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 (his poem "Neptune" will be printed
on posters and displayed in downtown kiosks, on City buses, and
in other public places from April through fall)
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.
. Christopher Connolly
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.
Ralph
James Savarese is the author of Reasonable People:
A Memoir of Autism and Adoption (Other Press 2007). A chapter
from this book was selected by Robert Atwan and Louis Menand as
a "notable essay" in the Best American Essays
series for 2004. He is also the 2003 winner of the Herman Melville
Society's Henig Cohen Prize for an "outstanding contribution
to Melville scholarship" for his essay "Nervous Wrecks
and Ginger-nuts: Bartleby at a Standstill." He has been a
finalist for Poet Lore's narrative poetry competition and
Southwest Review's new poets prize. As an undergraduate
at Wesleyan University, he was co-winner of the Irene Glascock
National Intercollegiate Poetry Competition. (Seamus Heaney and
Grinnell alum Amy Clampitt were the judges.) His poetry, translations,
and creative non-fiction have appeared in ACM (Another Chicago
Magazine), American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cream
City Review, Edge City Review, Flyway, Graham House Review, The
Guardian, Modern Poetry In Translation, New England Review, New
York Times, Poet Lore, Poetry Motel, Poetry International, Poets
Against the War, The Poker, Seneca Review, Sewanee Review, Southern
Humanities Review, and Southern Poetry Review. His
criticism and reviews have appeared (or are about to appear) in
A/B: Auto/Biography, American Book Review, American Disasters
(NYU Press), Disability Studies Quarterly, Leviathan: The Journal
of Melville Studies, Politics & Culture, and Prose
Studies: History, Theory, Criticism. At Grinnell, he teaches
American literature and creative writing, with particular attention
to the areas of modern poetry, non-fiction prose, and disability
studies. He is presently finishing a manuscript of poems entitled
Republican Fathers, and he is also at work on a book about
speechlessness in American literature.
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.
Saadi Simawe
is a fiction writer, poet, critic, editor and translator whohas 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 earned
a B.A. from Swarthmore College and holds M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D.
degrees from Cornell University. Her poems, stories, and essays
have been published in journals including Four Quarters, The Henry
James Review, Mati, North American Review, and Xanadu. In 1996 Paula
collaborated with poets Mary Swander, Ed Hirsch, Ray Young Bear,
Michael Carey, and Dan Hunter on the text for a commissioned choral
work by Grinnell faculty member and composer Jonathan Chenette.
"Broken Ground" was performed by the Grinnell Singers
and Des Moines Symphony around the United States to celebrate Iowa's
Sesquicentennial year. Paula has published poems most recently in
Ekphrasis, Flyway Literary Review, and Red Cedar Review, and fiction
most recently in the North American Review. She teaches creative
writing (fiction), women's studies, and the twentieth-century novel.
Writers @ Grinnell
Visiting Writers
Through an anonymous grant, Grinnell has been
able to invite permanent and visiting faculty members from the
world-renowned Iowa Writers'
Workshop to teach six-week short courses at the College in
advanced poetry and fiction writing.
Spring 2007
Marvin
Bell
Marvin Bell has been called "an insider who thinks like
an outsider," and his writing has been called "ambitious
without pretension." He was for many years the Flannery O'Connor
Professor of Letters at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and now teaches
for the low-residency MFA program based at Pacific University
in Oregon. Mr. Bell served two terms as the state of Iowa's first
Poet Laureate. He has served also on the faculties of Goddard
College and the Universities of Hawaii, Washington, Wichita State,
and (scheduled for this spring) Portland State. His list of former
students reads like a Who's Who of American Poetry. He has collaborated
with composers, musicians and dancers and is famous and infamous
as the creator of what are known as the "Dead Man" poems
and the "Dead Man Resurrected" poems. The most recent
of his nineteen collections of poetry and essays are Iris of Creation,
The Book of the Dead Man, Ardor, Nightworks: Poems 1962-2000,
Rampant, and his latest collection, Mars Being Red (forthcoming
in 2007). Mr. Bell has received awards from the Academy of American
Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American
Poetry Review, and has held Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships as
well as Senior Fulbright Appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia.
Mr. Bell, and his wife, Dorothy, divide their year between Iowa
City and Port Townsend, Washington.
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, 
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:
Christopher Connolly
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.
Ralph
James Savarese is the author of Reasonable People:
A Memoir of Autism and Adoption (Other Press 2007). A chapter
from this book was selected by Robert Atwan and Louis Menand as
a "notable essay" in the Best American Essays
series for 2004. He is also the 2003 winner of the Herman Melville
Society's Henig Cohen Prize for an "outstanding contribution
to Melville scholarship" for his essay "Nervous Wrecks
and Ginger-nuts: Bartleby at a Standstill." He has been a
finalist for Poet Lore's narrative poetry competition and
Southwest Review's new poets prize. As an undergraduate
at Wesleyan University, he was co-winner of the Irene Glascock
National Intercollegiate Poetry Competition. (Seamus Heaney and
Grinnell alum Amy Clampitt were the judges.) His poetry, translations,
and creative non-fiction have appeared in ACM (Another Chicago
Magazine), American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cream
City Review, Edge City Review, Flyway, Graham House Review, The
Guardian, Modern Poetry In Translation, New England Review, New
York Times, Poet Lore, Poetry Motel, Poetry International, Poets
Against the War, The Poker, Seneca Review, Sewanee Review, Southern
Humanities Review, and Southern Poetry Review. His
criticism and reviews have appeared (or are about to appear) in
A/B: Auto/Biography, American Book Review, American Disasters
(NYU Press), Disability Studies Quarterly, Leviathan: The Journal
of Melville Studies, Politics & Culture, and Prose
Studies: History, Theory, Criticism. At Grinnell, he teaches
American literature and creative writing, with particular attention
to the areas of modern poetry, non-fiction prose, and disability
studies. He is presently finishing a manuscript of poems entitled
Republican Fathers, and he is also at work on a book about
speechlessness in American literature. 
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.
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 earned
a B.A. from Swarthmore College and holds M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D.
degrees from Cornell University. Her poems, stories, and essays
have been published in journals including Four Quarters, The Henry
James Review, Mati, North American Review, and Xanadu. In 1996 Paula
collaborated with poets Mary Swander, Ed Hirsch, Ray Young Bear,
Michael Carey, and Dan Hunter on the text for a commissioned choral
work by Grinnell faculty member and composer Jonathan Chenette.
"Broken Ground" was performed by the Grinnell Singers
and Des Moines Symphony around the United States to celebrate Iowa's
Sesquicentennial year. Paula has published poems most recently in
Ekphrasis, Flyway Literary Review, and Red Cedar Review, and fiction
most recently in the North American Review. She teaches creative
writing (fiction), women's studies, and the twentieth-century novel.
Marvin
Bell