Scott Korb

Biography

SCOTT KORB WAS BORN IN SEPTEMBER 1976 and raised in a rural part of southeastern Wisconsin. He did well in school and enjoyed playing tennis.

He graduated from the University of Wisconsin late in 1997 and relocated to New York not long after. There he earned a degree in Theology from Union Seminary and another in Literature from Columbia University.

With M. Ryan Purdy, for a number of years he edited a small literary magazine called The American Journal of Print.

His books include The Faith Between Us (2007), a collection of personal essays presented as a conversation with Jewish writer Peter Bebergal; Life in Year One (2010), a popular history of first-century Palestine; and Light Without Fire (2013), an intimate portrait of the first year at America’s first Muslim college.

He is associate editor of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers (2008), which was awarded the American Historical Association’s 2009 J. Franklin Jameson Prize. His most recent book is a collection of essays, edited with Robert Bolger, about David Foster Wallace and philosophy, Gesturing Toward Reality (2014).

Scott is a former director of the First-Year Writing Program and Eugene Lang College, at the New School. He joined the Pacific University MFA faculty in the summer of 2013 and was named the director of that program in May 2020. He lives with his family in Portland, Oregon.