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This collection of personal essays explores finding home and place through the lens of weather, seasons, and other phenomena in the Midwestern sky. Michael Martone says, “Throughout the open prairie and the endless plains, Under a Midland Sky is a cogent, crystalline, severely clear accounting of this all-encompassing, aforementioned placeless place. Dean writes with gusts of gusto, fronts of high pressure, heaps of heart.” |
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The Grace of Grass and Water: Writing in Honor of Paul Gruchow |
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Ice Cube Press, 2007 |
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A collection honoring the memory of Paul Gruchow through the words of the many he touched as mentor, teacher, colleague, friend. New writing by award-winning authors Mary Pipher, Bill Holm, Carol Bly, Jim Heynen, Mark Vinz, Gary Deason, Louis Martinelli, and Bob Artley; an introduction by editor Thomas Dean; and one of Paul Gruchow’s last essays. |
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Ice Cube Press, 2006 |
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A short collection of essays specially published for 2006’s Second Iowa Conference on the Wild. Includes “The Wild Is Now,” a brief introduction by editor Thomas Dean; a short introduction by Mark Edwards of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources; “Bewildered,” a new essay by Stephanie Mills; and an excerpt from Bill McKibben’s Wandering Home. |
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Essays |
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Thomas Dean’s essays have been published in the periodicals The Wapsipinicon Almanac, here: The Stories Behind Where You Are, The Iowa Source, Little Village, and Spectator (The University of Iowa); and in several book collections from Ice Cube Press: Prairie Roots: Call of the Wild (2001), Living with Topsoil (2004), Prairie Weather (2005), and Letters to a Young Iowan (ed. Zachary Michael Jack, 2007). |
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Columns |
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A monthly column in Little Village: Iowa City’s News & Culture Magazine that explores living in place - in general and in our own community. Ongoing since 2002. |
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A semi-regular column in The Iowa Source that reviews books and explores the writing and literary life in the Midwest. Ongoing since 2006. |
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Academic Writing |
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Thomas Dean’s scholarly writing has focused on nature and place-based literature, the literature and culture of Iowa and the Midwest, American literary realism and naturalism, early American film, and place-based pedagogy. He has published scholarly essays and reviews in American Literature, American Literary Naturalism, Literature/Film Quarterly, JAEPL: Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, The Annals of Iowa, Anthrozoos, Frank Norris Studies, and The American Nature Writing Newsletter. Scholarly essays have also appeared in the books The Spiritual Side of Writing: Releasing the Learner’s Whole Potential (ed. Regina Paxton Fehr and Susan Schiller, Boynton/Cook, 1997) and American Nature Writers (ed. John Elder, Scribners, 1996). Dictionary and encyclopedia articles have appeared in The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa (ed. David Hudson, Marv Bergman, and Loren Horton, University of Iowa Press, 2009), Dictionary of Midwestern Literature Vol. 1: The Authors (ed. Philip A. Greasley, Indiana University Press, 2001), and Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (ed. J. R. LeMaster, Routledge, 1998). Dean served as editor of The NILAS Newsletter (Nature in Legend and Story) and The AEPL Newsletter (Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, National Council of Teachers of English). He also was the bibliographer for the regular “Current Publications” column in Frank Norris Studies and contributed to the annual scholarly bibliographies of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (published in Midamerica) and the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (published in an annual monograph). Dean is currently working on a book on the literature of Iowa. |