My books include The Hands-On Life: How to Wake Yourself Up and Save The World (Cascade Books, 2018), The Writer’s Eye: Observation and Inspiration for Creative Writers (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Eldorado, Iowa: A Novel (Bowen Press Books, 2019), and Advanced Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic in 2023. Recently, I completed Creature: A Novel of Mary Shelley. 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.

Contact Amy