About the Authors and Editors of KateChopin.org

KateChopin.org is a collaborative website. Except for news items or announcements of academic conferences, the information on this site is drawn from hundreds of peer-reviewed books and articles listed on our up-to-date bibliography pages. The authors of these books and articles are scholars at universities and other schools in the United States and abroad.

KateChopin.org is edited by a group of Kate Chopin scholars.

The co-editors are Bernard Koloski (Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania) and Heather Ostman (State University of New York: Westchester Community College) who work with the site’s bibliographer, its associate editors, the members of its advisory committee, and the editors of specific pages:

Thomas Bonner, Jr. (Xavier University of Louisiana)
Christina G. Bucher (Berry College)
Anna Elfenbein (West Virginia University)
Barbara C. Ewell (Loyola University of New Orleans)
Eulalia Piñero Gil (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain)
Beth Jensen (Georgia State University Perimeter College)
Kathleen Butterly Nigro (University of Missouri–St. Louis)
Kelli P. O’Brien (High School English teacher, Memphis, Tennessee)
Kate O’Donoghue (Suffolk County Community College)
Heidi Podlasli-Labrenz (University of Bremen, Germany)
Cido Rossi (São Paulo State University, Brazil)
Bonnie James Shaker (Kent State University at Geauga)
Emily Toth (Louisiana State University)
David Z. Wehner (Mount St. Mary’s University)

About Editors of KateChopin.org

Thomas Bonner, Jr. is Professor Emeritus at Xavier University of Louisiana, where he was formerly W.K. Kellogg Professor and Chair of English. He twice served as Distinguished Visiting Professor at The United States Air Force Academy. His books include Parterre: New and Collected Prose and Poetry, Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles (edited with Judith H. Bonner), William Faulkner: The William B. Wisdom Collection, and The Kate Chopin Companion with Chopin’s Translations from French Fiction. He has articles on American and Southern literature in journals and anthologies, including Mississippi Quarterly, Southern Quarterly, American Literary Realism, War Literature and the Arts, and The History of Southern literature. His poetry and fiction appear in literary magazines and anthologies, including The Cresset, Bluegrass Literary Review, New Laurel Review, Negative Capability, From a Bend in the River, and New Orleans by New Orleans. His book reviews have been published in the Times-Picayune, Choice, South Central Review, and America among other publications. He co-founded Xavier Review and edited it and its press for twenty years.He has organized symposia and conferences on literature in New Orleans, Santa Fe, and Taos and lectured and presented papers across the United States and in England. His graduate study was at Tulane University and he participated in the 1973 Bread Loaf Writers Conference. In addition to a special issue of the Mississippi Quarterly on Mississippi Writer John Faulkner, he recently coedited an issue of Xavier Review on another Mississippi writer Jesmyn Ward.

Christina G. Bucher has presented at Kate Chopin International Society sessions at the American Literature Association conferences, and she has chaired such sessions. She is the author of “Perversely Reading Kate Chopin’s ‘Fedora,’ ” appearing in the Mississippi Quarterly.

Anna Elfenbein is the author of Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin and of book chapters about Kate Chopin. She has presented at Kate Chopin International Society sessions at the American Literature Association conferences, and she has chaired such sessions.

Barbara C. Ewell is Professor Emerita and the former Dorothy H. Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, where she taught southern literature, late 19^th-century American literature and women’s studies. Her publications include a monograph on Kate Chopin (1985); numerous essays on southern women writers, feminist pedagogy, Renaissance poetry and other topics; and several coedited volumes, including (with Dorothy Brown) Louisiana Women Writers (1992); (with Pamela Menke) Southern Local Color: Stories of Region, Race and Gender (2002); (with Jorge Aguilar Mora and Josefa Salmon) The Anthology of Spanish American Thought and Culture (2017); and (with Teresa Toulouse) Sweet Spots: In-Between Spaces in New Orleans (2018). She is this website’s general bibliographer.

Eulalia Piñero Gil is Professor of American Literature and Gender Studies of the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid, Spain, where she teaches American Literature courses. She is the author of the translation and critical edition of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening/El despertar (2012). She has co-edited Visions of Canada Approaching the Millennium (1999),Voices and Images of Women in 20th Century Theater. Anglo-American Women Playwrights (2002), Women and Art: Visions of Change and Social Development (2010) and Breaking a Sea of Silence: Interdisciplinary Reflections on Gender Violence (2013). She has authored several peer-reviewed articles on Kate Chopin and other American women writers. She is the President of the Spanish Association for American Studies (SAAS).She edits and updates this website’s bibliography page in Spanish.

Beth Jensen is Professor of English at Georgia State University Perimeter College and has long been active in promoting the work of Kate Chopin. She is a member of the KateChopin.org website advisory committee.

Bernard Koloski is the author of Kate Chopin: A Study of the Short Fiction and editor of Approaches to Teaching Chopin’s The Awakening as well as Awakenings: The Story of the Kate Chopin Revival. He edited  Penguin Classics editions of Chopin’s early novel At Fault and her two published books of short stories Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie. He also edited The Historian’s Awakening: Reading Kate Chopin’s Classic Novel as Social and Cultural History (2019) and edits the Kate Chopin entry in the Oxford Bibliography of American Literature.

Kathleen Butterly Nigro has long been active in promoting the work of Kate Chopin. She is a member of the KateChopin.org website advisory committee. She has presented at Kate Chopin International Society sessions at the American Literature Association conferences, and she has often chaired such sessions.

Kelli Purcell O’Brien is a high school English teacher in Memphis, Tennessee, and a graduate education student at Christian Brothers University. Her forthcoming doctoral dissertation examines fashion in the society and literature of late 19th-century America in light of rapid urbanization and the formation and growth of the middle class. She has published work on 19th-century American literature and diversity in higher education, and her current professional goals revolve around cultivating love and excitement for literature in her students..

Kate O’Donoghue is editor (with Heather Ostman) of Kate Chopin in Context: New Approaches (2015). She has presented at Kate Chopin International Society sessions at the American Literature Association conferences, and she has chaired such sessions.

Heather Ostman is Professor of English of SUNY Westchester Community College in Valhalla, NY, where she teaches writing and American literature courses. She is the author or editor of five books: Kate Chopin and Catholicism (2020), (with Kate O’Donoghue) Kate Chopin in Context: New Approaches (2015), and Kate Chopin in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Essays (2008), as well as The Fiction of Junot Díaz  (2017) and Writing Program Administration and the Community College (2013). She has authored several peer-reviewed articles on Chopin and other women writers, and she has served as President of the Kate Chopin International Society since 2004. She is also the author of a novel, The Second Chance Home for Girls (2020).

Heidi Podlasli-Labrenz organized a symposium, “More Than Just a Southern Writer,” held at Knoop’s Park / Kränholm in Bremen-St. Magnus, Germany, on July 8, 2016. It was the first Kate Chopin international conference held outside the United States. She has presented at Kate Chopin International Society sessions at the American Literature Association conferences and edits and updates this website’s bibliography page in German .

Cido Rossi has presented at Kate Chopin International Society sessions at the American Literature Association  conferences. He edits and updates this website’s bibliography page in Portuguese.

Bonnie James Shaker is Assistant Professor of English at Kent State University at Geauga. A former journalist, she teaches and researches at the intersections of English and Media Studies. Her book, Coloring Locals: Racial Formation in Kate Chopin’s Youth’s Companion Stories (2003), combines her interests by focusing on Chopin’s periodical fiction. Her articles have been collected in The Only Efficient Instrument: American Women Writers and the Periodical (2001) and Defining Print Culture for Youth: The Cultural Work of Children’s Literature (2003) and have been published in American Periodicals (2017, 2020), Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers (2013), and Louisiana Literature (1997). Using digital archives, she and co-author Angela Pettitt recovered Chopin’s lost short story, “Her First Party.” She has presented papers across the United States, in France, and in Ireland at conferences sponsored by the American Literature Association, Center for History of Print Culture in Modern America, Children’s Literature Association, Midwest Modern Language Association, Society for the Fantastic in the Arts, Society for the Study of American Women Writers, and Transatlantic Women 3. She edits and updates this website’s pages Kate Chopin Archives: A Guide to Primary Documents and Kate Chopin’s Children’s Stories: Significance, Critical Treatment, and Characteristics.

Emily Toth is the author of Unveiling Kate Chopin, the standard Chopin biography, and is the most influential Kate Chopin scholar active today. She edited the first edition of Chopin’s A Vocation and a Voice and, with Per Seyersted, co-edited Kate Chopin’s Private Papers. She founded and edited the Kate Chopin Newsletter and published articles about Chopin in peer-reviewed journals and chapters in scholarly books; the newest chapter appears in New Orleans: A Literary History (2019). She is also a contributing columnist at the Chronicle of Higher Education and the author of published works of fiction and non fiction.

David Z. Wehner’s latest article is  “‘A Lot Up For Grabs’: The Idiosyncratic, Syncretic Religious Temperament Of Kate Chopin.” American Literary Realism 43.2 (2011): 154–168. He has long been active in promoting the work of Kate Chopin. He has presented at Kate Chopin International Society sessions at the American Literature Association conferences, and he has chaired such sessions.

If you’re doing research about Kate Chopin or her work, you may find this information helpful

If you need to do archival research about Kate Chopin’s work, you may want to check our Guide to Kate Chopin Archives.

If you want to know when Kate Chopin wrote each of her short stories and when and where each was first published, you can check our listing.

If you want to study works Kate Chopin wrote for young people, you can check our page on Kate Chopin’s Children’s Stories.

If you’re working on an article about Kate Chopin that you plan to submit to a scholarly journal, you may want to check our page about Best Journals for Kate Chopin Articles.

If you want to submit a proposal for a Kate Chopin International Society panel at next year’s American Literature Association conference, you can check our call for proposals.

If you want to read about Kate Chopin presentations at the American Literature Association conferences and other conferences since 2005, you may want to check the details of the presentations.

If you’re looking for another conference where you could present your work, you may want to check the University of Pennsylvania site.

If you want to read about a Kate Chopin panel in Ireland, you can check the one hosted by the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin in 2018. The conference, organized by the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society, dealt with areas like recovering voices of Irish-Americans, or American-Irish women and struggles of immigrant women. Among the panels at the conference was one devoted to the work of Kate Chopin. The panel was organized by Bonnie Shaker (Kent State University at Geauga), associate editor of KateChopin.org.

If you want to read about a Kate Chopin symposium on July 8, 2016, in Bremen, Germany (where Kate Chopin stopped on her honeymoon on July 8, 1870),you may want to read the details.

You can contact us for further information.