Monday, August 17 - poet Bob Cowser, Jr.

Monday at noon I’ll play another reading recorded at the Casa Romantica Reading Series in San Clemente. For more on this excellent free public reading series offered monthly, go to the Casa website. Bob Cowser, Jr. read at a recent Casa event. His first book, Dream Season was a New York Times Book Review "Editor's Choice" and "Paperback Row" selection and was listed among the Chronicle of Higher Education's best-ever college sports books. It garnered further praise in Sports Illustrated, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, and on NPR's "Only a Game." His second book, Scorekeeping, a collection of coming-of-age essays, was published in October 2006. Cowser is at work on a third book about the murder of one of his grade school classmates and the execution of her killer, the first execution in Tennessee in 40 years. He graduated summa cum laude from Loyola-New Orleans, then earned a Master's in English at Marquette University and PhD in creative writing from the University of Nebraska. An Academy of American Poets prizewinner and Pushcart Prize nominee, Cowser's work has appeared widely in American literary magazines, including the Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review, Sycamore Review, Brevity, Sonora Review and Creative Nonfiction. He is Associate Professor of English at St. Lawrence University. He also serves as associate editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. Cowser lives on the Grasse River in Canton, New York. He reads today, on Bibliocracy, his startlingly moving personal essay, “Scorekeeping,” on baseball, suicide, beautiful young men and poetry.

In our encore half hour, I'll play my March 2009 show featuring historian Jon Bekken on Louis Adamic's Dynamite.