Forthcoming (in June 2023) is A Description of Acquaintance: The Letters of Laura Riding and
Gertrude Stein, 1927–1930, which I have co-edited with Jane Malcolm.
I am also currently working on a monograph, “Gertrude Stein in Letters,” in support of which
I received a Edith and Richard French Fellowship from the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript
Library, Yale University.
I am the Anglo-American reviews editor for the journal Textual Cultures.
I have co-edited, with Deborah Mix, an MLA volume,
Approaches to Teaching the Works of Gertrude Stein. It includes contextual materials
and 26 essays by various contributors on the lifetime of Gertrude Stein’s writing,
from the 1890s to the 1940s. The essays are organized into four sections to highlight Stein’s
particular habit of writing across and between various genres, from narrative prose to poetry
and portraits, to plays and operas, to essays that articulate her creative principles.
Separate from this volume I have an essay in Modernism/modernity on
teaching Tender Buttons. (I recommend this edition of Tender Buttons.)
My workshop edition of Gertrude Stein’s novel Ida (1941) has been published by
Yale University Press, and a related article on Stein’s archive, “Gertrude Stein’s Twin,” is
in Textual Practice (25.6). This edition of Ida includes a suite of contextualizing materials:
drafts, letters, and intertexts from Stein’s archive; reviews of the novel; essays by Thornton
Wilder, her main interlocutor in the late 1930s; and the story of the Ida character’s referent,
Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor. See the reviews in The New York Times and
ALA’s Choice.
I have published articles that address letter writing: “Dickinson’s Epistolary ‘Naturalness,’”
in The Emily Dickinson Journal (14.1); “Stein, Riding and The Space of Letters,”
in the Journal of Modern Literature (29.4); and “The Saintsbury Years of Marianne Moore,”
in Textual Cultures (5.1). Material for this work on Stein and Moore came from
the American literature collection at the Beinecke Library and
the Marianne Moore collection at the Rosenbach Museum.
Articles in books: on Walt Whitman and adornment, in Whitman Among the Bohemians;
and on Ronald Johnson and his work as poet-editor for Radi os,
in a National Poetry Foundation collection.
I have short essays on Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein and Laura Riding, and have published
a couple of poetry chapbooks, one out from Phylum Press. Both were written in collaboration
with the artwork of Lara Odell; for an exhibition of her work in 2002
I wrote the catalogue introduction. She’s done a beautiful illustration for Stein’s Ida.
Some book reviews: Martin Delany’s Blake, edited by Jerome McGann;
Solveig Daugaard’s Collaborating with Gertrude Stein;
Barbara Will’s Unlikely Collaboration;
the Hollister and Setina edition of Stein’s Stanzas In Meditation;
Reading Emily Dickinson’s Letters: Critical Essays (Eberwein & MacKenzie, eds.);
Catherine Morley’s The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction;
Joel Bettridge’s Reading as Belief: Language, Writing, Poetics, Faith;
Ulla Dydo’s Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923-1934;
Thomas Gardner’s A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson;
Graham Foust’s As In Every Deafness;
Juliana Spahr’s Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity.
I am originally from the Thompson-Shuswap area in British Columbia, Canada,
first Chase and then Kamloops. I have a BA from UBC in Vancouver, Canada,
an MA from UWO in London, Canada, and a PhD from SUNY Buffalo, USA.
