Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (2020) and Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (2024). Her fourth poetry collection, West : Fire : Archive, was recently published by The Center for Literary Publishing. Dunkle writes a weekly blog called Finding Lost Voices, which revives the voices of women who have been forgotten or misremembered and serves as the Poetry and Translation Director at the Napa Valley Writers' Conference. She’s on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.
At Electric Lit Dunkle tagged eight books in which "you’ll find a different take on literary history, where you’ll not only see the literary elite you thought you knew differently, but you’ll also discover new figures." One title on the list:
Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation by Emily Van DuyneRead about the other entries on the list.
By the time I entered college and grad school, my mostly male professors told me that Slyvia Plath was just a young woman’s poet, as Emily Van Duyne writes in Loving Sylvia Plath, “a phase to pass through and grow out of in order to be taken seriously.” Van Duyne also reminds us how “Plath’s suicide is frequently presented as a capricious choice of a spoiled girl seeking revenge, rather than the culmination of a mental health crisis.” In her critical biography, Van Duyne fearlessly takes on the tired narrative that’s been cemented around Plath’s life and challenges it to include the sexual and physical violence Plath endured while married to Ted Hughes, along with how Hughes managed to control the narrative about Plath for decades after her death. This refreshing narrative takes on the immense task of finding our way back to the person Plath really was.
--Marshal Zeringue