Robert Root

Appearances:

In November 2011 Bob will present a two-day workshop on nonfiction at the Sanibel Island Writers Conference at 9-10:15 A.M. Thursday November 3 and Friday November 4. He will also read from his essay collection Postscripts and participate in a panel of editors. The conference is held at the Big Arts Summer Camp and the Sanibel Island Public Library.

2012:

Bob Root will teach "New Directions in Nonfiction," a class for the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis February 6 through March 25.

Bob will be among the creative nonfiction writers reading at AWP in celebration of the Ashland University MFA Fifth Year Anniversary. Jill Christman, Kathy Winograd, Sonya Huber, and Steve Harvey will be reading as well.

Bob will also be on an AWP panel titled “Desperate and Deliberate: Thoreau and the Nature Writer” along with David Gessner, Elizabeth Dodd, Mary Swander, and Tom Montgomery-Fate. The AWP Conference will be in Chicago February 29-March 3, 2012



Publications: A collection of Bob's essays of place, Postscripts: Retrospections on Time and Place, will be published by University of Nebraska Press in 2012.

Bob's review of The American Essay in the American Century by Ned Stuckey-French will appear in the January issue of The American Book Review.

Bob's interview with author and nonfiction scholar Carl H. Klaus will be published in the Spring 2012 issue of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, 14:1.

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. He hopes to publish a collection of his essays, Postscripts: Retrospections on Time and Place in the near future. His future writing projects tentatively--very tentatively--include a family memoir, creative nonfiction about the Hudson and Rhine Rivers, a brief history of The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White, a book about the Niagara Escarpment, and a book about Wisconsin.

Bob is a faculty member in creative nonfiction in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Ashland University in Ohio and a nonfiction teacher at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. He lives in Waukesha, Wisconsin.