When Patrick Lee Clark was headed for a career in pro football, he realized he was chasing someone else’s dream and approval. Turning down offers to go pro, he chose instead to follow his true passions: teaching and music. Now, he’s sharing those lessons in authenticity and purpose with his students at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD).

Clark grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas—the son of a mother who drove school buses for a living and a father who was a retired Veteran and USPS worker wanting him to seize those football opportunities. When Clark was presented with offers to play football professionally after successful years as an undergraduate student-athlete, he had to choose whether to pursue his own dreams or those of so many others.

Ultimately, Clark recognized that in order to be true to himself, he would have to leave the sports opportunities on the field. He started teaching college courses at the age of 23 and has continued for over 15 years. Since then, he’s spent his time pursuing those twin passions of teaching and music.

Clark now serves as a teaching assistant professor of English in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS) at UMD. Outside the classroom, he performs as a singer/songwriter under the stage name Lee Clark Allen, a fusion of his mother’s and father’s given names. His music is described as a blend of R&B, soul, blues, jazz, and gospel. And he works to bring some of those personal experiences and pop culture into how he teaches at UMD.

“I like to bring my authentic self into spaces, and UMD has allowed me to do that,” he said. “I knew Duluth was a good place for me.”

Clark works to channel that authenticity into the classroom by connecting theoretical concepts with real-world examples. “I try to bring real-life stuff into the classroom,” he said. By bringing popular music into discussions, he and his students look at the work of artists like Tupac Shakur, and his own alter-ego Lee Clark Allen, analyzing how they were written, breaking down the concepts of the work, and using them as a jumping-off point for assignments, writing letters and expository essays.

Clark is one of the instructors of College Writing (WRIT 1120), a course that all students must take to fulfill their liberal education requirement for writing and information literacy at UMD. In that class, students like Jules Howes learn and hone skills in critical thinking, argumentation, revision, and documentation. “It's a good class for me because I need to learn how to write, especially for college,” says Howes. “I want to succeed and have a future. I think a lot of that is learning how to write.” Preparing students like Howes for writing tasks they’ll encounter at UMD and beyond is exactly what Clark and other instructors of the course aspire to achieve.

“In my fifteen years of teaching,” Clark says, he’s found that students want to be heard, and to be “where the environment is safe enough for them to do their own thing with space for them to flourish.”

Part of the way he achieves that, says student Sasha Dunlap, is to give students autonomy. Whether it’s providing options for approaches to a task or subjects to work with, “He gives us choices where not everyone would give us a choice.”

Clark hopes to see his students thrive. His work is about empowering them to follow their own dreams, and sometimes that means pursuing a fulfilling career that can also support a passion. He hopes that his classes and the growth that students experience at UMD can “Give them the tools to help them dream,” he says. And then? “Go get it.”

All music explores vulnerability, says Clark. That’s true of his own work, and something that he recognizes with students, too. “Every act of being a student is an act of vulnerability, of submitting a paper, or of raising your hand to ask a question,” he says. “Every day they are being vulnerable.” Clark will be releasing his debut LP album, My World is Yours, August 2025 with 20 songs. Photo submitted.