John Bruce

Favorite quote:

“Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.”—Jonathan Swift

John Bruce was born on October 1, 1961, in Orange, California. After only a few months in southern California, he moved to San Mateo, California, where he spent his formative years and graduated from San Mateo High School in 1979. After highschool he enrolled at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California earning a B.A. in journalism in 1983.

Journalist

After several jobs including bank teller and professional watcher of soap operas in San Francisco, Bruce worked as a newspaper reporter at a weekly newspaper in Brentwood, California. A year later, he landed his first job as a reporter on a daily newspaper in Harlingen, Texas, along the U.S.-Mexico border. Additional stops as a newspaper reporter were made in Texas over the next several years, including Wichita Falls, Corpus Christi, and then once again in the Rio Grande Valley, in McAllen, Texas

Doctoral Candidate to University Professor

In 1991, John began graduate school at University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg (now University of Texas Rio Grande Valley). He earned an M.A. in English there in 1994. In 1998 he joined the faculty of University of Science and Arts in Oklahoma (USAO) before moving to Glasgow, Scotland and earning a Ph.D. in English Literature from the prestigious University of Glasgow in 2000. He now holds the position of Professor of Language and Literature at USAO.

Scholar and Author

He received the USAO Regents Award for Superior Teaching in 2009, a Faculty of Arts Research Grant from the University of Glasgow, a Selden Leavell Endowed Scholarship from the University of Texas-Pan American and a Journalism Scholarship from Humboldt State University. John is a member of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, the South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Horned Lizard Conservation Society.

He has published articles on John Milton, Jonathan Swift and Washington Irving. One article on Swift, published in 2002, is in a collection of essays published by Bucknell University Press. Additionally, he has made conference presentations in Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

Artist

John now resides in Chickasha with two border collies and three cats. He has exhibited paintings and sculptural work in multiple shows over the last several years in Oklahoma and New Mexico, amusing patrons with his unique folk-minimalist style combining straight lines, blocks of pure color, and perfect circles with confabulatory and loquacious titles.

Meet the Folks
October 11 - November 9, 2018

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