Department of English

A member of the Georgetown University English Department since 1987, Norma Tilden has focused her teaching on a broad spectrum of writing courses, from the core Humanities and Writing I to a range of offerings in nonfiction prose: creative nonfiction, essays, the New Journalism, nature writing, and environmental rhetoric. Within the field of Writing Studies, she has taught undergraduate seminars on “Approaches to English Composition” "Writers on Writing," and “Craft Studies,” as well as the graduate seminar “Approaches to Teaching Writing.” From 1990-1999, she served as Director of the Georgetown Writing Center. She currently directs the University Writing Program. Since 1997, she has also been a member of the core faculty for the Georgetown Center for the Environment.

Her teaching and research interests include literary nonfiction, the contemporary essay, the theory and practice of ecocriticism, writing theory and composition pedagogy.

Selected publications: “Wildwriting: The Poetics of Writing Animals.” [Proteus: A Journal of Ideas 24: 1 (2007)]; “Walter Inglis Anderson: Zographos” [The Yale Review 93.2 (2005)]; “Nothing Quite Your Own: Reflections on Creative Nonfiction.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 33.6 (2004); “Stratigraphies: Writing a Suspect Terrain.” [Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 25.1 (2002)]; “Word Made Flesh: Richard Rodriguez’s ‘Late Victorians’ as Nativity Story.” [Texas Studies in Literature and Language 40.4 (1998). Selected for re-publication in Contemporary Literary Criticism, v. 155.]

Honors, Grants, and Awards: In addition to numerous Georgetown competitive research grants, Tilden has received national and international writing awards: the Smart Family Foundation Prize for Best Essay published in The Yale Review 2005 (“Walter Inglis Anderson: Zographos") and the 2001 International Life Writing Prize (co-winner for “Stratigraphies: Writing a Suspect Terrain”). She was a finalist for the 2005 Prose Competition awarded by Pen and Brush, the 2004 Dorothy Churchill Capon Essay Award, and the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Essay Award of the Greenwall Foundation (2001). The English Department has nominated her four times for the College Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Current Projects: Tilden has completed a book-length ecocritical study of the contemporary American essay of place, titled "The Indigenous Essay: A New Poetics of Environmental Prose."
She is circulating a prose chapbook, “Animal Watch,” which is part I of an larger, ongoing project:"Zoographia: Lyric Essays."