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English Department Faculty
George
Barlow is a poet who earned a B.A. in English from California
State University, Hayward, an M.A. in American Studies and an M.F.A.
in Poetry, both from the University of Iowa. He specializes in African-American
literature, poetry, and teaches Craft of Poetry and the Poetry Seminar
most semesters. He is currently the Chair of Grinnell's English
Department. George is the recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship,
a Ford Foundation Fellowship, and a Graduate Opportunity Fellowship
from the University of Iowa. He has published two volumes of poetry,
Gabriel from Broadside Press, and Gumbo from Doubleday,
and is co-editor with Grady Hillman and Maude Meehan of About
Time III: An Anthology of California Prison Writing. George
has poems appearing in numerous anthologies, including The Oxford
Anthology of African American Poetry, The Anthology of American
Sports Poems, The Garden Thrives: Twentieth-Century African-American
Poetry, Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African-American Poetry,
Voices on the Landscape: Contemporary Iowa Poets, African American
Literature, In Search of Color Everywhere, Color: A Sampling of
Contemporary African -American Writing, Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep:
An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945, The Jazz
Poetry Anthology, The Best of Intro, New American Poets of the 80s,
Giant Talk: Voices of the Third World, Eating the Menu, and
A Galaxy of Black Writing. He has published poems in many journals,
including The Black Scholar, Caliban 2, River Styx, The Iowa Review,
Antaeus, Callaloo,
The Beloit Poetry Journal, Nimrod, The
American Poetry Review, Yardbird Reader, Big Moon and Obsidian.
He has had work accepted by theafricanamerican.com,
an online literary magazine, and most recently Iowa City's 2006
Poetry in Public Project, through which his poem "Neptune" was printed
on posters and displayed in downtown kiosks, on City buses, and
in other public places.
Khanh Ho received his B.A., MA., and Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles.
Ralph James Savarese is the author of Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption, which Newsweek described as a "real life love story and an urgent manifesto for the rights of people with neurological disabilities." In its first month of publication, Reasonable People was chosen "book of the month" by the Autism Acceptance Project in Toronto, CA. His poems, essays, articles, translations, and opinion pieces have appeared, among other places, in American Poetry Review, Sewanee Review, Southwest Review, Southern Poetry Review, Seneca Review, Southern Humanities Review, Edge City Review, New England Review, Graham House Review, Flyway, Cream City Review, Another Chicago Magazine, For New Orleans and Other Poems, Stone Canoe, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poet Lore, The Poker, Modern Poetry In Translation, Poetry International, Prose Studies, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, Politics & Culture, Disability Studies Quarterly, the New York Times, the LA Times, the
Baltimore Sun, the Atlanta Constitution Journal, the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, the Cincinnati Post, The Huffington Post, and the Gainesville Sun. He recently discussed his new book on the "Diane Rehm Show" (National Public Radio), "The Exchange" (Iowa Public Radio), "Live at Prairie Lights" (Iowa Public Radio), WNBC in New York, and NECN in Boston. The book was featured on ABC's "Nightly News with Charles Gibson" and CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360." He is the 2003 winner of the Hennig Cohen Prize from the Herman Melville Society for an "outstanding contribution to Melville scholarship," and the first chapter of Reasonable People received a "notable essay" designation in the Best American Essays series of 2004. He teaches American literature, creative writing, and disability studies at Grinnell College. His current projects include editing a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly on autism, a book on neuropoetics, and a
memoir and poetry project called Republican Fathers.
Saadi Simawe
is a fiction writer, poet, critic, editor and translator who
has a B.A. from Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and an
M.A. from the University of Nebraska. He also earned both an M.A.
in African-American studies and a Ph.D. in English from the University
of Iowa. He teaches English and African-American literatures. He
also offers independent projects on comparative literature and Middle
Eastern literature. He has published translations and fiction as
well as articles on African-American, Middle Eastern, and comparative
literature. Recently, his novel Out of the Lamp, was released
by Al-Rafid, an Arabic language publisher in Britain. He has also
recently published a scholarly work, edited for Garland, entitled
Black Orpheus: Music in African American Fiction from the Harlem
Renaissance to Toni Morrison.
Paula V. Smith holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College and M.A.,
M.F.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell University. Her work has been published
in numerous literary journals, including poetry in Ekphrasis, Flyway Literary Review,
and Red Cedar Review, and short fiction in the North American Review and
Bellevue Literary Review. Recent awards include Grand Prize (for her poem "In a Different
Kingdom") in the 2006 Evolution Poetry Contest, sponsored by the Society for the
Study of Evolution. Through writing poetry, Paula Smith has contributed to shared
projects with photographers, composers, and visual artists, as well as fellow poets.
In 1996 she collaborated with Mary Swander, Edward Hirsch, Ray Young Bear,
Michael Carey, and Dan Hunter on the text for a choral piece by Grinnell faculty
member and composer Jonathan Chenette. This commissioned work, entitled
"Broken Ground," was performed by the Des Moines Symphony and Grinnell Singers
to celebrate Iowa's Sesquicentennial year. Paula Smith's recently completed novel,
"The Painter's Muse," is currently under submission for publication. Beginning in
2008-09, she will shift responsibilities from teaching to serve as Dean of the College.
Other Writers among the Faculty and Staff
David
G. Campbell, Professor of Biology at Grinnell College,
is a scientist, teacher and author. He began his professional life
in the West Indies, as Director of the Bahamas National Trust for
the Conservation of Wildlife and as a consultant for the International
Union for the Conservation of Nature, in Switzerland. After earning
a Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University, Campbell joined the scientific
staff of the New York Botanical Garden, spending eight years in
the field in the Brazilian Amazon conducting research on the biogeography
of trees. In 1987 Campbell joined the sixth Brazilian expedition
to Antarctica, studying the life cycles and pathologies of the invertebrate
parasites of crustaceans, fish and seals. He may be the only biologist
to have research sites in those antitheses of diversity, the Amazon
and Antarctica. After coming to Grinnell College in 1991, Campbell
began a long-term project in Belize on the Maya forest and its people.
Campbell considers teaching to be an integral part of his fieldwork,
and has taken 210 Grinnell students and alums to the New World tropics.
The author numerous professional papers, Campbell is also a writer
of literary nonfiction. He is author of four books in this genre:
The
Ephemeral Islands (1977), a natural history of the Bahama Islands,
The
Crystal Desert (1993), a reminiscence on three summers in Antarctica
(chosen as one of the notable books of 1993 by the New York Times
Book Review), Islands
in Space and Time (1996), an exploration of ten wilderness areas
from Palau to Paraguay, and Land
of Ghosts (2005), a personal essay on Amazonian diversity, biotic
as well as human. Campbell has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship,
the Burroughs Medal, the PEN Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction,
the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award, and the 2005 Lannan
Award for Nonfiction. His current literary project is on Maya biophilia.
J. Harley McIlrath
is a fiction writer who, as the Assistant Manager in the College's
bookstore, runs the store's trade and textbook sections. Harley
has a B.A. in English and Philosophy, and a M.A. in English, all
from the University of Northern Iowa. His M.A. thesis was a collection
of original short fiction entitled Possum Trot & Other Stories.
His fiction has appeared in Aethlon, the Briar Cliff Review,
the Cream City Review, NightSun, the North American
Review, Short Story, and the Wapsipinicon Almanac.
Harley has written reviews for the Literary Magazine Review,
and served for a long while as Editorial Assistant to Robley Wilson
at the North American Review.
Kesho
Scott is a fiction writer, memoirist, essayist and cultural
critic with a B.A. in Sociology from Wayne State University, an
M.A. in Sociology from the University of Detroit, and a Ph.D. in
American Studies from the University of Iowa. Her book Tight
Spaces, a collection of autobiographical stories she co-authored
with Cherry Muhanji and Egyirba High, won the American Book Award
in 1988, has been translated into Italian and Arabic, and has gone
into several printings. She has also written The Habit of Surviving:
Black Women Strategies for Life (Rutgers University Press, 1991)
and Twenty Years of Unlearning Racism: which is due out in
2007. She is also at work on two other works: Autobiographical story
of Scott's political and personal memoir of life and love in Ghana
in the 1970s and Biographical Stories of African-American Men's
Habit of Survival, 2008. Kesho has also lectured and toured
extensively across the country and abroad, and has made appearances
on the Oprah Winfrey and Sonya Live shows, as well as C-Span. She
is past Chair and Associate Professor in Grinnell's American Studies
department. Scott won a State Department Fulbright to Ethiopia in
2001-2002 and is current Chair of the Department of Sociology at
the College.
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