I'm going to be taking a year off from my usual gig at the University of Missouri-Kansas City this fall and heading to Princeton University, where I'll be a Hodder Fellow for 2008-2009. The other Fellows are Tarell Alvin McCraney and Christian Barter. So it will be write, write, write for a year, with brief stops to light a candle for Mary MacKall Gwinn Hodder and the folks at the Lews Center for the Arts. You can read about the Hodder here


Speaking of Princeton, my friend Nate Rawlings is back in Iraq. I met him in Baghdad when I embedded there in 2006. He was class of '04 and had studied with John McPhee. I recently went down to Ft. Hood to see him off and do a radio piece on what has happened to him the last few years. (You can find that link on my non-fiction page.) Since then, Nate has started writing his own material for NPR and is now answering questions about his life in Sadr City both on the show Day to Day and on the NPR website. You can check him out here. And if you've got a question for Nate (or Capt. Rawlings as he is officially known) I hope you'll send it in.