Sandra M. Gilbert, a professor of English at the University of California, Davis, is the author of seven collections of poetry, including her latest, Belongings. A prose work, Death’s Door: Modern Dying and The Ways We Grieve, was published in 2006. Gilbert has also published a memoir, Wrongful Death, and an anthology of elegies, Inventions of Farewell, along with a number of critical works.
With Susan Gubar, a professor of English at Indiana University, Gilbert has coauthored The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th-century Literary Imagination, and No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the 20th Century. In addition, Gilbert and Gubar have coedited Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets and The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English. With poet and novelist Diana O Hehir, she has also edited MotherSongs: Poems By, For, and About Mothers; with poet-critic Wendy Barker, Gilbert coedited The House Is Made of Poetry, a collection of essays on the work of prize-winning poet Ruth Stone.
A former president of the Modern Language Association, Gilbert has taught in the past at Princeton, Indiana, and Stanford universities, as well as Cal. State, Hayward, and Williams College. She has been a recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, NEH, and Soros Foundation fellowships, and she has held residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Bellagio, and Bogliasco.
Gilbert appeared in Goldwin Smith Hall on March 29, 2007. This interview took place the previous afternoon.