Lee Abbott

Lee K. Abbott served as Professor of English in the Department of English at The Ohio State University from 1989 until his retirement in 2012, becoming Professor Emeritus thereafter. He co-founded the MFA Program in Creative Writing with David Citino, Michelle Herman, and Kathy Fagan, emphasizing full financial support for students, mentored teaching experience, and close interaction with practicing writers, thereby establishing a renowned community of writers. Abbott directed the creative writing program for two terms, chaired the department's Promotion and Tenure Committee for many years, and was instrumental in numerous faculty hires. His exceptional teaching earned him the Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award in 2004, followed by promotion to Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor in 2007. Renowned for his magnetic storytelling, Abbott influenced generations of writers through his fiction workshops and seminars, where he stressed narrative craft, nouns and verbs, and the sacred act of storytelling.

A prolific author of short fiction, Abbott published collections including Dreams of Distant Lives, Strangers in Paradise, Love is the Crooked Thing, The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting, Living After Midnight, Wet Places at Noon, and All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories. His stories, reviews, and articles on American literature appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, The New York Times Book Review, The Southern Review, Epoch, Boulevard, and The North American Review, with selections reprinted in The Best American Short Stories and The Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. Abbott received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a Major Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council in 1991. Born October 17, 1947, in the Panama Canal Zone and raised in Las Cruces, New Mexico, he passed away April 29, 2019, leaving a profound legacy in creative writing and literary education.