Luther college, decorah, iowa
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- The Luther College English Department
- John C. Bale, Martin Mohr, Mary Hull Mohr, and Harland Nelson.
Thomas Maltman’s essays, poetry, and fiction have been published in many literary journals. He has an MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato. His first novel, The Night Birds (Soho, 2008), won several national awards, including an Alex Award, a Spur Award, and the Friends of American Writers Literary Award. In 2009 the American Library Association chose The Night Birds as an “Outstanding Book for the College Bound." Mark Mustian is an author, attorney and city commissioner in Tallahassee, Florida, where he has practiced public finance law for over 25 years. Mark’s fiction has appeared in Stand Magazine, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, and Opium Magazine. His novel The Gendarme (Amy Einhorn Books/G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2010), a meditative account of the Armenian genocide by a Turkish former soldier, is available in foreign editions in France, Greece, and Israel. He is chair of the Lutheran Readers Project, a readers’ resource, writers’ connection, and book club (and part of the Lutheran Writers Project) designed to put quality books into the hands and minds of Lutheran readers. A member of St. Stephen Lutheran Church in Tallahassee, he has taught the high school Sunday School class since 2001. His website is at David Oppegaard is the author of the Bram Stoker-nominated The Suicide Collectors (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009) and the recently released Wormwood, Nevada (St. Martin’s, 2009). David’s work is a blend of science fiction, literary fiction, and dark fantasy. He holds an MFA in Writing from Hamline University and a BA in English from St. Olaf. His essay “The Amnesia of the Desert” appears in the spring 2010 edition of The Nevada Review. David lives in St. Paul, MN. His website is at <davidoppegaard.com>. A Lutheran preacher’s kid, Emily Rapp grew up in Nebraska, Wyoming, and Colorado. A Fulbright Scholar, she attended Harvard, St. Olaf, and the University of Texas-Austin, where she was a James A. Michener Fellow. She has received recognition for her work by Atlantic Monthly, StoryQuarterly, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Yaddo, and Bucknell University, where she was the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence. She has served on numerous ELCA boards and interned at the Lutheran World Federation. She is a professor in the Creative Writing MFA program at Antioch University-Los Angeles. Her book, Poster Child (Bloomsbury, 2007), is a memoir of her early life struggles and triumphs. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son. Steven Schroeder is the co-founder, with composer Clarice Assad, of the Virtual Artists Collective (a gathering of musicians, poets, and visual artists). His work appears in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, The Cresset, Druskininkai Poetic, JAMA, Mid-America Poetry Review, Rhino, Shichao, and TriQuarterly. He has two chapbooks, Theory of Cats and Revolutionary Patience, and four full-length collections: Fallen Prose, The Imperfection of the Eye, Six Stops South, and A Dim Sum of the Day Before. His most recent book in philosophy and religious studies is On Not Founding Rome: The Virtue of Hesitation (Cascade, 2010). He teaches at Shenzhen University (China) and in Asian Classics and in the Liberal Education for Adults program at the University of Chicago, where he received his PhD. Steven’s website is at Robert Schultz's books include two collections of poetry, Vein Along the Fault and Winter in Eden; a novel, The Madhouse Nudes (Simon and Schuster, 2008); and a work of nonfiction, We Were Pirates: A Torpedoman’s Pacific War (Naval Institute, 2009). He has received an NEA Literature Award in Fiction, Cornell University 's Corson Bishop Poetry Prize, and the Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry from The Virginia Quarterly Review. His first book of poems was a finalist for the Yale Younger Poets Prize and the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award. With a BA from Luther College and a PhD from Cornell University, Bob returned to Luther in 1985, teaching here for 19 years. He has also taught at Cornell and the University of Virginia. Since 2004 he has been the John P. Fishwick Professor of English at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. Robert’s website is at <www.robertschultz.us>. Paul Shepherd’s novel More Like Not Running Away won the Mary McCarthy Award and was published by Sarabande Books (2005). He has been a finalist for the James Jones, the Bakeless, and the AWP Awards. He has worked as director of a nonprofit housing group and in youth and family ministries. Most recently, he was Writer in Residence and Kingsbury Fellow at Florida State University, where he earned a PhD in English, and where he served as Senior Editor of International Quarterly. He now lives with his family in Virginia. Pastor Norene Smith is co-pastor, with her colleague and husband Paul Overvold, of Bay Shore Lutheran Church on the Wisconsin shore of Lake Superior at Whitefish Bay. A native of Seattle, Norene is a graduate of Pacific Lutheran University and both Wartburg and Luther Seminaries. From 1991 to 1997, she was campus pastor at Luther College. She has served on various synod worship committees and is currently a member of the ELCA Church Council. Before attending seminary, Norene’s vocational dream was to write skits for Saturday Night Live, which she says may help to explain her preaching style. She loves the wide variety of work pastors get to do with people of all ages and backgrounds. Mental Health advocacy is one of her passions. René Steinke teaches in the undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her novel Holy Skirts was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award and was listed among the Best Books of 2005 by the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post. Translated editions of the novel have been published in Italy and Spain. She is also the author of the novel The Fires. Her writing has appeared in anthologies and in the New York Times, Vogue, Bookforum, and TriQuarterly. Editor-at-Large for The Literary Review, René also teaches in the Riggio Honors Program: Writing at Democracy at the New School. Walter Wangerin, Jr. is a widely recognized writer on issues of faith and spirituality. Beginning with the Book of the Dun Cow, Wangerin has written in almost every genre: fiction, essay, spirituality, children’s stories, and biblical exposition. Wangerin has won the National Book Award, the New York Times Best Children’s Book of the Year Award, and several Gold Medallion Awards, including best fiction awards for both The Book of God and Paul: A Novel. Wangerin’s most recent work, Naomi and Her Daughters (Zondervan, 2010), is a historically accurate telling of the ancient narrative. Another 2010 book is Letters from the Land of Cancer (Zondervan, 2010), a meditation on his own illness and mortality. The author of more than forty books, Wangerin lives in Valparaiso, Indiana, where he is Senior Research Professor at Valparaiso University. Walt’s website is at Cary Waterman is the author of four poetry books, including When I Looked Back You Were Gone, which was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award. Her new collection, The Memory Palace, is forthcoming (Nodin, 2011). Her poems are included in Poets Against the War, To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets from Pre-territorial Days to the Present, and Where One Song Ends, Another Begins: 150 Years of Minnesota Poetry. She has received The Common Ground poetry award (2009), as well as grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Bush Foundation. She has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland. Cary teaches creative writing at Augsburg College in Minneapolis. An Alabama native, Amy Weldon is assistant professor of English at Luther. She holds a PhD in 19th-century British literature from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her fiction and creative nonfiction appears in Shenandoah, StoryQuarterly, South Carolina Review, Yemassee, Southern Cultures, Carolina Quarterly, and North Carolina Literary Review; her personal essay “The Fruits of Memory” is reprinted in Cornbread Nation 2: The Best of Southern Food Writing (2004). Her scholarly essays have appeared in Cardiff Corvey, Mississippi Quarterly, and Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary (2006.) A former Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Amy has completed a story collection, Traveling Grace, and is at work on a novel. Though born and raised on the Big Dry of eastern Montana, Joe Wilkins lives now with his wife and son in north Iowa, where he teaches writing at Waldorf College. He is the author Killing the Murnion Dogs (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press) and Ragged Point Road (Main Street Rag, 2006), and his work appears in the Georgia Review, Southern Review, The Sun, Orion, Slate, and Best New Poets 2006 and 2009. A National Magazine Award Finalist, he is the 2009 recipient of the Richard J. Margolis Award of Blue Mountain Center, which goes to “a promising new journalist or essayist whose work combines warmth, humor, wisdom and concern with social justice.” Joe’s website is at Vincent Wixon has three books of poems, including The Square Grove (Traprock Books, 2006), and most recently, Blue Moon (Wordcraft of Oregon). He is co-producer of documentary films on William Stafford and former Oregon Poet Laureate Lawson Inada. His work in the William Stafford Archives in Portland includes co-editing two Stafford books on writing for the University of Michigan’s Poets on Poetry Series, and choosing poems for Stafford’s selected poems. Wixon is retired from teaching high school English and Creative Writing in Southern Oregon, where he was named Oregon Teacher of the Year (1988). In 1996 he was awarded a Luther College Distinguished Service Award. Wixon and his wife Patty live in Ashland, Oregon, where he hits fungoes and serves as official scorekeeper for the high school baseball team. 
The Luther College English Department The English Department is active in the life of Luther College as a whole, and in its own collegial departmental conversation. We enjoy discussing our departmental goals as well as our teaching excitement, and we love conversing over our truly excellent meals together at department potlucks. We treasure the time we try to set aside in our busy lives to read and discuss each other’s creative and scholarly work, and we get a kick out of our social events with students, including flipping burgers at our fall picnic and costuming up for our annual themed Halloween party. Nancy K. Barry has lots of energy, and she needs it: she has many roles at Luther College. She is Professor of English, Assistant to the Dean for Writing and Academic Support, and College Writing Director. A native of Baltimore, she earned her PhD in Twentieth-Century Poetry at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and teaches a range of writing at Luther and in the University of Iowa’s Summer Writing Festival. Her primary writing genre is creative nonfiction, but her most recent creative endeavor was writing a one-woman play about her experience as a teacher undergoing treatment for breast cancer, Lessons from Cancer College, which has been performed locally and around the Midwest by actress Kristen Underwood. See presenter list for more information. Judy Boese is Administrative Assistant to the Paideia program (Luther’s interdisciplinary core program) and the English Department. Judy manages the production of The Paideia I Reader each semester and the quarterly publication of the faculty journal Agora. She is also administrative assistant to Carol Gilbertson for the Lutheran Festival of Writing. Both of Judy’s children are Luther grads, and her husband Charlie works at Luther too, so they’ve made Luther part of their family. Her favorite topic is her grandchildren, but she also loves to reminisce about her treasured trip accompanying a study abroad course to the “Sacred Spaces of Western Europe,” sites relevant to Lutheran-Catholic ecumenism—a reward for being named outstanding Luther staff member a few years ago. Joy Conrad, instructor in English, devotes her summers to teaching budding college students to read critically and write college-level work. An MA in Russian from the U of Iowa, she regularly teaches in our first-year common course, Paideia, and she teaches those wonderful, long Russian novels (and other literature) in translation. A student of dance, Joy encourages students to explore various kinds of artistic expression, as well as writing. William Craft wears a few hats at Luther. He’s our beloved dean--official title: Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the College. Jovial and gregarious, he is an avid soccer fan and an even more fervent reader and movie buff. A PhD from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in sixteenth-century poetry, he has published a study of the poetry of Philip Sidney. He loves the contact he can maintain with students and the classroom: despite his busy administrative schedule, he makes time to teach a class on Shakespeare each spring. Professor of English David Faldet’s recent book, Oneota Flow (U of Iowa Press), was chosen as the summer reading for Luther’s first-year class this fall, so David had the thrill of giving the opening convocation lecture to an audience who had read his book. In Oneota Flow David folds his local roots and stories into a natural-cultural history of Decorah’s Upper Iowa River and the Driftless region of Northeast Iowa. David’s interests in ecology make him an invaluable link between Luther’s English department and its Environmental Studies program, and his project as Jones Distinguished Professor was to lead the faculty to explore that field’s major questions and texts. A Luther grad and a PhD from Iowa in nineteenth-century British literature, David teaches Victorian literature as well as rhetoric. His fine talent as a visual artist combines with his literary scholarship in his work on the poet and designer William Morris. See presenter list for more information. Assistant professor Rachel Faldet is particularly interested in helping people who don't consider themselves writers find their voice and confidence. She teaches Introduction to College Writing and Effective Writing. A Luther alum and an MA in Writing from the University of Iowa, she is an active creative nonfiction writer and an expert editor. Her thoughtful essays on the details of individual lives, including her own, have found homes in regional and national journals. Her book Our Stories of Miscarriage landed her two appearances on NBC's Today Show—the first department member to appear on national TV. Like her husband David, she has an artist’s eye and she creates fine-art quality quilts. See presenter list for more information. Carol Gilbertson, Professor of English, grew up at Luther College, or so it would seem. She has taught at Luther for 43 years. An Augustana (SD) grad, an MA from North Carolina, and a PhD from the University of Minnesota with a specialization in seventeenth-century British literature, she has published on John Milton but also twentieth-century poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. As Jones Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in 2002-04, she developed the Luther Poetry Project, which brought poems into the foreground of campus life. She teaches courses in British Romanticism and Twentieth-Century literature as well as Milton. Her deep love is poetry: she not only relishes leading students into a love of language and cadence, but she often travels to hear poets reading their work, and she publishes her poems in a range of journals. With her husband Mark Muggli, she shares a joint position in the department. See presenter list for more information. Professor Lise Kildegaard is married to Luther—that is, her husband’s name is Luther, though she probably feels married to the college as well, so active is she in the departmental and college conversation. A PhD from the University of Chicago, Lise brings her joy in intellectual work equally to her upper-level teaching of 18th and 19th century British literature and to the first year common course, Paideia. She has found a way to combine her Danish heritage with her scholarly work: her fine translation of the celebrated Danish writer Louis Jensen’s Square Stories was adapted into a delightful campus student theater production. And she’s doing more Jensen translations. A lover of poems, she often tacks a fave on colleagues’ doors as a way to get our weeks off to a good start. She is one of our departmental bikers. Martin Klammer, Professor of English and Africana Studies, has a book on Whitman, Slavery, and the Emergence of Leaves of Grass (Penn St U Press). He’s continued his love of American literature, with its rich strain of African-American writing, in his teaching in both the English Department and the Africana Studies Department, of which he is chair. His more recent work focuses on South Africa. Martin has spent many January terms taking students to study its literature and culture, and his sabbatical year living there led to the publication of his recent book on the life of (and co-written with) Blanche LaGuma, an underground activist and wife of the celebrated novelist Alex LaGuma: In the Dark With My Dress on Fire: My Life in Cape Town, London, Havana and Home Again (Cape Town: Jacana, 2010). Kyhl Lyndgaard is our newest member—a post-doctoral fellow (sponsored by the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, of which Luther is a member) in English and Environmental Studies. A graduate of St. John’s University (MN), Kyhl received an MA in Creative Writing from the University of California-Davis. Newly married and freshly PhD’d in Environmental Studies and Creative Writing (U of Nevada), he moved to Decorah this summer and is teaching creative writing and environmental literature. A poet who studied with Gary Snyder and an artisan of handmade books (and married to an artist), Kyhl is also one of our department’s two speedy distance bikers: Kyhl biked from Minnesota to California a few years ago! Mark Z. Muggli, the current department head, likes biking but adores walking to work every day, if possible taking the three-mile route along the Upper Iowa River. A PhD in Renaissance drama from the University of Minnesota, he has a strong secondary interest in factual writing. He has published on Luther, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and the contemporary writer Joan Didion, and is working on an edition of Shakespeare's Winter's Tale. Mark primarily teaches Shakespeare in Performance, doing his own cutting of one of the plays down to a 60-minute version and teaching his students how to stage the play as it was originally performed. As part of an NEH summer seminar, he was lucky enough to play the ghost of Hamlet’s father on London’s Globe Theatre stage. Passionate about walking, he has taught a course in “Walking Books” and led study abroad courses that involved substantial hiking in England and Greece, co-led with his wife and colleague, Carol Gilbertson. Associate Professor Kate Narveson--an MPhil in history from London’s Warburg Institute and a PhD from the U of Chicago in Renaissance lit--also walks to work, but another of her joys is knitting sweaters of her own design. A scholar who has published on seventeenth-century devotional poets such as Donne and Herbert, she's at work on a book manuscript, deciphering Renaissance handwriting to explore the way lay men and women used their biblical literacy to pen scriptural devotions that offered a new form of self-definition. A classical violinist who has taken up fiddling at local folk dances, Kate’s recent marriage to a local solar electric specialist has added to the department’s voltage. Nicholas Preus, Associate Professor of English and Education, is one of our many close links to other departments. He draws on his former life as a high school teacher in courses on pedagogical methods and ethical issues in education, but he also teaches Victorian literature, novels, and poetry. Nick has a BA from Luther and a PhD from the U of Wisconsin-Madison. His latest literary interest is studying how insights from evolutionary psychology help us re-see literary texts, particularly Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald. A highly skilled woodworker, he builds beautiful furniture and makes a great artisanal beer. An eager reader of historical fiction and mystery novels with theological resonance, Professor Diane Scholl keeps us all up-to-date on her latest reads. A St. Olaf grad, a PhD from the U of Chicago, and a devoted teacher of American literature, Diane has published work on Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, on the trial of Ann Hutchinson, and on how seventeenth-century English devotional writing and American conversion stories influenced nineteenth-century American poets. She has an article on Alice Walker’s The Color Purple as religious parable. As Jones Distinguished Professor, she led the community in discussions of science and the humanities. She writes fine poetry. But she is perhaps most loved for her warm attention to life stories. Diane never forgets any of her students, past or present. She and her husband, Peter Scholl, share a joint appointment. Another Americanist, Peter Scholl also teaches our film courses. He has a BA from Augustana (IL), a PhD from the U of Chicago, and a fine book on Garrison Keillor (Twayne; U of Iowa Press), but lately his research interests have moved eastward: having studied the language, traveled extensively in China, and led study abroad programs there, Peter is our resident expert on all things Chinese. He has recently published an article on an early 20th-century Norwegian-American missionary to China who had close links to Luther College. His other interests include American humor and the Civil War, and he teaches a popular first-year course on Abraham Lincoln. The able editor of Agora: Luther College in Conversation—our fine faculty journal--Peter is another departmental biker. A transplanted Alabaman with a PhD from North Carolina, Assistant Professor Amy Weldon has settled into Iowa life, becoming a regular book reviewer for a regional arts journal, getting her students pumped about poetry slams, teaching adult classes in journal writing at a local arts center, and drafting a second novel about a small town in nineteenth-century Iowa. A Southern story-teller in the grand tradition, Amy is a passionate teacher of Southern American literature, British Romanticism, and—primarily—creative writing: fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Amy’s 2010 personal essay, “The Odd Girls: Flanner O’Connor and Me,” was co-winner of Shenandoah’s Bevel Summers’ Award. Another biker. See presenter list for more information. Novian Whitsitt is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and English. A PhD from Wisconsin-Madison, Novian wrote his dissertation on popular fiction written by Muslim women in Hausa, one of the Nigerian languages. Now he’s publishing in top journals in his field. Particularly interested in gender analysis of African, Caribbean, and African-American literature, Novian has served as Director of Women and Gender Studies at Luther. A thoughtful man, he has the ready smile and the athleticism to keep up with three elementary school children: Novian is a former basketballer for Stanford and our own prize-winning competitive biker: none of us can keep up with him, in more ways than one. And our good friends who are now emeriti--who still live nearby, keep up with Luther news, and attend its cultural and social events, and whom we want to thank for their continuing mentorship—are John C. Bale, Martin Mohr, Mary Hull Mohr, and Harland Nelson.
The Vibrant Word: Festival Information Registration 
At the registration table in the Center for Faith and Life (CFL) lobby, you will receive your copy of the printed program and your name tag, which will indicate your banquet preferences. If you wish to purchase an additional banquet ticket, to sign up to read your work at the Open Mike Friday night, or to request a hearing device, you can do these things at the registration table, which will be open Friday, 3:00-7:00 p.m., and Saturday, 8:00-10:30 a.m. You may also ask at the registration table for any other information or directions you need.
Festival Hosts Watch for the people with the light blue nametags—these are all the Festival hosts from Luther College. If you have a question, please feel free to ask any one of these individuals. Nametags
Your nametag is your ticket to all sessions, so please wear it at all times. If you purchased a ticket to the banquet, that ticket is included in the holder with your nametag. At the end of the Festival, please recycle your nametag by putting it in the box in the lobby of the CFL. Shuttle Service The Festival provides van shuttles between the hotels and motels before and after the sessions. Shuttles to the Festival from motels: Vans will leave the Country Inn and the Heartland Inn at the times listed below; the van from the Heartland Inn will also make a pickup stop at the Hotel Winneshiek before arriving at the CFL: Friday: 6:30 p.m. Saturday: 8:00 a.m. Sunday: 8:00 a.m. Shuttles from the Festival to motels: Vans will leave from outside the CFL main entrance to transport attendees back to the hotels at the times listed below: Friday: 9:30 p.m., 10:00 p.m., 10:30 p.m., 11:00 p.m. Saturday: 10:00 p.m. (immediately following the evening plenary session) For other transport needs, the local taxi company, Hometown Taxi (563-382-3155) runs on Friday 6:30 a.m.--6:00 p.m. and on Saturday 7:30 a.m.--8:00 p.m.; there is no taxi service on Sunday. If you need emergency transport assistance, please call Campus Safety and Security (563-387-2111). Meals
Coffee breaks and Friday evening’s reception are included in the registration fee. If you did not pre-purchase a space at Saturday’s banquet, a limited number of tickets will be available at the registration table--on Friday afternoon only--for $25. Other options for Saturday dinner are Luther’s cafeteria or Marty’s café on the lower level of Dahl Centennial Union. A list of area restaurants is available at the registration table. Coffee and tea will be available for Festival attendees on Sunday morning in the Center for Faith and Life Lobby from 7:45-9:00 a.m. Download 0.51 Mb. Share with your friends:
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