I’m an author of books on Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama, a Professor of English at Central Michigan University, a mother, a knitter, a reader, a reviewer of historical novels, and the property of an exceedingly fine cat indeed.
RECENT BLOG POSTS
My Year in Reading
Happy New Year! This has been an enormous year for me in terms of both reading and writing. I completed two biographical entries for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 391, due to be printed in 2023. I researched and interviewed two prolific YA authors whose novels I’ve enjoyed for years, Maggie Stiefvater and Elizabeth…
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Ben Jonson, Birthday Boy
Today is Ben Jonson’s 450th birthday. He’s not around to celebrate, of course, so I’ll raise a glass in his honor and re-read Bartholomew Fair, my favorite of his plays and the source of my career. I wrote about Ben himself on this straggly blog 9 years ago, and don’t have anything to add to…
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Best read of 2021 so far…
I just finished Lauren Groff’s Matrix and wow! Here’s the review I posted on Goodreads: Marie de France has been imagined in historical fiction before; she’s a tempting subject because her life story is a blank and we have only her gorgeous writings: Lanval, Bisclavet, the Fables, the lais, the legends of the saints. Lauren…
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Kristen-McDermott.com 