The University of Georgia Press (UGP) recently contacted Alfred University English Professor Susan Mayberry, advising her that UGP wanted to publish a paperback reprint of her 2007 book on Toni Morrison, "Can’t I Love What I Criticize? The Masculine and Morrison."
Mayberry initially was given a two-week deadline to make any “minor changes” she deemed appropriate. She negotiated with UGP for some extra time, then turned to undergraduate Ella Thompson for help.
An English major and third-year student from Vancouver, WA, Ella had studied British literature with Mayberry and had the skills Mayberry knew were necessary for completing a difficult project quickly.
“If she says she’s going to do something, she does it,” Mayberry says.
Working together, Mayberry and Ella made the UGP deadline. The 352-page paperback edition of "Can’t I Love What I Criticize?" is due to be released in the fall of 2026.
For Ella, who also works as a consultant for the AU Writing Center, the editing sprint was a 10-day adrenaline rush.
“I was proofreading, looking for spelling errors and grammatical blips. I’d never done anything on that scale before. I always get a big adrenaline rush when I’m taking an exam, and I was feeling that for hours on end while I was proofreading.”
Ella says she worked through one half of "Can’t I Love What I Criticize?" while Mayberry worked through the other half, keeping notes on typos (only two) and possible revisions and passing the notes to Mayberry for her own judgments, chapter by chapter. She estimates the entire process took about 65 hours of her own time.
“I was cramming to get the work done, but I also had a lot of fun. The project required intense focus on incredibly small details, so it was a workout for my mind.”
The process was also Ella’s introduction to the works of Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. In addition to studying literature in Alfred University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, she has been focusing on creative writing, taking classes in flash fiction and persona poetry, as well as the English Division’s Language of Literary Art course.
In the Writing Center, Ella works on encouraging students to become more confident in developing their own ideas, then honing those thoughts into well-wrought sentences and paragraphs. “Most of the time, students don’t trust what they’re doing in terms of their own analytical work,” she says. “I help them explore their own ideas and discover how they can start believing in themselves – without using AI.”
In 2021, Mayberry published her second book on Morrison, "The Critical Life of Toni Morrison," published by Camden House. A longtime English teacher at Alfred University, she serves as the Jane Petersen Professor of Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. In 2025, she was honored by The Toni Morrison Society for her scholarship on Morrison, receiving the Society’s Book Prize for Best Single-Authored Book, 2019-2022.
