Born in Kansas City in 1934, Giles Fowler joined the city’s prominent newspaper, the Kansas City Star, following his graduation from Westminster College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. During his 24 years at the Star, Fowler worked as a reporter, film and theater critic, and editor of the paper’s Sunday magazine, and also spent a year writing for The Times of London. He transferred this considerable background in journalism to teaching in 1981 and held positions at Kansas State University and Iowa State University’s Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, from which he retired in 2002.
While at Iowa State, Fowler pursued his interest in factual writing as a literary form, creating two courses in that area. He lectured for national and state writing seminars and became a Teaching Fellow at the Poynter Institute, which offers resources to journalism students, teachers, and practitioners. Fowler has contributed academic articles to Journalism History, Journalism Educator, and Journalism Quarterly, and a chapter on John Steinbeck to A Sourcebook of American Literary Journalism, as well as short fiction to the Sewanee Review. He died in 2018 in Ames, Iowa.
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