Glen Retief teaches advanced courses in memoir and personal essay, introductory courses in creative nonfiction, occasional fiction workshops, and literature courses. He is currently developing a course in travel writing, for writing majors as well as the general student population, that will involve taking students to South Africa, his home country.

Glen grew up in a South African game park during the apartheid era, but emigrated to the USA in 1994.  His essay, “Keeping Sodom Out of the Laager,” appeared in the first-ever anthology of South African lesbian and gay writing, entitled Defiant Desire, edited by Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron.  This essay has become a frequently-cited text in studies of apartheid history.

Glen’s short stories have appeared in numerous publications and journals, including The Greensboro Review, New Contrast, The James White Review, donga, Mangrove and Tribute, a South African mass market glossy magazine roughly equivalent to Ebony or Essence. 

His personal essay/memoir “The Jack Bank" recently appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review. Last year, "Saudade" appeared in New Contrast, South Africa’s premier literary journal. His personal essay “The Chameleon’s Home Country” won the AWP Intro Journal Award for Creative Nonfiction and appeared in Puerto del Sol.  He has also published personal essays in Fugue and The Massachusetts Review.

He has held numerous fellowships and awards, including a James Michener Writing Fellowship and Florida State University Fellowship—that university’s most prestigious award for graduate students.   Dr. Retief is recently accepted literary representation from Dystel and Goderich for his first memoir, entitled The Jack Bank. 

Occasionally Glen publishes newspaper columns and op-ed pieces in, among others, The Cape Times, The Star (Johannesburg), The Tallahassee Democrat, and the U.S. online magazine InsideHigherEd.com. His literary criticism has appeared in English Studies in Africa and Conradiana. A paper on the Ghananian author Ayi Kwame Armah is forthcoming in the scholarly journal Research in African Literatures.

Before landing in academia, he worked as an instructor of homeless HIV-positive substance abusers, a needle exchange advocate, an English Second Language teacher, and a teacher of high school students with learning disabilities. He has lived in Cape Town, South Africa; New York, New York; Tallahassee, Florida; Miami, Florida; London, England; Madrid, Spain; Guadalajara, Mexico; and Richmond, Kentucky.  He speaks English, Afrikaans, and Spanish, and he can say a few words in Xhosa and Zulu, including ones with some pretty interesting-sounding clicks.