Background

Bruce Cutler was born on October 8, 1930, in Evanston, Illinois, United States. Cutler died of kidney cancer, March 24, 2001, in Santa Cruz, California, United States.

Education

Bruce Cutler attended Northwestern University in 1949, the University of Iowa and the Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science (now Kansas State University, Manhattan), where he received his Master of Science in 1957. He did further graduate study at the Universita Degli Studi, Naples, Italy in 1957-1958.

Career

Cutler's early career found him at Wichita State University, where he taught in the English Department between 1960 and 1978, serving as Professor, Distinguished Professor of Humanities, Adele M. Davis Distinguished Professor of Humanities, and, from 1967, coordinator of the creative writing program, the first in Kansas to offer the Master of Fine Arts in fiction and poetry.

While in Kansas, he became interested in the history, culture, and landscape of the place, and in 1962 (a year after the celebration of the Kansas statehood centennial) he published “A West Wind Rises: The Marais des Cygnes Massacre.” In 1964, he used Sun City, Kansas, which is a collection of that name. In 1969 he edited the poetry of Wellington poet and woodcut artist May Williams Ward, for a collection “In That Day.”

Cutler was very active in the Fulbright program, traveling to and teaching in Paraguay, Argentina, Ecuador, Spain, and Switzerland. He also traveled to Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Honduras, and Panama.

Cutler published eleven books of poetry, beginning with a “First Book Poetry Award” in 1960 from the University of Nebraska Press for “The Year of the Green Wave.” One of his last books, “The Massacre at Sand Creek,” was nominated for a National Book Award in 1995.

In 1999, the Washburn University Center for Kansas Studies worked with Cutler to reprint “A West Wind Rises,” partly set near Trading Post, Kansas.

Achievements

• Cutler was a poet who, in addition to penning nearly a dozen volumes of prose, taught English and humanities at Wichita State University. He was responsible for developing the creative writing program there during the late 1960s, and in 1978 was named Adele M. Davis Distinguished Professor of Humanities. An award-winning poet, Cutler earned a First Book Poetry Award in 1960 from the University of Nebraska Press for “The Year of the Green Wave.” Some of his other writings include “A West Wind Rises,” “The Arts at the Grass Roots,” and “The Massacre at Sand Creek,” a book that was nominated for a National Book Award in 1995.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Massacre at Sand Creek: Narrative Voices

    (In the dawn of November 29, 1864, a Colorado militia unit...)

    1995
  • Seeing the Darkness: Naples, 1943-1945

    (Naples, Italy, was the first major European city to be li...)

  • At War With Mexico: A Fictional Mosaic 2001
  • Dark Fire: A Narrative Poem

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 194
  2010