Michael Kuelker was a full-time faculty member in the English department at St. Charles Community College from 1990 to 2019, teaching ENG 101, ENG 102, American literature survey courses, Introduction to Poetry, Creative Writing I, Contemporary Literature, and other courses. One of his specialty areas is Holocaust Literature. During his SCC career, Kuelker was awarded SCC Global Educator of the Year (2001) and Teacher of the Year (2004), and at SCC he also received mentor awards from Phi Theta Kappa in 2009 and 2011 and the President’s Award in 2019.
In 2001, Kuelker initiated an event that became an annual fixture: SCC Democracy Days, a four-day education forum whose mission is “to examine the history, health, and functioning of democracy in America and abroad.” The forum features presentations and panels by faculty, students, staff, administrators, and invited guests. Kuelker was the lead organizer of D DAYS until 2022, and the event carries on. See stchas.edu/democracydays.
Kuelker’s passion to study Holocaust history and literature dates back to his student days at St. Louis University in the 1980s. He has taught a course in Holocaust literature since the early 2000s, and his teaching is informed and fortified by his work as an interviewer of Holocaust survivors for the USC Shoah Foundation and the St. Louis Holocaust Museum. For 20 years, he has served on the Yom HaShoah Planning Committee at the St. Louis Holocaust Museum, helping in the months-long process to plan the annual public Holocaust remembrance commemoration. All of this find its way into teaching Holocaust history, memoir, fiction, poetry, and other materials of documentation and witness.
See “My Journey Studying and Teaching the Holocaust” by Michael Kuelker at Academia.edu. Kuelker is cited in a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article on Yom HaShoah 2014. He is cited in an article in the St. Louis Jewish Light about genocide in Darfur and the Holocaust.
Kuelker’s emphasis areas also include Jamaican literature, music, and culture as well as the music, history, and culture of the Ozarks. He is the editor and publisher of Book of Memory: A Rastafari Testimony (CaribSound Ltd 2005), the spiritual memoir by Jamaican Rastafari elder Prince Elijah Williams, and he penned and published The Ozark Mountain Daredevils on Record: A Narrative Discography (FM Books & Music 2022). He is an interviewee in the documentary film The Ozark Mountain Daredevils: Backstage (Ozarks Public Television 2022).
Today, Kuelker retains his position as Professor Emeritus of English at St. Charles Community College, and he is seeking adjunct teaching opportunities locally in St. Louis, MO.
Teacher and Writer