David Collins

Switching in the mid-1990s from scholarly writing to creative nonfiction, Dave Collins published essays in a host of literary magazines, interviews with two Paris-based American writers (Diane Johnson and Jake Lamar), and a fourteen-month newspaper column on life in Rwanda after the genocide. He has written as well for commercial magazines including two of his all-time favorite essays, "The Other St. Louis" for St. Louis Magazine and "The Night America's Caged-bird Sang at Westminster," a reflection on Maya Angelou's appearance at Westminster College where he taught English for forty years. Three of his short essays have won awards, two first place finishes, one second. A chapter from the manuscript of Accidental Activists: Mark Phariss, Vic Holmes, and Their Fight for Marriage Equality in Texas won the Mayborn Prize for (booklength) Literary Nonfiction in 2016. Accidental Activists is his first book. "My writing Accidental Activists began almost by accident," he likes to say. "I met Mark Phariss first as a student in 1978, never dreaming that I would one-day write a book about him and his now-husband, Vic Holmes. When in the fall of 2013 Mark announced that he and Vic were suing Texas for the right to marry, I sent a message of encouragement and suggested he should keep a journal of his experience with the idea of writing a book one day." Within minutes, Mark called. "Why don't you write the book?" he asked. "I did," Collins says now, "and discovered in the process that I had enrolled in the ranks of Bayard Rustin's "angelic troublemakers." Rustin was the man who taught Martin Luther King the art of non-violent protest, who organized the 1963 March on Washington where King gave his famed "I Have a Dream" speech. "Standing with Bayard Rustin, that's a good place to be."