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 R. Clifton SpargoR. Clifton Spargo is a fiction writer and literary critic who has taught creative writing at Yale and has an extensive body of critical work that addresses ethics, mourning, and the victims of social injustice. Cliff earned a Ph.D. in English and American Literature at Yale and holds degrees from Yale University, Yale Divinity School, and Edinburgh University. He was formerly the Pearl Resnick Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Cliff has published numerous essays and articles and is the author of two critical books - The Ethics of Mourning (Johns Hopkins, 2004) and Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death (Johns Hopkins, 2006), the latter of which features an extended philosophical meditation on the cultural status of the victim in Western society. In 2005 he was selected as one of three finalists for the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, an award given to encourage future leaders in the humanities whose work shows extraordinary promise and has a significant public or applied component related to cultural concerns. A passionate lover of all things rock and roll, Cliff is one of the featured essayists in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan (Cambridge University Press) which includes work by Jonathan Lethem, Eric Lott, Neil Corcoran, and others. Cliff has published numerous short stories and was the winner of Glimmer Train's award for new writers in 2001 as well as the Glimmer Train 7th Fiction Open Contest in 2004. Several of his published stories are part of an in-progress sequence centered on a survivor of sexual assault, and his fiction has been praised by literary critic Harold Bloom as "marked for permanence." A story from his most recent collection will soon be broadcast on NPR’s "Writers in the Attic" program. As the literary advisor to The Voices and Faces Project, Cliff oversees our testimonial writing workshop and directs the development of our "reading room." In tandem with our founder, Anne K. Ream, Cliff also reviews creative and literary proposals that are submitted to our project. "I've been a supporter of The Voices and Faces Project since its inception and a longstanding activist for social justice," says Cliff. "I am inspired by survivors' efforts to give witness to their experiences in writing." |