Clay Zuba

I am a writer and teacher based in Phoenix, Arizona. I received my Ph.D. in English from the University of Delaware in May of 2016. In addition to Delaware, I have taught at major universities across the United States, from George Mason, to the University of Houston, to the University of Arizona. In the fall of 2017, I made the move to teach at Xavier College Prep, a prominent college preparatory school in Phoenix. 

In 2023, I completed the manuscript for my first novel, “Love in the House of the Seven Gables,” a gothic mystery that serves as a prequel to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel House of the Seven Gables.

My path here began in the northwest Chicago suburbs, where I grew up in the land of windy, icy winters, and hot, humid summers. After receiving my Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Illinois with a concentration in literature and a minor in Philosophy, I moved to Austin, Texas. While taking a few years off before graduate school, I unexpectedly developed a successful career in real estate finance. Over a period of eight years I progressed from underwriting loans, to executing transactions in excess of $350 million for Wall Street firms, to serving as Vice President for a national banker where I managed an office of fifty-five people. 

But eventually, I recognized that my deep desire to study literature endured. I enrolled full-time in the Master of Arts in English program at the University of Houston, where I learned to study discourses of race and imperialism in writers like Herman Melville and Catherine Maria Sedgwick. Later, as a doctoral candidate at Delaware, I began to study Native American literatures, and how Native Americans adapted and resisted European writing and narrative forms. My doctoral dissertation was supported by a twelve-month dissertation fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, as well as research fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society and the Winterthur Museum and Library, and support from the University of Delaware. I finished "Printing Indians and the Imperial Contest in America" in 2016, with Edward Larkin generously serving as the project's Dissertation Director.

After finishing graduate work, I moved with my wife and kittens to Phoenix, AZ. After five years on the East Coast, we both sorely missed the warm weather and desert landscapes of the Southwest. In Arizona, I juggled teaching gigs between Arizona State and Scottsdale Community College.

While I teach, I'm writing a blog about Nathaniel Hawthorne and composing weird fiction set in the world of the author's classic novel The House of the Seven Gables. I stay active outdoors running, hiking, and camping and I like to take pictures of cats.