University of Dallas News

Issue date: 4/29/08 Section: Feature

The door to Andrew Osborn's office is open. He's sitting at his desk, meticulously correcting what I assume to be Literary Tradition II essays. The tweed sports jacket he wears fits perfectly, the cuffs of his white dress shirt exposed in just the right amounts. His legs - clad in neatly pressed dress pants - wrap tightly around the chair beneath him. With his back arched stiffly over his desk, he seems more like a hawk preparing for flight than an English professor grading essays written by freshmen. The frameless glasses that rest easily on his ears curve to the bone structure of his face, adding to his hawkish appearance while paradoxically correcting his imperfect sight. I knock softly on his door. Without turning his head, he says in a deep, matter of fact voice: "Is that you? Come in." That's the first thing I learned about Andrew Osborn: he's not easily distracted.

To say that Osborn maintains a pristine appearance is a gross understatement. He looks more like a mathematician than a poet. There's some truth to that look. Before Osborn ever considered himself a poet, he was interested in a career in the scientific field. He wrote poetry as a child, but never with any serious intentions. As a self-described "Jack of All Trades," poetry seemed to be more of a pastime than a profession: "I wrote a poem when I was a kid called 'Big Bang of the City.' Basically, it was about a country boy who was interested in a city. It focused on collisions between ball-bearing like entities."

Coming from Readfield, Maine, Osborn grew up in a rural setting. He attended a public high school that offered no AP classes. During his lunch breaks, Osborn would teach himself mathematics so that he wouldn't be behind upon entering college. Had he been just a few years older, he might have taken some of his high school English classes with the critically acclaimed horror fiction writer Stephen King, who taught at Osborn's high school for some time. King or no King, the high school he attended did not afford him the opportunity to write much. "In a public high school, if you don't have AP courses, and you don't have small class sizes, you don't get much of an opportunity to do any writing because the teachers can't read it," he said. "So, I'm assuming that I always had a talent for this [writing], but I never got to explore it until Harvard."
Upon entering Harvard as an undergraduate, Osborn planned to major in mathematics. Not long after he began his college career, however, he knew that math wasn't for him: "I was taking multi-variable calculus courses as a freshman. I was getting hundreds on all the tests, but so was everyone else. I didn't have any clue what it was all leading to. The classes were really boring. I knew that I was already a couple of years behind because the kids from the cities had been studying at elite science and math schools."

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