Norman German
Prize Winning Author of No Other World
Norman German is married to Raejean Clark, a gyotaku artist. Their dog, The Pupster, has a vocabulary of 40 words. German’s hobbies include fishing, running, weight lifting, and coin collecting. As president of German Properties, he locates and renovates distressed houses.
Dr. German has degrees in history, pre-law, philosophy, and English from McNeese State, the University of Texas, and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He has taught at Lamar University, Northwestern State in Natchitoches, and, for twenty-one years, Southeastern Louisiana University.
He claims to have attended UT on a Vampire Scholarship, selling two pints of plasma per week in order to buy food to make more plasma to sell.
A specialist in twentieth-century American literature, he has also published award-winning short stories, novels, poems, and literary criticism. His stories have appeared in commercial and literary magazines, including Shenandoah, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Sport Fishing, and Salt Water Sportsman. His scholarly articles cover a wide range of major American authors: Ernest Hemingway, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Raymond Carver, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Dickey, Anthony Hecht, and others. He has also been the fiction editor of Louisiana Literature for fifteen years.
Ernest Gaines awarded his novel No Other World first prize in the 1991 Deep South Writers Contest. The work, published by Blue Heron Press, fictionalizes the life of Coincoin, the ex-slave who became a slaveholder and founded Melrose Plantation, near Natchitoches.
Published by Thunder Rain Publishing Corp. in August of 2008, German’s third novel, A Savage Wisdom, was reviewed as “a work of exceptional literary merit” and is now in its second printing. As a Kindle book on Amazon.com, the novel has reached #5 in the competitive True Crime category.
German has won numerous awards for his lively and informative teaching style. In 2004, he won a three-year position as Southeastern’s Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities.
A self-proclaimed home-body, German has nevertheless hitchhiked through Europe, fished in Alaska, and explored Hawaii for a month.
His baseball novel Switch-Pitchers will be published by BlueWater Press of Florida in May of 2010. In the novel, Ernest Hemingway smuggles twin Cuban pitchers to the U.S. for a shot at major-league fame.
German is currently working on a thriller set in the Atchafalaya Swamp and the marshes of the Sabine National Wildlife Refuge. The working titles are Controlled Burn or Catch a Falling Knife. If you would like to vote for the title you prefer, please send an e-mail.