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Raymond Deeren

Assistant Professor

Languages & Literature

Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

M.F.A., Columbia College Chicago

B.A., Saginaw Valley State University

RS Deeren is the Co-Coordinator of the Creative Writing Program in the Department of Languages & Literature. He writes about odd jobs that helped him, and others like him, pay the bills. Originally from the rural working-class Thumb Region of Michigan, his fiction focuses on how social class plays to and through aspects of American life such as race, gender, and sexuality. Dr. Deeren is part of the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts where he is the Senior Editor for Zone 3 Press (365bet's internationally distributed literary magazine).

  • Creative Writing & Writing Pedagogy

  • Contemporary Fiction

  • US Working-Class Studies

  • Rural/Urban Dynamics

Critical Work
  • "Fiction Friction: Teaching Chronic and Acute Conflict in Bonnie Jo Campbell's Short Fiction." MICHIGAN SALVAGE: APPROACHES TO THE FICTION OF BONNIE JO CAMPBELL (Michigan State University Press 2024).

Creative Work
  • Enough to Lose: Stories. Winner of the 2024 Michigan Notable Book Award and a 2024 Midwest Book Silver Award

  • RS Deeren's fiction has been published in Joyland Magazine, Great Lakes Review, and anthologized in John Freeman's Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation. His interviews of fellow authors can be found a Chicago Review of Books.