Steve Edwards

About Steve

Though the number astonishes him, Steve has been teaching college writing for twenty-five years, with stops along the way at Purdue University, Emerson College, Simmons College, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and, for the last decade, as a professor of English Studies at Fitchburg State University, in Massachusetts. He is the author of Breaking into the Backcountry, a memoir about the seven months he spent as caretaker of a remote homestead along the federally designated “Wild and Scenic Rogue River” in Oregon. He is also the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Fiction/Nonfiction, and the author of personal essays that have appeared in The Sun, Orion, Literary Hub, and Longreads. His latest work, an essay about the intersection of writing, mental health, and neurodiversity, is forthcoming from The Yale Review. When not writing and teaching, Steve spends his time playing guitar, taking photographs, and subjecting his son to dad jokes. 

A constant across Steve’s years of teaching has been the pleasure he feels when working with students to discover — and sometimes rediscover — themselves through the stories they tell. The pleasure is in his practice of curiosity: being present in the moment, asking incisive questions, and listening deeply to the answers, with which he guides writers toward taking the kinds of risks that lead to breakthroughs on the page. He sees his teaching as a way to express gratitude for the many wonderful teachers who helped him not only to write better but to understand how, through writing, he could live a more vital and engaged life.