MARTIN, Wendy 1940–

PERSONAL:

Born March 15, 1940, in Coral Gables, FL; daughter of Earl E. (an engineer) and Teresa Martin. Education: University of California, Berkeley, B.A., 1962; University of California, Davis, Ph.D., 1968.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, Centers for the Arts & Humanities, Claremont Graduate University, 121 E. 10th St., Claremont, CA 91711. E-mail—Wendy.Martin@cgu.edu.

CAREER:

Queens College of the City University of New York, Flushing, NY, assistant professor of American literature, 1968-87; Centers for the Arts & Humanities, Claremont Graduate University, CA, professor, 1987—. Has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of California—Los Angeles. Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, founder and editor, 1972. Member of editorial board, Heath Anthology of American Literature, and "Gender and Culture" series, University of North Carolina Press.

MEMBER:

Modern Language Association of America, American Studies Association.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) The American Sisterhood: Feminist Writings from Colonial Times to the Present, Harper (New York, NY), 1972.

(Editor) A Chronological Reading of Adrienne Rich's Poetry, Norton (New York, NY), 1974.

Seduced and Abandoned in American Literature (sound recording), Everett/Edwards (De Land, FL), 1976.

An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1984.

(Editor) New Essays on The Awakening, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1988.

(Editor) We Are the Stories We Tell: The Best Short Stories by North American Women since 1945, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1990.

(Editor and author of introduction) Colonial American Travel Narratives, Penguin (New York, NY), 1994.

(Editor) The Beacon Book of Essays by Contemporary American Women, Beacon (Boston, MA), 1996.

(Editor) The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

(Editor) More Stories We Tell: The Best Contemporary Short Stories by North American Women, Pantheon (New York, NY), 2004.

(Editor, with Danielle Hinrichs and Sharon Becker) The Art of the Short Story: Stories and Authors in Historical Context, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2006.

Also author of critical preface to Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth, Charlotte's Daughter, [and] Reuben and Rachel (three novels), by Susanna Rowson, Garrett Press, 1971; contributor to Women in Sexist Society, edited by Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran, Basic Books (New York, NY), 1971; and Essays in Contemporary American Humor, 1977; author of a monograph on Adrienne Rich for Scribner, 1977. Contributor to periodicals, including Early American Literature, American Literature, Eighteenth Century Studies, Studies in Romanticism, Los Angeles Times Book Review, and the New York Times Book Review.

SIDELIGHTS:

Wendy Martin is a professor of American literature and creative writing, as well as an author and editor. Among her numerous popular works of editing are The Beacon Book of Essays by Contemporary American Women, We Are the Stories We Tell: The Best Short Stories by North American Women Since 1945, and that book's 2004 companion volume, More Stories We Tell: The Best Contemporary Short Stories by North American Women. The last title collects two dozen stories by women from the 1970s to the new millennium, featuring authors such as Grace Paily, Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, Bobbie Ann Mason, Jamaica Kincaid, and Gish Jen. Martin chose the tales with the dual purpose of providing entertaining reading and also offering an insight into the lives and experiences of North American women in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

A Publishers Weekly contributor felt that More Stories We Tell "surpasses" the earlier We Are the Stories We Tell, concluding that "readers of this volume will find lasting pleasure in the strength, breadth and emotional resonance of the stories here." Similarly, Booklist contributor Debi Lewis believed the book provided "an excellent anthology, one to read and reread many times." Patricia Moore also had praise for the "richness and the range of the collection," in her Kliatt review.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

periodicals

Booklist, February 15, 1996, Donna Seaman, review of The Beacon Book of Essays by Contemporary American Women, p. 981; May 1, 2004, Debi Lewis, review of More Stories We Tell: The Best Contemporary Short Stories by North American Women, p. 1547.

Contemporary Review, January, 2003, review of The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson, p. 55.

Kliatt, September, 2004, Patricia Moore, review of More Stories We Tell, 37.

Library Journal, December 15, 1983, Suzanne Juhasz, review of An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, p. 2333; May 15, 1990, Addie Lee Bracy, review of We Are the Stories We Tell: The Best Short Stories by North American Women since 1945, p. 98; January, 1996, Marcie Zwaik, review of The Beacon Book of Essays by Contemporary American Women, p. 99.

New York Times Book Review, February 19, 1984, Susan Gubar, review of An American Triptych, p. 26.

Publishers Weekly, March 23, 1990, Peggy Kaganoff, review of We Are the Stories We Tell, p. 73; January 1, 1996, review of The Beacon Book of Essays by Contemporary American Women, p. 64; March 29, 2004, review of More Stories We Tell, p. 38.

online

Claremont Graduate University Web site,http://www.cgu.edu/ (May 19, 2006), biographical information on Wendy Martin.*