Amherst Reads About the Author

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I was born in Syracuse, New York, but grew up in a small town in Western Pennsylvania. I graduated from Amherst in ’89 with a BA in English; lived in Paris for a year; then started a PhD in comparative literature (English and French, 19th century) at Princeton University. I finished my PhD in 1999 and then taught English at an all-girls independent school outside of Philadelphia for ten years. I have been teaching writing in the Writing Program and the English department at the University of Southern California, where I am an associate professor (Teaching), since 2012. I live in Los Angeles with my husband and two daughters.

I’ve written two books: Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table (Picador 2016) and, just recently, The Angel in the Marketplace (University of Chicago Press). My book reviews, cultural criticism, and personal essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Aeon Magazine, Guernica Magazine, The American Scholar, The New Republic, and The Boston Review. I’m currently working on a collection of personal essays.

My path to becoming a writer was circuitous. While my graduate work was focused on nineteenth-century French poetry, the time I spent teaching English and American literature at the high school level re-introduced me to the nineteenth-century American scene. When a friend’s literary agent discovered I was a descendent of the Oneida Community, the nineteenth-century Christian socialist free-love commune in upstate New York, he suggested I write a book about it. I did, and have been immersed in writing about American history, literature, and politics ever since. I am an academic by training, so my books are heavily researched, but I try to write for a broader general audience. I received an National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Grant in 2017-2018 to write The Angel in the Marketplace, an award specifically for books that will make scholarship accessible to a popular readership.

I chose Amherst because it was beautiful, the best college I applied to, and my father was an alum (’57). My political science classes with George Kateb and Dana Villa, and my literary theory classes with Andy Parker, were my most formative intellectual experiences. I wrote my senior thesis with Rhonda Cobham-Sander, and still cherish the memories of long meetings in her office talking about poetry and Derek Walcott.

My favorite author has to be Henry James. It is impossible to choose one favorite book—as a non-fiction writer, books that have had a big influence on my style are Joan Didion, Where I Was From, and James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. I tend to be too purple in my prose and their spare, searing elegance is a good reminder to keep it simple.