The valedictorian of his high school graduating class, a Georgia Governors Honors Program in Science student and an honors graduate and scholarship student of Amherst College where he studied the sciences and majored in English, David Robert Wellens, began teaching English after earning his Masters in English Education (with Dr. Joan Kaywell and Dr. Jeffrey Golub) at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. After a number of years of high school English teaching in the Tampa Bay area, David went overseas to South Korea to teach English as a Foreign Language. He started doing so since 1999 and has often returned to teach English in that country where he was born "David MacLachlan" as a United States Citizen Born Abroad at the US 8th Army Base in Seoul (Feb. 3, 1963). David was born on the same day/ that Robert Frost had passed away.
As a promising math and science student of the famed Dr.Norton Starr (MIT), Dr. Dudley Towne (Harvard), and Dr. Arthur Zajonc (Univ. of Michigan) at Amherst College, he matriculated at the college a few months after Prince Albert of Monaco (a political science and economics major) graduated from the College. David's English Department influences were Dr. Laura Wexler (who later lectured at Yale) Dr. William Heath (University of Wisconsin), Dr. William Pritchard (Harvard), Dr. Andrew Parker(University of Chicago), Dr. David Sofield (Stanford), Dr. Robert Townsend (Harvard), and Dr. Judith Frank (Amherst College). David was the first student ever in the top-ranked department of English at Amherst College to write an autobiographical thesis. The best selling novelist, Dan Brown, was a fellow English major with David. David was also a classmate of the late David Foster Wallace and recalls a three hour conversation with Wallace on campus near Frost Library where they shared their stories. In a strange turn of fate, just a few days after the publication of David R Wellens' first book of poetry, David Foster Wallace took his own life.
David R Wellens was also acquainted with the Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature, Joseph Brodsky, when the young lady David was dating (an exchange student from the Soviet Union and later a physician practicing Podiatry in Florida) introduced them. David briefly audited one of his classes while Brodsky was a professor at Mt. Holyoke College. David still remembers how Brodsky joked about smoking and drinking coffee just before his classes, which was fondly mentioned in a recent biography of the Russian émigré poet.
David has 9 books for sale at this time on Amazon and other book sellers internationally. The book of plays, "Shakespeare Shortened" was first published by Meriwether Publishing, but is on sale privately at this time awaiting a contract from a new publisher, and the second, "A Year in Korea: An American Journal" with Hamilton Books (Rowman & Littlefield), is his account of teaching ESL in South Korea at Chungnam Institute of Foreign Language Education (CIFLE). Three books of prose/auto-biographical/non-fiction, "This Is What Happened", "The Scotch Trio Club" and "The White Door to Heaven" are now available on Kindle and tell the story of David's charmed and sometimes tragedy touched life in Miami and Korea. A few brief academic pieces have also been published via Kindle Direct Publishing. David is presently self-publishing, on Amazon Kindle, a series of shortened Shakespeare plays such as "Othello Shortened" and "Julius Caesar Shortened," and more are on the way.
He has had the pleasure of signing "Poems from Songtan" and including a much welcomed message in it to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. This book, his first book of poetry, is to be found in her personal library, as well as in the great libraries of the UK, the USA and the world. David's mother, Suncha Wellens-Shepard (nee Suncha Chang), a friend of Tom Jones, Jackie Gleason and Hugh Hefner, a mixologist, a model and Playboy Playmate of the Year in the 1970's, has been the author's business and health advisor and constant source of inspiration during all their years, especially after the tragic suicide of David's father Theodore Raymond Wellens in 1977. She is known to her friends as an astute and friendly companion, an entertaining storyteller, as well as a talented concert harmonica player in her youth. She speaks both Korean and English. David hopes to be appointed to a tenured professorship and/or lectureship at one of the great universities in the world. David continues to write, publish, teach, research and travel, as well as play the classical guitar. He also enjoys photography with his Sony camera and collecting fine art. As an adolescent, David raced motocross competitively on a Honda, lettered in tennis in high school and played men's volleyball inter-collegiately for Amherst College. He rushed Phi Delta Sigma and was an active member of the fraternity before such organizations were disbanded on the campus of the College. He also studied classical guitar performance with the renowned Philip DeFremery.
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