Michael Austin teaches Eighteenth-Century British Literature, World Literature, and Rhetoric at Shepherd College in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, where his wife, Karen, is Director of the Writing Center. While in graduate school at the University of California at Santa Barbara, he became interested in Mormon Literature and wrote the article, "The Function of Mormon Literary Criticism at the Present Time," which won the 1995 Association for Mormon Letters Award for Criticism. He currently writes a column in Sunstone on Mormonism and Literature and has, in addition to his work on this topic, published articles on Saul Bellow, Daniel Defoe, Abraham Cowley, and the literature of the Old Testament.