Author
Literary Scholar, Lecturer, public reader;
Teacher, educational consultant, word crafter.

                            ...Celebrating the written word

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

“If we continue to overlook our literary heritage,
the sound of the best that has been written, spoken and sung vanishes,
and with it goes the deepest dimension of civilization.”

Paul G. Zolbrod has had a lengthy and varied career, starting out as an apprentice diesel machinist, a truck driver, an army draftee during the Korean War era, and eventually becoming a long-time college teacher, a student of Medieval and Early Renaissance literature, and a pioneer investigator of Native American oral poetry.

Underlying his life’s work has been an abiding love for language, especially when it is recited ceremonially and composed with intense care. In what he himself has written, and in his own public appearances, he stresses the relationship between the printed word and the sound of the human voice, both spoken and sung. He likes working with students and educators and has served as a consultant to classroom teachers, school administrators, and textbook editors. He has investigated the deep relationship that exists between Native American oral traditions and the Western World’s literary heritage. Following his retirement from Allegheny College after thirty years on the faculty there, he has taught at the Crownpoint, New Mexico campus of the Navajo Nation’s Diné College. In addition, he continues to lecture, give readings, conduct workshops and seminars, and advise teachers and textbook editors. He invites inquiries and virtual conversations with lovers of poetry, prose fiction, the essay, and the spoken word nationwide.