The English Department at Florida State University fostered many incredibly talented and successful people throughout the years. From best-selling authors and poets to some of the biggest figures in entertainment today, there are a wide variety of FSU English Department alumni who have gone on to accomplish great things. This list was incredibly difficult to narrow down due to the exhaustive list of accomplished alumni, but here are 9 Notable Alumni of the FSU English Department.
Jesse Lee Kercheval
Jesse Lee Kercheval is a world-renowned writer and teacher, and Kercheval has authored works from a variety of genres and topics throughout her career. Her memoir, Space, about her childhood and the Space Race, won the Alex Award from the American Library Association. Her short story The Dogeater, a tale about an Igorrote man brought to New Orleans for the 1904 World’s Fair, won the 1986 Associated Writing Programs Award for short fiction. Kercheval is currently an English professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where she has been teaching since 1987.
Anthony Cormier
Anthony Cormier is an American journalist who currently works for Buzzfeed News, and previously worked for the Tampa Bay Times and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Cormier is arguably most known for being a co-recipient of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. His reporting, alongside his colleague Leonara LaPeter Anton, detailed the deterioration of Florida’s mental hospitals and how this issue is largely the fault of Florida state officials. Cormier accepted a position at Buzzfeed News in early 2017 off the back of this success, where he currently works today.
Barry Jenkins
Barry Jenkins and his crew of fellow Florida State graduates have been staples of the film industry ever since their breakout 2016 film Moonlight, which was nominated for 8 Oscars and won 3, including Best Picture. That night, Jenkins became just the fourth ever black nominee for the Best Director category and just the second black man to ever direct a Best Picture winner. His exhaustive list of accomplishments doesn’t stop there, as his follow up film If Beale Street Could Talk, was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture - Drama.
Ed Tarkington
Ed Tarkington, a cousin to renowned American novelist Booth Tarkington, is a Nashville-based novelist with deep roots to the South. Tarkington’s work often centers on Tarkington’s fascination with “the contradiction between the espoused values of Southern WASP society … and the ruthlessness upon which the pedestals of the gentry are built.” Tarkington’s debut novel Only Love Can Break Your Heart was an ABA Indies Introduce selection and a Southern Independent Booksellers Association bestseller. His most recent novel, The Fortunate Ones, expands upon his ideas of Southern hypocrisy and has been critically acclaimed since its January 2021 publication.
Jeremy Willis
Jeremy Willis graduated from the FSU English Department in 2004, and by October 2005 was already working for the worldwide leader in sports, ESPN. While he initially wanted to study fiction writing, Willis says one of his professors opened his eyes to the beauty of nonfiction storytelling, claiming “I had never looked at nonfiction or journalism before … nonfiction writing can be just as creatively challenging as fiction.” Throughout his 16 year run so far at ESPN, he has covered high school and college sports as well as the NFL, and currently leads a team of 7 editors in charge of curating news and alerts for the ESPN news team. The best advice Willis can give to younger students who want to follow a similar career path to him is “be curious and flexible. (In my job) I needed to be able to be flexible and move around.”
CJ Hauser
CJ Hauser graduated from Florida State University in 2016 with her doctorate in creative writing, and currently teaches writing at Colgate University. However, she is most known for a viral 2019 essay she wrote entitled “The Crane Wife,” where Hauser is sent on a scientific expedition to examine the whooping crane, an endangered species of bird found off the gulf coast of Texas. The essay combines the two topics of the birds along with Hauser’s real life experience of calling off her engagement a week before departing, which goes on to heavily influence the essay. The work was published in The Paris Review and immediately went viral, which led to Hauser making an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers.
Cathy Areu
Cathy Areu, a literature graduate of FSU from 1992, is a contributing editor for the Washington Post and has been a frequent news TV pundit for years. Areu got her start in journalism as a staff writer for the Florida Flambeau when she was a student, which she claims “taught me how to be a great journalist.” During her time at the Washington Post, she has had the opportunity to interview a wide variety of political figures, which include Al Franken, Laura Bush, Nancy Pelosi, and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Areu is also the founder of Catalina magazine, a magazine for and by hispanic women. Due to this success, Areu became a key advisor for several Fortune 500 companies who wished to reach hispanic women in their marketing but did not know how.
Bert Kreischer
One of Florida State’s most famous modern graduates from any major, Bert Kreischer graduated from Florida State with a degree in creative writing in 1997. Kreischer initially gained infamy from a Rolling Stone article published the same year of his graduation entitled “Bert Kreischer: The Undergraduate,” which detailed a journalist following around Bert for a week and documenting his antics. This article was then adopted for the 2002 film “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder.” Meanwhile, Kreischer made a name for himself as a stand-up comic in the late 1990s and 2000s, which has led to Bert starring in 5 stand up specials, most recently 2020’s Hey Big Boy which was released on Netflix. Today, Kreischer remains one of the most popular stand-up comics on social media, with a wide variety of shows and podcasts to show for it.
Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson was never known to follow the rules, and this was the case for most of his life. In high school, he was faced with the prospect of either going to prison or going to the military, to which he chose to enlist in the Air Force. During his time in the Air Force, Thompson took night classes at Florida State University, which lasted until Thompson’s discharge from the Air Force. Thompson would go on to create many seminal works, most notably the critically acclaimed “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” in 1971 which was adapted into a feature-length film starring Johnny Depp in 1998. Thompson is also responsible for creating the genre of “Gonzo Journalism,” which went against the structured rules of journalism that Thompson detested. A typical piece of Thompson “Gonzo Journalism” would often include first-person remarks and a severe lack of objectivity, both things that made Thompson’s work stand out from others.
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