Lives of Consequence
John D’Agata ’95
Professor of English and Director of the Nonfiction Writing Program, University of Iowa
In his note to the reader in the 2009 anthology “The Lost Origins of the Essay,” John D’Agata ’95 wonders: “Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art?”
During his career as a writer, D’Agata has parsed these tensions — between art and information, truth and fact — in his books “The Lifespan of a Fact” (with Jim Fingal) and “About a Mountain,” which was named by the New York Times as one of the 100 Best Nonfiction Books Ever Written. His first collection of lyric essays, “Halls of Fame,” was published by Graywolf Press and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction.
D’Agata has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. He is the editor of “A New History of the Essay,” a three-volume series from Graywolf that includes “The Next American Essay” (2003), “The Lost Origins of the Essay” (2009), and “The Making of the American Essay” (March 2016).
In the introduction to that latest volume, the writer and literary James Wood calls D’Agata “the renovator-in-chief of the American essay. As practitioner and theorist, writer and anthologist, as example and the enabler of examples, D’Agata has refused to yield to the idea of non-fiction as stable, fixed, already formed…Instead, he has pushed the essay to yield more of itself, to find within itself an enactment of its own etymology — an essaying, a trying, a perpetual attempt at something (after the French verb essayer, to try).”
A summa cum laude Hobart graduate, D’Agata was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and earned High Honors. He later completed an M.F.A. in both poetry and nonfiction at the Iowa Writers Workshop, but says, “The Colleges are where I first learned how to write, and where I was first encouraged as a creative thinker to imagine a place for myself in the literary world. It was a tremendous gift to have such an experience.”
In 2006, he joined the faculty at the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, the top-ranked program in the country, which D’Agata now directs. At Iowa, he now teaches courses on the history of the essay, experiments in essaying, and a variety of workshops.
During the 2017-18 academic year, D’Agata served as Trias Writer-in Residence at HWS.
In 2018, an adaptation of “The Lifespan of a Fact” premiered on Broadway starring Daniel Radcliffe, Cherry Jones and Bobby Cannavale, who played D’Agata.