Writer. Teacher. Seeker.
As a teaching writer, I inspire readers – on and off the page. Raised on an Alabama farm, I’m professor and department head of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa and codirector of its biennial Luther College Writers Festival. I hold a B.A. in English and journalism (University Honors Scholar designation) from Auburn University (1996) and a Ph.D in nineteenth-century British literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2005).
“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” – Frederick Buechner
My books include Creature: A Novel of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein (Sea Crow Press, 2025), Advanced Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), Eldorado, Iowa: A Novel (Bowen Press Books, 2019), The Writer’s Eye: Observation and Inspiration for Creative Writers (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), and The Hands-On Life: How to Wake Yourself Up and Save The World (Cascade Books, 2018). Featuring chapters on Byron, the Shelleys, William Blake, Anna Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and John Keats, my nonfiction book in progress, A Thing of Beauty: Reading the Romantics in a World on Fire, blends memoir and scholarship to argue that these writers can teach us how to live richly and responsibly in our complex, climate-challenged, beautiful world.
At Luther College, I teach creative writing, Paideia (Luther’s first-year common course), Romanticism, Medicine in Literature, and seminars on William Blake and on William Faulkner and his descendants (Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.”) I also design and teach the study-abroad courses “In Frankenstein’s Footsteps: The Keats-Shelley Circle in London, Geneva, and Italy” and “English Monsters: From Frankenstein to Big Brother.” In the spring of 2019, I directed the London portion of the “London and Florence: Arts in Context” program for the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM), spending five months in the city that – next to Oak Bowery, Alabama – is my favorite place in the world.
-
Relatively Recent Recommended Reading
- The Restless Republic by Anna Keay
- Dinner With Joseph Johnson by Daisy Hay
- Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev
- The Last Queen by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
- The Vampire: A New History by Nick Groom
- An Elephant in Rome by Loyd Grossman
-
What I'm Writing
- A Thing of Beauty: Reading the Romantics in a World on Fire
… and more.
