Deno Trakas was the Laura and Winston Hoy Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at Wofford College, but now he’s a happy retiree who spends his time writing, reading, playing tennis, walking his friendly Doberman, and trying to keep the deer from eating his flowers. He’s published two chapbooks of poems, a memoir entitled Because Memory Isn’t Eternal: A Story of Greeks in Upstate South Carolina, and the novel Messenger from Mystery. He’s currently revising a new novel, The Admiral of Smyrna. He’s won five S.C. Fiction Project Prizes for short stories and an individual artist grant in fiction from the S.C. Arts Commission. He’s also collaborating with a colleague who’s a photographer and art historian on a series of abstract photographs for which he writes haiku.
Click here for the application to have Deno Trakas speak in your community.
Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor: the Complex Stories of Immigrants in America in the Twentieth Century Presented by Deno Trakas. Immigration has been a controversial topic for many years, some would say forever, here and abroad. Having studied the Greek immigrants in his own family for his memoir, Because Memory Isn’t Eternal, and having talked … Read more
So We Beat On, Boats Against the Current: the Perennial Appeal of The Great Gatsby Presented by Deno Trakas. Having studied at USC with Matthew Bruccoli, the preeminent F. Scott Fitzgerald scholar in the world, Deno Trakas began his teaching career by designing a course on Fitzgerald, which became the most popular class he taught at … Read more
Running with Bulls and The Sun Also Rises Presented by Deno Trakas. The key scenes in the novel that launched Hemingway’s career take place in Pamplona, Spain, which is world famous for the running of the bulls every morning of the week-long Fiesta of San Fermin. As a devoted fan who had taught The Sun Also Rises for twenty … Read more
Only Trouble Is Interesting: The Art and Craft of the Short Story Presented by Deno Trakas. The writer Lisa Cron has said that stories are more important to human evolution than the opposable thumb–the thumb helps us to hang on; stories tell us what to hang on to. Deno Trakas will read selections from several … Read more
A Reading from and Discussion of Messenger from Mystery Presented by Deno Trakas. Novelist Sterling Watson calls my book “a taut page-turner about love and death on the dark side of international education” featuring a “forbidden affair of an American professor and his sultry Iranian student, the Hitchcockian suspense of men and women on the run … Read more
PO Box 5287
Columbia SC 29250
2711 Middleburg Drive
Suite 203
Columbia SC 29204
803-771-2477
