The Duke University English Department welcomes Professor John (JP) Gritton as one of our two new Assistant Professor of the Practice of Creative. Gritton joins the Duke English department after serving as the Cynthia Woods Mitchell fellow at the University of Houston last year. Professor Gritton earned his BA in English and Creative Writing from Hamline University, MFA from Johns Hopkins University, and his Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Houston.
He has received several awards and honors including the DisQuiet fellowship and the Donald Barthelme Prize in fiction. Gritton’s debut novel Wyoming, published by Tin House Books is scheduled to hit bookshelves on November 19, 2019. Gritton’s literary works have been published in Black Warrior Review, Greensboro Review, New Ohio Review, Southwest Review, and Tin House, just to name a few.
“From its first assured sentence to its last, Wyoming marks the debut of a gifted storyteller. This is a compassionate novel for all its violence and despair, an authentic, pitch-perfect portrait of an America too often caricatured or ignored. There are hard truths here, grit and cruelty, but JP Gritton’s fine pose is nuanced enough, generous enough, to keep his troubled narrator’s humanity, his beating heart, apparent at every turn.” - Alice McDermott, author of The Ninth Hour
As writers, I think we’re joining narrative conversations that have been taking place since, well, people started telling stories. I push my students to find how their fiction might belong to or respond to, a narrative “lineage”—ultimately, these are discoveries we make for ourselves, through writing. In a typical class, we’ll discuss a piece of fiction or an essay on the craft and complete a piece of writing that “responds” to that work.
The second-best piece of advice I ever got about writing was: set aside a certain amount of time every day and devote it completely to writing. The best piece of advice I ever got was: if you miss a day, don’t worry about it too much.
I had always liked to write, but my first love was for the visual arts. My mom’s father and her sister were both painters, and for a long time, I thought that was what I wanted to be. But then, I’d always loved to read. Over time, I just gradually realized that I was much more interested in the story behind the image. Now I find the charge reversing: I’m fascinated by the work of an author like Robertson Davies, who takes a painting and narrates its provenance with amazing skill in his novel What’s Bred in the Bone.
I was astounded by the creative and scholarly accomplishments of my colleagues in the department. But when I came to Durham, I was also struck by the fact that the English Department was an incredibly welcoming, humble group of people. It’s a rare mix of virtues in a department, and I consider myself ridiculously lucky to be a part of it.
We are thrilled to have Professor JP Gritton join the Duke English faculty and look forward to his future contributions, especially in the area of creative writing. During the Fall 2019 semester, Professor Gritton will be teaching English 110S: Introduction to Creative Writing and English 221S: Introduction to Writing of Fiction.
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English Department
