jtcomo7@gmail.com 917.923.2856

As a lecturer, writer, teacher, and communication consultant JAMES COMO has counseled and addressed a broad diversity of people within a wide range of settings at home and abroad.  He holds the Ph.D. in Language, Literature and Rhetoric from Columbia University and now is Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric and Public Communication at York College (CUNY) where, upon joining the faculty in 1968, he founded the Speech discipline and thereafter, with a number of colleagues, the Department of Performing and Fine Arts, which he would chair for fifteen years.

A founding member of the New York C. S. Lewis Society (1969), his Branches to Heaven: The Geniuses of C. S. Lewis is a ground-breaking study of Lewis as a rhetorician and his Remembering C. S. Lewis is a benchmark biographical anthology now in its third edition (and fourth decade).  These, along with his many articles on Lewis in such journals as The Wilson Quarterly and The New Criterion and on-air commentary for five biographical documentaries have established Dr. Como as one of the most highly-regarded Lewis scholars in the world.  His most noteworthy book, from the Oxford University Press, is A Very Short Introduction to C. S. Lewis.

His contributions to rhetorical theory and criticism have been at international conferences and as journalism.  As a credentialed foreign journalist he covered the landmark Peruvian elections of 1990 and and has written on Peruvian culture and communication often since then.  Most recently he has published essays, stories and poems in a number of different venues, a recent book being ‘The Tongue is Also a Fire’: essays on conversation, rhetoric and the transmission of culture. . . and on C. S. Lewis.

He has been a Chancellor’s Access to Excellence honoree and a Salvatori Fellow with the Heritage Foundation and is a member of the International Spanish Honor Society.  At York College his commitment to outstanding teaching has been recognized by students with a number of awards, notably from the York College Alumni Association and the York college Male Initiative Program.

• “James Como remarks that as he worked his way through the Lewis corpus he discovered that ‘coming through the words was a distinctive person who exuded trustworthiness.’  The same could be said of the author, who, in this succinct and sweeping introduction to Lewis the man, the writer, and the apologist delights the reader with a broad grasp of Lewis’s life and works and performs the admirable task of whetting one’s appetite, not only for reading Lewis for the first time but also for reading him again – and again.”   
• – Fr. John Morrison, To Love Another Person: A Spiritual Journey Through ‘Les Miserables.   

Here is his latest book on C. S. Lewis: