Skip to content →

Author: Patrick Dobson

Dr. Patrick Dobson is a work in progress until his termination. In the meantime, He is a writer, scholar, postman, and college professor living in Kansas City, MO.

The University of Nebraska Press published his travel memoirs, Canoeing the Great Plains: A Missouri River Summer in 2015 and Seldom Seen: A Journey into the Great Plains in 2009. Canoeing the Great Plains won the 2016 High Plains Book Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award. His essays and poems have been published in New Letters, daCunha, Kansas City Star, Garo, Wood Coin, and JONAHmagazine, and others.

Dobson earned a doctorate in American History and Literature at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 2013. He has edited books, taught journalism, and been a union ironworker. He now teaches American History, Modern Latin American History, and Western Civilization at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, KS.

He looks forward to hearing from you soon.

Comprehensive exams

Listen, I’m in this rut. It came on easily, unnoticed. I finished with finals after a long, long summer of intense reading and study. The test itself was more of a mean-spirited hazing than a test of anything I knew or didn’t know. Everyone says it’s like that, as if…

Leave a Comment

the very late show

Insomnia is a kind monster. It comes with the rustle of blankets, the sudden and single snore of my lover, the restlessness of imagining. It’s soft, sleeplessness. Half awake, I think of a poem, a word game, a need to do something I forgot. Then, I’m awake. Instead of laying…

Leave a Comment

Skip the hip

Ah, Kansas City. Our money-intensive media feeds bad information, rank opinion, and outright falsehood into the mainstream. Lack of accountability has made the Kansas City media—alternative news print, blogosphere, or any other new media—a really rotten place to inform ourselves about anything. The link between “media” and free press in…

Leave a Comment