Steven Dunn is the most recent Rachel Rivers-Coffey Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing. Dunn spent time at App State during the first ten weeks of the fall 2024 semester. I interviewed Professor Dunn at the end of September, just before App State was closed due to impacts from Hurricane Helene. As I spoke to Professor Dunn, I was struck by his enthusiasm for teaching, and his somewhat unconventional start as a writer and writing instructor.
“We wanted to write our own stories where people were just allowed to be Black and/or queer and nobody would die.”
Professor Dunn shared that he was a visual artist before he was a writer. In his late 20s at his art opening, his wife pointed out how many words were in his paintings. It was this realization that caused Dunn to begin writing, despite “never really liking books.” Writing and teaching allowed him to leave the engineering field and discover his appreciation for words as he hadn’t before. He completed his undergraduate degree at the age of thirty and graduated with his MFA from the low-residency program at Stetson University five years later.
Steven Dunn’s first book, Potted Meat (2016), is about coming of age in West Virginia while dealing with a changing body, racism, trauma and addiction in a Black community. His second book, water & power (2018), is a military novel using multiple voices taken from interviews after Dunn’s ten years in the Navy. Dunn sought to spread the storytelling out in his second book, since he feels that military novels often thrive off of a singular voice and don’t take into consideration multiple perspectives. His most recent book, Tannery Bay (2024), is co-authored with his friend, Katie Jean Shinkle, and revolves around a community stuck in a loop of Julys. Dunn and Shinkle call the book a “queer-blaxploitation fairytale.” The collaboration process involved learning to write from other perspectives and developing imagination in a way which Dunn appreciated in his own writing after completing Tannery Bay. “We wanted to write our own stories where people were just allowed to be black and/or queer and nobody would die,” Dunn states as the reason behind writing Tannery Bay. The collaborative book is ultimately about collaborating to overcome oppression, with plenty of action and a heist, which Dunn compares to Ocean’s Eleven.
One of the things that intrigued Professor Dunn about the opportunity to be the Rachel Rivers-Coffey Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing was to return to the Appalachian Mountains. Originally from West Virginia, Professor Dunn lives in Colorado and was excited about the opportunity to return to the mountains and have a balance of teaching and time to write. The landscape of the mountains is one of his favorite parts of working at App State. While living in Banner Elk, Dunn enjoyed spending time in the landscape writing in the forest and by the creek. His favorite parts of App State are the welcoming faculty in the English Department and the passion for writing he saw in the students he taught.
Written by Grace Buckner
