Department of English

As an educator, I arm students with the critical thinking, analytic, and writing skills necessary to survive the Academy and the murky employment waters beyond. Better readers, better writers, better thinkers.

As a novelist, I explore the violent clash between traditional Southern culture (ego, pride, loyalty, attachment to place) and supra-human technology (say, androids). My first book, Anomalous Man, currently in revision, chronicles the life of Ansou Loam, a cosmonoponaut from Coushatta, Louisiana. Before the novel begins and dramatized in out-of-sequence chapters, Loam flees to sea (space) after striking his lady love. Five years later, 48-year-old Loam, sipping his homemade whiskey, is shot out of orbit around a seemingly lifeless world. Someone has flung an actual stove at Loam's boat, and now the man must wander the alien dust with only his good little breathing machine, his ready-to-give-out-at-any-moment vak, for friend. Of course, other machines he meets upon and under the planet’s surface may not be so accommodating. Like a Faulkner or Cormac McCarthy novel, Anomalous Man ruminates on violence, loneliness, regret, and the cost of survival. Exciting!