W&L English Professor Published in The Hopkins Review Lesley Wheeler’s essay “Ghost Tour” was featured in a guest-edited folio for the Summer 2023 issue.

By Brian Laubscher
October 10, 2023

Lesley Wheeler, Henry S. Fox Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, saw her essay “Ghost Tour” featured in the Summer 2023 issue of The Hopkins Review.

Wheeler’s work was presented in “Traversals: A folio on walking,” a segment guest-edited by Anna Maria Hong and Christine Hume that features writings on various walks that “traverse the globe, exploring how we move through locales, rural and urban, while navigating the extremities of the 21st century. The works underscore the capacity of each writer to ignite new models of belonging and transience as they go.” Several distinguished writers are featured in the folio including Claudia Rankine, Petra Kuppers and Camille Dungy.

“I feel so honored to keep company with these great writers, and I hope the folio will be useful to writers and teachers,” said Wheeler. “Walking can liberate a person’s thinking – I sometimes build it into creative writing assignments – but walking isn’t safe or possible for everyone in every space.”

Wheeler has been a member of the W&L faculty since 1994, teaching poetry from the 19th through the 21st centuries and creative writing. She holds a B.A. from Rutgers University and a Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Wheeler serves as the poetry editor of Shenandoah and her works have been widely published, including her debut collection of essays titled “Poetry’s Possible Worlds,” which debuted in May 2022. She also authored the novel “Unbecoming” in 2020.

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