Stan West - Columbia College Chicago

Stan West

Adjunct Professor of Instruction

swest@colum.edu

Biography

A former foreign correspondent for the San Francisco-based Pacific News Service, Stan West remains a working journalist, reporting for the Wednesday Journal and WPNA-AM. He’s been a conflict journalist and culture reporter most of his career. A documentarian who co-coordinates the Oak Park International Film Festival, West has written and co-authored several award-winning nonfiction books including Suburban Promised Land, which won the 2010 Illinois State Historical Society Award for Excellence. He’s worked for decades in broadcast and print journalism. He teaches writing, television and media literacy. Stan West received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans. His thesis was on American expatriate writers in Paris and Madrid. His form was creative nonfiction. West holds a Master’s in the Teaching of Writing from DePaul University and a Bachelor’s in Rhetoric from University of Illinois-Champaign/Urbana. He’s studied French, Italian, Arabic, Japanese, Spanish and Zulu. He has bilingual twin sons and a daughter who are all college grads and a psychiatrist-wife. West appeared in a 2019 Routledge anthology, Approaches to Teaching the Works of Edwidge Danticat (Edited by Celucien L. Joseph, Suchismita Banerjee, Marvin E. Hobson, and Danny M. Joey Jr.). West presented on Creative Nonfiction for Wadsworth Cengage’s 2014 Conference. His newest book, James Baldwin's Black Lives Blues Are Mine, comes out in 2021 for Kendall Hunt Publishing Company.

Degrees

B.A., Liberal Arts & Sciences University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 1973
M.A., Writing DePaul University 1999
M.F.A., Film & Theatre University of New Orleans 2007