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Quick Facts
Biography
David King Dunaway is Professor of English at the University of New Mexico and Distinguished Professor of Broadcasting and Documentary Studies, San Francisco State University (2009-2015). He is a national radio producer/podcaster, biographer, and an international expert in American studies specializing in oral history, folk music, and Route 66.
Books
David Dunaway's first book, How Can I Keep From Singing, the first biography of folk musician and social activist Pete Seeger, was based on his doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, and first released in 1981. Since then, it has been translated into Japanese and Spanish and been through six printings. Working with Seeger, Dunaway completed a revised, updated version of the biography in 2008 from Villard Books/Random House.
In addition, Dunaway is also the editor of Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (with Willa Baum; second edition, Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), and the author of Huxley in Hollywood (Harper Collins, 1990), Writing the Southwest (with Sarah Spurgeon; revised edition, University of New Mexico Press, 2003), Aldous Huxley Recollected (AltaMira/Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), Across the Tracks: A Route 66 Story (previously printed), and Oral History on Route 66: A Manual (National Park Service, 2005). His most recent works are Singing Out: An Oral History of America's Folk Music Revivals (with Molly Beer; Oxford, 2010), A Pete Seeger Discography (Scarecrow Press/Rowman, 2011), and A Route 66 Companion (University of Texas Press, 2012) .
Radio series
Dunaway has been active in radio since 1972, when he produced "Midnight Country" for KPFA-FM in Berkeley. Four of his radio documentary series were developed in conjunction with his books – "Writing the Southwest" (1995) with funding from the NEH and the Humanities Endowments in Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico; "Aldous Huxley's Brave New Worlds" (1998) funded by the California and New Mexico Endowments for the Humanities and Public Radio International; and "Across the Tracks: A Route 66 Story" (2001) which received awards from the International Radio Festival, the Associated Press, and a Silver Reel. In 2008-9, he produced "Pete Seeger" on PRI, three, one-hour documentaries airing on more than 300 stations and winning Best of Show: Audio from the Broadcast Education Association. He is currently a DJ for KUNM-FM in Albuquerque, NM.
Magazine and journal articles
Dunaway has written extensively for the popular media, with articles on music, social activism, and oral history appearing in venues from Mother Jones to the Village Voice and the New York Times. In 2004, his writing on the Danish government's efforts to derail the world's oldest experiment in anarchy, Christiania, was carried by the San Francisco Chronicle and National Public Radio's Morning Edition.
Dunaway also writes extensively for academic audiences, contributing articles to scholarly journals such as the Oral History Review and The Public Historian, the Journal of American Folklore, Southwestern American Literature, and New Media and Society.
Current projects
Dunaway works with the National Park Service's Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program. After a three-year research project locating, identifying, and cataloguing archives on Route 66, with a particular focus on oral history collections, he's now interviewing Route 66's historians and planning a nationwide project to interpret Route 66, including his anthology, A Route 66 Companion. Currently, he's writing the first book on the experience of wearing glasses, Four Eyes (www.glassers.us)