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Christopher Cokinos
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Associate Professor of English
Editor, Isotope
At USU since 2002 |
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Office:
Phone:
E-mail: |
412 Ray B. West
(435) 797-3351
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Education
B.A. English, journalism minor, Indiana University, 1986
M.F.A. in Writing, Washington University in St. Louis, 1991
Teaching
Christopher Cokinos teaches primarily creative-writing courses, including nonfiction and poetry. He has a strong interest in research-based personal narratives and the lyric essay. He also has taught literature courses on American nature writing and the nonfiction literature of space exploration. Both at Utah State and previously at Kansas State University, Cokinos has directed M.A. creative thesis projects. Some of his former students have gone on to publish work in such venues as Orion, Under the Sun, In Brief (W.W. Norton) and Irreantum. His undergraduate and graduate students have continued their study in M.F.A. programs at, among other places, the University of Arizona, Iowa State and Goucher College.
Administration and Service
The first chair of Utah State's Creative Writing Committee, Cokinos is also the founder of Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature & Science Writing, which is a two-time winner of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. The magazine has garnered high praise from writers, artists and scientists as a home for work that crosses the two-culture divide between the humanities and the sciences. Work that has appeared in Isotope has been reprinted in Best American Science and Nature Writing and Best Creative Nonfiction and has been listed as Notable several times in such anthologies as Best American Essays. For more information, visit the magazine's website at: http://isotope.usu.edu/ . Cokinos serves on several committees, including the Creative Writing Committee, the Sustainability Council and the board of the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art. The NEHMA website is at: http://www.usu.edu/artmuseum/ . Beyond the university, he is on the board of HawkWatch International, among other conservation groups.
Research and Creative Activity
The winner of the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, a Whiting Award and the Glasgow Prize for an Emerging Writer of Nonfiction, Christopher Cokinos is the author of Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds (Tarcher/Putnam, 2000; Warner Books, 2001; new edition forthcoming, Tarcher/Penguin, 2009) and The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars (forthcoming, Tarcher/Penguin, 2009). He has published essays, articles, reviews and poems in a variety of venues, including Shenandoah, The Iowa Review, Birder's World, Science and Poetry. He has work recent and forthcoming, as of late 2008, in Manoa (special issue edited by Barry Lopez), The American Scholar, the Los Angeles Times, Wasatch Journal and Sky & Telescope. He has won grants from the National Science Foundation/Antarctic Visiting Artists and Writers Fellowship Program, the American Antiquarian Society and the Utah Arts Council. Cokinos is available for readings from his nonfiction and has given presentations on research in nonfiction writing, scale moves in nature-and-science writing, the braided essay, the lyric essay and questions of veracity and invention in nonfiction.
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