A List
9/4/06

SLU ENGLISH PROF COWSER AWARDED FELLOWSHIP

CANTON - St. Lawrence University Associate Professor of English Robert Cowser Jr. has been awarded a fellowship by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) which will allow him to work on an upcoming book.

For two weeks in January of 2007, Cowser will be among the approximately 20 Fellows at the VCCA, near Sweet Briar College in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, focusing on their own creative projects at this working retreat for visual artists, writers and composers.

Fellows are provided with lodging, a studio and meals, and have no schedules or obligations beyond morning and evening meal gatherings, enabling them to be highly productive. Serving more than 300 artists a year (over 3,000 since its inception in 1971), the VCCA is one of the nation's largest year-round artists' communities.

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. Now a member of the St. Lawrence Valley Trailblazers, 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.

In October, the University of South Carolina Press will publish Cowser's Scorekeeping: Essays from Home, a collection of reflections on boyhood in the West Tennessee college town of Martin, as well as other places he has called "home." Cowser's next book, on which he will work at the VCCA, is Green Field: Crime and Punishment Haunt a Hometown, a true-crime memoir dealing with the 1979 abduction and murder of a first-grade classmate of Cowser's, and the execution 20 years later of the man convicted of the murder.

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More information: Bob Cowser's Web site, including a schedule of upcoming appearances

Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Web site