Faculty & Staff

Silas Dent Zobal
Assistant Professor of English
Phone: 570-372-4538
Email: zobal@susqu.edu
Office Location: The Writers Institute - 610 University Ave

Academic Credentials:
PHD, SUNY Binghamton
MFA, Univ of Washington
BA, DePaul University

Born in Bellingham, Wash., Zobal grew up crabbing and fishing for salmon in the bay. Educated in Chicago, he was hit by four different cars when working as a bicycle messenger in the Loop. Now a decade-long inhabitant of the East Coast, he’s spent the last ten or so years making up for, in the words of a friend, his "misspent youth." From his observation of his own slow migration eastward, Zobal suspects that the writer Mark Winegardner was right when he said that the "Midwestern School of writing is the main stage. Everything else is pretty peripheral. Midwesterners are so full of self-loathing that they can’t bring themselves to say so. Think about it. We’ve had nine American Nobel laureates—five of the nine from the Midwest. No other region has produced more than one. Midwesterner Ernest Hemingway once said, ‘All of American fiction comes from a book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn’—by a Midwesterner."

Zobal has published stories in journals and magazines such as the Missouri Review, Glimmer Train, Wisconsin Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, New Orleans Review, and Shenandoah. He has been anthologized in Peculiar Pilgrims: Stories from the Left Hand of God; featured in a meet-the-author segment in the Missouri Review; and awarded the inaugural Discovered Voices Award from the Iron Horse Literary Review. He was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to work on his novel, titled The Feather Book.

Courses:

• ENGL-100 Writing and Thinking
• ENGL-205 Literature Studies
• ENGL-540 Internship
• WRIT-250 Creative Writing
• WRIT-270 Small Press Editing and Publishing
• WRIT-350 Intermediate Creative Writing
• WRIT-540 Internship
• WRIT-550 Senior Writing Portfolio
• WRIT-590 Independent Writing Project