Associate Professor, Department of English

Director of Creighton University Press and Editor, An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture & the Arts

I’ve been at Creighton since 2000, when I arrived as assistant professor of English and director of our Summer School at Trinity College Dublin. As I continue to happily split my time between Ireland and the U.S., I’ve become associate professor of English, Director of Creighton University Press, Editor of An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts (edited between here & Dublin), and author of a couple more books. I was born and raised in the Polish neighborhoods of Chicago. Growing up, my family moved ever outward into what has become known as “Chicagoland”—that vast expanse of interstate and Portillo-crossed land extending west to Dubuque, north to Beloit, and south to Springfield.

Following a mildly distinguished basketball career (2.1 pts & 4.7 fouls per game) at Benet Academy where I contributed to the National High School Record for consecutive home victories (102, including 96 consecutive conference victories…but who counts that stuff), I attended the University of Chicago, as most do, to play basketball. Following injury and the expressed need to leave home, I traveled to the College of St. Thomas where I came under the tutelage of (and timely scholarships from) Dr. Thomas Dillon Redshaw, and Michael Bellamy. Those two, and a number of individuals since, have taught me not how to study, but how to live. Since then, I’ve hoped that my field has been not only the living tradition of Irish Studies, but humane lettres itself. To that end, I’ve published poetry, articles, books; and I have most recently pursued the facilitator’s role as editor and publisher so as to insure that words which might be lost are otherwise heard. That sense of legacy might have something to do with age, but I think it has to do with the magnetic attraction of those first neighborhoods and my own desire to create the same center of gravity for others—through any writing or action I undertake.

The great Chicago photographer, Richard Nickel, wrote, “the longer I live, the more I appreciate my idiosyncrasies. God bless my parents.” I find myself following Nickel and saying that often about my parents, my professors, my friends, my loved ones who shape me. May we all grow to live & love idiosyncratic lives.