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
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. My previous book, Other People’s Mail, an
anthology of modern letter stories, was published in 2000 by the University of
Missouri Press.
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 and I lived in London, New
Guinea, and San Francisco before settling, with our son, in Brookline,
Massachusetts. 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 3100- volumes-long) is available online.