Pacific Mourns Passing Of MFA In Writing Professor Jack Driscoll

The Pacific University Master of Fine Arts in Writing program remembers longtime faculty member Jack Driscoll, who passed away on June 25, 2024, at age 78.

Driscoll passed away peacefully at his home in Mystic, Connecticut after a six-month battle with pancreatic cancer.

His passing came during the MFA’s program’s annual summer residency, which allowed faculty, alumni and staff to remember and celebrate his life and legacy. Announcing the news of his passing during the residency, program director Scott Korb referred to Driscoll as a literary hero, whose love of language and song shaped a generation of students and the MFA forever.

Driscoll joined the Pacific MFA faculty in 2006. The author of four books of poems, three collections of short stories and four novels, he won numerous awards for his literary work. His novel, Lucky Man, Lucky Woman, received the 1998 Pushcart Editors’ Book Award, the Barnes and Noble Discovery of Great New Writers Award and the 1999 Independent Book Publishers Award for Fiction.

His final book, Twenty Stories, a collection of new and selected works, was published by Pushcart in late 2022 and won the Pushcart Editors’ Book Award. He was also a two-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship.

Prior to joining the Pacific MFA faculty, Driscoll founded the creative writing program at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan. He led the program from 1975 until his retirement in 2008 and continued to serve the program as an artist-in-residence.

Driscoll was preceded in death by his wife, Lois, in 2021. He is survived by his daughter, Cate; twin brother Toby Driscoll; sisters Gail Deliso, Maura Driscoll Ditmar and Bean Driscoll; two grandchildren and many nieces, nephews and friends.

Read more about Jack Driscoll in this tribute posted by the Interlochen Center for the Arts.

Photo courtesy of the Interlochen Center for the Arts and used by permission.