Wild Knights
The University of Bridgeport's English & Professional Writing Blog

We caught up with Carl, The University of Bridgeport's resident kangaroo, for a quick round of 20 Questions. Who are your two favorite American presidents? Roosevelt. What is your favorite country? Peru. What is your favorite Edgar Allan Poe story? The Murders in the Rue Morgue. What is your favorite leafy green? Arugula. Who is your favorite singer-songwriter? Rufus Wainwright. What’s your favorite Top 40 band? Maroon-5. Who’s your favorite Latin American poet? Pablo Neruda.

WK: Hey Carl. How’s your summer going? Carl: Oh, great. My professors at UB tell me that I should write every day, and so I’ve been trying to do that, and I started cranking out my first mystery novel. WK: That’s great, Carl. What’s it about? Carl: Do you want me to read you the first chapter? WK: That sounds great. Let’s hear it! Carl: It was a stormy night on the Bridgeport campus. Thunderheads were blowing in off the Atlantic, making the elms and maples go into d

You know the feeling. You flip through channels, feeling like your brain is getting sucked out through your eyeballs. Was it FCC Chairman Newton N. Minnow who called television a “vast wasteland”? Or was it T.S. Eliot? Either way, they were right. Until now. Folks tuning in to Wallingford Public Access television recently might have stumbled across a new presence on the airwaves, a beacon of enlightenment, wisdom, and culture. It must be Unpacking Classics with Professor La

Susan Ferency was an Associate Professor in the University Bridgeport’s College of Health Science. She was UB's Faculty Senate President. She was a beloved teacher and colleague. She was my friend. I was surprised last fall when she emailed me out of the blue to tell me that she wanted to submit some of her photographs to Groundswell, UB’s long-running annual magazine showcasing campus-based art and creative writing. I was not sure what to expect, but when I opened the

WK: Hey Carl! You completed your first year at UB! How’d it go? Carl: Wow. It was so inspiring, prose fails me, so I wrote a poem about it. WK: No way. Carl: Indubitably. My experiences as an English major at UB have empowered me to flex my verbal talents in a variety of startling directions. Let me read you my poem. [Lights dim, mellow jazz comes from somewhere.] When you’re a kangaroo You don’t know what to do. Your heart is in your shoe. You feel like sometim

Right-wing critics attacked Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show as un-American, but the show emblematized many of the themes and values that characterize the American literary tradition. When Puerto Rican recording artist Bad Bunny was announced as the headlining performer for the halftime show of Super Bowl LX, conservative commentators blasted the choice as un-American. Department of Homeland Security adviser Corey Lewandowski decried the NFL for picking “somebody who

One of the great things about majoring in English is that there are so many different ways to do it. According to University of Bridgeport Department Chair Dr. Randy Laist, “English is different from other disciplines because the content, the knowledge, is less important than the learner. This means that ‘studying English’ or ‘majoring in English’ can look very different from one student to another, because there’s so much intellectual flexibility and so much personalizatio

Edival Rios and Dr. Randy Laist at the awards ceremony Milagros lives on Clinton Avenue in Bridgeport. Her husband lured her away from her native Puerto Rico with false promises, cheated on her repeatedly, and then died, stranding her in a house full of mostly ungrateful children. She hustles and struggles to make ends meet, until finally she announces to her children that she is going back to Puerto Rico. "How?" her children ask. "You don’t have any money." “It was then

Sigmund channels his inner cat Any performer would be challenged by the role. You have to be a cat. Ok, Sigmund can do that. He’s been doing it all his life. You have to be a living cat. Ok, still good. And you also have to be a dead cat. A little more of a stretch, but not too much. Sometimes Sigmund is so lazy and serene that he looks like he could be dead. It’s one of his many talents. But now you have to be dead and alive at the same time. Hmm. That’s a genuine act

Have you ever had an idea? If you are like most people, you probably have had an idea before. In fact, you might even have a number of ideas every day. Maybe even a large number. Things you think. Things you notice. Funny ideas, sad ideas, disturbing ideas, and even ideas about your ideas. If you are like most people, the idea comes and goes, and then that is the lifespan of the idea. If you are like the student writers featured in Groundswell 2026 , however, you do someth