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 Ward and Balkin 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 think that many people interested in storytelling 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 former 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, 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.
I’m
now at work on a travel book, Lost in New
Guinea—a kind of cross-cultural memoir about living among the Baining
people of New Britain with my husband, who was an anthropologist at the time,
and returning to the tribe some forty years later. For a glimpse of this experience, please take
a look at the travel essay I wrote for the New
York Times. They called it “Defensive Reading,” but I prefer my own title:
“Jungle Books.”