking
  • taking in stories (from books & film & TV & other people's voices)
  • eating good food with dear ones
  • going on medium-sized adventures with the Zwart menfolk (husband, two sons)
  • wandering art museums & botanical gardens & unfamiliar cities

Additional information

Academic interests

  • postmodern and contemporary fiction written in English
  • postcolonial literature—especially Southeast Asian literature
  • modern and contemporary poetry
  • writing poetry

Research and scholarship

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, HAD, and Ploughshares, as well as other journals and magazines. In addition, she is the co-editor of book reviews for Plume; her own reviews have been published there and in The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Publications

Professor Zwart has recently published several poems, including "The Perishable" in Rattle, "Stachys Byzantina" and "The Burley Park Flea Market" in Faultline, and "Women's Bathroom, College of Fine Arts” in Boston Review, “Our Neighbor Reads” in Margie, and “The Legend of Good Aunts” in Natural Bridge. She has written several book reviews for Books and Culture, including one on Steven Millhauser's Dangerous Laughter, one on Toni Morrison's A Mercy, and others (in the print edition) on Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, Mavis Gallant's The Cost of Living, and Tash Aw’s Map of the Invisible World.

Awards

  • Sabbatical (interim and spring term 2016).
  • Calvin Research Fellowship (2 course releases, interim and spring term 2009)

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