Bob Kunzinger reads throughout the world at Literature Festivals, Workshops, Conferences, Senior Facilities, Universities, High Schools, and Pubs.

His work has appeared in countless magazines and journals, including the Washington Post, the Southern Humanities Review, St Anthony Messenger, Kestrel, the Chronicle of Higher Education, World War Two History, and more, including dozens of newspapers. Several of his essays have been noted by Best American Essays, and he has published nine collections of works, including the critically acclaimed Penance: Walking with the Infant, and Borderline Crazy. His critically acclaimed book, A Third Place: Notes in Nature, is available from Madville Publishing of Texas. His memoir The Iron Scar: A Father and Son in Siberia has been critically praised by Newsday, Yahoo Entertainment! Best selling author Tim O’Brien, and Actor/writer Martin Sheen. It has been nominated for a Library of Virginia Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and a National Book Award. 

Reviews:

I wish every book I’ve read over the past two months had been as moving, gripping, and loaded with fascinating information. The journey becomes an emotional and thematic whole that transcends the standard “look what I saw” travel book. So many things stick with me: the royal blue station shacks, the birches with no tops, the meat and potato pastries, the smell of onions, the vodka, the wheel tapping, the once-in-hundred-year flooding, the vast vacancies of human presence, the moving village of the train, the Leningrad hero, the Leningrad ghosts . . . Just so much. Well done!

-Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato

The Iron Scar brought me on a journey that unexpectedly and artfully had me thinking about my own father and my sons throughout the book, as well as introducing me to the wild, warm, and colorful world of Siberia. Thank you for bringing me onboard with you and your son.

-Martin Sheen, actor and author of Along the Way: The Journey of a Father and Son

Last night I finished reading A Third Place and was every bit as impressed as I thought I’d be. I’m too often blind to the world around me, snagged up inside myself, and your book made me keenly—even painfully—aware of all I had been missing. One sentence (among many) that collided with me had to do with how we go looking for one thing and then discover another, which is the case not only in regard to nature but also in regard to people. Also, I was frequently startled by how things I would’ve passed by without notice caught your attention, then caught your writer’s sensibility, then led to ruminations that embraced not only the natural world but also meanings and associations at the core of life itself, including human consciousness, human behavior, and human yearning. It’s a beautifully written book. And a beautifully thought book.

The best writing about place– and that includes this book — really starts from the place within. This book transforms place into parables, so that a shoreline becomes the edge of the only reality we tread, a bay becomes the estuary of our own heart. I find in these times, I really need the prose and acuity and poetic soul of someone like Bob Kunzinger, who has mastered the art of turning time into the essay, which is his gift to his readers. A truly redemptive writer working at the top of his game, this book belongs by your fireside— or in that cramped seat on the plane! 🙂

–Jacki Lyden, NPR

For information and scheduling, contact 757.581.4063 or email bobkunzinger@yahoo.com