583 Shakespeare, 496/G Women's Poetry, 482/G Shakespeare, 336 Shakespeare (for non-English majors), 300 Junior Composition, 200 Introduction to Literature, l99H Freshman Honors Composition, and 300 Honors Junior Composition.
from Vanderbilt University in l99l and am in my fourteenth year of teaching at Western. A tenured professor, I also serve as the Graduate Advisor in the English department.
Academic specialties: Shakespeare and American women poets
Classes taught: I teach 583 Shakespeare, 496/G Women's Poetry, 482/G Shakespeare, 336 Shakespeare (for non-English majors), 300 Junior Composition, 200 Introduction to Literature, l99H Freshman Honors Composition, and 300 Honors Junior Composition.
Current project: Jane Olmsted (Director, WKU Women's Studies Program) and I have started a series called the Kentucky Feminist Writers Series. Our first book was Writing Who We Are: Poems by Kentucky Feminists, which was published in l999 by WKU and is now in its second printing of 500. Contributors range in age from sixteen to ninety and in occupation from farmer to university professor. In the fall of 2001 we published Telling Stories: Fiction by Kentucky Feminists with, among others, Sallie Bingham, Pat Carr, Sena Naslund, Dorothy Sutton, and Crystal Wilkinson. The next book in the series is I to I: Essays by Kentucky Feminists, with a deadline of 1 June 2003 and a publication date of fall, 2003. For details on submitting essays and/or obtaining copies of the first two books, please see the link on my home page.
Something I believe: Shakespeare knew everything! 
Research interests: Shakespeare and early modern widows; Shakespeare pedagogy; the subversive techniques of women poets; women's spiritual literature; the brain, consciousness, and perception and its relation to literature
Some publications/presentations: I have recently had an essay, "The Duchess of Malfi as a Tragedy of Identity," published in Studies in Philology (winter, l999 issue) and another essay, "Polonius as Nemesis," in Hamlet Studies (l999). RE:AL, The Journal of Liberal Arts has accepted a paper, "To 'hold them in solution, unsolved': The Ethics of Wholeness in Four Contemporary Poems" for publication in the fall of 2000. I read a paper on "Shakespeare and the Tri-Partite Brain" at the Science and Literature Conference in Gainesville, Florida in November, l998. Q/W/E/R/T/Y, a journal based at the Universite de Pau in France, recently published a paper, "Dramatic and Competitive Intertextuality in Richard III".
Creative interests: I am also a poet and have recently had two poems, "sewing, a kind of work which you may call endless" and "Needlework," published in Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Other recent publications in poetry include The Southern Anthology, The Chrysalis Reader, The Other Side, The Louisville Review, and the Emily Dickinson Anthology, in whose poetry contest I was a 2001 semi-finalist. I have recently read my poetry at the Women Writers Conference at the University of Kentucky and the 20th Century Literature Conference at the University of Louisville. For my poem about an early American woman writer whose work has been lost, click Anne Yale Hopkins.
Why, as a Shakespearean, I love the twentieth-century: Shakespeare's works have entered the popular culture at this time to an extent unprecendented since his own
Married to: John Oakes, professor in the art department 
Children: Chris, who is in his second year in a Ph.D. program in Japanese Studies at the University of Chicago, Marya, who graduated in December 2000 with an art major and a folk studies minor from WKU, and Antonia, a sophomore psychology major and creative writing minor at WKU.
When my nose is not stuck in a book 
, I like to: search for antiques, garden, eat out, talk, walk/meditate in nature 
, read some more
New pursuits: I am a beginning tai chi student. 
A favorite quote, currently: "You didn't come into this world; you came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here." Alan Watts, a student and teacher of
Buddhism
Another favorite quote, currently: "I was doing nothing but Being, and the Dancing 
Energy came by my place." Mirabai, a l3th century female poet from India