Michael Cocchiarale

Michael Cocchiarale, PhD

  • Chair of English and Creative Writing
  • Associate Professor of English
Media Expertise:
  • Communications & Marketing
  • Arts & Culture

Affiliated Programs

Education

  • PhD, American literature (2000)
    Purdue University--West Lafayette (IN)

About Me

Since 2000, I've been teaching American literature, creative writing, and composition at Widener. I have co-edited three collections of scholarly essays—Upon Further Review: Sports in American Literature (2004), Critical Insights: American Sports Fiction (2013), and Critical Insights: The American Short Story (2015). Still Time, my collection of short stories, was published by Fomite Press in 2012. Here Is Ware, a novella, was published in installments by Novella-T in the summer of 2014.

Research Interests

I have two main research interests: sports literature and flash fiction. I am interested in how fiction writers and poets use sports to explore issues of identity, gender, race, class, psychology, competition, and civic pride. More recently, I've become interested in flash fictions extremely short narratives typically less than 1,000 words.

Publications

  • Cocchiarale, Michael, and Scott D. Emmert, eds. Critical Insights: American Sports Fiction. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2013. Print.
  • Cocchiarale, Michael. Still Time: Short and Shorter Stories. Burlington: Fomite, 2012. Print.

Professional Affiliations & Memberships

Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP)

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