English Professor Clark Closser’s student and faculty colleagues alike are dismayed by the news of his retirement scheduled for the end of summer 2010.Please join us Monday, April 26, at 7:30 p.m. in the Plaster Student Union Theater, to hear Professor Clark Closser read his essay “The Summer I Carried a Gun,” a masterpiece set, as the author describes it, “in the gothic darkness of central Georgia in the mid-1960’s,” and is taken from Closser’s autobiography in progress, Death on Valentine Street.
Dr. Closser began teaching in the English Department at Missouri State University (then Southwest Missouri State University) in fall of 1978. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas, where his dissertation focused on the work of British novelist John Fowles. Closser later had an essay of his on Fowles published in the book John Fowles and Nature: Fourteen Perspectives on Landscape and actually read a version of this essay, “In the Sea of Life Enisled: Narrative Landscape and Catherine’s Fate in ‘The Cloud'” at the John Fowles Symposium in Lyme Regis, England. John Fowles himself, one of the twentieth century’s most important novelists, .was among the delighted audience members to hear Closser’s presentation.
Clark Closser is a successful poet and creative nonfiction essayist. His early poems were published in the chapbook His Times, and his personal essays have entertained and enlightened audiences at Missouri State for years, including “Sunday Morning” and “Roger’s Recreation.” His community Nineteenth-Century Novel Reading Group has read a novel every month and discussed it, with Closser’s guidance, at a meeting in a group member’s home. So far, the group has read and discussed over one hundred and fifty novels, including War and Peace and Crime and Punishment!
Regarded by students and faculty alike as a master teacher, Closser seems to have memorized all the recent Norton Anthologies of American and British literature, and typically stands ready to recite key passages of poems, or entire poems, to illustrate a key point in a lecture or discussion. He won a University Teaching Award in 2001 and a College of Arts and Letters Teaching Award in 1997.