NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) was an American writer, activist, and public intellectual. Born in New York City, she lived most of her life in that metropolis, with short periods spent in upstate New York during her college years (1930–1932) and in the San Francisco Bay Area (1945–1949). Rukeyser’s first book of poems, Theory of Flight, won the Yale Younger Poets Award and was published in 1935. She would go on to publish more than a dozen other poetry collections, the last being The Gates: Poems in 1976. In 1947, Rukeyser gave birth to her son, William Laurie Rukeyser, out of her desire to raise a child on her own. From the 1950s on, she had an open relationship with, but maintained a separate household from, her literary agent Monica McCall. Throughout her life, Rukeyser pursued a variety of careers—ranging from political reportage, magazine and film editorships, wartime service for a federal propaganda agency, radio broadcast and production, screenwriting for film and television, education, and nonprofit leadership. No matter her occupation, though, writing was the chief means of her livelihood. Although she is best known for her poetry and self-identified principally as a poet, in actuality she was prolific in a variety of forms—ranging from poetry, short and long fiction, children’s books, drama and musicals; to journalism, biographies, and literary and political nonfiction; to screenplays, radio scripts, and teleplays. All her writings contributed to her evolving, career-long vision of the complex interrelationship between conventional and experimental literary formalism and social justice, which encompassed her fierce commitment to racial, class, and gender equity, sex positivity, and anti-war views. Much of what she wrote never appeared in print, often because of editors’ and publishers’ politically or ideologically motivated suppression. The bulk of Rukeyser’s previously published nonpoetic writings has not yet been recovered. Having experienced several strokes and suffered for years from diabetes and heart disease, Rukeyser died in 1980, at the age of sixty-six.

Eric Keenaghan is the author of Queering Cold War Poetry (Ohio State University Press). His writings about American modernism, cold war and New American poetry, and LGBTQ+ poetry, poetics, and politics have appeared in many collected volumes and in such journals as PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Textual Studies, Journal of Modern Literature, and Translation Studies. He is associate professor in the English Department at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Contact him at ekeenaghan@albany.edu.

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein is the author of Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century (Cornell University Press), and she recovered and edited Muriel Rukeyser’s unpublished Spanish Civil War novel, Savage Coast (Feminist Press). An NEH Public Scholars fellow, she is writing the first biography of Rukeyser (Bloomsbury). She lives in the UK, where she is associate professor of gender studies and twentieth- and twenty-first-century women’s writing at the University of Bristol.