Daniel Lynch came to LaGuardia in 1974. He is a Professor of English and a former chair of the English Department. He has published short stories, poems, essays, reviews, articles on pedagogy and a novel, Ventry (1990). He has received several PSC/CUNY grants for Creative Writing, also a three-year VATEA grant from New York State ($160,000) to introduce the use of computers with word processing software in teaching writing to learning disabled students. This was the start of our department’s use of computers. He is a past president of the New York College English Association. An editor of New York Stories since its inception in Spring 1998, he has been editor-in-chief since 2000. He is also the Grievance Counselor for the College’s chapter of the PSC. In the last year, in 71 visits to LaGuardia’s pool, he has swum 43 miles.

Schools Attended: Fordham College (B.A.) and University of Pennsylvania (M.A. and Ph.D.)

Area of Specialization: The written word and how it comes to be.

Favorite Quote: "The hits keep on comin'." Or, as Heraclitus put it, "Panta rhe." Or, yet again, as Suzuki Roshi said, "All phenomena are in ceaseless change, all subject to the laws of cause and effect." We just have to deal with it.

Authors I teach:

• Sophocles, Oedipus the King, Antigone,
• Euripides, Medea
• The Bible as literature
• William Shakespeare, (most often) The Tempest, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• New York Stories
• I assign a book, generally a novel, in every class I teach. [In 1975, a student who was about to graduate from this college told me had never read a book. I vowed that none of my students would be able to say that.] In addition to a host of poets, essayists and short story writers, in recent years I have taught in various classes these books (in no particular order):
• Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies
• Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
• Toni Morrison, Beloved
• Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones
• Barbara Kingsolver, Pigs in Heaven, Animal Dreams
• Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine
• Art Spiegelman, Maus I & II
• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
• Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
• Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
• Pete Hamill, Forever
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
• Mario Puzo, The Fortunate Pilgrim
• Anza Yezierska, Breadgivers
• Jamaica Kinkcaid, Lucy