Copyright © 2006 Amanda Beck

   Office: 451 EPB
   Phone: 319-335-0426
   E-Mail: Tom-Simmons@uiowa.edu

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Tom Simmons

Nonfiction Writing

Although I have taught nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa for 11 years, my background is in poetry: I held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford University many years ago, and my first publications--in the Christian Science Monitor, the Atlantic, the New Republic, the Threepenny Review, the Southern Review, and elsewhere--were poems. Over time, I grew more interested in nonfiction, not only because writing and publishing became necessary to feed my family (a graduate student stipend barely grazes the poverty level for a family of three or four), but because I saw close links between the essay and lyric poetry. Those links have continued to inform my writing, and my teaching, in my years at the University of Iowa.

Since 1991 I've published four books of nonfiction: The Unseen Shore (Beacon Press, 1991); A Season in the Air (Fawcett Columbine, 1993); Erotic Reckonings: Mastery and Apprenticeship in the Work of Poets and Lovers (University of Illinois Press, 1994); and Ghost Man: Reflections on Evolution, Love, and Loss (1stBooks Publishers, 2001). Though I've grown disenchanted with the changes in the publishing industry over the years I've been teaching, I've asked myself and my students to be true primarily to their own voices and visions, and let the consequences be as they are. Among my unpublished works are a novel, Starcrossed, and a collection of poems, Boundary Waters. I hope in the near future to concentrate primarily on writing poetry while teaching nonfiction as if it were an extension of the best features of the lyric poem.