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Jack Hicks Professor of English

Ph.D., University of North Carolina

JACK HICKS teaches at the University of California , Davis (English), where he is former Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program (1992-2001). His current interests are in the Literature of California, the Literature of Nature/Wilderness, contemporary American fiction/nonfiction and digital culture. Hicks is Founding Director of "The Art of the Wild" (AOW), an annual summer program on writing creatively with nature, wilderness and the environment. Convening each July in the Sierra Nevada of California, the program has attracted 600+ participants (from 30 U.S. states--including Hawaii and Alaska --and Canada , Guam , Japan , the United Kingdom and Australia ) since inception in 1992. Featured on BBC-Worldwide Radio and BBC-TV, AOW was the subject of a one-hour video special airing nationally on PBS-TV in Fall, 1996, currently syndicated and distributed worldwide by PBS-TV. He launched the Pacific Regional Humanities Center at UC Davis as Director for 2002-2003. Since 2000, he has been an active member of the workgroup that won a $1.3 million dollar challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to establish the Pacific Regional Humanities Center (PRHC) at Davis . Serving the California , Oregon , Washington , Alaska , Hawaii and Pacific Island area, the PRHC establishes UC Davis as a Pacific Rim center for humanities research and public programming. Hicks directed the initial two PRHC activities in April 2002, "Digital Divides," a national conference on the impacts of digital technology, and the 15 th annual California Studies Conference at UC Davis April 24-26, 2003 .

JACK HICKS received his PhD in American Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . Publications include two critical books on contemporary fiction ( Cutting Edges and In the Singer's Temple ) and many articles and reviews. He has also published 40+ articles on film, television, sports and popular culture, in magazines ranging from Nation to TV Guide . He is Co-Editor (with James D. Houston, Maxine Hong Kingston and Al Young) of The Literature of California ( University of California Press ) , a comprehensive two-volume anthology of California literature from Native American origins to the present. Volume I (2000) was published to national acclaim (featured on National public Radio), winning the 2001 California Commonwealth Club medal for the best book on California . Volume II will appear in early 2005. He is also Co-Editor of the forthcoming California Poetry (Heyday Books, 2003), with Dana Gioia and Chryss Yost. Fulbright scholar in France and the former Soviet Union , Hicks has lectured on literature, environment and American culture in France , Germany , Russia , and Japan and throughout the U.S. He has served as editor, consultant, peer reviewer and project director for publishers, professional organizations, state and federal agencies and private foundations. He lives in Sacramento , California with his wife and young daughter.

Literature of California site

Email: wjhicks@ucdavis.edu