Eric Dregni


Eric Dregni is an American author. He is an associate professor of English and Journalism, at Concordia University in Saint Paul, Minnesota where he teaches writing. He has written or co-written travel memoirs and essays about Minnesota, Norway, and Italy, as well as guidebooks and books on popular culture in American Midwest.

Childhood and personal life

Dregni lives with his wife, Katy, and two sons in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis. His family lived in Belgium when he was a child, and traveled in Britain and Northern Europe before they settled in Minnetonka.
In the 1990s he played in the amateur novelty band Vinnie and the Stardüsters. Dregni founded the band with John Perkins. The two met as teenagers on a junior high school church trip but formed the band as undergraduates at Macalester College. Dregni, a music major, graduated in 1990.

Career

A profile in the MinnPost characterized Dregni's writing career as suggestive of a man on "an endless vacation." He has written a number of guidebooks to the American Midwest, the product of a series of road trips. His book In Cod We Trust, came out of a Fulbright Fellowship that funded Dregni to spend 2003 in Norway with his wife and their newborn son. "Never Trust a Thin Cook," was written after a series of extended visits to Italy, culminating in a year-long residence in Modena in the 1990s.

As author