Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. Dwight Garner argued in 2018 that she was perhaps "the most purely gifted poet of the 20th century". She was also a painter, and her poetry is noted for its careful attention to detail; Ernest Hilbert wrote “Bishop’s poetics is one distinguished by tranquil observation, craft-like accuracy, care for the small things of the world, a miniaturist’s discretion and attention."
Edmund Wilson Jr. was an American writer, literary critic and journalist. He is widely regarded as one of the most important literary critics of the 20th century. Wilson began his career as a journalist, writing for publications such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. He helped to edit The New Republic, served as chief book critic for The New Yorker, and was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Notable works include Axel's Castle (1931), described by Joyce Carol Oates as "a groundbreaking study of modern literature." Oates writes that Wilson "encroached fearlessly on areas reserved for academic 'experts': early Christianity in The Dead Sea Scrolls (1955), native American civilization in Apologies to the Iroquois (1960), and the American Civil War in Patriotic Gore (1962)." He also authored a novel, I Thought of Daisy (1929) and a collection of short stories, Memoirs of Hecate County (1946). He was a friend of many notable figures, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and Vladimir Nabokov. His dream for a Library of America series of national classic works came to fruition through the efforts of Jason Epstein after Wilson's death. He was a two-time winner of the National Book Award and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. He died in 1972 at age 77.
Penelope Mary Fitzgerald was a Booker Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist and biographer from Lincoln, England. In 2008 The Times listed her among "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945". The Observer in 2012 placed her final novel, The Blue Flower, among "the ten best historical novels". A.S. Byatt called her, "Jane Austen’s nearest heir for precision and invention."
Douglass Residential College is a non-degree-granting program established in 2007 and open to female undergraduate students at any of the degree-granting schools of Rutgers University-New Brunswick. It replaced the liberal arts degree-granting Douglass College which had been opened in 1918. Douglass, originally named New Jersey College for Women, was renamed in 1955 after its founder and first dean, Mabel Smith Douglass.
Helen Vendler was an American academic, writer and literary critic. She was a professor of English language and history at Boston University, Cornell, Harvard, and other universities. Her academic focus was critical analysis of poetry and she studied poets from Shakespeare and George Herbert to modern poets such as Wallace Stevens and Seamus Heaney. Her technique was close reading, which she described as "reading from the point of view of a writer".
May McKisack was an Irish medievalist and academic. She was a professor of history at the University of London's Westfield College and at the University of Oxford in Somerville College. She was the author of The Fourteenth Century (1959) in the Oxford History of England.
Otelia Cromwell was a distinguished scholar and Professor of English Language and Literature at Miner Teachers College now known as University of the District of Columbia. She was the first African American to graduate from Smith College, receiving a B.A. in Classics in 1900. She later earned her M.A. at Columbia University in 1910 and a Ph.D. in English at Yale University in 1926, becoming the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate degree there.
Léonie Fuller Adams was an American poet. She was appointed the seventh Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1948.
The Mount School is a private Quaker day and boarding school for girls ages 3–18, located in York, England. The school was founded in 1785, and the current principal is David Griffiths. The Mount School is one of seven Quaker schools in England. In 2020, it became the first girls' school in the North of England to become an All-Steinway School. The school is also a member of the Girls' Schools Association and the Independent Schools Council.
Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published five collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was published in 2015.
Northwestern University Press is an American publishing house affiliated with Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. It publishes 70 new titles each year in the areas of continental philosophy, poetry, Slavic and German literary criticism, Chicago regional studies, African American intellectual history, theater and performance studies, and fiction. Parneshia Jones is director of the press. It is a member of the Association of University Presses.
William Chaderton was an English academic and bishop. He also served as Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity.
Emma Wilson, is a British academic and writer, specialising in French literature and cinema. She is Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Corpus Christi College.
Eleanor Shipley Duckett was an English-born philologist and medieval historian who spent most of her career in the United States. For thirty years, she taught at Smith College. Duckett published a number of books with University of Michigan Press, mainly on European history, religious history, and saints, and was a reviewer for The New York Times Book Review. Initially, Duckett was known for writing accessible historical books on the Middle Ages; later, she acquired a reputation as an authority on early medieval saints. A devout Episcopalian, Duckett was the lifelong companion of novelist Mary Ellen Chase.
Helen E. Augur was an American journalist and historical writer. Augur was born in Albert Lea, Minnesota, and graduated from Barnard College in 1916. She became a journalist in Chicago, leaving for a while after the war to become a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in Russia. She began writing for McCall's in 1932. In 1937 Augur had a "torrid, though short-lived love affair" with her second cousin, Edmund Wilson.
Helen Ruth Castor is a British historian of the medieval and Tudor period and a BBC broadcaster. She taught history at the University of Cambridge and is the author of books including Blood and Roses (2004) and She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (2010). Programmes she has presented include BBC Radio 4's Making History and She-Wolves on BBC Four.
Suzanne Muchnic is an art writer who was a staff art reporter and art critic at the Los Angeles Times for 31 years. She has also written books on artists, collectors, and museums.
Helen Constance White was an American academic who was a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. White twice served as the English department chair and was the first woman to become a full professor in the university's College of Letters and Science. She was also the first woman elected president of the American Association of University Professors, and a president of the American Association of University Women (AAUW), University of Wisconsin Teachers' Union, and University Club. White wrote six novels and numerous nonfiction books and articles.
Darra Goldstein is an American author and food scholar who is the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian, emerita at Williams College.
Elizabeth Deering Hanscom was an American writer and college professor. In 1894, she was in the first group of seven women granted doctoral degrees at Yale University, and she taught English at Smith College from 1894 to 1932.
