James McConkey, is Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus at Cornell University. Known for his meditative nonfiction narratives, James McConkey began teaching at Cornell in 1956, as an assistant professor in the English department. He wrote fiction until the early 1960s, and retired in 1992 as Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus. McConkey is the author or editor of 14 books, including Court of Memory, Stories from My Life with the Other Animals, To a Distant Island, and The Anatomy of Memory. His research and teaching interests are Creative writing (poetry and fiction), Modern literature and prose, Modern fiction, particularly British.