Dr. David McCracken

Dr. David McCracken received his BA from Belmont College (now Belmont University) in 1985. He received his MA in Rhetoric and Composition from Texas A&M University in 1988 and his PhD in American Literature from Texas A&M University in 1994. After completing a one-year postdoctoral appointment at Texas A&M University, Dr. McCracken taught from 1995 to 1998 at Francis Marion University and from 1998 to 2022 at Coker College/University. His teaching interests are first-year writing, literary criticism, American literature, and contemporary fiction. His research expertise includes the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, and Chuck Palahniuk in addition to the literary areas of American dirty realism and American working-class literature.

Dr. McCracken was a first-generation college student from Seven Mile, Ohio, in 1981, and he was an NAIA All-American in the marathon at Belmont College in 1985. He met his wife, Wendy, at Eastern Kentucky University when he began work on his MA in 1985. Dr. McCracken has presented at numerous conferences and has published several articles, including two books. He is currently working on a manuscript for McFarland Publishing about the progression of dirty realism into transgressive pragmatism.