Trent Hergenrader
Writer | Professor | Gamer
About me
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of English and College of Liberal Arts at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where I serve as the Director of the Center for Worldbuilding and Storytelling. I earned my Ph.D. in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing in 2013 from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I am a co-founder of the Creative Writing Studies Organization and the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, for which I serve as one of the senior editors. My scholarship deals with the creative process of worldbuilding, using tabletop role-playing games to teach aspects of fiction writing, and the study of large-scale transmedia storyworlds in print fiction, films, television, comics, and games.
I live in Rochester, NY with my family where I spend a considerable amount of time outdoors in all four seasons. I am a lifelong global soccer fanatic, a lover of tabletop role-playing games, and an unrepentant Iberiofile who is working on improving his Spanish and learning Portuguese.
Scholarship
My scholarship resides at the intersection of creative writing studies, digital pedagogy, and games and game-based learning.
This includes my academic publications, the classes I teach, my creative projects and digital experiments, and my print fiction and prose.
AUTHOR
Collaborative
Worldbuilding
for Writers and Gamers
Provides a structured methodology for writers and game designers to co-create vast fictional worlds for use as common settings.
CO-EDITOR
Creative Writing Innovations
This edited collection explores topics such as multimedia genres, collaborative writing, field-based work, and issues of authorial identity.
CO-EDITOR
Creative Writing in the Digital Age
From social media tools to Inform 7, the book investigates the benefits and potential challenges emerging technologies present to creative writing instructors.
CO-AUTHOR
The Worldbuilding Workshop
Describes the learning theories and application of worldbuilding, games, and play to develop students’ critical thinking and empathy.
News & Notes
From time to time, I will post news and notes about what I’ve been up to recently. This includes travel, outdoor activities and camping trips, good things I’ve eaten, the state of world football (especially in regards to the US National Teams, La Liga in Spain, and the Premier League in England), games I’m playing, what I’m working on, conferences I’m attending or presenting at, and musings on politics, literature, philosophy, media, and the ongoing process of learning the Spanish language.
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