Although I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota (Oh no! A Twins fan!), I grew up in Lawrence, Kansas and have been a die-hard Jayhawk supporter all my life. I attended both the University of Kansas and the University of Bordeaux, France, as an undergraduate and received a BA in English and French from KU in 1978. After a "brief" real-world stint of factory work and softball, I began my graduate studies in English at the University of Exeter, England, from 1979-82, for which I am completing a PhD dissertation on nineteenth-century writer Thomas Hardy and Victorian architecture. I also received an MA in English (Creative Writing) from the University of Kansas in 1985. Since that time I have been a lecturer in English at KU, teaching a number of freshman/sophomore courses, including the course on which this Independent Study course is based (ENGL 203: Literature of Sports). I have also taught creative writing at Washburn University in Topeka.
My sports interests, like yours undoubtedly, date back to childhood, both as a competitor and as a fan. Sports and literature consumed my youth; my heroes were not only Harmon Killebrew, Jim Ryun, and Jo Jo White, but also characters in the writings of Ernest Hemingway and A. Conan Doyle! As an athlete I competed in baseball, football, basketball, track, and cross-country into my high-school years, with mixed results. In college I worked at a bar called The Ballpark, where patrons played an electronic baseball game that could pit the 1919 White/Black Sox against the 1961 Yankees. And even at the "tender" age of 37, I continue to play/manage a softball team that has somehow reached the state level of ASA softball (Class D) in three of the last five years.
As a creative writer I've published poetry in a wide variety of magazines, including The American Scholar, Kansas Quarterly, High Plains Literary Review, Stone Country, and Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature. A baseball poem of mine, "Satan Vows to Make a Comeback," was recently published in an anthology of baseball poetry entitled Hummers, Knucklers, and Slow Curves: Contemporary Baseball Poetry (Illinois University Press), edited by Don Johnson. I am also the poetry editor for Cottonwood Magazine and Press.
ENGL 203 The Literature of Sports