Angela O'Donnell

 Angela O'Donnell

Angela O'Donnell

  • Courses10
  • Reviews21

Biography

Fordham University Rose Hill - English


Resume

  • 1987

    Loyola University Maryland

    English Professor

    Director of Affililate Faculty Development

    Baltimore

    Maryland Area

    Loyola University Maryland

    Fordham University

    English

    Spanish

    French

    University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

    Master of Arts - MA

    English Language and Literature/Letters

    Doctor of Philosophy - PhD

    Wyoming Area High School

    Pennsylvania State University

    University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

    Penn State University

    Bachelor of Arts - BA

  • Higher Education

    Event Planning

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    Non-fiction

    Religion

    Poetry

    Still Pilgrim

    Still Pilgrim is a collection of poems that chronicles the journey of life as seen through the eyes of a keenly-observant friend and fellow traveler. The reader accompanies the Still Pilgrim as she maps universal terrain

    navigating the experiences that constitute her private history yet also serve to remind the reader of his or her own moments of enlightenment

    epiphany

    and encounter with mystery. Each of the 58 poems of the collection marks a way station along the pilgrimage where the Pilgrim and reader might pause and ponder before continuing with the inevitable march forward.\n\n\nAt the center of this travel book lies a paradox: the Pilgrim's desire for the gift of stillness amid the flux and flow of time

    change

    and circumstance. \"Be still and know that I am God

    \" sings the Psalmist

    channeling the voice of the divine. \"Teach us to care and not care. Teach us to sit still

    \" prays the poet

    T.S. Eliot. Still Pilgrim depicts and embodies this human dilemma--our inevitable movement through time

    moment by moment

    day by day

    and the power of art to stop both time and our forward march

    to capture the present moment so we might savor the flavor of life.\n\n\n\"The Still Pilgrim's history consists of flashes of joy and visitations of sorrow

    engagement with saints and with artists (the Pilgrim's personal patron saints)

    epiphanies sparked by words and songs and stories

    revelations triggered by encounters with beauty and terror. The reader who perseveres through these poems is no longer merely a reader--he or she is a partner in pilgrimage and a friend. These poems have become your poems

    this story your story

    bespeaking our (un)common beginnings and our equally (un)common end.\" -- Angela Alaimo O'Donnell

    from the Afterword

    Still Pilgrim

    These are lovely poems that embrace unlovely realities--the hard life of \"Coal Town

    \" the families that labor beneath its ashen skies

    the death of the father

    the loves of the mother

    spiritual hope dogged by spiritual despair. It is O'Donnell's superb

    inspired language and forgiving imagination

    of course

    that survive the \"slag heaps/ where culm dumps rise camel-backed

    \" and in so doing

    remind us of the salvation inherent in the art of poetry when it is performed at an exceptionally high level. Such is the quality of the finely crafted poems of Angela O'Donnell's Mine.\n--B.H. Fairchild

    author THE ART OF THE LATHE\n\nGritty and tender by turns

    the poems in Angela Alaimo O'Donnell's Mine evoke a lost world--the world of an Italian immigrant family pitted and shaped by Pennsylvania's mining world. There's such a trenchant bite and unswerving gaze in these poems

    and yet a sense of the real value of these people

    who would otherwise go nameless

    except for the care and honor O'Donnell evokes from this world which might so easily otherwise have lacked a local habitation and a name

    a luminescence against the ravages of time.\n--Paul Mariani

    author of DEATHS AND TRANSFIGURATIONS \n

    MINE

    A chapbook of poems inspired by the saints.

    Waiting for Ecstasy

    The Province of Joy is a book of hours rooted in the rich theological imagination of fiction writer

    Flannery O'Connor. A lifelong Catholic devoted to liturgical prayer

    O'Connor was also an avid reader and thinker who lived a rich spiritual life. Cutting a broad swath through spiritual and theological texts of every stamp

    O'Connor engaged ideas about the nature of prayer and its many forms on a daily basis and often shared them in her correspondence

    essays

    and stories. This book brings together O'Connor's practice of prayer and the rich spiritual context within which O'Connor lived and out of which she wrote. \n\nO'Donnell organizes this devotional around six themes:\n\n* The False Self and the True Self\n* Blindness & Vision\n* Limitation & Grace\n* The Mystery of the Incarnation\n* Revelations & Resurrections\n* The Christian Comedy. \n\nIn addition

    she presents brief reflections suggesting links between the themes

    readings

    and prayers of the day with O'Connor's fiction. These parallels illustrate of some of the ways in which O'Connor's practice of her faith and her art intersect and serve to illuminate one another.

    The Province of Joy: Praying with Flannery O'Connor

    In this lyrical adieu to her mother

    renowned Catholic essayist

    poet

    and professor Angela O'Donnell explores how the mundane tasks of caregiving during her mother's final days--bathing

    feeding

    taking her for a walk in her wheelchair--became rituals or ordinary sacraments that revealed traces of the divine.\n\nWith Joan Didion's grasp of grief

    the spiritual playfulness of Mary Karr

    and the poetic agility of Kathleen Norris

    Angela Alaimo O'Donnell narrates the events that followed her mother's fall and the broken hip that led to surgery. As O'Donnell and her sisters cared for their mother's failing body during the last days of her life

    they unconsciously observed rituals that began to take on a deeper importance. Bathing her each morning was a kind of baptism

    the nightly feeding of pie took on a Eucharistic significance

    trimming and polishing nails became a kind of anointing. Beyond the seven there are the myriad sacraments they made up: the sacrament of community via cell phone

    the sacrament of wheelchair pilgrimage around the nursing home

    and the sacrament of humor and laughter. This deeply human portrait of loss is balanced by the surprising grace found in letting go; it will resonate with any spiritual reader but especially caregivers and those currently in grief.\n

    Mortal Blessings

    RADICAL AMBIVALENCE: RACE IN FLANNERY O'CONNOR

    Angela Alaimo O'Donnell's WAKING MY MOTHER reaches through memory to truth

    enlarging family history and stories of her mother's life into connections that twine us all: story

    spirit

    family. \"If art is what we do to break bread with the dead (Auden)

    and rhyme and meter are the table manners (Heaney)

    then Angela Alaimo O'Donnell's hard-won

    well-wrought

    acoustically sumptuous poems set forth a proper feast: haunting

    abundant

    free of pieties. As with any good wake

    here the living and the dead behold one another. The kinship is astonishing.\"-Thomas Lynch

    Waking My Mother

    Lovers' Almanac is a collection of poems that explores the varieties of love that human beings experience. Anchoring the volume is a 12-poem sonnet sequence featuring an intimate dialogue between a man and woman

    each poem keyed to one of the months of the year. The book offers a range of poems engaging divine love

    agapeic love

    familial love

    fraternal love

    parental love

    and homage

    the love we bear towards artists

    saints

    and heroes. As the title implies

    Lovers' Almanac also explores the concept of time and the ways in which love is grounded in the succession of seasons--both the seasons of the year and the seasons of life. These incarnational poems devote attention to embodied

    incarnate love

    evident in all times and places

    and celebrate the power of love to open us up

    save us from the prison house of self

    and redeem us from the suffering human beings are heir to. Love accompanies us throughout the course of human life

    from birth to death

    defying loss

    loneliness

    aging

    and our inevitable mortality. The premise of the book might be summed up by one of its epigraphs

    echoing St. Paul: \"Love never fails\"

    LOVERS' ALMANAC

    There is more than a touch of Elizabeth Bishop in these carefully constructed poems by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell. A quiet

    but profound power is released in poem after poem as the poet exercises her talent for finding the unexpected blessings secreted within all the moments of our lives - even those that are most quotidian. From the tiny \"pleasure of slicing celery\" to the \"tornado that ripped/ the roof off your life

    \" O'Donnell's poetic world is continually replenished by a spiritual omnipresence that manifests itself as ordinary and domestic

    but is nothing less transformative than grace.\n\n--Kate Daniels

    author of FOUR TESTIMONIES\n\n\nIn Moving House

    her aptly-named first book of poems

    Angela Alaimo O'Donnell demonstrates both her versatility and her mettle

    flint-fiery and tender by turns. Here is a collection of grace-filled

    gritty

    vulnerable lyrics

    rife with surprises at every turn

    inscribed in a language we quickly come to trust. Here is the record of someone who has been through the fire and the pit

    and emerged--thanks to a fierce wit and a hard-won faith--whole and healing. Hers is a welcome addition to the great tradition of religious poets

    writing in an idiom we will recognize

    a voice as much at home with Dante as with Melville and Van Gogh.\n\n--Paul Mariani

    author of Deaths and Transfigurations

    Moving House

    Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith tells the remarkable story of the gifted young woman who set out from her native Georgia to develop her talents as a writer and eventually succeeded in becoming one of the most accomplished fiction writers of the twentieth century. Struck with a fatal disease just as her career was blooming

    O’Connor was forced to return to her rural home and to live an isolated life

    far from the literary world she longed to be a part of.\n\n In this insightful new biography

    Angela Alaimo O’Donnell depicts O’Connor’s passionate devotion to her vocation

    despite her crippling illness

    the rich interior life she lived through her reading and correspondence

    and the development of her deep and abiding faith in the face of her own impending mortality. She also explores some of O’Connor’s most beloved stories

    detailing the ways in which her fiction served as a means for her to express her own doubts and limitations

    along with the challenges and consolations of living a faithful life. O’Donnell’s biography recounts the poignant story of America’s preeminent Catholic writer and offers the reader a guide to her novels and stories so deeply informed by her Catholic faith.

    Flannery O'Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith

    These are extraordinary poems

    lucent

    crafted

    a-shine with life! O'Donnell's book is a hymn of praise that celebrates the least as well as the greatest

    the secular and the holy

    art and reality

    \"the maker and the made.\" Placed strategically throughout the book are six poems of \"heresy

    \" because nothing is simple here: firm in its faith

    St. Sinatra sings

    and sings all things. I do not exaggerate: this book took my breath away.\n --Kelly Cherry

    author of The Retreats of Thought: Poems\n\nIn Saint Sinatra

    O'Donnell offers-with textured terms

    savory wit

    and estimable learning-an exhilarating hagiography

    one that insists that whatever it is we choose to become

    we begin here in the midst of our heavy-laden days

    and together.\n --Scott Cairns

    author of Compass of Affection: Poems New & Selected\n

    Saint Sinatra & Other Poems

    ANDALUSIAN HOURS : POEMS FROM THE PORCH OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR

    Angela

    Alaimo O'Donnell

    Fordham University

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