Garrison, Bakopoulos to leave Grinnell College

By Cadence Chen chencade@grinnell.edu

Grinnell College English professors Dean Bakopoulos and John Garrison will leave Grinnell College at the end of the spring 2023 semester.

Both are the only current Guggenheim fellows at the College, recipients of a selective grant given to individuals who excel in the arts.

Bakopoulos, the current director of Writers@Grinnell and Writer-inResidence, will end his 12th year teaching at the College to be associate professor of screenwriting at the University of Iowa’s department of cinematic arts starting this fall.

himself and become friends with some writers in Iowa City he greatly respects. He described the university as idyllic for writers as an institution invested in creative writing and home to the premiere Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

During Bakopoulos’ time at the College, he mainly taught fiction writing and screenwriting. In the last four to five years of his writing career, he pivoted from novel writing to screenwriting, a change he cites as a mid-career shift.

OWEN BARBATO

Dean Bakopoulos will leave the English Department this spring after his 12th year at the College.

Living just outside of Iowa City and having worked as a visiting professor for the university before, Bakopoulos has already familiarized

The demand for creative writing and expression at the College is high, according to Bakopoulos. Because he is one of the only fiction writers in the department, he said his classes would often fill beyond the maximum occupancy. In the 2014-2015 academic year, for example, he said over

100 students tried to register for his 200-level Craft of Fiction seminar.

In the past, he had gotten job offers from institutions with established creative writing programs, and he chose to continue teaching at Grinnell. He said he leaves with nothing but fondness, and his departure from the College was not an easy decision to make.

Although Bakopoulos said that the English department is not currently headed in the creative writing direction, he feels that the College is poised to have one of the greatest creative writing programs in the country at the undergraduate level.

Garrison, who specializes in