A List
9/3/07

SLU PROF. COWSER TO DISCUSS BOOK OF ESSAYS AT GATHERING

CANTON - The Friends of Owen D. Young and Launders Libraries at St. Lawrence University will celebrate the publication of Scorekeeping: Essays from Home, by Associate Professor of English Bob Cowser Jr., with a gathering on Friday, September 14, at 4 p.m. in the Josephine Young Room of Owen D. Young Library. Cowser will speak at the event, which is open to the public, free of charge.

Published in 2006 by the University of South Carolina Press, the book is a memoir of Cowser's formative years in Tennessee, Louisiana and Nebraska. Its publishers state, "In 1970 Esquire named the rural West Tennessee college town of Martin as one of the nine happy towns left in the United States. Cowser offers a dissenting opinion on this assessment of the bucolic environs of his youth in his collection of forthright reflections on boyhood in Martin and episodes in the other locations that have thus far constituted 'home.' Ranging in tone from confessional and contemplative to candid and comic, the pieces in Scorekeeping: Essays from Home form an exceptional portrait of small-town life as witnessed by an introduced specimen - the son of English professors among insular townies - with an unflinching eye and creative wit."

Cowser is the author of the 2004 memoir Dream Season: A Professor Joins America's Oldest Semi-Pro Football Team, which detailed his experiences playing for the Watertown Red and Black. Also a former player for the St. Lawrence Valley Trailblazers and a color commentator for radio broadcasts of St. Lawrence University football games, Cowser is an Academy of American Poets prizewinner and a Pushcart Prize nominee who earned his bachelor's degree from Loyola University, a master's degree from Marquette University and the Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Nebraska.

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More information: Bob Cowser's Web site