Bio

Jeanetta Calhoun Mish earned her Ph.D. in  American Literature at the University of Oklahoma in 2009. Mish was a Sutton Graduate Fellow in English at OU; she also won the Peter Kyle McCarter Memorial Endowment Award in American Studies (2005), the Ruby N. Courtney Writer’s Scholarship from the Oklahoma State Regents (2005), and a Bruce Granger Dissertation Fellowship, which is administered by World Literature Today (2009). Ms. Mish’s field of scholarship is 20th Century American Literature, with specialties in working-class literature, poetry, and women's literature. Her dissertation, “To Be of Use”: Empathy and Ethics in Contemporary American Women’s Poetry of Work and Workers, reflects her long-standing interest in literature as a social force and draws from her background in women’s writing, American working-class and ethnic literatures, aesthetics, and cultural theory.

  

Ms. Mish has published both critical and creative works. In 2006, her article on private and public metaphor in the poems of Chicana poet Demetria Martínez was published as a chapter in the collection  Mediating Chicana/o Culture: Multicultural American Vernacular. Mediating Chicano/a Culture has just been released in paperback. Mish’s aricle “‘I’m From the 21st Century’—Third World/Wave Ethical Media-Poetics and Empathetic Consciousness in ‘Bananas’ by Lorna Dee Cervantes.”  will be included in the 2010 collection Lorna Dee Cervantes: A Critical Anthology, edited Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson.  She has published encyclopedia entries on Ms. Martínez and on Native American poet Carroll Arnett.  Ms. Mish writes creative non-fiction and poetry; her most recent poetry publication is in the journal LABOR: Studies in Working-class History of the Americas.  Her poetry collection, Work Is Love Made Visible was published in March of 2009 by West End Press.

Planned future projects include collecting and contextualizing twentieth-century women’s vernacular and naive poetry of Texas and Oklahoma, preparing a critical biography of radical poet Lucia Trent, who, according to the Austin Poetry Society, while living in San Antonio “initiated the recognition and designation of an annual Texas Poetry Day (October 15) and National Poetry Day (April 15),” and creating a film and text project on the aesthetic expressions of the rural working-class.

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