Brooks Landon
"The Gift of Style: Celebrating the Sentence"

Brooks Landon is the Herman J. and Eileen S. Schmidt Professor in the University of Iowa English Department, where he teaches courses in Prose Style, Postmodern Fiction, and Science Fiction. He is also the Director of the University of Iowa General Education Literature Program.

Landon is the author of four books, two dealing with science fiction and two focused on American novelist Thomas Berger. The most recent of these is Understanding Thomas Berger (University of South Carolina Press, 2010).

His science fiction work began with writing for an Iowa Public Television series called Watch the Sky: The American Science Fiction Film. Work on this series led to his book The Aesthetics of Ambivalence: Rethinking Science Fiction Film in the Age of Electronic (Re)Production. He also published a general introduction to science fiction literature called Science Fiction After 1900: From The Steam Man to the Stars. For his work in science fiction criticism, Landon received the 2001 International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA) Distinguished Scholarship Award.

Brooks is also the author of Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft, a CD/DVD lecture course offered by the Great Courses Company.

About his presentation, Brooks quotes Michael Cunningham: “I’m still hoping to write a great sentence. If I do, I’ll let you know,” and Don DeLillo: “This is what I mean when I call myself a writer. I construct sentences.”