Writer. Teacher. Environmentalist. Seeker.
Amy Weldon, an Alabama native, is professor of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. She holds a B.A. in English and journalism from Auburn University (1996) and a Ph.D in nineteenth-century British literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2005).
Amy is the author of 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, 2018), and Eldorado, Iowa: A Novel (Bowen Press Books, 2019). Her novel-in-progress, Creature, is based on the life of Mary Shelley. Featuring chapters on Byron, the Shelleys, William Blake, Anna Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft, and her beloved John Keats, her nonfiction book in progress, An Awful Rainbow: Teaching the Romantics in a World on Fire, blends memoir and scholarship on boxing, circus “freaks,” skylarks, poetry, climate change, and more to argue that these writers, on and off the page, can teach us how to live richly and responsibly in uncertain times.
At Luther College, Amy teaches creative writing (fiction, nonfiction, and poetry), Paideia (Luther’s first-year common course), Romanticism, and a self-designed biennial study-abroad course called “In Frankenstein’s Footsteps: The Keats-Shelley Circle in London, Geneva, and Italy.” In the spring of 2019, she 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 her favorite place in the world.
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Recent Recommended Reading
- The Heavens, Sandra Newman
- “As Goes the South, So Goes the Nation,” Imani Perry, Harper’s July 2018
- Underland, Robert Macfarlane
- Black and British: A Forgotten History, David Olusoga
- Rising: Dispatches From the New American Shore, Elizabeth Rush
- Stand Out Of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, James Williams
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What I'm Writing
- Creature: A Novel of Mary Shelley
- Advanced Fiction Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (for Bloomsbury Academic)
- An Awful Rainbow: Teaching the Romantics in a World on Fire
… and more.
