Beck Series features Denison professors

The Beck Writers Series welcomes English Department faculty and authors Michael Croley, Jack Shuler and Ann Townsend ’85.

Michael Croley was born in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Corbin, Kentucky. His writing has won awards from the Kentucky Arts Council, the Key West Literary Seminars and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Croley’s stories have appeared in Narrative, The Paris Review Daily, Kenyon Review Online, Blackbird, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Fourth Genre and Cleveland Plain Dealer. He has been named a literature fellow by the NEA for 2016.

Jack Shuler is author of “Calling Out Liberty: The Stono Slave Rebellion and the Universal Struggle for Human Rights” (2009), “Blood and Bone: Truth and Reconciliation in a Southern Town” (2012), and “The Thirteenth Turn: A History of the Noose” (2014). His writing has appeared in Salon, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Times, Truthout and Cleveland Plain Dealer among others. He holds the John and Christine Warner professorship at Denison University.

Ann Townsend ‘85 is the author of two collections of poetry: “Dime Store Erotics” (1998), and “The Coronary Garden” (2005), and is the editor of “Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry” (2007), with David Baker. Her poetry, fiction and essays appear widely in literary magazines and anthologies. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. A founder of the literary nonprofit VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, she is the 2016 recipient of the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Prize, given by Poets and Writers to recognize VIDA’s major contribution to the broader literary community.