James Goodman

Research, Teaching, and Writing: U.S. history; African-American history and race relations; historical writing; creative non-fiction; history as fiction; fiction as history; what history is and why it matters

James Goodman teaches history and creative writing. His passion, as a writer, as a teacher, and as the U.S. editor of the journal Rethinking History, has been to take literary form seriously in the reading and writing of history and every other form of non-fiction.  He believes that all writing (humanities scholarship no less than the fiction, poetry, and drama that humanists study) is creative writing.  His issues of Rethinking History feature the work of historians, scholars in other fields, creative writers inside and outside academe, and graphic artists struggling to find the forms—the literary structures, the perspective(s), the images, the voice(s), the words, the pace--that do their subjects the most justice.  His first book is  a narrative history of the Scottsboro Case and controversy written from many different points of view. His second book, Blackout, is a quick-cutting, kaleidoscopic recreation of the the blackout and blackout looting in NYC in the summer of 1977.  For his most recent book, he wandered far afield, exploring the long and twisted life of one of the most famous and infamous Hebrew bible stories, Genesis 22.  But Where Is the Lamb? Imagining the Story of Abraham and Isaac was published by Schocken Books in 2013.   He has received fellowships and awards from NYU, Princeton, Rutgers, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and Stories of Scottsboro was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.