Telling Stories: True Stories of Trust and Betrayal
May 7, 2008 (2:00pm - 3:00pm)

Biographical Sketch :

Lynn Z. Bloom is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Aetna Chair of Writing at the University of Connecticut, where she has taught rhetoric and composition studies research, autobiography, creative nonfiction, and women writers courses since 1988. She is the recipient of the 1999 UConn Alumni Association Award for Distinguished Research, and research awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Council of Teachers of English, and the US Department of Agriculture. She has previously taught at Butler University, directed writing programs at the University of New Mexico and the College of William and Mary, and served as department head at Virginia Commonwealth University. She has served as President of the national Council of Writing Program Administrators, 1988-90, and chaired the Division of Teaching Writing and the Division of Prose Writing of the Modern Language Association.

Among her 20+ books are Doctor Spock: Biography of a Conservative Radical (1972); the co-authored American Autobiography 1945-1980: A Bibliography (Wisconsin, 1982), and two edited diaries of American women civilian prisoners in the Philippines in World War II, Natalie Crouter’s Forbidden Diary (Burt Franklin, 1980; 2001) and Margaret Sams’s Forbidden Family (Wisconsin, 1989, 1996). Composition Studies as a Creative Art: Teaching, Writing, Scholarship, Administration (Utah State UP, 1998) contains a number of personal essays. Other edited volumes include Composition Studies in the New Millennium, Rereading the Past, Rewriting the Future (SIUP, 2003); Composition Studies in the Twenty-First Century, Crisis and Change (SIUP 1996); The Arlington Reader (Bedford, 2003; 2007), and The Essay Connection (8th ed. Houghton Mifflin 2007). The Essay Canon is in progress.

Her most recent (of over 125) articles include “Freshman Composition as a Middle Class Enterprise” (1996), “The Essay Canon” (1999), and “Living to Tell the Tale: The Complicated Ethics of Creative Nonfiction” (2003), all in College English; “Women’s Confinement as Women’s Liberation: World War II Civilian Internees in South Pacific Camps” (Arms and the Self, 2005); (“Im)Patient” (Prose Studies 2005); “Writing and Cooking, Cooking and Writing” (Pilaf, Pozole, and Pad Thai, 2001); and “The Seven Deadly Virtues” JAEPL (2005).

New Additions Include:
The Seven Deadly Virtues and Other Lively Essays: Coming of Age as a Writer, Teacher, Risk Taker (U of South Carolina Press, May 2008)

Writers Without Borders: Writing and Teaching Writing in Troubled Times (Parlor Press, May 2008)