DR. C.W. CANNON

Instructor
MA, Ph.D., University of Illinois in Chicago

C.W.Cannon grew up in the French Quarter, Faubourg Marigny, and Bywater neighborhoods of New Orleans. He attended New Orleans public schools—McDonogh 15, Gregory, Ben Franklin, and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. His first artistic passion was music. As a teen he wandered the streets of old New Orleans and painted them with the Bach, Brahms, Chopin, Wagner and Mahler blaring out of his Sony Walkman. He had the privilege of learning from Bert Braud and Ellis Marsalis at NOCCA (and from McDonogh 15’s Walter Payton, his first music teacher). He went on to study composition at the Northwestern University School of Music, but gradually shifted to consuming and producing more words than notes. He left Northwestern with a degree in German Languages and Literature and headed for Berlin on a Fulbright Scholarship.

 Anyone with even a vague familiarity with recent history will realize that Berlin was a fascinating place in 1990-91. It is perhaps ironic (perhaps not) that his own New Orleans began to beguile and animate C.W. during his stay in Europe. Hemingway said he had to sit in a café in Paris to write about Michigan. Similarly, while dodging teargas canisters at an annual anarchist “uprising” in Kreuzberg, Cannon began to apprehend things about his own indigenous culture. Since then, the strange, unsettling power and beauty of his native city have driven most of his own cultural production. His novel, Soul Resin (FC2 Press), is a multi-layered ghost story bringing together different generations of Crescent City history. Luis Alberto Urrea offered this praise: “C.W. Cannon’s Soul Resin foments cognitive revolutions…New Orleans has always been clogged with restless dead: here, they slither among the ghosts of the living and seem to outlive them. Truly original.”  

His short fiction and non-fiction have appeared most recently in the New Orleans Review, the Times-Picayune, nolafugees.com, and Constance. His work is also available in anthologies such as In Our Own Words: a Generation Defining Itself; Louisiana in Words, and Year Zero: a Year of Reporting from Post-Katrina New Orleans. Of particular interest is his “New Orleans Manifesto,” featured in Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? (Chin Music Press).

Aside from New Orleans, his interests include American literature and culture broadly, radical and innovative fiction, music of all stripes, Marxist critical theory, and “freshman comp” as a genre.

Phone Number:
(504) 280-6671

Email Dr. Cannon@
cwcannon@uno.edu

Address: Liberal Arts Building 309

Office Hours:

MW 12:30-2:00pm
F 8:30-10:30am

Courses for Fall 2007:

Engl 1158-008:
Freshman Composition II
MW 9:30-10:45am

Engl 1158-476:
Freshman Composition II
(Online)

Engl 2041-476:
Major American Authors
(Online)

Engl 2041-001:
Major American Authors
MW 8:00-9:15am