Brooks Landon is a professor in the University of Iowa English Department, where he teaches courses on contemporary literature, including science fiction, and a Prose Style course devoted entirely to the many forms sentences can take. He is currently fascinated by the apocalyptic turn in contemporary postmodern fiction, and has become an expert in forms taken by our current fascination with zombies, devoting s course, "Dead is the New Alive" to the question: Why do we apparently need all these zombie stories? His postmodern fiction course, "Masters of Disaster", focuses on the many kinds of non-zombie apocalypses that have recently appeared in literary fiction. His Prose Style course is built around his book, Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds Sentences We Love to Read. Landon earned his phD from the University of Texas at Austin and has been at Iowa since 1978.