Dr. John Vanderslice
Associate Professor
Phone: (501) 450-3653
Office: Thompson Hall 338
Degree:
Ph.D., English, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
MFA, Creative Writing, George Mason University
B.A., English, University of Virginia
Teaching Specialties:
Fiction writing, poetry writing, travel writing, contemporary fiction and poetry, and composition
Biography:
John Vanderslice, a native of the Washington DC metropolitan area, earned a B.A. in English from the University of Virginia in 1983. After graduating, he worked as a writer for a major insurance corporation in Washington, DC. In 1986 he entered the M.F.A. in creative writing program at George Mason University and graduated with that degree in 1991. While at GMU his areas of concentration included poetry writing, modern and contemporary poetry, and the Irish Literary Revival. Additionally, he helped arrange and edit a collection of primary documents from the Irish Literary Revival. In 1993, he moved to Lafayette, Louisiana to enter the Ph.D. in English program at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette (formerly University of Southwestern Louisiana). There his areas of concentration included fiction writing, twentieth-century American literature, twentieth-century British Literature, early American literature, and Renaissance literature. His dissertation, titled Christopher Robin Lives, is a collection of short fiction with a critical introduction that examines the nature, development and use of epiphany in modern and postmodern fiction, particularly the short story. After graduating from ULL in 1997, he moved to Conway, Arkansas and began teaching at the University of Central Arkansas. To date he has published forty-five short stories as well as poetry, literary criticism, and book reviews. His work has appeared in The Seattle Review, Laurel Review, Southern Humanities Review, Sou’wester, South Carolina Review, and many other leading journals. He has recently completed the novel Yellow, a fictionalized life of Vincent Van Gogh. He maintains a blog about this project, titled Creating Van Gogh. His earlier novel Burnt Norway is available through Lulu.com. His teaching interests include fiction writing, poetry writing, travel writing, contemporary fiction and poetry, and composition.