Bob Cowser
Associate Professor of English

“It’s hard to pick just one valuable experience I’ve had here at St. Lawrence,” says Bob Cowser. “Relationships are the truest source of enjoyment in my work. I value greatly relationships I’ve formed with students and colleagues.”

Hailing from a rural northwest Tennessee college town, Cowser found himself in a similar environment when he joined the St. Lawrence faculty in 1998. He currently serves as coordinator of creative writing and interim director of the writing program. He has also been a workshop leader at St. Lawrence’s Young Writers Conference, held annually for high school writers.

The recent publication of his acclaimed book Dream Season: A Professor Joins America’s Oldest Semi-Pro Football Team highlights both his favorite hobby and his academic specialty of creative nonfiction, particularly memoir and literary journalism. He is gathering material for a second book, the story of the abduction and murder of one of his grade school classmates in 1979 and the eventual execution 20 years later of the man convicted of killing her.

When asked about his inspiration, Cowser replies, “My parents, lifelong professors of English who understood their work to be a vocation.”

Cowser earned a B.A. from Loyola-New Orleans in English and print journalism, an M.A. in English from Marquette and a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Nebraska.