Southern Utah University
English Dept.
Cedar City, UT 84720

(435) 865-0990
petersent@suu.edu

(Literary Arts)

Todd has a masters degree in creative writing from Northern Arizona University and doctorate in the same from Oklahoma State University. He has taught writing at Oklahoma State and is currently teaching at Southern Utah University. His work has appeared in Cream City Review, Weber Studies, Third Coast, Mid-American Review and elsewhere.

Todd's writing has been influenced in large part by the work of painters and photographers. As such he takes a particularly visual approach to language. In his classes and workshops, he often assembles an arrangement of objects such as milk bottles, old car parts, sycamore seed pods?anything with physical and emotional texture?and he asks students to describe it in vivid detail, as if they were painting a still life with words.

He also asks students to "write" portraits. He has a collection of antique flea market photographs, and from these images of mysterious and unknown people, he asks students write a short, imaginative biography that answer questions like: who is this person? what is their story? what are they thinking about?

Formerly the curriculum and intern director for an environmental education facility in the San Juan Islands of Washington, Todd likes to abandon the classroom when possible. In one exercise, he provides students with a piece of pipe to use as a viewer. He then he asks them to choose something engaging in the landscape and write it. The act of sitting and focusing their attention in this way, helps them understand that the first part of writing well is learning to "see" with language.

Ansel Adams often mentioned that making a photograph involves two distinct parts: the making of the negative and the making of the print. Todd feels that Adams presents an important artistic principle that applies to writers as well. At first, good writers write to catch a moment or idea then go at it again (and again and again) in order to polish that idea and give it luster. This process is central to his work and his classroom approach.

Todd is available for extended projects, short-term workshops, collaborations with other artists (particularly photographers and painters), and teacher training. He is especially interested in the latter, particularly in the areas of creative writing pedagogy, exercise workshops, and methods for integrating creative writing into the general curriculum. It would be best for him to stay in or around Iron, Washington, and Garfield counties during the school year. He has no restrictions from May through August.