In February, I posted on the acquisition of the "Plath Family papers" by the Beinecke Library at Yale. Due to the inquisitiveness of Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, we have learned that the papers will open in the next few weeks (this Autumn).  That's it. That's the post. More information perhaps when there is some to share.  In the meantime, last Friday, the 12th of September, saw the publication by the LSU Press of Julie's most recent book Lives Revised:  Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath .  Congratulations, Julie! All links accessed 18 September 2025.

On 22 February, Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick and I received word that our recently edited and published book The Collected Writings of Assia Wevill , published by the LSU Press, won the Susan Koppelman Award for the Best Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited book in Feminist Studies in Popular and American Culture issued by the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association . The formal announcement was made yesterday and Julie and I have been invited to the PCA's virtual conference in April. Wow. Just wow. And it being announced intentionally or not on the anniversary of the deaths of Assia and Shura Wevill was meaningful. From her Penguin Random House authors page, "Susan H. Koppelman is a feminist literary historian and anthologist. Her credits include T wo Friends and Other 19th-Century American Lesbian Stories , Between Mothers and Daughters , The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe , and The Signet Classic Book of Southern Short Stories ." If you have not done...

Please join Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick and me at an event tomorrow, Thursday the 6th of January 2022, hosted by our publisher, the LSU Press, on our recent publication The Collected Writings of Assia Wevill . Registration information is here . It will be recorded, but we would love for you to witness our talk live. The starting time is 2 pm Central US time (12 noon Pacific time/3 PM Eastern US time/8 PM London time/9 PM Dortmund time). Buy the book! Please! Looking forward to seeing you then! All links accessed 28 December 2021.

Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick and I would like to invite any and all interested in our book, The   Collected Writings of Assia Wevill, to join us on Zoom for a celebratory book launch. We plan to each read a letter, a journal entry, a poem, and discuss a bit why the book was important to us to bring out. Time permitting we can field some questions.  Date: Saturday, 13 November 2021 Time: 1 pm, Eastern US time Duration: 30-45 minutes Click here to register!!    Remember to use discount code 04GIFT when you order direct from the LSU Press .  All links accessed 30 October and 1 November 2021.

The first half of 2021 is in the rear view mirror. Sylvia Plath featured in every day for me, and maybe for you. In April and May, in the US and in the UK, respectively, readers were treated to the publication of Three-Martini Afternoons: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton ( publisher's website ). A  new edition  of Plath's poems is in the works for a 2024(ish) publication with Faber and Faber in London. Heather Clark's massive, commendable Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath was shortlisted for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. This is a phenomenal accomplishment and recognition for Clark's tome ( publisher's website ). Congratulations, Heather. Red Comet is a remarkable achievement. Paulina Bren published a biography of The Barbizon Hotel ( publisher's website ). Plath features a little bit in it, I am told. On  14 June, Janet Malcolm , author of The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes , passed away. Here and there I was worki...

As an author and an editor, there are very few things that can be more exciting to providing an update about a forthcoming publication. One that has been in the works since the spring of 2018. When Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick asked me to work on a project, then called, The Selected Writings of Assia Wevill I knew immediately I wanted to do it. Even, as it was, on the heels of polishing off the second volume of The Letters of Sylvia Plath . As the project developed, it was decided that the title needed to be updated to The Collected Writings of Assia Wevill .  One of the biggest and happiest updates I can think of concerns the cover and as such it is with pleasure and pride that we present to you the cover image designed by the creative minds at the LSU Press, our publisher. We still have miles to go before the book is out. But we can say that the official publication date is 10 November 2021. Pre-order the hardback here! Or the Kindle here! Thank you!! All links accessed 20 April 2...

Today Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick and I are very proud to annouce that we submitted our copyedited text back to LSU Press for our forthcoming book, The Collected Writings of Assia Wevill . More news and updates about the book as it happens. The next step is to have the book typeset and to do the indexing. So, lots of fun to be had. There is no news on the cover yet but I hope to share it here when it is available. Thank you all sincerely for your interest this the volume!! In January, I put the finishing touches on an essay that should be included in the  Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath , titled "'They will come asking for our letters': Editing The Letters of Sylvia Plath." It was adapted and enlarged from my keynote talk given at the "Sylvia Plath: Letters, Words and Fragments" conference held at Ulster University, 10-11 November 2017. The various contributors are awaiting their contracts, so more news on this once they have been issued. However, in additi...

  Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick and I are very happy to say we submitted our manuscript for The Collected Writings of Assia Wevill  to the published, LSU Press, last Monday, 26 October. We are very excited to see it in their hands.  The manuscript, including more than twenty photographs and scans of documents we will use for illustrations, stretches to 298 pages. In it, you will read Assia Wevill's life and experiences in her own words with contextual annotations that bring color and information to her texts. We began this project with a vision to assemble Selected Writings back in the spring of 2018 and it is so thrilling to see it to this point, where we of necessity had to elevate it to something as comprehensive as a Collected Writings .  It was an honor and a privilege to work on this project---Julie's third book; my fifth book (the sixth is done, nearly, too)---with Julie, and our contacts at the Press have been marvelous. Thank you, Julie! And, as well, thank you ...

On Thursday, 9 January 2020, I had the privilege to share the stage with a panel of Sylvia Plath scholars--Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick (organizer and presenter), Heather Clark (presenter), and Janet Badia (respondent)---at the MLA conference in Seattle. Our topic was "New Developments in Sylvia Plath Studies: Archives, Biography, and Feminism". The audience was small, but that did not have any bearing on our passion for our respective pieces. After my talk, entitled "The Indefatigable Sylvia Plath", Heather presented "P(l)athography: Sylvia Plath and Her Biographers" which provided an overview of the role Plath biographies have played in pathologizing their subject. This was followed by Julie's "'Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children': Sylvia Plath's Representations of Assia Wevill", an investigation on Wevill's role as a muse in Sylvia Plath's poetry. Janet responded with an eloquent summation of our talks asking...

So what did you think of Sylvia Plath in 2019? It seemed to be a year dominated by Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom , the short story published in the UK and the US in January and then which started appearing in translations. It is wonderful a newly published short story could kind of captivate its readers across the globe, which I think is a great sign that Plath--and her work--is in demand. As in the past, this is a look back at the year as I lived it. It seems I spent most of January publicizing the story on the blog, as well as the real Mary Ventura, who was a friend of Plath's in Wellesley in the mid-to-late 1940s. I spent most of the month of January, too, packing up my belongings and changing jobs and states. Sadly I still do not feel settled but, well, I will get there eventually. It is weird not being in Plath's backyard any longer after twenty years… But, you probably do not want to read my moaning, you want to read about Plath. At any rate, I think Mary Ve...