A 2005 graduate of the Institute, Maj. Henry Wise taught for several years in Taiwan, where he worked for the ROC Military Academy in Fengshan, selecting, instructing, and training cadets who would go on to study in American military institutions, including VMI. In 2015, he earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Mississippi, where he continued to teach creative writing and composition until he joined VMI’s English faculty in 2017. At VMI, he teaches American literature and creative writing and serves as faculty adviser to Cadence (formerly The Sounding Brass), VMI’s annual fine arts journal, which he edited as a cadet. He has taught a variety of courses, among which are those of his own design on the subjects of Frontier American Literature and the works of Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner. Maj. Wise has advised several independent cadet projects on topics as varied as environmental anxiety in Cormac McCarthy’s novels, Mark Twain’s challenging of romanticism in Roughing It, and reconciling Ralph Waldo Emerson’s surprising involvement in the Abolitionist movement with his skepticism of society in “Self-Reliance.” A writer across multiple genres, his poetry has been published in Shenandoah, Radar Poetry, Clackamas, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere; his nonfiction can be found in Southern Cultures. His debut novel, Holy City, will be published by Grove Atlantic in 2024.

Assistant Professor
English, Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies