Paula Bernat Bennett, now retired, was professor of English at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. She has published widely in the field of American women's poetry. Her latest book is Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry, 1800-1900 (2004). Karen L. Kilcup is professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her books include Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition (1998), Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition (1999) and A Cherokee Woman's America: Memoirs of Narcissa Owen, 1831-1907 (2005).
This marks a milestone in the resurgence of the study of the rest. It features poets, like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Lydia Huntley Sigourney, who were famous in their day, as well as poets who were marginalised on the basis of their race or their sociopolitical agenda. It also takes a fresh look at poets whose work has been dismissed as sentimental, genteel, or didactic.