Steve Almond Quits BC Writing Post

Resignations don’t get much more public than Steve Almond’s Boston Globe op-ed from Friday afternoon, an open letter to Boston College president William P. Leah announcing that he was quitting his adjunct English professor’s job over BC’s selection of Condoleezza Rice as this year’s commencement speaker. And it’s not just that he doesn’t like the war in Iraq. “Simply put,” he writes, “Rice is a liar… I cannot, in good conscience, exhort my students to pursue truth and knowledge, then collect a paycheck from an institution that displays such flagrant disregard for both.”

Mind you, Almond won’t exactly be twiddling his thumbs. In addition to being in the middle of a month-long book tour to support Which Brings Me To You, a novel written in collaboration with Julianna Baggott, he recently signed a two-book deal with Random House, which exercised a pre-empt in order to land Not That You Asked, a batch of “subversive and humorous” essays. (One wonders if it’ll include his infamous attack on an unimpressed bookblogger…)

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