Anne Boyd Rioux is the author or editor of seven books, including the Indie bestseller Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters (Norton 2018) and Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist (Norton 2016), one of the Chicago Tribune‘s ten best books of the year. She is the recipient of four National Endowment for the Humanities awards, two for public scholarship. You can find her on NPR and BBC Radio, in the Washington Post and Literary Hub, and elsewhere.

Photo by Jennifer Zdon
Author photo cropped
Photo by Jennifer Zdon

Longer bio:

Anne Boyd Rioux is a writer and expert on American women writers, uncovering the stories of their lives and fostering renewed appreciation for their forgotten or undervalued works. She is currently at work on a nonfiction narrative book about the 20th-century expatriate writer Kay Boyle, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The recipient of four NEH awards, two for public scholarship, Anne has a Ph.D. in American Studies and was an English professor for twenty-three years. She is on the Board of Directors of the Biographers International Organization, and her essays and reviews appear in the Washington Post, Salon, Lit Hub, Lapham’s Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has been interviewed on the BBC, NPR, and radio programs in Ireland, Sweden, and Australia, and she speaks regularly at book stores, museums, and universities. She has delivered talks at the Boston Athenaeum, the Tuscon Book Festival, the Kansas City Library, the Harvard Bookstore, and more. (If you are interested in booking her for an event, contact her at the email below.)

Anne has published seven books, the most recent of which is  Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters (Norton 2018), which was an Indie bestseller and chosen as one of the best books of the year by Library JournalThe Daily Mail, and A Mighty Girl. It was also one of the best reviewed books (Lit Hub), one of the best books of August (Christian Science Monitor), a book not to miss (USA Today), and one of the best books of summer (Newsday). Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy was published to mark the 150th anniversary of the overlooked and underestimated classic, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, as was the deluxe edition of Little Women which Anne edited for Penguin Classics. A New York Times article about the anniversary prominently featured Anne and her work, as did numerous essays and reviews in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.

Anne’s 2016 book Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist (Norton) also received considerable attention. It was chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune and was reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. This biography, and the collection of stories, Miss Grief and Other Stories, which Anne also edited, helped bring Woolson the renewed attention she deserved. A hauntingly beautiful writer praised by Colm Toibin in his foreword to the collection of stories, Woolson was famous in her day but neglected as the all-male American literary canon formed in the twentieth century. Anne also edited a collection of Woolson’s stories published by the prestigious Library of America in 2020.

In her teaching and writing, Anne is passionate about the recovery of American women writers who wrote fascinating, sometimes provocative, and often daring works that have been unavailable and unread for generations. While this began as a scholarly interest, Anne’s mission has extended beyond the walls of academia as she has realized how important it is for today’s  readers and writers to know about the accomplished foremothers who have been kept hidden from them. Anne is also the author of Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America and editor of Wielding the Pen: Writings on Authorship by American Women of the Nineteenth Century, both published by Johns Hopkins University Press. You can also follow her current interests in her teaching and writing by subscribing to her newsletter “Letters from Anne” (below).

Contact

Publicity

U.S.: Kyle Radler kradler@wwnorton.com         

Tel: 212.790.9452

U.K.: Emily Cary-Elwes   ecary-elwes@wwnorton.co.uk         

Tel: 020 7323 1579

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