Richard Jewell  College Teaching, Meditation, Creative Writing

Contact: Email me at richard at jewell dot net  (Replace "at" with "@" and "dot" with a period.)

Resume/Curriculum Vita

Videos: (1) 2014 & 2017, 1 hr. each (Public TV Interviews, Access to Democracy).
(2) You Tube, 6 min, 2021 (This I Believe: Racial Justice Series)

Sample Christmas Story

General Biography:
              
(For more details, see the major sections College Teaching, Meditation, and Creative Writing.)

Richard retired in 2019 from Inver Hills College where he was a Writing, Literature, and Humanities professor in the English and Humanities. On campus, he ran three programs as part of his work: the honor society, the twice-yearly Student Success Day, and the yearly Student Research Conference. He also cofounded MnWE--the Minnesota Writing & English Annual Conference—with Donald Ross of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and continues as its General Coordinator and bimonthly newsletter editor. Several of his classroom books and a scholarly work on critical thinking are available here.

He grew up on a farm near Monmouth, Illinois, USA, and graduated from Warren High School. He attended Shimer College, a Great Books school at its Mt. Carroll, Illinois, campus for a year, and for a second year at its Oxford, England campus. He then transferred to Monmouth College, receiving a B.A. in Philosophy with a minor concentration in Creative Writing. He was accepted into the M.A. in Creative Writing program at San Francisco State in 1970 but, because of the Vietnam War draft, had to divert, attending San Francisco Theological Seminary, Berkeley campus, instead, where he specialized in existentialism (M.A. in Theology) and street ministry (M.Div.).

He then moved to Minnesota, where he lived in his twenties and thirties in Minneapolis, the village of Randolph, and the town of Little Falls, and back to Minneapolis, where he continues to live now. While in Randolph and Little Falls, he developed a freelance writing career with over 100 publications of his articles, photos, and stories. Some of his creative writing is available here online.

However, in 1982, he discovering a love of teaching. In 1983, he began offering college composition classes at St. Cloud State University, earning an M.A. in English with training in composition theory and a creative writing thesis in 1985.

In his adjunct teaching years, 1985-2001, he taught primarily at St. Cloud State, Minnesota community colleges, and as a full-time composition lecturer in the English Department of the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis. During this time, he presented at national and regional conferences and published scholarly works on critical thinking in writing, the Nobel Prize, and adjunct teaching issues. In 2001, he accepted a tenured position at Inver Hills College.

Since retirement in 2019, Richard has devoted much of his time to practicing, researching, and writing about meditation. He began practicing in 1962 as a young teenager, driving his father's tractor up and down long fields for hours at a time. He now has over 10,000 hours of practice. He has experience and knowledge of Christian, Hindu, and New Age spirituality, along with aspects of Buddhism and Judaism. He has written several books on meditation available online here.

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Most recent page revision: June 2024
Top photo: Richard at MnWE, © Gordon Pueschner