#stephanie-burt

#stephanie-burt

Plath excelled at baking, making six-egg sponges and hand-painting labels for honey, while also taking language lessons and writing poetry for the BBC.

I've been writing both poetry and short stories since I was a child, but I first began to think of myself as a writer when my 11th-grade English teacher encouraged me to lean in. I started to take my craft seriously in college, majoring in English with a focus on creative writing. By the time I graduated in the mid-1990s, I considered myself a poet.

Marsha eventually brought her salon to campus and founded the Comparative Literature Women's Caucus, an activist collective that established the first women's literature classes in Comparative Literature, conceived and taught by graduate student women. Caucus members helped produce the first major translation anthologies of women's world-wide poetry, encouraged women to write feminist dissertations on women authors, and researched discrimination against women in the department.

Many editors languish in the margins of history, their contributions largely invisible despite how much they shape whom and how we read. But in recent years, amid a wave of books unearthing overlooked figures, biographers have turned their sights to pioneering book and magazine editors-including Malcolm Cowley of Viking, Judith Jones of Knopf, Bennett Cerf of Random House, and Katharine S. White of The New Yorker -anointing them as the unsung architects of the American literary canon.