Alexander Lambert Blackburn was born in Durham, N. C., where his father was a teacher of writers at Duke University. Thus as a boy he was shaped by an environment of imaginative writers, including such future luminaries as William Styron, Mac Hyman, and Reynolds Price. Inspired by his father, Alex Blackburn carried a passion for writing across his academic training at Andover, Yale, UNC Chapel Hill, and Cambridge University ( Ph. D. in English). After graduation from Yale he volunteered as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army during the Korean War and was dutifully radiated at an atomic bomb test. After stints teaching creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and world classics at the University of Maryland's European Division, he pioneered in the teaching of those subjects at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, where he also founded and edited Writers' Forum, a literary journal devoted to discovering and publishing new writers from the West. Blackburn has published four novels, a collection of essays, a study of the origins of modern fiction in the picaresque novel in Spain, France, England, Germany and America, a major critical study of southwestern novelist-philosopher Frank Waters (seven times nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature), and an autobiographical / biographical memoir, recently published by Irie Books- The Fire Within: Reflections on the Literary Imagination in which he explores the nature of creative imagination. He has also published two ground- breaking anthologies of fiction writers, most of whom were/are from the West. The most complete biographical information to date is to be found in Blackburn's memoirs, Meeting the Professor and The Fire Within, and in John Nizalowski, Embracing the West: An Interview with Alexander Blackburn, The Bloomsbury Review, July/August 2006. The Alexander Blackburn Collection is deposited with the David M. Rubenstein Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Box 90185, Durham, NC 27708-0185. Blackburn as an author or editor has published 31 books and has co-edited with John Nizalowski The Emergence of Frank Waters, a collection of critical essays by various literary scholars. For his work as educator, novelist, critic and editor, Blackburn in 2005 received the Frank Waters Award for Excellence in Literature. Among previous winners of this prestigious national and international award are: N. Scott Momaday, Barbara Kingsolver, Tony Hillerman, John Nichols, Joanne Greenberg and Ann Zwinger. Suddenly a Mortal Splendor, touted as deserving of a Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in The Dallas Morning News review, was runner-up for the 1996 Colorado Book Award in Fiction. The Voice of the Children has received the International PeaceWriting Prize. Blackburn has also won a faculty book award from the University of Colorado, a first prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Chancellor's Award for outstanding service to the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Alex's Web Page is: alexanderblackburn.com
