HARVEY, Steven 1949-

PERSONAL: Born June 9, 1949, in Dodge City, KS; son of Max J. and Roberta (Reinhardt) Harvey; married Barbara Hupfer, May 8, 1971; children: Matthew, Nessa, Samuel, Alice. Ethnicity: "White." Education: Wake Forest University, B.A., 1971; Johns Hopkins University, M.A., 1973; Middlebury College, M.A., 1984; University of Virginia, Ph.D., 1989. Politics: Democrat. Religion: "Not affiliated with any church." Hobbies and other interests: Banjo, guitar, folk music.

ADDRESSES: Home—P.O. Box 356, Young Harris, GA 30582. Office—Humanities Division, Young Harris College, Young Harris, GA 30582. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: English teacher at a day school in Charlotte, NC, 1974-76; Young Harris College, Young Harris, GA, professor of English, 1976—. John C. Campbell Folk School, writing instructor, 1995—; Butternut Creek and Friend (folk music group), performer. Georgia Humanities Council, member, 1999-2002.

MEMBER: Associated Writing Programs.

AWARDS, HONORS: Essay award, Augusta Writers Conference, 1990, for "Kid Talk"; fellow, MacDowell Colony, 1994.

WRITINGS:

Powerlines (poetry), Aleph Press, 1976.

A Geometry of Lilies (nonfiction), University of South Carolina Press (Columbia, SC), 1993.

Lost in Translation (nonfiction), University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1997.

(Editor) In a Dark Wood: Personal Essays by Men on Middle Age, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1997.

Bound for Shady Grove, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2000.

Work represented in anthologies, including Best American Essays 1992, edited by Robert Atwan. Contributor of essays, poetry, and reviews to periodicals, including

Doubletake, Harper's, Beloit Poetry Journal, Creative Nonfiction, Southern Humanities Review, Shenandoah, and Iowa Review.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A series of personal essays.

SIDELIGHTS: Steven Harvey once told CA: "'Much is in little,' Roman poet and satirist Horace wrote. Essayists like me keep the job manageable by thinking for a long, long time about hardly anything at all, the essay forcing us to pay attention to all that we take for granted. It helps to have a dull life, a simple life like mine of family and friends and time to think, one in which 'what is' is more important than 'what happens.'

"Since I write essays exclusively, the form says a great deal about who I am and why I write. Essays like mine are not arranged by plot or form, but by anxieties. They don't wonder 'what next?' Instead, like a worried parent, they ask 'now what?' with a groan. The anxieties are relieved not so much by the telling, like confessions, but by the arranging, the way some of us fix a problem at work by cleaning up the desk.

"As a result, 'getting it right' for me is not a matter of being true to events or details. It is a matter of putting events and details into a revealing—a revelatory—relationship with each other. That is the lesson I have learned from the writers who have influenced me the most: Michel de Montaigne, Henry David Thoreau, William Hazlitt, E. B. White, Loren Eiseley, James Baldwin, Annie Dillard, Scott Russell Sanders, Franklin Burroughs, James Kilgo, and Sam Pickering. Strolling through the museum of love and change I try to do what these other writers do so well: rearrange for all to see the treasures we cannot keep."