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John D’Agata celebrates the Nonfiction Creative Writing Program 40 year Anniversary

John D’Agata celebrates the Nonfiction Creative Writing Program 40 year Anniversary

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The University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year and the program’s director John D’Agata has hundreds of lapel pins and rub-on tattoos in his office to help celebrate.

The design for that tattoo and pin is a bright red heart on fire with a pencil stabbed through it. On it, in cursive, is written a single word: “Essay.”

If such an image doesn’t do justice to the kind of passion D’Agata has for the essay, the fact that he just finished a three-volume, 1,786-page anthology, “A New History of the Essay,” dedicated to celebrating the art of the essay, does.

“It was absolutely the collection of essays I love,” D’Agata said in his fourth-story office of the English Philosophy Building where the lapels and tattoos are kept. “This is, for a lack of a better way to say it, a selfish way of saying it’s my anthology.”

 

Berg, Zach. “UI’s John D’Agata Celebrates Nonfiction Program’s 40 Years.” Iowa City Press-Citizen, Press Citizen, 6 Apr. 2016, www.press-citizen.com/story/news/2016/04/06/uis-john-dagata-celebrates-nonfiction-programs-40-years/82673302/