Rate My Professor Gretchen Comba

Gretchen Comba serves as Teaching Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, contributing to the university's programs in Literature and creative writing. She earned her BA in English from Florida State University, MA in English from Virginia Commonwealth University, and MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In her administrative role, Comba supports the department's undergraduate and graduate initiatives, including the MFA in Creative Writing program, where she advises theses and participates as core faculty. Her office is located in Anderson House at 913 W. Franklin Street, room 201.

Comba's research interests encompass creative writing (fiction), short story cycles, and 20th-century U.S. literature. She is the author of the short story collection The Stillness of the Picture: Stories, published by Kore Press in 2016. Her fiction has appeared in prestigious journals including Salamander ("Goatman," issue 51, 2020–2021), storySouth ("Chessie: The Chesapeake Bay Sea Monster," issue 50, 2020), Alaska Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The North American Review. In scholarly publications, she contributed "William Maxwell" to Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature, edited by Jackson Bryer (Oxford University Press, 2017; updated Spring 2022), and "An ‘Unlikely’ Intersectionalist: Black Feminist Ethics in William Maxwell’s Time Will Darken It" to MidAmerica: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (volume XL, 2013). Additionally, she authored the chronology for F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Comba has received the F. Scott Fitzgerald Prize for Short Fiction and the Yemassee Award for Exceptional Contribution to the Magazine. She has given public readings, such as in Virginia Commonwealth University's Visiting Writers Series on April 13, 2017, and her work enhances the department's engagement with contemporary Literature through teaching and mentorship.