Robert Root

Teaching: Bob Root moved from Colorado to Waukesha, Wisconsin, in August 2008. He now teaches in the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Ashland University, a program that focuses on both poetry and creative nonfiction. The two week 2009 Summer Residency takes place July 23-August 8. Non-residency mentorships are conducted through the internet.

Publishing: In Spring 2009 the University of Oklahoma Press published Following Isabella: Travels in Colorado Then and Now. The fifth edition of The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/​on Creative Nonfiction was published by Pearson/​Longman in January 2009. The Spring 2009 issue of The Pinch included Bob's essay, "Postscript to a Postscript to 'The Ring of Time'."

Presenting: Bob was a visiting writer at the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference in Alaska in June 2009. He presented talks on the alternative essay and the alternative memoir on two panels at the AWP Conference in Chicago in February 2009. In September 2009, he taught a one-day workshop, "The Art of the Alternative Essay and Memoir," at the Loft in Minneapolis. In October he spoke to nonfiction students in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Memphis and read from his writing.

In February 2010 he will be a visiting writer at the Geneva Writers Conference in Bellevue, Switzerland. On April 8, 2010 he will speak on research for Following Isabella and read from the book at the Littleton Museum in Littleton, Colorado. Earlier that day he will be on the panel "Writing Biographies: Making Someone Else's Story Your Own" at the AWP Conference in Denver; other panelists include Honor Moore, Joy Castro, Diana Raab, and Tracey Daugherty. On Sunday, April 11, he will serve as a visiting writer at the Writers Studio at Arapaho County Community College, along with Sonya Huber, Stephen Haven, and Ruth Swartz, and, on April 13, he read and conduct workshops on nonfiction writing at Adams State College in Alamosa. His Colorado tour ends at the Estes Park Historical Museum at 2:00 on Saturday, April 17.

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. His second book-length work of creative nonfiction, Following Isabella , chronicles his attempt to learn how to live in Colorado by tracing the trail of nineteenth-century travel writer Isabella Bird around the Front Range. His future writing projects tentatively--very tentatively--include a memoir about growing up in Lockport, creative nonfiction about the Hudson and Rhine Rivers, a collection of essays on sauntering as an en plein air essayist in the national parks, a brief history of The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White, and a book about the Niagara Escarpment.