Robert Root

2006 DONALD MURRAY PRIZE WINNER

The Donald Murray Prize, awarded by the Special Interest Group in Creative Nonfiction of the National Council of Teachers of English and including an honorarium of $500 sponsored by Thomson/Wadsworth Publishing, honors the best essay or work of creative nonfiction on the subjects of teaching and/or writing during the calendar year. The 2006 Murray Prize was given to Robert Root for "A Double Life," published in Writing on the Edge (16:2 Summer 2006: 69-81). The essay is about being a teacher who writes and a writer who teaches. The judges were Lynn Bloom, Doug Hesse, and Rebecca Faery.

MICHIGAN WRITERS SERIES

Hear audio recordings from the Vincent Voice Library of an interview, a reading, and a Q & A at Michigan State University December 7, 2001.

Teaching: In Summer 2008 Bob Root will begin teaching as a Visiting Adjunct Professor in the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Ashland University. The program focuses on both poetry and creative nonfiction. The 2008 Summer Residency takes place July 13-July 26.

Publishing: In Spring 2009 the University of Oklahoma Press will publish After Isabella: Notes on Coming to Colorado. The fifth edition of The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction will be published by Pearson/Longman in Spring 2009.

Bob Root (Robert L. Root Jr.) believes he has been a writer since he was around eight years old, when he came home with a friend from a showing of Superman and the Mole Men, pried open the lock on his mother’s typewriter, and created a series of very short adventures about Tiger Boy. Since then, his life and career have centered on his writing, his study of the way other writers compose, and his teaching of writers and writing teachers. His bachelor’s degree from State University College, Geneseo, New York, was in English education and theater and his graduate degrees from the University of Iowa were in English literature, but he also did post-graduate work in composition and rhetoric before beginning twenty-eight years of teaching at Central Michigan University. There he taught courses in composition and rhetoric, nonfiction, editing, English education, literature, and media. He retired from full time teaching in 2004 to devote more time to writing creative nonfiction and to writing about it.

A frequent presenter on creative nonfiction and composition at national, international, and regional conferences, his scholarship and teaching led to many articles and books. They include: a book for writers, Wordsmithery, which went through two editions; a book for teachers of writing (co-edited with Michael Steinberg), Those Who Do Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching; and an anthology of creative nonfiction (also co-edited with Michael Steinberg) The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction, now in its fourth edition. His essay “Collage, Montage, Mosaic, Vignette, Episode, Segment,” originally published in The Fourth Genre, has been used often in creative writing courses across the country. He has also published two books examining how nonfiction writers do what they do, Working at Writing: Columnists and Critics Composing and E. B. White: The Emergence of an Essayist. The culmination of Bob's work as a writing teacher and teaching writer will come with the publication of The Nonfictionist's Guide: On Reading & Writing Creative Nonfiction.

His creative nonfiction includes essays of place published in literary journals such as North Dakota Quarterly, Rivendell, Ecotone, The Concord Saunterer, and divide; “Knowing Where You’ve Been,” in Ascent, was named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2004. As an essayist he has been an Artist-in-Residence at Acadia National Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, and Isle Royale National Park; his anthology co-edited with Jill Burkland, The Island Within Us: Isle Royale Artists-in-Residence 1991-1998, won the 2001 Excellence in Media Award from the National Parks Service. He edited and contributed to Landscapes with Figures: The Nonfiction of Place, an anthology of essays and writers’ commentaries on their composing published in 2007 by the University of Nebraska Press. His first full-length work of creative nonfiction, Recovering Ruth: A Biographer’s Tale, was named a Michigan Notable Book in 2004 by the Library of Michigan.

Bob Root is currently the Interview/Roundtable editor for Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, one of the first literary journals devoted exclusively to literary nonfiction. He continues to talk about creative nonfiction at creative writing and English education conferences and has been a visiting writer and speaker in writing programs at colleges and universities around the country. Since moving with his wife to Colorado in June 2004, he has completed the manuscript of a book in which he follows the trail of nineteenth-century travel writer Isabella Bird around the Front Range of Colorado. In the future he will be working on a memoir about growing up in Lockport, creative nonfiction about the Hudson and Rhine Rivers, and a collection of essays on sauntering as an en plein air essayist in the national parks.