Rate My Professor Gretchen Comba

Comba's research interests encompass creative writing (fiction), short story cycles, and 20th-century U.S. literature. She is the author of the short story collection The Stillness of the Picture: Stories, published by Kore Press in 2016. Her fiction has appeared in prestigious journals including Salamander ("Goatman," issue 51, 2020–2021), storySouth ("Chessie: The Chesapeake Bay Sea Monster," issue 50, 2020), Alaska Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The North American Review. In scholarly publications, she contributed "William Maxwell" to Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature, edited by Jackson Bryer (Oxford University Press, 2017; updated Spring 2022), and "An ‘Unlikely’ Intersectionalist: Black Feminist Ethics in William Maxwell’s Time Will Darken It" to MidAmerica: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (volume XL, 2013). Additionally, she authored the chronology for F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Comba has received the F. Scott Fitzgerald Prize for Short Fiction and the Yemassee Award for Exceptional Contribution to the Magazine. She has given public readings, such as in Virginia Commonwealth University's Visiting Writers Series on April 13, 2017, and her work enhances the department's engagement with contemporary Literature through teaching and mentorship.