Paul Bogard
Paul Bogard is an associate professor in the English department where he teaches courses in First Year Writing, Creative Writing, and Literature with a focus on the environment. Before coming to Hamline, Paul taught at Northland College (Ashland, Wisconsin), Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem, North Carolina), and James Madison University (Harrisonburg, Virginia). Paul holds a BA in Religion from Carleton College, an MA in English/creative writing from the University of New Mexico, and a PhD in English/Literature and Environment from the University of Nevada, Reno.
Paul’s books include The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light (Little, Brown), The Ground Beneath Us: from the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are (Little, Brown), and the children’s picture book What if Night? (Keystone Canyon P). He is the editor of Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark (U of Nevada P). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, Salon, Outside, Audubon, Conservation, Reader’s Digest, National Geographic, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere.
I believe that college isn’t only about earning a degree so that you can “get a job” so that you can “make money” in order to buy “stuff.” As important as employment and income and possessions may be, they are hardly the only aspects of a meaningful life. College is—or, ought to be—a time when you are asked to contemplate the life you will live and to engage with eternal questions about love and death and beauty and sorrow and gratitude and responsibility to yourself, to others, to the rest of creation. This kind of contemplation and questioning is exactly the work you will be asked to do in my classes and exactly the work that will fuel your writing. I look forward to meeting you.
