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James Winter has been part of the Kent State English department since 2010. In his creative writing classes, by emphasizing a close-reading approach, he makes sure students feel their work is being taken seriously while they also engage with writers as canon as Hawthorne, Chopin, and Cather, as well as contemporary voices like Ko, Machado, Saunders, and Roxane Gay. As a writer, he is interested in how self-protective behaviors force us to face our deepest fears. In his fiction and creative nonfiction, he explores how we survive surviving; how we cope with our coping; how we obfuscate, rationalize, and tend to our psyches. He is also interested in history, power structures, and parent-child relationships. His work has been published or is forthcoming in One Story, Salamander, PANK, Barrelhouse, Midwestern Gothic, and Dappled Things, among others. He won the 2018 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize and was a Frank McCourt Memoir Finalist.

His composition courses tend to explore sociopolitical identity through writers like Plato, Steve Biko, and MLK, and texts such as Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, What You’re Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte, and Bad Stories by Steve Almond. You can also catch his students analyzing music by classic artists like The Who, Marvin Gaye, The Rolling Stones, and U2. These materials serve as a basis for assignments such as personal essays, mini-memoirs, and research projects in hopes that students will discover how to become continual contributing members of their communities.