A List
10/16/06

'ESSAYS FROM HOME' NEW MEMOIR BY SLU PROF COWSER

CANTON - St. Lawrence University Associate Professor of English Bob Cowser Jr. let readers in on the world of semi-pro football in his last memoir, and turns to his formative years in Tennessee, Louisiana and Nebraska in his latest, Scorekeeping: Essays from Home. The book is out October 16 from the University of South Carolina Press.

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

His next book, in progress, 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