Paul Crenshaw is an assistant professor of English who has previously had his work published in the "Best American Essays" series in 2005 and 2011.
The most recent edition of Yes! Weekly features a face familiar to many students, faculty and staff at Elon — Assistant Professor of English Paul Crenshaw.
The Yes! Weekly cover story by M.C. Armstrong centers around “Names,” an essay in which Crenshaw ponders the meaning behind the derogatory names he and his fellow soldiers called one another during basic training during the summer of 1990, and also traces his path to Elon and his work as a writer and professor.
From the Yes! Weekly piece titled “Best American: Veteran and writer Paul Crenshaw on war and the American ‘other'”:
Crenshaw writes every day. He now teaches at Elon University. One of the things he says he says he likes most about writing essays is that his students seem to respond to the form and, additionally, essay readers seem to really like him.
“My essay, “Storm Country,” was in Best American 2005,” he says, “and not long after it was published a friend of mine was on a plane and sat next to a passenger who was reading my essay. She took a picture and sent it to me. That was a good day.”
Along with his inclusion in the Best American Essays series, Crenshaw was honored last spring as the winner of the prestigious 2017 Pushcart Prize for his essay, “The Hornet Among Us” that was published in the journal War, Literature and the Arts.