At the age of thirty, Bob Cowser, Jr., is leading a happy life as a husband, father, and English professor in upstate New York. But he misses the exhilaration he felt as a young man when he took the field for high school football games. In what is every Monday morning quarterback's fantasy, Bob Cowser, Jr., revisits his days as a football star by joining the Watertown Red and Black, the country's oldest semi-professional football team. With the hesitant blessing of his wife, Cowser drives the lonely sixty miles to try out for the team in Watertown, New York, a former mill town of soldiers, corrections officers, and blue-collar workers that is a far cry from his leafy campus. Over the next five months he will make this journey many more times as the Red and Black weathers everything from team feuds to agonizing losses to the deployment of some of its players to war. From the first kickoff, "Professor" realizes that he will have to work hard to earn the respect of his hard-edged teammates. The fulfillment of his boyhood dream will teach him some unexpected lessons about real life as an adult.
Bob Cowser, Jr.'s first book, DREAM SEASON, published in 2004 by the Atlantic Monthly Press, was a New York Times Book Review "Editor's Choice" and "Paperback Row" selection and was listed among the Chronicle of Higher Education's best-ever college sports books. It garnered further praise in Sports Illustrated, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, and on NPR's "Only a Game." His second book, SCOREKEEPING, a collection of coming-of-age essays, was published in October 2006 by the University of South Carolina Press, and his third book GREEN FIELDS, about the 1979 murder of one of his grade school classmates and the execution of her killer in 2000, the first execution in Tennessee in 40 years, was published as part of the Engaged Writers Series at the University of New Orleans Press in November 2010. He is also the editor of WHY WE'RE HERE: NEW YORK ESSAYISTS ON LIVING UPSTATE, published by Colgate University Press in 2010.
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Cowser grew up in rural west Tennessee, where his parents worked as college English teachers. He graduated summa cum laude from Loyola-New Orleans in 1992 with majors in English and Print Journalism, then earned a Master's in English at Marquette University in 1994 and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Nebraska in 1998.
An academy of American Poets prizewinner and Pushcart Prize nominee, Cowser's work has appeared widely in American literary magazines, including River Teeth, Fourth Genre, The Pinch, the Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review, Sycamore Review, Brevity, Sonora Review and Creative Nonfiction. He is Professor of English at St. Lawrence University, where he teaches courses in nonfiction writing and later American literature, and an Honored Visiting Graduate Faculty Member with Ashland University's Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts program. He also serves as associate editor of RIVER TEETH: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. Cowser lives on the Grasse River in Canton, NY with his wife, Candace, and their sons Jackson and Mason.
