Born and raised in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, Stephen Lewis holds a doctorate in Puritan American Literature from New York University, and he is Professor of English Emeritus at Suffolk Community College, on Long Island, New York. He now lives on five acres in a restored farmhouse on Old Mission Peninsula in northern lower Michigan.
Throughout his career, he has been both a
writer and a teacher of writing. As a teacher, he has worked with
college level and adult learner students in a variety of settings from
standard classrooms, to online, to one on one tutorials, to small group
workshops. In all of these environments, he has had success
encouraging student writers to improve their skills. In a
number of instances, these successes have led directly to publication.
His writing career
began with a college textbook publication in 1970, followed by four
more texts over the next twenty years. During this period, he
also published short stories, poetry, and articles. His first
novel, The Monkey Rope was published
in 1990 followed by And Baby Makes None (1991)
two mysteries set in Brooklyn and published by Walker &
Company. He turned his attention to a different time and place,
New England in the seventeenth century, for Mysteries of
Colonial Times, written for Berkley, and drawing upon
his expertise as a scholar of New England Puritanism. The
Dumb Shall Sing, the first of this series was published
August, 1999, followed by The Blind in Darkness
in May, 2000, and The Sea Hath Spoken
January, 2001. His historical novel, Murder On Old
Mission, put out in 2005 by Arbutus Press, was a finalist
in the historical fiction category of ForeWord Magazine’s
book of the year awards. His mystery novel, Stone
Cold Dead, was submitted by Arbutus to the 2007
Edgars. Mission Point Press in 2017 reissued Murder On Old Mission and published its sequel Murder Undone.
He continues writing in various genres. Broadview Press, a Canadian house, published his sixth college textbook, Templates, a sentence level rhetoric. His short stories "Mumblety-peg" and "Like Water Over Stones" appeared in Rosebud Magazine in 2018 and 2019. Subsequent to them he reworked the blog describing his being the caregiver for his wife who succumbed to early onset dementia into a book (see Published Works). Feeling the need to always be writing something, he now produces a regular column for the Traverse City Record Eagle. He's also looking for a home for his literary novel Two Sisters, which explores both the Holocaust and assimilation into American culture.