Robert Wolf (born c. 1944) is an American writer, journalist, and entrepreneur. His non-fiction writing focuses on everyday life, frequently that of farmers and other rural Americans. [1]
Wolf is past recipient of the Bronze Medal for radio commentary and the Sigma Delta Chi Award, both from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Robert Wolf spent his formative years wandering the United States, searching for the "American Soul." As an adolescent his goal was to "work every job in the country, live in every town and city and have conversations with everyone."During the 1960s and 70s, Wolf hitchhiked and rode freight trains across country, while seeking out iconic American types. Poets & Writers wrote "he was a ranch hand in New Mexico, a journalist in Chicago, a teacher in an inner-city Brooklyn school and at a penitentiary, as well as a doctoral candidate in philosophy, a dabbler in art, a hitchhiker and hobo."
By 1987, having settled in Chicago, Wolf wrote a weekly column and features for the Chicago Tribune . In 1988 he married singer and artist Bonnie Koloc and the couple moved to Nashville, where Wolf organized a writing workshop for the homeless. In 1990, Wolf, along with Steven Meinbresse, established Free River Press, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Initially intended as a publishing vehicle for the homeless, Wolf expanded the press's mission to "create a collective autobiography of America.
When Wolf and Koloc moved to rural Iowa, Wolf began running writing workshops for neighboring farmers. The workshop resulted in three books published by Free River Press. Since then Wolf has conducted workshops not only throughout the Midwest, but in the Mississippi Delta, the Southwest, and in New York and Chicago.
In 1999, Oxford University Press published An American Mosaic: Prose and Poetry by Everyday Folk , selected from the first nine years of Free River Press writings.
His early Iowa experiences led Wolf to begin writing about the ongoing farm and rural crisis and to begin, in 1994, writing about the need for rural America to develop self-reliant, decentralized regional economies. [2]
Free River Press publications have appeared on CBS News Sunday as well as NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition . Since 2010 Wolf lhas produced a weekly radio program for Free River Press, American Mosaic, airing on community stations in a dozen states. [1]
Wolf obtained his degrees from Columbia University and the University of Chicago. [1]
Free River Press is a nonprofit publishing house founded in Nashville, Tennessee, whose mission is to develop a literary mosaic of Americana as written by people from all walks of life. It pursues this goal by conducting writing workshops in farmhouse dining rooms, homeless shelters, small town libraries, senior centers, urban churches and foundations. Its goal is to amass a collection of writings that will eventually resemble a collective American autobiography.
The Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, is a graduate-level creative writing program. At 87 years, it is the oldest writing program offering a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in the United States. Its acceptance rate is between 2.7% and 3.7%. On the university's behalf, the workshop administers the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the Iowa Short Fiction Award.
An American Mosaic: Prose and Poetry by Everyday Folk is an anthology of writings by persons without literary ambition that were developed in the first nine years of Free River writing workshops. Published in 1999 by Oxford University Press, the collection contains prose and poetry of the homeless, short essays and stories by Midwestern and Mississippi Delta farm families, by small town residents of vanishing rural America, and by men who make their living on the Mississippi River: a towboat captain, a river pilot, a commercial fisherman.
Mark Strand was a Canadian-born American poet, essayist and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990 and received the Wallace Stevens Award in 2004. Strand was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University from 2005 until his death in 2014.
Creative writing is any writing that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature, typically identified by an emphasis on narrative craft, character development, and the use of literary tropes or with various traditions of poetry and poetics. Due to the looseness of the definition, it is possible for writing such as feature stories to be considered creative writing, even though it falls under journalism, because the content of features is specifically focused on narrative and character development. Both fictional and non-fictional works fall into this category, including such forms as novels, biographies, short stories, and poems. In the academic setting, creative writing is typically separated into fiction and poetry classes, with a focus on writing in an original style, as opposed to imitating pre-existing genres such as crime or horror. Writing for the screen and stage—screenwriting and playwriting—are often taught separately, but fit under the creative writing category as well.
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Bonnie Koloc is an American folk music singer-songwriter, actress and artist. She was considered one of the three main Illinois-based folk singers in the 1970s, along with Steve Goodman and John Prine forming the "trinity of the Chicago folk scene". Her music continues to be recognized and valued by historians of Chicago folk music as well as by her long standing fan base in that area. But her voice, which may be considered crystalline in its clarity, is remembered as well.
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