ZACHARY MICHAEL JACK has authored or edited more than fifteen award-winning books in a variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, essay, literary journalism, and creative nonfiction. His work has earned the Prentice Hall Prize, two nominations for a Pushcart Prize (Best of the Small Presses), and two nominations for the Theodore Saloutos Award for the year’s best book on agricultural history. Zachary’s work in total has earned him listing in Who’s Who in America.
Zachary’s most recent works are novels celebrating his love of place: What Cheer: A Love Story, a romantic comedy praised by Lynne Carey as a “celebration of Midwestern values at their loving best,” and the family novel The Links of Evalon, a magical realism of a father, a son, and a shared love of sport and spirituality. The WorldGolf Network’s Mike Bailey calls the The Links of Evalon “a lively, easy-to-read tale that teaches that each of us must find our way on the links and in life.”
Specializing in writing on place, sport, and the outdoors, Jack has edited the work of the foremost advocates of nature, place, and outdoor life, including Liberty Bailey in Liberty Hyde Bailey: Essential Agrarian and Environmental Essays, Wendell Berry in Black Earth and Ivory Tower, Henry Wallace in Uncle Henry Wallace: Letters to Farm Families, and, most recently Teddy Roosevelt in The Green Roosevelt. Zachary selected and edited these and other central figures in the environmental conservation movement in the highly regarded reference volume Love of the Land.
Jack’s environmental and rural writings have earned praise from Bill McKibben and A. Carl Leopold, among others, and have been featured in the Chicago Tribune, the Des Moines Register, and on Chicago and Iowa Public Radio. Jack is especially invested in sharing with young adults the transformative power of place, efforts which resulted in his founding and directing of the Iowa School of Lost Arts, and the publication of the well-loved collection about his home state, Letters to a Young Iowan, endorsed by Iowa governors Robert Ray and Terry Branstad, the widely held reference volume Iowa: The Definitive Collection, and an anthology of neglected Regionalist poet-dramatist-fiction writer Jay G. Sigmund, The Plowman Sings.
A former sports editor, Jack most recently authored the family sports novel The Links of Evalon. He contributes to sports and outdoor publications nationwide, and is the editor, most recently of Farewell to Sport and Inside the Ropes: Sportswriters Get Their Game On, a volume L. Jon Wertheim of Sports Illustrated calls “as rich a collection of writing–not just sportswriting, but writing writing–as one could hope to find.” Jack edited the classic voices of sportswriting, including Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, and Paul Gallico in the Golden Age anthology Participatory Sportswriting.
Zachary’s two, award-winning collections of place-based poetry include Perfectly Against the Sun and the Inanity of Music and Wings, called by the Midwest Book Review “Inspiring and evocative work by a remarkably gifted poet.”
An associate professor of English, Jack teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in writing, rural and urban studies, and sports and leadership studies at North Central College. He is the great-grandson of pioneering soil conservation writer Walter Thomas Jack and a proud resident of Iowa, where he continues to steward his Iowa farm.