Miller, Nina 1958–

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Miller, Nina 1958–

PERSONAL: Born 1958. Education: Northwestern University, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES: Office—Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, 1600 Pierce St., Lakewood, CO 80214. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Educator, writer, and administrator. Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, former professor; Iowa State University, former associate professor of English; Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, Lakewood, CO, chair of liberal studies. Has worked for Colorado Council on the Arts, Mizel Center for Arts and Culture, and Colorado Ballet and Performing Art Works.

WRITINGS:

Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York's Literary Women, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1999.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A book about the lost history of anarchism in U.S. education.

SIDELIGHTS: In her first book, Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York's Literary Women, author Nina Miller explores the lives of notable early twentieth-century women writers as they traveled through the literary subcultures of New York City in the late 1910s and through the 1920s. In addition to exploring the lives and works of such well-remembered writers as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker, Miller also delves into those less remembered, including Genevieve Taggard, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Helene Johnson.

In her book Miller explores these authors primarily in terms of their love poems and the freedoms and constraints they faced as successful women writers in the public arena. She also delves into the contributions they made to the development of the "modern woman" in terms of femininity, relationships, and selfhood. In addition, the author explores how these women fit into the various New York literary subcultures of the time, including bohemian Greenwich Village, Harlem Renaissance, and the Algonquin Round Table. In Making Love Modern she argues that their positions in these subcultures greatly affected both their personas and writings. For example, as the only female member of the Algonquin Round Table, Parker developed a rapier wit so as to ensure her acceptance by her male counterparts, who routinely berated women.

Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Catherine Saint Louis commented that while "Miller's language is laden with academic jargon," "ultimately she makes the idiosyncratic tensions of each subculture come alive." Library Journal contributor Jeris Cassel called Making Love Modern "a scholarly work unique in the study of modernist New York, women's love poetry, and the role of women in modernism." In a review in the Journal of American History, Lisa Cohen deemed the work "a cultural studies project whose primary mode and strength are subtle close reading, and key for Miller are the ways this poetry responds and testifies to the forces of publicity." Cohen went on to note that "Miller is attuned to individual poems' fault lines and to these writers' complex placement, 'caught between subjectivity and iconicity,' as they both toed the line and exceeded it."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Literature, December, 2000, Juliana Spahr, review of Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York's Literary Women, pp. 879-879.

Journal of American History, June, 2002, Lisa Cohen, review of Making Love Modern, p. 245.

Library Journal, March 15, 1999, Jeris Cassel, review of Making Love Modern, p. 80.

New York Times Book Review, July, 18, 1999, Catherine Saint Louis, review of Making Love Modern, p. 18.

Publishers Weekly, January 11, 1999, review of Making Love Modern, p. 66.