Talk:Tom Kealey

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This guy appears to be someone of significance to the Stanford University Community, and to essentially no one else. 70.132.14.22 07:42, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Kealey literally wrote the book on Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing programs, one of the fastest-growing graduate school fields (approximately 50 programs in the early 80s, approximately 300 such programs now, according to an article in this month's Atlantic). His blog is considered a primary resource for aspiring poets and novelists, not to mention he has published in several journals/magazines of note (particularly Best American Non-Required Reading, Prairie Schooner, Story Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Indiana Review--these are some of the top national journals in short fiction). The Wallace Stegner Fellowship Kealey received is perhaps the most prestigious creative writing fellowship in the United States. He was a finalist for one of the most important fiction awards in the country, the Iowa Fiction Award (given by the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, ranked #1 in the U.S. in its field [i.e. the creative writing M.F.A.] since its inception back in the 1930s). I could go on. He's significant, IMO.

Come now, you and I both know that he's a popular prof at Stanford and that lots of people enjoy his class, and that they are pretty much the main reason this page is here. Wikipedia is not for fan pages, even for professors. As for all the stuff you mentioned -- pretty much every professor at a major institution is published in journals relating to his field, and yet -- surprise surprise -- we don't have pages for all of them, or even most of them, or even a significant minority of them. Stanford is a great school, and most of its professors are notable within the rather limited context of their particular fields. That doesn't make them generally notable enough for a Wikipedia entry, imho. I'm going to go out on a limb here -- you're a student of his, aren't you? 70.132.14.22 07:59, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Actually, no. I live and work on the opposite side of the continent from Kealey. I disagree with you on several counts: first, I don't think you can compare a professor of, say, economics, who publishes in esoteric journals nobody reads, with a professor who's a novelist and publishes the sort of work that everyone reads--that is, fiction. There's a reason (and this is my second point) that the notability guidelines talk about periodicals with distributions of more than 5,000--it's because that pushes out most academics who publish in specialized fields not of general interest (e.g., if Wikipedia featured an article on every physical chemist who'd ever published an article in a scientific journal we'd double the site's entries in a night; unlike novelists, scientists take decades, not years, to hit "the big time," if they ever do--for novelists, appearing in major periodicals is usually the penultimate step in the process), and the Wikipedia guidelines thus include, quite intentionally, those who begin publishing widely in fields of general interest. Frankly, just on appearing in Best American Non-Required Reading he'd meet the 5,000+ requirement. Instead, he "won" the biggest fellowship award in his field and has been a finalist for one of the biggest publishing awards, all the while regularly placing his work in journals that meet this site's notability requirements. The problem with this entry, really, is that so much personal data has been included that it feels like a resume, and that almost all the data appears beneath the "contents box," making the entry proper look right empty. The reason I haven't moved things around yet, frankly, is because I was hoping that those who put those aspects of the article there in the first place (e.g. "volunteer work") would come to this space and explain their thinking. I still hope they'll do that; otherwise, all this article needs, I think, is a cleanup.