Endowment series connects students to creative writing
Creative writing can take many different forms. It can be a poem, short story or full-length novel, fiction or nonfiction. But it can also be a comic book, a screenplay or a personal essay. Creative writing is storytelling. For Thomas “Price” Caldwell Jr., it was his legacy. The Tutwiler native graduated from Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, with a degree in English in 1962 before attending Tulane University for his master’s and Ph.D. in English in 1964 and 1969, respectively. Price influenced countless students as he taught in universities around the world, eventually landing at Mississippi State University, where he spent half of his four-decade-long career. For 20 years, Price served as an instructor and associate professor of English at MSU. He wrote poems, short stories, articles, essays and other literary works over the years; however, the most influential legacy he left
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FOUNDATIONS | Spring 2022
was the creative writing program he brought to life in the Department of English at Mississippi State. “Creative writing can take a reader anywhere in the world,” said his daughter Delia. “It's accessible to anyone who wants exposure to interesting subjects and experience lives and places different from their own.” Price passed away in February of 2015 at the age of 74. His wife Alice Carol and their children Delia and Michael created the Price Caldwell Visiting Writers Series Endowment at MSU to remember and carry on his legacy. Each semester, the endowment hosts a visiting writer to perform a public reading on campus and engage with students in the classroom. The endowment enables a diverse range of experienced and talented writers to interact with MSU students of all majors, while exploring different disciplines of creative writing. “Dad always was a proponent that a liberal
