These 10 authors teach creative writing, literature, and other subjects at universities. Many have M.F.A.s in writing.
Don Bredes is a writing teacher and a versatile writer who published two “mainstream” novels then took a long hiatus. Now he’s back, in a new genre: crime fiction.
Born in New York in 1947, he got his BA from Syracuse University and his MFA from the University of California—Irvine. He later settled in Vermont, and made it the scene of his fiction. He has received grants from the Vermont Council for the Arts. He has published stories (Paris Review) and nonfiction (New York Times). In an autobiographical piece, he mentioned delaying marrying and starting a family to devote himself to a writing career, and noted the difficulties the irregular income of a freelancer can cause a couple. He has taught creative writing in high school, college, and currently at the University of Maryland University College, an online university. He co-wrote the screenplay for A Stranger in the Kingdom, an independent film, in the late ‘90s.
His first two books were “mainstream” novels. After a novel-publishing gap of almost 20 years, his two recent novels are mysteries starring a series detective.
Novels
Hard Feelings Atheneum 1977 * Bantam 1981 *“The diction and tone are unnervingly accurate, and after finishing Hard Feelings one has the impression he has spent 10 straight hours with an average adolescent.” –New York Times
Muldoon Holt 1982 *
Cold Comfort Harmony 2001 *“Don Bredes is not exactly a household name right now, a situation that is somewhat puzzling to me, and one that I would hope to be temporary.” –Bookreporter.com
“Bredes complicates his story by involving too many briefly observed players in too many tangential angles of this land and drugs conspiracy. But he has a clear, unscented style that smells like fresh air.” –New York Times
The Fifth Season # Three Rivers Press 2005 * Random House pb and ebook 2005 “Here Mr. Bredes is in the great tradition of Dashiell Hammet, who pretty much defined the genre of American crime fiction.”—Barton Chronicle
“A much more literate and deeper thriller than the run-of-the-mill murder story.” –Rocky Mountain News
Main sources: Contemporary Authors
About Men: Rights and Choices New York Times Feb. 21, 1988.
T. Alan Broughton is a teacher and practitioner of many genres of creative writing. He wrote four novels, all published in the period 1977-1984.
Born in Pennsylvania in 1936, Broughton attended Harvard and Julliard before graduating from Swarthmore. He got his M.A. from the University of Washington in 1964. In 1966 he began to teach at the University of Vermont, where he spent his entire career, becoming professor emeritus in 2001. [He earned $67,600 as a professor, according to the university’s base pay list.-the vote is to omit]
Broughton has done much to assist and encourage apprentice writers. In addition to directing the writers’ workshop at the University of Vermont, he has written for the Young Writers Project and The Writer magazine.
He has published many poems, stories, and articles, contributing to anthologies and periodicals ranging from Commonweal to Cosmopolitan. University presses and small presses have published collections of his works, starting in 1972. His most recent is Suicidal Tendencies: short stories from University Press of Colorado in 2003.
His novel-publishing phase was brief and fast-paced, with four “literary” novels appearing in hardcover from large New York publishers in seven years. As is generally the case, though, the writing took much longer. He told LJ that his first novel took 12 years to write, and told The Writer in 1992 that subsequent novels took at least 3 years. Several authors from the class of ’77 had similarly short careers with New York publishers, but found small presses to publish their novels. Broughton works with such presses on his story and poem collections, but he has apparently given up the long form.
Novels
A Family Gathering Dutton 1977 # “Action is somewhat disjointed and there is too much of the stereotyped South” –Library Journal
Winter Journey Dutton 1980 * # “Not a page turner; it grows on one slowly, even deliberately….a novel of so many virtues.” –Washington Post
The Horsemaster Dutton 1981 #
Hobb’s Daughter Morrow 1984 *#“skillfully and affectingly written” --New York Times
Main Source: Contemporary Authors
Douglas Day (1932-2004) shows how a career in the academy can bring stability to a writing career. He spent 47 of his 72 years at UVa. He was a professor of English and comparative literature. He also taught creative writing. Most of his works were scholarly, but he also wrote two historical novels.
Day was born in Panama, where his father, a U.S. Navy officer, was stationed. Day joined the Marines and became a pilot, but injury in a car accident ended his flying career. He continued to serve as a reserve officer. He earned his BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Virginia-Charlottesville, joined the faculty in 1962, and taught literature there until he retired in 2000.
He won the National Book Award for a 1974 biography of Malcolm Lowry and also wrote about Robert Graves, William Faulkner, and other authors. A fluent Spanish speaker, he had a lifelong interest in Hispanic literature and culture. He studied and taught in Spain and Latin America.
His first novel, Journey of the Wolf, concerns a Spanish Civil War veteran who returns from exile during the final years of Franco’s reign. Day told LJ in 1977, “I teach a great deal of modern fiction, and I find increasingly that I am bored with what I teach---too much play with form, too little content.” Fourteen years later he published his second novel, about the Mexican Revolution. He was working on another novel in retirement, but troubled by ill health, was unable to finish it.
Novels
Journey of the Wolf Atheneum, 1977 * Winner, Rosenthal Fiction Award. “Narrated in lean, efficient prose, with unobtrusive flashbacks to the war, this first novel is a taut adventure story of an exile’s return to danger, disillusionment and death” –New York Times
“manages to outlast the errors and inexperience of its author.”
--Time
The Prison Notebooks of Ricardo Flores Magon Harcourt Brace, 1991 * “Ultimately, the hero’s voice is not strong enough to propel the novel…The rich historical material here, however, exercises a pull on the reader’s imagination.” –Publishers Weekly
Main sources: The Cavalier Daily, Inside UVa Online, Contemporary Authors
Garrett Epps is a legal scholar. Most of his writing is nonfiction, but he has also written two novels about politics.
Born in Richmond, Va. in 1950, Epps went to Harvard, where he was editor of the Crimson. His first career was in journalism; he was a reporter for the Richmond Mercury
and other papers, and managing editor of a “short-lived liberal weekly” (he told LJ in 1977). He has continued to contribute articles to periodicals, including New Republic. He earned an MA in creative writing from Hollins College and a law degree from Duke. He is now a professor at the University of Oregon law school. His recent books have been historical studies of the Constitution.
Earlier, he published two novels dealing with lawmakers, the first set in Richmond, the second in Washington, D.C.
The Shad Treatment Putnam 1977# University Press of Virginia 1997* “a promising start toward entering Epps’ name on the list of prominent southern writers.” –Library Journal
The Floating Island Houghton Mifflin 1985*# “It may seem like a farce but in truth it tells how things don’t work in the nation’s capital.” –user review on amazon.com
Main sources: University of Oregon law school Web site
Wikipedia
Contemporary Authors
Curt Leviant is a professor of Hebrew and Yiddish in the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers. He is a prolific and much-praised editor-translator of Sholom Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and others.
He received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University, whereupon he joined the faculty and spent the rest of his career there. He received an award for 40 years service in 2001 and is now retired.
Leviant got his first novel published with the aid of Saul Bellow, who was so enthusiastic he recommended the author to his own agent. He has pursued experiments in language and narrative structure in four more volumes of fiction. He has won several literary awards and fellowships and garnered admiring notices. From the Florida Sun-Sentinel, he received the maddening compliment, “a leading candidate for the title of best unknown American novelist.” His second novel came out as a mass-market paperback from a big publisher, but since then he has been published by small academic presses
Novels
The Yemenite Girl.* Hardcover Bobbs-Merrill 1977 (republished by Syracuse U Pr, 1999)
Won Edward Lewis Wallant Award “Leviant’s first novel is well-written and perceptive.”—Library Journal.
Passion in the Desert *Avon, 1983 “The most beautifully written novel by an American Jewish author since “Call it Sleep.” [attribute??]
The Man Who Thought He Was Messiah * #Jewish Publishing Society 1990. Nominated for National Jewish Book Award
Partita in Venice *University of West Alabama Pr 1999 “Messy and ill-conceived, but told with such unaffected sincerity and infectious delight that it becomes a real joy to read” –Kirkus Reviews
Diary of an Adulterous Woman * Syracuse University Pr 2001
Novellas
Ladies and Gentlemen, the original music of the Hebrew Alphabet
Weekend in Mustara#
Published in 1 volume by the University of Wisconsin Pr, 2002
“Leviant's work, in these instances, reveals a writer so enamored of an idea that he has forgotten a crucial element: making the reader care.” D. Epstein, Shofar: Interdisciplinary review of Jewish studies
Beverly Lowry’s six novels represent only one phase of her very active writing career. In recent years she has devoted herself to non-fiction. She is an unusual combination of university teacher and “quality lit” novelist with popular journalist.
Born in Memphis in 1938, she received her B.A .in theatre from Memphis State in 1960. She has pulled off the rare feat of becoming a prof without a doctorate or master’s: she is currently as associate professor of English at George Mason University. In addition, she has taught literature and/or creative writing at the University of Houston and the universities of Montana and Alabama. She writes for newspapers, including the New York Times, and magazines, including Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, and Granta.
“I wrote a lot in high school,” she told the Austin American-Statesman. “I come from a town of writers.” She was referring not to Memphis but to Greenville, Mississippi, where she grew up. Shelby Foote and Walker Percy were residents. In college she was more interested in plays, but then she went back to stories or novels. She credited Donald Barthelme with teaching her how to edit her work.
Lowry’s novel-writing career was interrupted by a personal tragedy, the death of her son in a hit-and-run accident, and her involvement with a female murderer on Death Row. The book she wrote about these experiences was Crossed Over: A Murder, A Memoir. Coming out during the “fact crime” boom of the late ‘80s-early ‘90s, the book was widely reviewed and made into a TV-movie. It remains her best-known book, wrote Thomas Fleming in 2003. She has published only one novel since it came out. Her interest then shifted to African-American biography. Her first subject was Madam C.J. Walker, America’s first black female millionaire. This embroiled her in controversy with Walker’s descendant, the author of a competing biography. Her most recent book is about Harriet Tubman.
Three of Lowry’s novels are set in a fictional counterpart of Greenville. Like most authors who publish with major New York houses, Lowry has shifted from one to another every couple of books.
Novels
Come Back, Lolly Ray Doubleday 1977 Louisiana University Press 2000* “But, reservations not withstanding, the flashes of Flannery O’Connor-like toughness are gratifying to the core. Lowry’s imagination proves sound and patient.” –New York Times
Emma Blue Doubleday 1978 *
Daddy’s Girl Viking 1981* Penguin 1981
The Perfect Sonya Viking 1987 Penguin 1988 Texas Christian University Press 2004 * “Middling contemporary [fiction of?] the self-discovery variety, not unappealing, not altogether successful.” –Library Journal
Breaking Gentle Viking 1988 Penguin 1991* “Another of Lowry’s broody, keenly detailed studies of that font of blood-deep imperatives [?] family.” Kirkus Reviews
The Track of Real Desires Knopf 1994* “Lowry’s latest novel is set in provincial Eunola, Mississippi, among a group of hapless mid [life?] friends who view one another much as they did in high school.” --Library Journal
Main sources: Contemporary Authors, “Author Lowry Finds herself on Fast Track”by Anne Morris in the Austin American Statesman, 1994, “Straighten Up” by Thomas Fleming, New York Times 2003
Sheila Nickerson is a poet. She published one novel, then returned to poetry. She has also published nonfiction. She has a strong regional identification as an Alaskan.
Nickerson was born in 1941 in New York City. She got her bachelor’s in English from Bryn Mawr. In 1971, she moved to Alaska. To an inhabitant of the tame lower 48, her résumé suggests she was a resourceful jack of all literary trades in a place where wordsmiths were in short supply. She worked as proofreader-supervisor in a word processing center, editor of a prison literary magazine and of Alaska Fish & Game magazine, arts administrator and designer of writing programs for the public library, and teacher of creative and technical writing for the University of Alaska. After all that, and after publishing several books and being poet laureate of Alaska, she earned a doctorate in creative writing from Union Institute in 1985, at the age of 44. The lesson for aspiring writers here might be that to keep getting jobs in the arts, it isn’t enough to be an artist, you want to have a Ph.D., too. She currently lives in Washington State.
Nickerson told LJ in 1977 that she had written her novel, In Rooms of Falling Rain, seven years before. She wanted to see if she was up to the challenges of writing in the long form. The challenges were made more daunting by the fact that she was at home with two young children. She succeeded, and the book was brought out by a small press. She said that she had written a second novel and was in search of a publisher. The search was apparently unsuccessful.
She returned to her first love, poetry. She has published nine books of poems with small presses, and her works have also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. She has also written two nonfiction books about interactions between early Arctic explorers and native peoples of Alaska, brought out by large New York publishers.
Novel
In Rooms of Falling Rain Thorp Springs 1977. “An evocative and poetic novel that ebbs and flows in perfect harmony with its subject.” –Library Journal
Main source: Contemporary Authors
C.E. Poverman prefers the short story, but he has published two “literary” novels and a thriller. A graduate of the famed Iowa workshop, he teaches creative writing. He has made the transition from large New York publishers to small regional ones.
Poverman was born in 1944. He received a B.A. from Yale and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. He joined the faculty of the University of Arizona at Tucson in 1977. A former director of the creative writing program, he became a full professor there. Currently he is at Middlebury College. He hasn’t spent his entire life on campuses, though; he also worked for a San Francisco private detective agency, an experience he used in his crime novel On the Edge. “It’s another way of seeing how the world really goes together,” he told Tucson Weekly. He has received numerous awards and grants, most unusually a Chesterfield fellowship which took him to Universal Studio to write screenplays.
The Iowa writer’s workshop provided Poverman with a sound basis for his career. His first book, a short story collection, was published by University of Iowa Press and won the Iowa School of Letters Award for Short Fiction in 1976. The next year, Viking published his first novel, and the University of Arizona hired him. His stories have been published in many literary magazines and anthologies. He has also published another collection.
Novels
Susan Viking 1977*
Solomon’s Daughter Viking 1981*
My Father in Dreams Scribner 1988* “Not so much a novel as a series of short stories that lurches around the narcissistic Jed Hartwick and his equally unlikeable family and friends.” –New York Times
On the Edge Ontario Review Press 1997 * “This is entertainment that could make you think.” --Tucson Weekly
Main sources: Tucson Weekly 1998, Contemporary Authors
Wyatt Wyatt (1937-2002) was an English professor who published two “mainstream” novels.
Born in Oklahoma, Wyatt traveled widely in the U.S. and Europe, holding what are often called “flap copy” jobs, because authors like to say in their jacket bios that they’ve gotten their hands dirty: bag-worm picker, janitor, gold miner… He was also a poet, critic, screenwriter, and political speechwriter.
He taught literature at the University of Central Florida 1969-1998. His academic department’s death notice also sounds like an epitaph on his novels. It quotes Charles Micarelli, dean for humanities and social sciences: “The novels were excellent. They were well written and engaged the reader. Both were considered for movies, but that didn’t work out. Those things often don’t work out.”
So it’s heartening to record that Wyatt’s name has not been extinguished. The university established a scholarship in creative writing in his name, and its libraries preserve his manuscripts and other papers.
Novels
Catching Fire Random House 1977* “This first novel is as shapeless as a punctured balloon.” --Library Journal
Deep in the Heart Atheneum 1980 pb* “This is a novel of no great consequence, but one of immense charm and small truths.” --Library Journal
Main source: documents on ucf.edu