Reflections on the books, poems, and essays that have shaped a lifetime of thinking and teaching
Donna has rarely been without a book — or two, or three. For as long as those who know her can remember, she has moved through the world with a novel on the nightstand, a collection of poems in her bag, and an essay half-finished on the kitchen table. Reading, for Donna, has never been a pastime. It has been a way of paying attention.
"A book worth reading is worth reading slowly, and more than once."— Donna A. Gessell
As a professor of English at the University of North Georgia for more than three decades, she brought that conviction into every classroom — that literature is not a subject to be surveyed but a conversation to be entered. Her students learned to read the way she does: carefully, personally, with full awareness that a great book changes the reader who meets it.
This section of the site gathers her reflections on books, poems, and essays that have mattered — works she returns to, works that reframed how she saw everything after, and works she has spent a career pressing into other people's hands. It is not a catalog. It is a record of a reading life.
The works that demanded the most — and gave back the most. Fiction, memoir, and the books that became old friends over decades of rereading.
Poems she has carried for decades, lines that surface at unexpected moments, and collections that changed how language felt on the page.
The essays that clarified something, argued beautifully for something, or made the reader feel less alone in thinking something difficult.