Mark Svenvold
Professor
Department of English
Seton Hall University
United States of America
Biography
Robert Graves captured the working life of a poet. "Prose books," he said, "are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat." I am, first and foremost, a poet, working on my next collection. As for my "show dogs," I have written recently about bicycle nomads for Orion Magazine; wildcat oil geology for Fortune/Small Business; and solar power and offshore wind power for The New York Times Magazine. My books include Big Weather (Henry Holt Co, 2005) about tornado chasers and the culture of catastrophilia and Elmer McCurdy: The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw, (Basic Books, 2002), which unravels the bizarre career of a Long Beach, California, fun house mummy. A 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Nonfiction, he covers renewable energy for AOL's DailyFinance. He teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at Seton Hall University and is actively engaged in the undergraduate literary and performance scene on campus.
Research Interest
Poetry and nonfiction writing
Publications
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• "You Can Go Home Again: A Season in Amateur Men's Baseball", Best Life, April 2008
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• "Wind-Power Politics: America's First Offshore Wind Farm and the Sea-change in the Culture and Commerce of Renewable Energy" The New York Times Magazine, Sheila Glaser (ed.), September 2008
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"Indie Oil Hunter Strikes a 'Screamer'" CNN/ Money, Gay Bryant (ed.), October 2008
