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

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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