job offer from the President of Ave Maria College in Michigan. The Pearces arrived in the United States on September 7, 2001. Pearce recalls that his first day of teaching coincided with the September 11 attacks, "making my arrival in the States something of a baptism of fire." The first issue of the Catholic literary magazine the St. Austin Review, which Pearce has coedited ever since alongside Robert Asch, was also published in September 2001. Pearce was the host of the 2009 EWTN television series The Quest for Shakespeare. Based upon his eponymous book, the show is concerned with Pearce's belief that Shakespeare was a Catholic. In a 2014 essay, Pearce announced that he had become an American citizen. In his 2017 stage play Death Comes for the War Poets, according to Catholic Arts Today, Pearce weaves "a verse tapestry," about the military and spiritual journeys of war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. In a 2022 interview with Pearce, Polish journalist Anna Szyda from the literary magazine Magna Polonia explained that the nihilism of modern American poetry is widely noticed and commented upon in the Third Polish Republic as reflecting, "the deleterious influence of the contemporary civilisation on the American soul." In response, Pearce described "the neo-formalist revival" inspired by the late Richard Wilbur and how it has been reflected in recent verse by the Catholic poets whom he and Robert Asch publish in the St. Austin Review. Pearce said that the Catholic faith and optimism of the younger generation of Catholic poets made him feel hope for the future. In July 2022, Pearce was a speaker at the 41st Annual Conference of the American Chesterton Society in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Pearce's lecture was titled "How Chesterton Saved Me from anti-Semitism". Works Publications Published in the United States as Published in the United States as (Book Review and Summary) References Primary Secondary External links Autobiographical page Saint Austin Review Clips of Joseph Pearce speaking about his conversion: 1, 2 Joseph Pearce speaks about his conversion The Quest for Shakespeare, EWTN's page for the TV show Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings — A Catholic Worldview 1961 births American Roman Catholic poets American modernist poets Ave Maria University faculty British expatriate academics in the United States British modernist poets Catholic philosophers Converts to Roman Catholicism from atheism or agnosticism Distributism English biographers English emigrants to the United States English Catholic poets English