Nanora Sweet

Associate Professor Emerita
449 Lucas Hall
314-516-5541
sweet@umsl.edu

PhD, Univerisity of Michigan
MA, University of Missouri - Columbia
BA, University of Michigan

Nanora Sweet, Associate Professor of English Emeritus, taught writing and literature at UMSL from 1981 to 2011, serving as Department Chair 2007-2008 and as Director of Women’s and Gender Studies 1997-2000. She served as faculty advisor for the student Litmag for fourteen years. As a member of the MFA faculty in Creative Writing, Nan guest-edited Natural Bridge (#16 and #23) and published two chapbooks of her poetry. Off campus, she has been a member of the St. Louis Women’s Poetry Workshop “Loosely Identified” and co-editor with Rebecca Ellis of its anthology Breathing Out. Receiving her PhD from the University of Michigan in 1993 with a dissertation on Romantic poet Felicia Hemans, Nan has published twenty articles and entries on this poet, including an all-new biography for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. With Julie Melnyk of the University of Missouri (Columbia) she published a collection of critical essays, Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century, and with Barbara Taylor of the University of Nottingham she edited Hemans’s The Sceptic for Romantic Circles. In 2013, with the generous help of the William A. Kerr Foundation, UMSL’s Gender Studies Program established a student Research Grant in Nan’s name. In 2014 the British journal Women’s Writing will publish a special edition on Hemans which Nan has co-edited with Kate Singer of Mt. Holyoke College. Her goal remains a full-length biography of this leading woman poet.