Gail
Pool
A Biographical Note
I’ve been involved in literary
journalism for three decades—as a magazine editor, a review editor, a critic, a
columnist, and a freelance journalist.
For four years, I was editor of Boston Review—which was then
called New Boston Review—and for more than ten years, I was books editor
of the Radcliffe Quarterly, an alumnae publication (nowadays also an
alumni publication). I’ve been a book
columnist for the Christian Science Monitor, where I reviewed travel
literature; for Wilson Library Bulletin, a trade magazine, where I wrote
a column on magazines, created and edited a book review section, and later
reviewed mysteries; and for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where I wrote a
column on first fiction that also appeared regularly in the Houston Post
and the San Diego Union-Tribune, and sometimes in the St.
Petersburg Times and the Kansas City Star. My articles and essays have appeared in such
publications as Columbia Journalism Review and the New York Times,
and I have written about reviewing for the Women’s Review of Books, Boston Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. My article on women on the book page—as
reviewers and authors—appeared in the March/April 2008 issue of the Women’s Review of Books. In April 2010 I participated in a roundtable
at Northeast MLA where I spoke about Book Reviewing Then
and Now: An Overview. I have a
wonderful agent, Kit Ward, of the Christina Ward Literary Agency in
Massachusetts.
My previous book, Other People’s Mail –an
anthology of modern letter stories—was published in 2000. There’s been lively interest in epistolary
fiction these days (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society,
for example), and I’ve recently updated my web site for this book. I realize that this very literary anthology
isn’t for everyone, but I think that many people interested in storytelling
(especially writers) will share my fascination with these letter stories by
such writers as Alice Munro, Nadine Gordimer, Julio Cortazar, Tadeusz Borowski,
Doris Lessing, Torgny Lindgren, and Gail Godwin.
I was born in New York City, attended Hunter
College High School, and concentrated in Classics at Harvard. I have an MA in Creative Writing and an MLS. My husband, Jeremy, and I lived in London, New Guinea, and San Francisco before settling, with
our son, in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Jeremy is a map collector, head of the Boston Map Society, and publisher
of the Antique Map Price Record (www.maprecord.com), a guide to the antiquarian map field that has
been published since 1983. We now
live in Cambridge, where for many years I taught Writing for Publication at the
Radcliffe Seminars. I’m a member of the
National Book Critics Circle and the National Writers Union. I’m also a member of LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com/), and for those who
enjoy browsing other people’s libraries, the catalog of my books (still
in-progress, but so far around 4000-volumes-long) is available online.