A Boundary Waters History: Canoeing Across Time (MN)
Stephen Wilbers grew up playing in the woods with his brothers and friends. When he was old enough to go canoeing with the Boy Scouts in Canada, he went. He'll always remember the good times he had canoeing with his dad in the Boundary Waters.He has published more than eight hundred columns on effective writing in theMinneapolis Star Tribune, theOrange County Registerand other newspapers. He has collected some of those columns into two books,Writing for Business(winner of a 1994 Minnesota Book Award) andWriting by Wilbers, now available as an e-book. His book on stylistic technique,Keys to Great Writing, has been described as "a writing class in a book."This Northern Nonsense: Ernest Oberholtzer and Mallard Island, his chapbook of poems about the gentle giant who helped save the Boundary Waters Canoe Area from development, was published in October 2009 by Red Dragonfly Press.He is currently writing a sequel toA Boundary Waters History: Canoeing Across Time(tentatively titledCanoeing Across Time: A Sawbill Log), as well as a Boundary Waters guidebook with Bill Hansen. In addition, he is writing a comic novel,A Grammatical Affair: A Romance with Language, which offers a review of common writing errors and stylistic technique in the form of a sexy, wildly romantic, heartbreaking, sappy love story.He earned his BA at Vanderbilt University and his MA and PhD at the University of Iowa, where he wrote a history of the Iowa Writers' Workshop for his dissertation, which was published by the University of Iowa Press. He was a visiting Fulbright fellow at the University of Essex in Colchester, England. At the University of Minnesota, he directed Student Academic Support Services in the College of Liberal Arts before serving as associate director of the Program in Creative and Professional Writing.He and his wife, Debbie, live in Minneapolis and have two grown children, Eddy and Kate, who is married to Markus. A proud member of the Loft Literary Center since 1981, he served as the Loft board chair from 2007 to 2009.