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Gail Pool (born July 4, 1946) is an American writer and critic, whose work has focused on books, the culture of magazines, and travel.
Pool was born in New York City, where she attended Little Red School House and Hunter College High School. [1] She concentrated in Greek and Latin at Harvard University, graduating in 1967. In 1966, Gail married Harvard classmate, Jeremy Pool, and in 1969-70, for Jeremy's fieldwork in anthropology at the London School of Economics, the couple spent sixteen months (1969–70) living with the Baining of New Britain, in what was then the Territory of Papua and New Guinea. Pool wrote about this powerful experience for the New York Times , [2] and in her book, Lost Among the Baining: Adventure, Marriage, and Other Fieldwork (University of Missouri Press, 2015). Pool has lived in San Francisco, where she received an MA in English and Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, and in Brookline, Massachusetts, where she received an MLS at Simmons School of Library and Information Science and was elected to the board of trustees at the Brookline Public Library. [3] She and her husband now live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spend winters in Sanibel, Florida. She has one son.
In 1976, Pool became editor of Boston Review , then a newly founded arts magazine called New Boston Review. [4] She left in 1980, passing the publication on to Arthur J. Rosenthal, director of the Harvard University Press, and for the next decade wrote about the culture and business of magazines, writing a column in Wilson Library Bulletin , and articles in such publications as Columbia Journalism Review , Massachusetts Review , and the Radcliffe Quarterly. As a book critic in the 1980s and 1990s, Pool wrote a travel literature column for the Christian Science Monitor , and a fiction column for the Cleveland Plain Dealer that also appeared in the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Houston Post. She reviewed for many publications, including the New York Times , was a regular contributor to the Women’s Review of Books, and for many years was books editor of the Radcliffe Quarterly. In two essays she wrote during this time—"Inside Book Reviewing," which appeared in Boston Review [4] and was selected for Best of Library Literature 1987, [5] and “Too Many Reviews of Scholarly Books are Puffy, Nasty, or Poorly Written,” which appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education —she developed her critique of reviewing that led to her book, Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America. [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] Pool taught writing at Emmanuel College and at the Radcliffe Seminars.
“An Interview with Grace Paley,” New Boston Review, Winter 1976.
“Anne Sexton: Poetry and Witchcraft,” New Boston Review, Spring 1978, reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism.
“Jean Rhys: Life’s Unfinished Form,” Chicago Review, Spring 1981; reprinted by Gale, 2005–2006.
“Women’s Publications: Some Issues,” The Massachusetts Review, Spring 1983.
“How to Cook Your Goose: A Survey of Women’s Magazines,” Radcliffe Quarterly, 1984.
“Are Health Magazines Good For You?”, Radcliffe Quarterly, June 1985; reprinted in Medica: Women Practicing Medicine, December 1985.
“The Computer Magazines’ Puffery Problem,” Columbia Journalism Review, September 1, 1985; reprinted in Computer User, Spring 1986, and in Newsday, 1987.
“View from the Masthead: Women in Magazine Publishing,” Radcliffe Quarterly, Spring 1988.
“Point of View: Book Reviewing,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 20, 1988; reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism Select, Gale, 2001.
“Travelers in a Golden Age,” Boston Review, August 1988.
“Nonfiction in Children’s Magazines,” The Horn Book Magazine, July/August 1990.
“Imagination’s Invisible Ink: Carol Shields’s Stone Diaries,” Women's Review of Books, May 1994; reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism.
“Censorship/Self-Censorship in Book Reviewing,” Women's Review of Books, September 1994.
“Dawn Powell,” entry in American Women Writers, Crossroad/Continuum, 1994.
Cynthia Ozick, entry in American Women's Writers, Crossroad/Continuum, 1994.
“Magazines for Children,” in The Reader's Companion to Twentieth-Century Children's Literature, Houghton Mifflin, 1995.
“A Tradition of Terror: Women in the Trees,” Women's Review of Books, March 1997.
“Defensive Reading,” New York Times Sunday Travel Section, October 25, 1998.
“Pictures From an Expedition: Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge,” Women's Review of Books, Jan. 1999; reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism.
“Gail Pool is Enchanted by Lee Smith,” Women's Review of Books, July 1999.
“When A Grand View Has a Steep Price,” New York Times Sunday Travel Section, October 24, 1999.
“Book Reviewing: Do It Yourself,” Women's Review of Books, March/April 2008.
Sarah Josepha Buell Hale was an American writer, activist, and editor of Godey's Lady's Book. She was the author of the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb". Hale famously campaigned for the creation of the American holiday known as Thanksgiving, and for the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument.
Robin McKinley is an American author best known for her fantasy novels and fairy tale retellings. Her 1984 novel The Hero and the Crown won the Newbery Medal as the year's best new American children's book. In 2022, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association named her the 39th Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master in recognition of her significant contributions to the literature of science fiction and fantasy.
Vilas Sarang (1942–2015) is a modernist Indian writer, critic and translator.
Ruth Whitman was an American poet, translator, and professor.
Boston Review is an American quarterly political and literary magazine. It publishes political, social, and historical analysis, literary and cultural criticism, book reviews, fiction, and poetry, both online and in print. Its signature form is a "forum", featuring a lead essay and several responses. Boston Review also publishes an imprint of books with MIT Press.
Gail Godwin is an American novelist and short story writer. Godwin has written 14 novels, two short story collections, three non-fiction books, and ten libretti. Her primary literary accomplishments are her novels, which have included five best-sellers and three finalists for the National Book Award. Most of her books are realistic fiction novels that follow a character's psychological and intellectual development, often based on themes taken from Godwin's own life.
Betty Ellen Fussell is an American writer and is the author of 12 books, ranging from biography to cookbooks, food history and memoir. Over the last 50 years, her essays on food, travel and the arts have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines and newspapers as varied as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Saveur, Vogue, Food & Wine, Metropolitan Home and Gastronomica. Her memoir, My Kitchen Wars, was performed in Hollywood and New York as a one-woman show by actress Dorothy Lyman. Her most recent book is Eat Live Love Die, and she is now working on How to Cook a Coyote: A Manual of Survival.
Sydney Pokorny was an American lesbian writer, editor, columnist and activist based in New York. She graduated from Vassar College in 1988 with a degree in art history. The author of numerous articles on topics ranging from "Madonna Studies" to art criticism and the AIDS epidemic; she also cowrote the Lambda Literary Award nominated So You Want to be a Lesbian? with Liz Tracey.
Jan Steckel is a San Francisco Bay Area-based writer of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, who is also known as an activist in the bisexual community and an advocate on behalf of the disabled and the underprivileged.
Corinne Demas is the award winning author of five novels, two collections of short stories, a collection of poetry, a memoir, two plays, and numerous books for children. She has published more than fifty short stories in a variety of magazines and literary journals. Her publications before 2000 are under the name Corinne Demas Bliss.
Inez Haynes Irwin was an American feminist author, journalist, member of the National Women's Party, and president of the Authors Guild. Many of her works were published under her former name Inez Haynes Gillmore. She wrote over 40 books and was active in the suffragist movement in the early 1900s. Irwin was a "rebellious and daring woman", but referred to herself as "the most timid of created beings". She died at the age of 97.
Janet Burroway is an American author. Burroway's published oeuvre includes eight novels, memoirs, short stories, poems, translations, plays, two children's books, and two how-to books about the craft of writing. Her novel The Buzzards was nominated for the 1970 Pulitzer Prize. Raw Silk is her most acclaimed novel thus far. While Burroway's literary fame is due to her novels, the book that has won her the widest readership is Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, first published in 1982. Now in its 10th edition, the book is used as a textbook in writing programs throughout the United States.
Kelly Cherry was a novelist, poet, essayist, professor, and literary critic and a former Poet Laureate of Virginia (2010–2012). She was the author of more than 30 books, including the poetry collections Songs for a Soviet Composer, Death and Transfiguration, Rising Venus and The Retreats of Thought. Her short fiction was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South, and won a number of awards.
Martha Saxton is an American professor of history and women's and gender studies at Amherst College who has authored several prominent historical biographies.
Merle Goldman is an American historian and sinologist of modern China. She is Professor Emerita of History, Boston University, especially known for a series of studies on the role of intellectuals under the rule of Mao Zedong and on the possibilities for democracy and political rights in present-day China.
Doris Cole,, is an American architect and author. She was a founding principal of Cole and Goyette, Architects and Planners Inc. She is the author of From Tipi to Skyscraper: A History of Women in Architecture. which was the first book on women in architecture in the United States.
Patricia Traxler, winner of the 2019 Kansas Book Award in Poetry, is an American poet, essayist, and fiction writer who lives in Salina, Kansas. She is the author of four volumes of poetry, a novel, and a short story collection. Born and raised in San Diego, California, one of eight children in a working-class family, Traxler was much influenced by her maternal grandmother, Nora Dunne, a poet from County Cork, Ireland, who lived with the family for several years during Traxler’s childhood.
Trudier Harris is an American literary scholar, author, and Professor Emerita at the University of Alabama. She was the J. Carlyle Sitterson Distinguished Professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Harriet Zinnes was an American poet, fiction writer, translator, art critic, literary scholar and professor. She is associated with poets such as Karl Shapiro, Delmore Schwartz, and Allen Ginsberg, and the writer Anaïs Nin.
Robert Boyers is an American literary essayist, cultural critic and memoirist. Currently, he is the editor of the quarterly magazine Salmagundi, Professor of English at Skidmore College, and Director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute, which he founded in 1987.
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