Amazing Colleagues, Part II

With CitizenSE in danger of losing its status as the obscurest blog on teh internets, thanks to Inside Higher Ed, now is as good a time as any to pick up my series on the incredible people I work with where I left off last October--with our creative writers. James Thomas Stevens, author of Combing the Snakes from His Hair, Mohawk/Samoa: Transmigrations, A Bridge Dead in the Water, Bulle/Chimére, and The Mutual Life, is one of the most impressive people I've ever met. It's not just that he's a fantastic poet, essayist, teacher, historian, and theorist--often simultaneously. Or that he has a gift for languages, a knack for research, a zest for connections, and a healthy disrespect for arbitrary borders. It's that you can always count on him to call it as he sees it--after seeing it from angles few others could imagine. His only flaw is an intolerance for science fiction--and a stubborn refusal to admit that Almanac of the Dead is a science fiction novel--but nobody's perfect, eh?