English and Creative Writing Professors’ Winter Break Reads
By Rabi Michael-Crushshon ’26
This winter break flew by, leaving many wishing they had more time to read their to-be-read list. The Words asked ENCW professors what they read over break, and what they would recommend.
Professor Matt Burgess
What did you read over break? Wuthering Heights in preparation for what appears to be a wonderfully bonkers movie adaptation.
What was your favorite book you read over break? Alan Furst’s Night Soldiers, a WWII-era spy thriller about imperfect everyday people making a small but significant difference against fascism.
Professor Sarah Ghazal Ali
What did you read over break? I read the novels The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong and My Work by Olga Ravn, the translated essay-esque collection, In Vitro by Isabel Zapata, and a few forthcoming poetry collections that I’m either blurbing or planning to review!
What was your favorite book you read over break? Everything I read was fantastic, but I really loved My Work. It was my first encounter with Ravn, and I’m hungry to read more by her now. The structure of the narrative is unlike anything I’ve read before.
How many books were on your break reading list? How many did you read? I don’t keep organized TBR lists! I’m a moody reader and start and abandon books without shame. I didn’t have a goal to read any number of books, but ended up reading six books.
What book(s) from break would you recommend to your students? I would recommend In Vitro to my students because everyone should be reading more translated literature. In 2026, make a concentrated effort to read more books that weren’t written, weren’t imagined in English!
Professor James Dawes
What was your favorite book you read over break? Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo
How many books were on your break reading list? How many did you read? 13/2.5
What book(s) from break would you recommend to your students? Anything by Sally Rooney
Professor Amy E. Elkins
What book(s) from break would you recommend to your students? My break was really busy, I always hope I will have more time to read than I do! But I have a couple of recommendations for students.
First, I listened to Lily King’s new novel, Heart the Lover, on audiobook (and promptly bought the paperback, too). It’s an amazing book–tender-hearted in a way you don’t really see coming…sort of like Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway meets Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. I’ll definitely be including Heart the Lover on a future Dark Academia syllabus since it follows a group of college friends as they separate and then find each other again years later under very different circumstances.
Then I got halfway through The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa (translated by Polly Barton). I’m still enjoying it, but it’s a book to savor. It’s about an art history grad student from Japan studying in Germany. She’s visited by her friend, but there is a twist! He died in the 2011 earthquake. This novel is full of quiet beauty and will likely be part of my next major academic monograph on archives, queer theory, and humanities research.
Other books I’d recommend: Ian McEwan’s latest novel, What We Can Know. For your Valentine–Richie Hofmann’s new book of poems, The Bronze Arms. Also, my book Crafting Feminism from Literary Modernism to the Multimedia Present just came out in paperback!
Professor Michael Kleber-Diggs
What did you read over break? Okay, I have to start by saying I don’t keep a list! I feel like I should get an account in Goodreads or The StoryGraph, and maybe this will be my prompt to do this. Also, by way of background, I am what I call a “contemplative reader.” This is my elegant phrasing for “I read very slowly. My retention is good, and my comprehension is good, but my pace is impressively slow, both because I am an internal oral reader (I feel like there’s an official name for this) — I read silently the same way I read aloud. I’m also a savorer. I get lost in language and structure and the writer’s decisions. I reread sentences, paragraphs, and chapters that I like (As an example, once, on a plane trip somewhere, re-reading The Grapes of Wrath, I got to Chapter 14 and just read it over and over for the remainder of the flight. I love it so much.).
- Here’s what I remember reading over break (I may be missing one):
- What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
- Clown Town by Mick Herron
- Kitchen Hymns by Pádraig Ó’Tuama
- A Christmas Memory: One Christmas, and The Thanksgiving Visitor stories by Truman Capote (I read these every holiday season)
Professor Cody Klippenstein
What did you read over break? An eclectic mix: You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue (short, weird, and wonderful fever dream), The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien (pensive and full of feeling), and Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon (1,000 pages. Of dragons!).
What book(s) from break would you recommend to your students? Sorry, but I have to go with the 1,000-page Priory of the Orange Tree. You have to understand, I am not a reader who typically cares one way or another about dragons; it was a gift. I intended to leave it behind in my home before going to the airport over break; I was only 400 pages in at that point. I opened the door, stepped outside, paused–then sighed and went back for it. I might’ve dislocated my shoulder hauling it in my carry-on, but it was such a delight to read that I have no regrets.
Professor Mercedes Sheldon
What did you read over break? I re-read the entire Parasol Universe series by Gail Carriger, as I very much need the escapism. It’s the only steampunk fiction that I’ve read. I also read Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey in preparation for teaching it, as well as Julia Thomas’ The Victorian Mind’s Eye: Reading Literature in an Age of Illustration (2025).
What was your favorite book you read over break? It’s a tie between Carriger’s Manners & Mutiny {Book 4 of The Finishing School series within the Parasol Universe} and Thomas’s The Victorian Mind’s Eye.
How many books were on your break reading list? How many did you read? I am terrible at list-making, so none? A dozen? For sure, Austen & Thomas were on my list, and I did read those. And reading for pleasure was on my list, and I did that. So…I read my whole non-list?
What book(s) from break would you recommend to your students? Carriger’s third series, The Custard Protocol, is about a group of college-aged friends going on grand adventures and discovering a broader world than they’d previously been able to imagine and finding themselves as individuals and a collective along the way. I’d also recommend Austen’s Northanger; it is such a witty parody, rich in social commentary and fabulous characters.
Professor Ben Voigt
What did you read over break? I have two little kids, so my winter break reading list mostly consisted of things like Goodnight Moon, To Market, To Market, and visits to Richard Scarry’s Busytown. I did manage to read a few grown-up books, though. My favorite might’ve been Richard Siken’s new-ish collection of prose poems, I Do Know Some Things, which is a kind of fragmentary autobiography; the poems about relearning to talk after his stroke are especially searing.
What book(s) from break would you recommend to your students? I can also recommend To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness by Robin Coste Lewis
Professor Daylanne English
What did you read over break? What book(s) from break would you recommend to your students? I did not have a reading list for break, with the exception of Susana Morris’s wonderful new biography of Octavia Butler, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler (2025). I recommend it to anyone interested in Afrofuturism, Butler, or first-rate biographies of important U.S. literary figures.
Rather than other book recommendations, I have a few musical recommendations for this time in the Twin Cities, including Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy, Nina Simone, and Frank Ocean.
Thank you to all the professors for answering these questions and recommending such great books.