Rich Bloom
Assistant Professor
Rich Bloom is an award-winning journalist with more than 30 years writing and editing for newspapers and magazines across the country. He is a published playwright whose first play, "When Your Soul Cries," a two-act drama set in the civil rights era, will have its world premiere in Columbus, Ohio this August. He hired and mentored a young writer at Lansing (MI) Magazine who would win a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in the 1990s. He has studied creative writing under Walter Tevis, author of "The Hustler" and "The Queen's Gambit", and is currently developing a new American musical.
Hello! This is my story.
I have been pushing one word up against another to create scenes and characters almost from the time I entered school. That love of language carried over into my adult life when I pursued a career in journalism – both magazine and newspaper. I have written thousands of articles with a particular fondness for features. Features open the door to a writer’s creativity, limited only by his or her imagination. My intent in teaching “Painting With Words” is to help adult writers find their voice and style by understanding the components of evocative writing as well as developing an “it’s OK to color outside the lines” attitude.
Two of the featured books in this class will be “The Killer Angels” and “The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer.” “Angels” is a fictional account of the Battle of Gettysburg, written by Michael Sharra and recipient of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. “Court-Martial” is an exercise in alternative history that presumes Custer wasn’t killed at the battle of the Little Big Horn and instead, is court-martialed for the debacle.