Welcome to Shadow Chasing! I’m Graley Herren, the creator of this site. Let me tell you a little bit about myself.
I grew up in a tiny town in middle Tennessee called Baxter. After graduating from Upperman High School, I went to college at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. I met my future wife Cathy at the UT Bookstore where we both worked. We got married and moved to Tallahassee where I got a doctorate in English at Florida State University.
In 1998, I was fortunate to get a job as an English professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati. I’ve worked there ever since, teaching a wide variety of classes, including courses on Bob Dylan. Oh, I should also mention that Cathy and I had a son in 2000…and named him Dylan!
I’ve also been active as a scholar, publishing (among other things) three books: Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), and Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind (Anthem Press, 2021).
I love Bob Dylan and am endlessly fascinated with his art. Shadow Chasing gives me a space to post my latest writing on Dylan, putting his work into conversation with a wide array of other artists and situating his art within various cultural, historical, and aesthetic contexts. I have a lot of fun putting these pieces together, and I hope you find them both enlightening and enjoyable. Thanks for reading!
