Dr Rowena Kennedy-Epstein

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and 20th/21st-Century Women's Writing at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser's Twentieth Century (Cornell UP, 2022), which won the Modern Language Association Matei Calinescu Prize, and she has published three editions of Rukeyser’s witting: The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose (Cornell UP, 2023), her novel Savage Coast (Feminist Press, 2013), and Barcelona, 1936 (Lost&Found 2011). She’s currently writing the first biography of Rukeyser (Bloomsbury USA), for which she was awarded a 2022-23 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Fellowship.

Mother of US All: The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser will be the first biography of Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), whose genre-bending work—poetry, plays, films, novels and biographies—defied and remade women's positions in twentieth-century America, from her involvement in wide-ranging artistic and political circles from New York to Hollywood, to her accounts of the Spanish Civil War, the rise of fascism, racial injustice, environmental disaster, and single motherhood as a queer woman. Described by Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich as ‘mother of us all’, Rukeyser changed how we see the role of the woman writer, the activist writer, the queer writer, the Jewish writer, the mother writer, and yet she has not been recognised for these revolutionary reinventions, silenced by Cold War gender, political and publishing norms. Through archival recovery, interviews and primary research, this biography makes visible Rukeyser’s central place in American literature as a catalyst and creator, demonstrating the value of her work for understanding the political crises—and possibilities—of our own times.