Irvin Peckham

Irvin Peckham grew up in rural Wisconsin in a time when small farms still had outhouses. He went to one-room schools and graduated in eighth grade with a class of two. He went to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the sixties, a transformative experience framed by civil rights demonstrations and resistance against the war in Vietnam.

He received his BS and MA degrees from Wisconsin and a BEd from the University of Toronto. After teaching high school English for thirteen years, he returned to graduate school to earn his PhD in Literature from the University of California, San Diego. He subsequently directed writing programs at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, and Louisiana State University, from which he retired as a full professor in 2014.

He married Sarah Grove a few days before they left for Canada in 1971. They were married for forty-one years until she died of cancer in 2011. He has two children, one in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where he now lives, and another in Denver; and four grandchildren, three in Harrisonburg and one in Denver.

In his research, he focused on social-class relationships and writing assessment. He has been particularly influenced by John Dewey, James Moffett, Charles Cooper, Ira Shor, and Paulo Freire. He learned from them that education should make students want to learn more rather than celebrate when the class is over. At James Madison University, he now teaches a writing class called “Writing as Breathing.”

His latest book, Viajando sin Mapas (Traveling without Maps), recounts his journey through Mexico and Central America, which was also a journey into solitude, the place where one learns how to live alone.