Placing the Academy: Essays on Landscape, Work, and Identity

by Jennifer Sinor (Editor), Rona Kaufman (Editor)

A set of creative writers here responds to the call for literature that addresses who we are by understanding where we are—where, for each of them, being somehow part of the academy. Their personal essays delineate the diverse, sometimes unexpected roles of place in shaping them, as writers and teachers in varied environments, through unique experiences and distinctive worldviews—in reconfiguring their conjunctions of identity and setting, here, there, everywhere, and in between.

 

Offering creative comments on place, identity, and academic work are authors Charles Bergman, Mary Clearman Blew, Jayne Brim Box, Jeffrey M. Buchanan, Norma Elia Cantú, Katherine Fischer, Kathryn T. Flannery, Diana Garcia, Janice M. Gould, Seán W. Henne, Rona Kaufman, Deborah A. Miranda, Erin E. Moore, Kathleen Dean Moore, Robert Michael Pyle, Jennifer Sinor, Scott Slovic, Michael Sowder, Lee Torda, Charles Waugh, and Mitsuye Yamada.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2007

About the author

Jennifer Sinor is the author of Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O'Keeffe, a collection of essays inspired by the letters of the American modernist Georgia O'Keeffe and Ordinary Trauma, a memoir of her military childhood told through linked flash nonfiction. She teaches creative writing at Utah State University where she is a professor of English. She is also the author of The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray's Diary, a book about the diary of her great, great, great aunt, a woman who homesteaded the Dakotas in the late nineteenth century. All of her books work to reveal the extraordinary possibilities that arise in the most ordinary moments of our lives.

Born into a military family, Jennifer has lived all over the United States. While she considers Hawaii her first home, she has come to love northern Utah, where the mountains remind her of the ocean in the way they crest all around her.

Jennifer graduated from the University of Nebraska, the University of Hawaii, and the University of Michigan. She is married to the poet Michael Sowder, and they have two boys as well as a passel of animals.

Reviews

[Josephine Ensign · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading most of the essays in this book. I especially liked "Six Kinds of Rain" by Kathleen Dean Moore and Erin E. Moore, as well as Rona Kaufman's "Running in Place: The Personal at Work, in Motion, on Campus, and in the Neighborhood." This is a book I plan to return to and have purchased a copy for my home library.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This extraordinary book of exceptional essays was recommended at a lecture I heard at OSU. It is a privilege to read.